Come Into My Double Parlor

(Moved from GoDaddy)

The Original Parlor is creaking its way back to life after a month of catastrophe.  No, I don't know what happened.  I do know that I've kept a lot of notes and records of the site over the years and had pretty thoroughly backed it up before things got really bad.  It's kind of funny to go through file after file after file in the archive and suddenly find something from, say, 2011 that I'd forgotten about.  

What I kept seeing was this 19-year-old I once was, laying down reading these novels for the first time.  Imagine that-someone so young is reading these richly detailed novels, absorbing the story, the characters and their world.  And becoming interested in the world she actually lived in again.  There was so much that Anne Rice put into these novels, not just from her world, but the rest of the world--its history, its people and the events and beliefs that shaped it.  Nothing about human experience was too trifling when put into the context of a family of witches.

Witches who were human, ordinary people with extraordinary abilities that connected them to the spiritual and the supernatural in ways most humans could never comprehend.  To go from Suzanne to Deborah to Charlotte, which took the family from Scotland to France to Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti), then from there to Louisiana, to New Orleans and beyond was like a tour of history during that entire time period.  And it was written in a way only Anne Rice could have written it.

Anne Rice could go from describing what a bathroom looked like by describing how it felt to take a nice hot bath in it to describing how other characters could get into a snit of alarm over the precociousness of the character taking the bath.  A kid who had announced her first car would be a Porche (resulting in "You are not buying that child a coffin on wheels!"), that she aimed for a career in stock portfolios (Mona One, Mona Two...) and would travel by plane wearing a cowboy hat, that she'd trained the paper boy to cat her Wall Street Journal up to her bedroom window (on Amelia Street, not First Street) a certain way, and she could build a file directory in MS-DOS that actually outsmarted a nosy lawyer cousin.

This was all in the beginning of Lasher, y'all.

Mona Mayfair was a very computer literate character.

So, what is this about double parlors?

Historical Survey of 1239 First Street, 1964

Let me explain what "double parlor" means.  

If you look at photos of the parlor of the First Street house, you will notice that it is a rather long room that takes up a substantial amount of square feet along the length of the house.  It has two entries from the main hallway of the house, two windows at each end of the parlor, two fireplaces, and two more tall windows that open onto the side porch where Deirdre Mayfair spent most of her life from 1976 to 1989.  But look up at the ceiling in the middle of this room.

You see an elaborate arch with intricate designs in the plaster.  "Ornate" is a word one could use to describe it and the identical corbels at each end of the arch.  This arch is what basically helps turn the room into a "double parlor".  The other thing that makes it a "double parlor" is the fact that one half of this room is a mirror image of the other half of the room.  The arch is like a mirror in that sense.  Never mind the actual mirrors in the room, which, by the way, appear to be the same ones that have been there at least since 1933.

The other end of the parlor in this 1933 historical photo.

The "double parlor" is a room seen in many similar houses in New Orleans, and even in plantation mansions.  Another way the concept of the "double parlor" was used was Nottoway's famous "white ballroom".  Although the two ends of the room were not identical in layout, a mirror image of one another, the room still had ornate arches that also contained Corinthian columns that served to section the large room into two parts without adding walls or doors.

You can find out more about the historical survey on The Witching Hour: The Mayfair House.  Oh, yes, I will link to pages of the Parlor 2.0 in blog posts like this one.  But the Original Parlor will feature links between it and the Parlor 2.0.  The page of the Parlor I just mentioned has this already.

Another double parlor?  The James Gallier house in the French Quarter.  The house that was used as Lestat's townhouse in the AMC series.  When you watch Mayfair Witches, look at the interior of the parlor.  It has a double parlor, but the arches include columns like the Gallier house and Nottoway's White Ballroom.

As for my "double parlor"...

I have to wonder how Mona Mayfair would have approached this mess.

The Original Mayfair Witches Parlor is up and is in the same place I've had it for the last 17 years--Tripod Lycos.  Because I have that annoying tendency to save A LOT of stuff, I'd backed up the site in my own pretty thorough way before things got really dire.  I don't know what happened.  All I know is, I intend to make sure my content--that is MINE, and a surprising amount of it is--remains preserved, available, and remains under my control.  

I built this Chronicles site as a "sister site" to the Original Parlor due to the limitations of the Parlor's original host.  But now, with The Mayfair Witches Parlor 2.0, I've got a "double parlor".

Whether or not the Original Parlor is live makes no difference in how I have to migrate content.  I have to do it manually either way.  And I have migrated a substantial amount of it.  It is backed up, ready to go should the Original Parlor's host go SPLAT.  Again.

I'm going to be honest.  During this month of disaster, I was so exasperated, so tired, so frustrated and so DONE with things that just "happen" that NO ONE seems to think is worth explaining, things that I can never seem to find definitive answers for that I came very, VERY close to unpublishing the Original Parlor after 17 years.  And I am going to talk about it.  

Now, based on what I have seen and become aware of, I am going to take a wild guess.  Not about other websites hosted by Tripod Lycos and whether or not they, too, went down.  I know for a FACT they did.  I checked them myself.  I also know Angelfire also had a calamitous month of June.

And I did not just "check to see" if my website was live. I also pinged it.  There's a reason I wanted to share that little detail and I promise you, it really is for entertainment purposes only.  

Here's my wild guess.  I'm not the only one who continues to maintain a website or online resources to continue to hopefully help preserve the literary legacy of Anne Rice and its impact who has encountered a rather obscene amount of mysterious things to content with.  Things we get sucked into stupid little games of "20 Questions" and "Can you guess..." with--oh, for...

But yes.  I very nearly just unpublished the d*** thing, I was so tired of what was happening and no answers.  Yes, I filled out a "ticket".  In detail.  It's still there.  In detail.

Bottom line--the Original Parlor lives.

But now, it is a "double parlor".  Because if that is going to keep happening or I'm going to keep having weird problems with no answers, or the host itself--GASP!--gives its last gasp, or whatever, the Parlor will NOT.  

So, if the Original Parlor go SPLAT, go HERE:

My likeness, my Emerald and House 3D Models,
and coming soon, my COFFEE.