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Ellen's been thinking about a few things on her side of the Door, most of them having to do with the ghoul named Wagstaff who calls himself 'America's oldest teenager', and his means of keeping in touch with the people of post-nuclear Philly. Hence she's changed out of her armor and into her faded, worn, blue-and-gold jumpsuit with bits of armored reinforcement, and she and Dogmeat are seated at a table with a sign that reads:

RECOMMENDATIONS WANTED: Music!

Should be similar in style and sound to one or more of the following artists:
The Ink Spots, Bob Crosby, Roy Brown, Billie Holiday, Danny Kaye, The Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Kay Kyser, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole

Other artists also okay if they are not too bizarre by comparison

If she can pick up some recommendations, great; if not, well, she'll find some other way. In the meantime, at least she has a little time to think over a plan or two.

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Sam walks by in his civies and catches sight of the sign.

"Kind of a narrow focus," he says after reading it, "But I think you'd like Marvin Gaye or Tina and Ike. The Temptations and the Supremes could work, too."

"I'm trying to come up with some music I can use to get on the good side of an audience that's only had limited musical exposure before," Ellen says. "Other than the stuff that the locals perform themselves, which is supposed to be mostly the kind of thing you'd expect from a play or a vid of an old play, this is what they've had access to."

"Hmm. Well in that case, Marvin Gaye, and Tina and Ike might be a bit much. They're great mind you, they just can be a lot if you're used to older stuff. The Temptations and the Supremes are only about ten years after Nat King Cole. At least in my world."

Ellen nods. "Is there any particular song of theirs you'd recommend?" she says. "Or any particular record, just to start with? I haven't really heard that much myself, so..."

"Hmm, that's a good question. The Supremes had a lot of hits, but they didn't really get noticed until Baby, Where Did Our Love Go?. In fact, their album of the same name might be a good place to start. I think there are three of their big hits on it, if my memory is serving."

"The Supremes come from an era of singing groups, where you had more than one vocalist all singing the same lyrics and harmonizing together. Same with the Temptations, except they were all men, while the Supremes were all women."

"That should work, I think," says Ellen. "The group part, I mean. I'm going to need to listen to the music first, of course, just to have a good idea what I'm dealing with."

"Do you need this on vinyl or would cassette tape work? If cassette tape would work, I could put together a mix for you."

Charles smiles as he reads the sign and comes over to Ellen, "I can provide a lot of recommendations as that's the music of my time."

Today has been a fairly good day, Sean's making progress.

The trees are the sappiest, the days are the nappiest
The dogs are the yappiest, the kids are the scrappiest
The jokes the snappiest, the folks the happiest
Way back home-

"That would be appreciated," Ellen says. "I've just met up with a fellow who holds regular dance parties for the locals, but he's only got so many records to play..."

('Man' may be stretching it; the figure in her mind's eye looks more like a human put together from half-rotted, half-burnt meat, although he's wearing a varsity letter jacket.)

He takes a sip of tea, that song will be stuck in his now then sees the figure, who is striking,

"Oh, do you need records or recommendations? I could bring my collection and Bar could copy it. I have a lot of records."

"I don't know how you make copies of records," Ellen says doubtfully. "But if Bar could do it, sure. It wouldn't be too different from me just ordering records and paying in bottlecaps, I guess."

"If I bring them to Bar, she can copy them and there's no need to pay. I have a good collection and I'm glad to share it."

"Thank you," says Ellen. "I'll still owe you, though. For your trouble, if nothing else- and if this works it'll make a big difference to the Brotherhood's efforts anyway, so I'll owe you for that, too. I'll figure out something."

"That seems fair to me. Who's interested in the music?"

He saw her mental image of the man but doesn't know how he fits in.

Edited 2015-08-06 18:31 (UTC)

"Strictly speaking, at the moment it's just me," says Ellen. "But I got an idea from a ghoul in Philadelphia- he's the only one most of the people in the city have ever seen, and he's kind of disturbing-looking, but he keeps himself popular by throwing dance parties with his old record collection. People in Philadelphia will do a lot for entertainment that doesn't involve gladiator combat on ice."

