1 – Birthday – Extras    Barry Home    Let’s Hear It For the Boy

St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)
by John Parr

I love all of my Barry music (all my story soundtracks, really).  Considering this song is the very first in the whole story, it was a fairly late addition, but it has been super beloved and on repeat since the moment I designated it.

You’ll see as the story and music go along how much I love both lyrical irony and foreshadowing, and there’s so many things I love about this song being the first one in this story.

Firstly, it’s such a coming-of-age guy song, owning the MAN element in such an unapologetic 80s way.  As Barry approaches his 16th birthday in the weeks preceding Chapter 1, he feels like this is his chance!  He’s moving up in the world, becoming the MAN he’s always known he could be!

In Barry’s 15.99-year-old mind, “coming of age” means demonstrating responsibility and ambition in a very masculine, solid way.  Showing the world (starting with his dad) that he’s ready to go play in the big kid mud of the wider world.  Or really, drive through mud at high speed with slow-mo cameras watching him spin out cinematically.  Meanwhile, he’s totally oblivious to the “writing on the wall”…

As might be obvious, considering his transformation begins on the 4th page of the story (including the cover page) and 7.5 minutes into the audiobook version (right around 7 min and 26 secs, and 7/26 is my birthday), I never intended the foreshadowing in the first scene of the story to be especially subtle.

Barry Anderson wakes up on the morning of his fateful sixteenth birthday, and his fairy godmother mom worries he’ll be disappointed not inheriting her powers, and then before he goes downstairs, Barry contemplates magic being a feminine thing in his mind, especially fairy godmother magic of course.  It’s not a subtle trail, nor does it steer away from tropes at all.  If people anticipate the nature of the inciting incident, I ain’t mad.  (I have been pleasantly surprised how many people *didn’t* expect him to turn into a girl, who didn’t know beforehand.  Most people expect him to get magic, but a lot of people haven’t expected the gender change until his pubes flip outside-in, lol.  I tend to think my plot choices are glaringly obvious, so it’s always a nice surprise when they’re more subtle than I realize, ha.)

Basically, the foreshadowing on the morning of Barry’s 16th birthday was never intended to be subtle.  And I rather like the idea that that’s true in-universe as well.

Dania would never dare to hope that her boy would be an oh-so-rare glitter baby!  But I like the idea that part of her feels it coming.  As demonstrated as the story goes on, fairies can often feel things “in the wind” so to speak, especially the more in-tune with magic they are.  And especially fairy godmothers on behalf of their fairy godchildren (which Dania is to Barry, which I don’t mention directly until later.  Fairy mothers are automatically the fairy godmother to their biological children).  So I like to think that while she was bustling about that morning, trying not to be disappointed that her magic line was going to end—because after all, she was so proud of her dear sixteen-year-old—that part of Dania’s mind was thinking about Uncle Larry, and the fraction of a possibility that a wand would appear above her oldest baby’s head at 9:42am.

Barry however, as usual, is completely clueless, genre-blind to the foreshadowing in his own life (as I think most of us are).  He only has eyes for his own big, manly plans, full of cars, college, girlfriends (hopefully), and making a name for himself in the non-magic world.  As his 16th approaches, Barry has a slightly naïve, marginally egotistical idea of his future, one that a ton of us can identify with from being teenagers ourselves: the idea that if he seizes diligent enough control over his own life, then the seas will part before him, and hang “banners” and “play music” in his wake.

And in my opinion, those aren’t bad things to want.  I don’t think it was bad for me to want people “groveling at my fett” for my writing, as I typoed as a seventeen-year-old on my profile, back when Facebook was newfangled.  It’s not bad to want to make your way in the world, in a big way.  But, like Barry has to learn, it’s a little more complicated than that.  And sometimes our futures end up a lot bumpier than we pictured…  But maybe that doesn’t mean our “life is over!” like Barry melodramatically worries right away.

One of the major themes of this story is how “fate” interacts with selfness and the will of the individual, and with our own plans.  From 9:42 am on his 16th birthday, Barry Franklin Anderson is a male fairy godmother, like it or not.  And at this point I’ve already written over a quarter million words about how he learns to “deal with it.”

When I picked this song, I knew at some point that I was going to have to figure out what “St. Elmo’s Fire” even meant.  I knew it was a Brat Pack movie I hadn’t seen, with Emilio Estevez (who, since I was born in ’89, I was much more familiar with in Mighty Ducks and my high school Mission: Impossible obsession), and I knew there was a “St. Elmo’s Bar” in the movie.  But I put off looking it up, afraid it would ruin my use of the song if “St. Elmo’s Fire” was inapplicable to my use of it in Barry.  I figured, eh, light and heat are #motifs, with fire and rockets being recurrent; being from a coming-of-age 80s movie, it probably has some metaphor for what they learned from the bar about keeping the fire and passion that they had gained, blah blah blah.

