Screams in the Night

Last night, after putting the kiddies to bed, my wife and I sat down to enjoy One Night with the King, possibly the most atrocious portrayal of the story of Esther ever put on film (more on that later), when out from the forest surrounding our home came the most unearthly horrific sounds.

"What is that?", we said.

It was so ghastly, in fact, that Monica ran upstairs to make sure the kids weren't spooked. I peeped out the downstairs window, and lo - into the moonlight walked some kind of cat! It was a "big'un", with (as far as I could tell) tan skin and a long tail, and the most horrible yowl I ever heard. It yowled a few times in our back yard and then ran off to circle the neighborhood a few times. Monica said it was trying to spook everyone in the neighborhood out.

Yeesh. It spooked us out. Who wants to let your kiddies play in the yard with that on the loose? I suspect it may have been a bobcat, although bobcats don't have long tails (hence the name - their tails are bobbed). Maybe I just thought it had a long tail - it didn't seem quite big enough to be a mountain lion (6-7 feet long), although the Internet(s) says they have been known to hang out around the Blue Ridge mountains.

Anyway, with that out of the way, we returned to the latest retelling (if you could call it that) of the epic tale of Esther (I think it was the same story), which was quite engrossing only because I had no idea how the story would end. I mean, I know how the Bible story ends, but this was like a (very) loose paraphrase of the Bible story. For example, during the final revelation scene where Esther says "I'm a Jew", and Haman is supposed to grovel for his life, he says, instead, "You expect me to beg, don't you!", and then proceeds to mock her.

The King of Persia is depicted as a hunky chauvinist (with long Vidal Sassoon hair and so forth) that suspects Esther of cheating on him (because of her {in the movie} in-person meetings with Mordecai), which creates additional drama for her unsummoned court appearance (since, in the movie the king thinks she might be an adulteress, there's a good bit of drama indeed).

And the King only believes Esther at the last when he sees a dazzling light show of spinning Stars of David reflected by her magical(?) necklace. I say magical because *gasp* - nobody else can see it but Esther and her hubby. Very imaginative, but in the Bible the king believed Esther because he loved her (with all the types and shadows pertaining thereto). Not because she had a spiffy necklace.

Maybe the wild cat was screaming in agony on our behalf.