The Parlor on Elegance of the Eternal

Happy Halloween!

The Files on the Mayfair Witches--UPDATED

The Files on the Mayfair Witches here on the Parlor's blog will be back soon!  Of course, the main website is always available!

The Files on the Mayfair Witches menu is fully restored, which means when you click on the links under Inside First Street, you will get the actual page listed that you clicked on.  Over time, the font will be visible, too!  Which means it will be large enough to be legible.

The Parlor Turns 15

 

This month marks fifteen years since the launch of Come Into My Parlor in 2008.  I did not imagine I would still be here fifteen years later, but here I am.  Fifteen years later, Anne Rice has passed on, and now I hope the Parlor will help preserve her remarkable literary legacy.

Just For Funsies

If you have not come across this page on the site, let me introduce you to The Parlor on Wayback Machine.  On this page, you will find a list of links to each page that I archived on Wayback Machine, which is run by Internet Archive.  The site was archived as it appeared until the first week of February 2023.  That is when the madness of restoration--and I DO mean madness!--began.

Of course, the Parlor did not look that way when first launched in 2008, or in its early years.  I made a little video that shows pages on the Parlor as they looked in those earliest years.  I do have another version with "Dance of the Witches" from the soundtrack to the film, The Witches of Eastwick, but I'll put this version here instead.  It is already on the site.  

So, let's have a squizz, shall we?

 

 

My reaction when I saw some of the pages of the Parlor in its earliest years...

 

The Mayfair Galleries

The page about Amelia Street seems to be a very popular one.  So, I wanted to take a moment to assure you that the image galleries will be back very soon!  There are a handful of pages on the Parlor site that have image galleries.  Or they just ARE image galleries.  Those are coming back very shortly (whyIoughtasuesomebody...)

Another page, Inside First Street, is a bit different.  The gallery above now shows some large Mouldings One images of the historic photos of 1239 First Street--in color!  Now, I do use a free version of Playback to do this, so it's not perfect, but I did a little trick or two to make the color image a bit more realistic.  

Off I go to redo the galleries (whyIoughtasuesomebody...)

The Mayfair Witches Family Tree~Mona Mayfair Page Begun

I've been doing a lot with the family tree of the Mayfair Witches.  We know a lot about genetics today than we did when the books were first published, beginning with The Witching Hour in 1990.  I have used my family tree maker software to not only build the tree, but also to calculate relatedness. 

As you can imagine, the software has its own names for relatives and degrees of relatedness.  On a tree like the Mayfair tree, this can be problematic because of how many inward twists and loops the tree makes between the same individuals.  Like this:

For Michael Curry and Rowan Mayfair, I have hourglass and extended family charts on their individual relatedness pages, one that has Lionel Mayfair as Antha Mayfair's father, and one with Cortland Mayfair as Antha Mayfair's father.

Mayfair Relatedness~Rowan Mayfair

Mayfair Relatedness~Michael Curry

The software also wants to tell me about Morrigan Mayfair, Michael Curry's Taltos daughter with Mona Mayfair.  And Mona Mayfair is described as a "twentyfold" Mayfair.  I am certainly going to see if I can get the software to tell me more about this twentyfold thing, but I thought I'd also include Morrigan Mayfair (on her own page).

Until then, I've begun the page on Mona Mayfair, which is by no means complete...

Mayfair Relatedness~Mona Mayfair 

As stated on Rowan Mayfair's Relatedness page above, don't be shy; if you have any questions or you'd like to make a suggestion, alert me to an OOPSIES, I can be reached by old fashioned email at:

mayfair_95@yahoo.com

Because Lycos ate my webmistress@comeintomyparlor.com email 

World of the Witches

I kept forgetting this one, but when you go to the main navigation menu and click on World of the Witches, it will open the page that gives an overview of Rowan and Lasher's trip from the US to Britain and Europe before returning to the US and Rowan's eventual escape in Houston, Texas.  Except the maps that were once on the page haven't been for some time.

I've put maps and images back onto this page, and they are larger ones you can open to see at full size.  I've started to put images on the main site the way they appear on the pages here: with edge fade, which looks a bit nicer a lot of the time, I think.  But I finally got to it.

The maps come from The Witches' Companion, and I have straightened them so they aren't slightly off center like they were before...

An Update For Architectural Enthusiasts...

...is that what it's called?