However, when I finally researched what “St. Elmo’s Fire” is, after having it in the soundtrack for five months, ho boy, was it so much better than I could possibly have imagined or planned for!

Quoting Wikipedia:

St. Elmo’s fire is a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a corona discharge from a rod-like object such as a mast, spire, chimney, or animal horn in an atmospheric electric field.  It has also been observed on the leading edges of airplanes, as in the case of British Airways Flight 9.  The intensity of the effect, a blue or violet glow around the object, often accompanied by a hissing or buzzing sound, is proportional to the strength of the electric field and therefore noticeable primarily during thunderstorms or volcanic eruptions.

Here’s a video I really liked, explaining what St. Elmo’s fire is, how it works, and showing what it looks like:

(This is the only video of his I’ve watched but that’s an ISFJ(ej) face, if you’re curious.
Like David Boreanaz, Anderson Cooper, Aaron Eckhart or Pedro Pascal.)

Guyyys… it’s a weather phenomenon of electricity and light.  AND IT’S FRICKN’ BLUISH PURPLE.  Are you kidding me?!?!  I didn’t know that!!

A few other facts about St. Elmo’s fire, none of which I knew of course, that shall prove themselves very relevant to #motifs as the story unfolds:

• It’s most associated with sailors, who saw it amidst stormy, turbulent waters.
• It was considered an omen, for good or for bad.
• The Greeks called it “Helene,” literally meaning “torch.”
• Welsh mariners referred to St. Elmo’s fire as canwyll yr ysbryd — “candles of the Holy Ghost.”
• For those who may have forgotten amidst COVID times, “corona” just means “crown” in Latin.  It’s basically a tiara shape of light.

If I were to iterate the amount of serendipity that occurs in relation to my decisions for this soundtrack, honestly no matter how much you love me, it would get tedious.  Sometimes it feels like there are more accidental, coincidental successes with this interconnected musical weave than there are deliberate, purposeful ones on my part.  And there are a lot of intentional decisions here.  You are embarking on a ridiculously silly, way over-thought-out, complicated compilation of thematic bops, that I spend so much mental energy getting just right.  But I couldn’t have made St. Elmo’s fire, a phenomenon of nature written into a silly-awesome 80s song before I was born, fit in perfect ways I never could have expected or planned for, when I didn’t even know what it was!!

Am I saying the Wheels of Fate and Time had unexpected hands in the making of this soundtrack?  …I’m not, not saying that.

Alls I’m saying is that sometimes we super didn’t plan for things to go the way they do.  We have our plans, and we want big, good, exciting things for ourselves.  Maybe we’re hoping “our time is now,” and it’s not… or maybe it is, just not in the way we pictured, at all.  Maybe we just want the freedom to be ourselves; “is that too much to ask?!”

But maybe, it’s not the end of the world if things don’t go our way, and we’re not as genre-savvy to the universe as we thought we were.  Maybe that’s when we learn to bloom where we’re planted, even if we never wanted to be a flower in the first place.  Maybe the lyrics to our life’s song fit a lot better for who we are than we ever could have intended.  Maybe there’s more to the soundtrack of you, than you’ve even imagined yet.

Maybe don’t fight the foreshadowing.  It’s not always as subtle as we think it is.

And so Barry Anderson descends the stairs to eat bacon on his sixteenth birthday, feeling anticipation about being in motion, a fiery passion within him about the man he plans to be… having no earthly clue that within minutes he’s going to get lit up like a violet Roman candle; a pillar of St. Elmo’s fire; a lightning rod of fate.

One of my favorite lines in this song, fitting with Barry’s ongoing determination towards magic, is: “You broke the boy in me, but you won’t break the man.”

All Barry Anderson wanted for his 16th birthday was a set of wheels and the freedom to be a man and use them.  Instead, life at sixteen became entirely about what “being a man” really even means.  What being “Barry Anderson” really even means.

(And as far as my 80s coming-of-age movie genre-savvy went, that wasn’t terribly far off.  Although now that I’ve read about the synopsis of the movie, I honestly have no desire to see it.  I could be wrong, but the characters seem like terrible people!  And, dare I say, but I feel like the lyrics of the song fit better for this, than the original movie.  Sorry young Rob Lowe and Rob Lowe’s mullet, both of which are indeed beautiful.)

1 – Birthday – Extras    Barry Home    Let’s Hear It For the Boy