A Brief Update

I forgot to report that the episode "Helen vs. Handel's Messiah" was re-published for the Holiday Season (or, more specifically, the Christmas season, since it's about Messiah, after all).  Please take a look at it.  For those who are queasy about too much physical sex, there's very little of that in the story!

The background to the episode is in another episode [yet unpublished], in which Helen sings at a performance in London.

Helen met an unusual and interesting girl at Westfield College, where Helen had taken up an Associate Professorship in music.  The other girl (a woman in her middle twenties, actually) was a language instructor, and  had introduced herself as Rain.  At this time Helen was single, because she and Michelle (her partner while she had been on the run [Helen On the Run--unpublished]) had split up, and her faithful friend Penny (Erin's mother) had died of cancer, and Helen was in fear of violating the Judge's exhortation to conduct herself in a manner suitable to a mother of two young children, on pain of being sent to serve her suspended sentence for kidnapping.  (The kids, of course, were her own, but that's another story.)

Rain and Helen were soon desperately in love.  Helen had a firm friendship with Sophie Cocteau, a tennis player, and of course Lorna Shapiro, who was Becky's girl, also had a serious crush on Helen, but Helen needed someone who could be a true partner, for the long term, and it looked very much as though Rain was the one.  In addition, Rain just adored the two youngest kids, Alison and James, and that settled it for Helen.

Some time later, Rain disclosed to Helen that her name was actually Evelyn Woodford, and that her father was a British earl.  Rain had not written or called home for more than a year, being in rather a rebellious phase.  But this new relationship seemed important enough that she wanted her parents to meet Helen.  As luck would have it, Helen was also invited to sing in a performance of Messiah in London, which was attended by Queen Elizabeth, who spoke to Helen briefly after the recital, in the Royal Box.  The following year, too, Helen spent in England in Rain's family home.

Another wonderful Christmas episode centered around Helen visiting Olive Gibson, the mother of Jeffrey Gibson (little James's father), on which occasion she was also invited to conduct the massed bands of the Armed Services on the Mall in Washington DC.  This was also an occasion in which she played tennis with Sophie Cocteau, and there was a brief romance between the two, which they decided, by mutual agreement, not to let get out of hand, simply because every major romance Helen had had up until then had ended badly.  Sophie wanted to be a constant presence in Helen's life, for Helen's own sake, and her theory was that it would be impossible if Helen and she became lovers.  By the time Helen and Rain (Lady Evelyn) had found each other, Sophie and Helen were merely good friends.  (But Helen was harder on Rain than on any of her other lovers, and the end of that relationship reflects more poorly on Helen than anything that happened before or since.)

Kay