image courtesy of Warner Brothers
It came to my attention recently that HBO is adapting the prequel to Practical Magic into a series. Practical Magic – or, as it’s known in my household, “only the best movie of all time” – taught me a great many important life lessons and this seems like a good time to review and renew my commitment to a life lived entirely like a Stevie Nicks video.
1. Your hair cannot be too long and flowy. Your skirts cannnot be too flowy and floral. You cannot have too many sets of brunette/red-headed sisters. There cannot be too many original Stevie Nicks songs.
2. If you are somebody’s maiden aunt, you must dress exclusively in outfits from the Victorian era even though it’s 1998.
3. You are a witch. You will do spells. You will do spells pretty much to the exclusion of doing anything else, because let’s face it, real jobs are dumb. You will probably acquire all of your life partners by way of spell-doing, and this is fine.
4. While not doing spells or perhaps in conjunction with doing spells, you will stay up all night drinking margaritas with your fabulous maiden aunts.
5. The neighbors in your picturesque New England town will know that you are A Witch. (Either that, or that you are perpetually on the verge of going to Coachella, but same difference really?) Integrate your innate genetic witchiness and your day job, as in, for example, making skin care products using your herbal knowledge. Because you know what they say: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life because you are a fictional character in a movie who has no apparent money troubles anyway.”
6. Witches do not decorate in Danish Modern. Some witchy design ideas to consider are: antique furniture, New Englandy houses, overstuffed kitchens, a truly insane number of candles, and an entire greenhouse full of plants. Once you have all these items in place, compound them by several orders of magnitude. There will be no Konmari-ing of anything.
7. Do not be afraid to do a little light renovation of your house on the spur of the moment. If you think you hear the deathwatch beetle, just go ahead and rip up all the floorboards.
8. While your taste in clothing must be casually adorable, and your deep conditioner must be top-notch, your taste in men can be very, very bad.
9. You are extremely stunning and alluring, so you can say really off the wall things about your creepy vampire cowboy boyfriend – for example: “Sometimes we just stay up all night, worshipping each other... like bats.”
10. Do NOT go BACK for your TIGER’S EYE.
11. Do not under any circumstances murder a man by dosing him with belladonna.
12. If you murder a man with belladonna, do not under any circumstances bring him back to life using your family’s ancient but weirdly collage-y looking spellbook.
13. Your real friends are the people who will help you kill a man. Twice. And then help you bury the body. In theory. Hahaha!
14. Men can be referenced regularly, but can remain somewhat secondary to the plot of your life. This movie has not one, not two, but THREE sets of sisters. And like three men total, and two of them have died, and it’s actually fine. I’m not throwing off on the importance of Aidan Quinn’s character here. Not at all. It’s just that one decent man is all that’s really required. What’s the opposite of the Bechdel-Wallace Test? We’ll call it the Scorsese-Coppola test: two (2) named men characters must have at least one (1) conversation with each other that isn’t about a woman. Except for maybe a two line exchange between the bad zombie cowboy (Goran Visnjic) and the good non-zombie cowboy (Aidan Quinn), Practical Magic fails the Scorsese-Coppola test, and this is also fine.
15. An exorcism can totally be a fun weeknight get-together for your girlfriends!
My friend Cat helpfully tweeted at author Alice Hoffman to ask if one should read the original book or the prequel first. You will be interested to know that Alice Hoffman’s answer was: “Either is fine.” I have to say that I really respect this laid-back approach from her. It’s the attitude of someone whose has a lot of lace clothing and potted plants. It’s the approach of a woman who, say, drinks a lot of margaritas that she may or may not have used spell-casting to make. In other words, her nonchalance is a witchy nonchalance. Therefore please read the books, or don’t read the books, but get your heavy duty detangling comb, your burn book spellbook, and your floral maxi skirts ready, because we’re going witching, losers!
Jeanne Obbard is a poetry reader for Drunk Monkeys whose work has appeared in Gingerbread House, Glass, andFive2One. She enjoys botanical gardens, long walks on the beach, and being contrary. She has a blog but has forgotten the password so it’s probably being used to disseminate Russian kompromat now. Safer to find her on Twitter where her very imaginative handle is @JeanneObbard.