I’m naming names today: Jenn Moss and Alan Sorrentino.

Alan Sorrentino is in the news about his letter to the editor decrying women wearing yoga pants in public. I know what Alan is talking about. His yoga pants were my muffin tops.

A muffin top is the fleshy overspill above a waist band, developing and exposed when one is wearing a tight lower garment – pants, shorts, skirt – and a cropped top. They were most prevalent among girls and young women. Probably still are. I haven’t seen one for a while.

Muffin tops caused me problems. How could someone wear something so tight and not be appalled by the flesh spilling out? Do they know how they appear? That developed my second problem. I’ve always been irritated by America’s ideals of beauty and perfection, and how humans should look. And here I was, sucked right into it. Damn America.

So I wanted to praise these people for being indifferent about my problem and showing their body as it is, and without embarrassment. But, sigh, I was also disturbed, because these people looked obese and overweight. Shouldn’t they be taking better care of themselves? That led directly to self-confrontation: is that what you think about NFL players with their big bellies? 

No, Michael, it usually isn’t. I was all about the player and what they brought to the table.

Alan, of course, was writing about his problem in what the yoga pants revealed to him about his opinion of female curves. Just like me and my muffin tops, the yoga pants were not about the people wearing them: the problem is him and his perceptions.

Now let’s move on to Jenn Moss. She’s a writer who posts on roughandreadyfiction.com. On Meta Monday, she posted about seeing Richard III at STNJ. Dwelling on Derek Wilson and his awesome guns, she wrote about how this buff actor compared to people’s usual perception of Richard III. In her final paragraphs, she wrote:

Meanwhile, this whole muscle thing got me thinking: what kind of assumptions do we bring to a play or book that we know well? Have you ever rejected a portrayal of a beloved character because it just didn’t match the vision you had in your head? Did a remake or reboot ever leave you cold? I love the Star Trek reboot, for example. But the 2005 film version of Pride & Prejudice just doesn’t do it for me.

I’m going to keep asking myself this question whenever I see a revival or any other remake: How open am I to a different look or fresh interpretation of a favorite character?

Why yes, Jenn, I have thought about these questions. I mutter and rant quite often about what so many – like you, Guy Ritchie – do to Sherlock Holmes. I grimaced at the treatment endured when the television show, ‘Wild, Wild West’ was made into a movie. And then someone did it – gasp – to the ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’. Look what’s going on in the Marvels Universe movies. And ‘Star Trek’…grrr…. “What is the world coming to?” I bitterly huffed in best BitterBen fashion.

Of course, I was always talking about my problem. I didn’t realize it until I grasped that I do the same thing to the fiction I write. I take original ideas and torture them into something else. In my science fiction, I discard the intelligent scientific foundations from the likes of Asimov and Clarke. The science and technology just are, a big leap from here and now. Sure, internal logic to the novels is solid, but I make no effort to explain how we made advances in space travel, FTL, teleporters, compilers, terraforming, and colonizing other planets: they just are as part of the setting, much like televisions, cars, cell phones, malls and aircraft travel just are as part of a modern setting.

Reluctantly I concluded, it’s a good thing when a television show, movie, novel, song or idea is re-interpreted and presented in a new light. It is how art, science technology, and government in all their forms have worked since just about the first time a story was done, a ruler proclaimed, a tool was created, or a drawing was made on a wall. Someone saw it and thought, “Wouldn’t it be better this way?” Then they offered their interpretation – thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

We’re always doing this, imagining, re-imagining and re-interpreting all the art, technology, history and events of time.

Now leave me alone. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. After all, that’s what all this is really about.

And that’s my problem.