Anyway.

Something I have been anxious to do for weeks now, I managed to do.  A lot of my time over the last several weeks has been focused on site navigation, which I hope makes it much easier for people to navigate the site without having to scroll, click, click, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, click, scroll, click, click, scroll...

And you won't have to do any of that on the page I just updated, House of Patterns.

The original images (they are still there in all their tiny glory for metadata reasons) were too small to really see all the details on the plans for 1239 First Street.  So I managed to find larger images, in case anyone wants to look closely at them, save a copy...

When I began to build the parlor as a 3D model, I did use the floor plan to place the doors, windows, fireplaces, measure dimensions...  If anyone out there enjoys building 3D models of historic homes like this one, the plans should be a big help.

This is a chance to mention again something I have wanted to add to the site for a while.  A page that does a survey of homes in the Garden District built in the same basic style as the Brevard-Rice house.  The house is in the basic style of American Townhouse, but is something of a polyglot when it comes to what you see on the house.  The front of the house is one place where the "Greek Revival" comes into it.  It does have two different styles of columns fronting it.

But not all the homes in the Townhouse style in the Garden District have exactly the same things on it.  Not all of them feature the Egyptian keyhole doorway on the front door, and not all of them have the same type of columns on the galleries (porches).  

The Morris-Israel house (1331 First Street) is one people might recognize as readily as they might now recognize the Soria-Creel house.  It has the lacy green arches along its front galleries, similar to the side porch of the Brevard-Rice house.  This one would be a fun one to give an overview of along with some resources because quite a bit can be learned about these houses just from fairly recent photos of work going on inside it.

I've always loved the restoration part of The Witching Hour.  When the series began in January, my mother reread the book and she wondered how a house, especially one in New Orleans, could remain fairly intact through 60 years of neglect.  Where I live, you don't see houses built with basements anymore because our water table is as high as the grass and the drainage caused too many problems for many houses with basements.  So we have what Anne Rice described Michael Curry crawling across to confirm the house had chain-walls: a crawl space.

A crawl space, not chain walls!  But chain walls and the description of their thickness and what they were built with just might be one thing that would keep a house like that from disintegrating from decades of neglect--to a point.

Just for funsies, I've always been fascinated in that creepy train wreck sort of way with the description of Fontevrault sitting in several feet of water but still standing.  I doubt that would even be possible, but I could be wrong.  I first read Taltos just before the Mass Market edition was released, so when I saw the cover with the plantation house sitting in swampy water and listing to one side, I was pretty fascinated!  

Several nights ago, I decided to see if I could find a plantation house that looked like the one used on that cover...or the one that WAS used on that cover.  In The Witches' Companion, you will see a photograph of the front of Belle Grove, a plantation house long gone but in its day was said to have been absolutely beautiful.  This was one example of Fontevrault shown.  

Then I found a short New York Times article that said the "prototype" for Fontevrault was the still standing Madewood Plantation.  When I looked, I could see it was.  The artist who created the cover for the Mass Market edition made some changes to the wings of the house, but the main facade is almost a complete match.  So I found a great image of Madewood shrouded in mist, pinpointed the height of the water, and made an animated graphic with reflecting water.  It is at the bottom of the page on the Amelia Street house on the main website.

Which leads me to the next idea I've mentioned before regarding houses.  

The two houses, the Amelia Street house and First Street, do sometimes seem to be confused with one another.  Anne Rice at one time did own several properties in New Orleans, including houses, but I think her main residence was First Street.  I want to do something that will help distinguish which house is which.  It will be fun, because both houses are absolutely gorgeous! 

I hope I can do that very soon, because the process of improving the site's navigation has NOT been an easy one!

Even though it was difficult, I finally found a way for this blog to feed into a widget on the website's Home page with good old fashioned RSS.  It's a website that, believe it or not, is for surfers!  But they have a great RSS feed generator, so if you need one for your own website, here is a link for Surfing Waves, or look for the link in the bottom right corner of the widget and it will take you to their site.

But...

Build a menu to put on each page of a fairly large website that will show up without having to copy and paste the code for it into each and every page?  Nope.

So I had to set it up a different way with a main menu, submenus, and jump menus with anchor links.  It's been time consuming but I think it's been well worth the time and effort.  Other than new content, you're likely to see a lot of these types of changes to the site to make it much easier to navigate and enjoy!