"I'd imagine anything would be preferable to that and its hard to go wrong with music."

Ellen nods. "I'm also told there's a part of the city where people take their musical performance seriously enough to fight about it, or something like that," she says. "Wagstaff- that's the ghoul- Wagstaff said something about dance battles and staying alert for people snapping their fingers. I... wish I could say I understood what he was talking about."

"That sounds like something from a movie, though much stranger than West Side Story."

"Stranger than which, now?" Ellen says. "I don't recognize that name."

"Its a musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet, there are two gangs. When we first meet them, they snap as part of their choreography. I saw it on Broadway and then a movie of it was made about two years ago,"

A record appears on the counter, the original cast recording of West Side Story from 1957 and a picture of the Jets snaping.

"Huh," says Ellen thoughtfully. "... you know, they actually look kind of like some people I used to know. Or like those people wanted to eventually look, anyway."

She's thinking of Butch, mostly, but the other Tunnel Snakes did kind of have the same sort of attitude about them.

She can't help but wonder whatever happened to the lot of them.

"I knew a lot of people who dressed like that, it was the style when I was growing up. Things haven't changed that much. Its interesting that those styles carried over into your world after all that happened,"

She did make clear that in the Vault, things slowed down and people get stuck in what they know or think is safe. He wouldn't have thought his time fit that description.

Edited 2015-08-06 19:56 (UTC)

"Well- to be fair, the ones I'm thinking of mostly dressed like this." She plucks at the sleeve of her Vault suit. "Only the suits they wore were the same as my original suit. No armor, no leather, no reinforcements, just fabric. Butch and his buddies stole the jackets from one of the Vault's oldest storerooms. The Overseer never made them return them, for whatever reason. I don't know where they got the hairstyle idea from, though. It's not like we had any Elvis vids in the Vault."

She'd never even heard of Elvis Presley as anything but his early career as a gospel singer until she came to Milliways, and then she only heard about him because Corazon had run across the King's School of Impersonation in New Vegas. If anyone in the Vault had ever seen his hairstyle or similar, they'd kept their sources to themselves.

'That is strange but I guess its a look that's not too hard to pull off. Were they popular? They would have been at my school,"

They would be bad boys and Charles was never one of them.

"Get out of my way, you stupid Tunnel Snakes!"
"Oh, I can show you a real 'tunnel snake', Amata-"
"God, Butch! Why don't you just leave me alone?"
"What're you gonna do about it? Run tell your daddy on us?"

"They... were more popular than I was," Ellen says carefully, after a bit. "The adults thought they were weird, but the other kids... more or less got on with them okay."

It was more than she'd managed, that was for sure.

Charles drinks his tea as that's a painful memory,

"Yes, that type is good at making people respect them if not like them. They sound awful."

"Paul Hannon wasn't too bad, but he let the others push him around way too much," Ellen says. "Butch was a jerk, though. On the other hand, he did get stuck with that Vault hairdresser job..."

Smugness is a terribly unbecoming emotion.

Ellen does not always try to control it very hard.

He smirks with a shrug, "Well, clearly he knew what he was doing with his hair."

"That's not even how they picked him," says Ellen. "There was an aptitude test, a written one- and I don't remember there being fashion questions on it. I mean, that was years ago, so I might be wrong, but."

"How strange but then aptitude tests have always been a little odd."

"They apparently worked fairly well for Vault 101 for a long time," says Ellen with a shrug. "I don't know how the GOAT was structured, but it seems to have kept things running- it's irrelevant now, I'm pretty sure, unless Amata decided to keep using the thing even though the Vault is open now."

And she's not about to ask, because after that whole 'thank you for coming to the Vault and saving us but you have to leave now and never come back' thing, she doesn't want to see or hear or deal with Amata ever again.

"They were used at some points in my time but not everyone thought they worked."

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