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I posted a silly audio thing on Tumblr a couple days ago:

A bootleg track from the (nonexistent) late ’80s all-female production of Les Miserables, featuring Le Bien de l’ABC, the Saint-Simonian lesbian feminist commune, on the eve of revolution.

And, as predicted by the Law of Tumblr that states that the less work, effort, and passion you put into a post, the more notes it will get, silly audio thing that I spent half an hour on (mostly involving playing with other effects in Audacity) has 178 notes as of time of posting this...

But it is fun to be able to use Tumblr's notes system to trace how a post spreads across the internet, so of *course* I have been keeping a close eye on the reblogs (and the tags on them), and as predicted by the Second Law of Tumblr, many of the tags on reblogs have either made it clear that people didn't actually read the post, or have shown that listeners are getting something out of it that I didn't.

(Mostly, what they've been getting out of it is 'wow, girl Grantaire', when I actually think that Grantaire's voice is the one that works least well? It was low-pitched and non-singy enough that, unlike Marius and whoever the first singer was, it doesn't really sound obviously like a female singer to me. ...of course, it does sound like a low-voiced woman whose voice has been roughened a bit further by bad alcohol and smoking, but still, all I can hear is that the pitch-shifting didn't work as well.)

Although I did get one comment to the effect that we need more lesbian Marius, with which I DEEPLY agree. Marianne Pontmercy, who storms out of her grandfather's house to honor the memory of her father, gets 'adopted' by Courfeyrec, stubbornly educates herself enough to support herself respectably (even if she has to do more of the same work for less pay than Marius did....), lives in made-over gowns and wanders Paris staring at clouds - until she meets a beautiful girl named Cosette and falls in love... and at that point the story starts to diverge from canon rapidly.

(I knew that if I started reading the book I'd wind up being most interested in Marius. Called it. Oops.)

...anyway, I am heading home from my summer of cat-and-flat-sitting in Chicago in a few days, alas. (yes, I did spend time I should have been packing on messing with Audacity instead.) I shall miss being able to walk or bike to interesting places whenever I feel like it, and I shall definitely miss being able to walk to the Lake.

A friend of mine drove up to pick me up as an excuse for a road-trip, so we're going to take it slow on the way back East. Anybody know of any fun road-trip stops - or, in fact, anything interesting - anywhere in the state of Indiana? We haven't found any yet.

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Don't know Indiana but would recommend stopping for soup and pie in Hudson, Ohio - it's a small Western Reserve Town with town square, shops and bandstand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson,_Ohio . Also stop in at the Great Geauga County Fair in Burton over the Labor Day weekend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geauga_County_Fair

Alas, I think we'll be heading through the southern half of Ohio, because we wanted to stop at some Hopewell archeological sites (also my mother's people are Miami Valley people, so if I stop at a little town square or a county fair, it has to be there, due to inborn anti-Cleveland-area loyalties, sorry) but those do both look interesting!

I'll always be Turnpike loyalist!

Ooh, are you doing Serpent Mound? Or elsewhere?

On the road trip that

skygiants and I did a few weeks back (NYC to St. Louis and back), we swung by Connor Prairie, which is a living history museum right outside of Indianapolis. It's fun if a living history museum is what you're looking for! I'm also told that the Children's Museum in Indianapolis is a lot of fun, but I haven't been myself.

We had the Roadside America app, which tells you about lots of random little museums and so forth; unfortunately, it's only available on Apple stuff. We didn't find much of anything that we were interested in on the backroads of Indiana, but if you're more entertained by diners with large cows on the roof or the world's largest _____, you may find things of interest!

I think we're going to end up doing the full Southern Ohio Prehistory Tour - Dayton to Caesar's Creek to Fort Ancient to Serpent Mound to Fort Hill to Seip Mound to Hopewell Culture National Historical Park to Leo Petroglyph. (I think we're going to skip cutting back up north to finish off with Newark and Flint Ridge and Moundsville though, in favor of Parkersburg and the Oil and Gas Museum, which is one of my favorite tiny museums ever.) ...unless we burn out on looking at mounds before that.

I've been poking at the Roadside America website in Indiana and yeah, it seems to be mostly like 'the world's largest ball of paint'. We... may see how bored we get. :P Connor Praire sounds interesting, though, thanks!

Oh, nice! I haven't seen most of that -- Serpent Mound on a school trip as a kid, and pictures of some of the rest. And then Cahokia all the way out in Illinois on this latest trip. That sounds really fun. (Until the point when one burns out on looking at mounds, as you say.)

I hear Grantaire as a woman, and terrific female Feuilly, and definitely Marianne Pontmercy. But the part where the women's voices come in throws me, because then I can hear the difference between their voices and the original men's voices.

It's pretty awesome, though!

Yeah, that is the hinkiest part (it works much better with songs that have either only men's voices, or only women's, but I wanted Les Amis and the other Amis songs have even more mixed-choral parts.)

The bit with the women's voices in it is actually only shifted up about half as much as the rest of the song (which means, correspondingly, the men's voices in it still sound like men's voices) because if I shifted it up any more, the women's voices sounded like the Chipmunks, and if I didn't shift it at all, the contrast in sound quality between it and the rest of the song was too obvious.

(I probably could have finessed that better - i.e., maybe shift that section down instead of up, so the original women's voices sounded like the shifted women's voices, and the men sounded like a new men's chorus coming in - but see above about 'spent half an hour messing when I should have been packing.' :P)

Yeah, I decided at that point that possibly that was a children's chorus or something. All the gamins are now trained boy sopranos!

But the first half is really awesome, and Grantaire's voice absolutely sounded to me like a whiskey-roughened woman's. The whole thing was really excellent.

I was actually thinking that given the life histories of counterculture women of similar class in that period, it's not *unlikely* that there would be a couple of small children de l'ABC underfoot who had of course been singing revolutionary songs since before they could talk. :P (I would say something about hoping the kids wouldn't be drinking, but, well, they probably would be...)

They probably wouldn't have been drinking much! For... whatever that's worth... Ah, history.

...I missed the part where this was edited music. I THOUGHT IT WAS A REAL GENDERSWAPPED CAST OF LESBIAN AMIS.

Alas, no. As far as I can tell there hasn't even been an all-female Takarazuka version (the only Japanese version I've found was a normal show with mixed casting.) I SUPPORT THIS HAPPENING THOUGH.

It would be *so amazing*

I personally thought it worked pretty well, and Grantaire just sounded like they had a throaty smoker's voice or something. I played it for my friend and they found it disturbing how female all the singers sounded in this song. :)