Does This Frog Make You Feel Calm?! Or Perhaps Like You Have Been Mildly Poisoned With Henbane?

Does this frog make you feel calm?! Or perhaps like you have been mildly poisoned with henbane?

Please enjoy these extra notes regarding things that appear in my Shameless Big Bang fic Last Night at the Verona Grand Hotel, in order of appearance. Also now listed in the work endnotes on AO3 (but without the pictures).

This post contains lots of spoilers for the fic.

The train that Mickey takes from Chicago to Los Angeles is an Amtrak route called the Southwest Chief.

Mickey reads Treasure Island as a reference to Loftec’s fic Take this waltz.

The green popsicle is Melona.

I went for fictionalized geography around where exactly the hotel is, but the descriptions of the view on the drive up are based on pictures of Los Liones Trail.

The Verona Grand is, of course, inspired by the early years of the Chateau Marmont, but also crossed with a creepy old hotel I’ve stayed at in Colorado. The name is a reference to the setting of Romeo and Juliet plus the Neptune Grand from Veronica Mars (for that sunshine noir energy).

The Mark of Zorro (1920): Full disclaimer, unlike Mickey, I didn’t watch the whole thing (I didn’t have the good incentive of looking for my crush), but the moments I referenced are here and here.

(About ten years ago, I went to an outdoor movie screening that had been advertised as The Mask of Zorro but turned out to be The Mark of Zorro; after about 30 minutes, we all gave up and went home. Sorry, Douglas Fairbanks! We wanted Antonio.)

Hunter’s name is a reference to 1950s actor Tab Hunter, who came out as gay in 2005. (One of his long-term relationships was with Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame, after they met at the Chateau Marmont.)

KY Jelly has been around since the early 1900s (!). Here’s some of the vintage packaging. We’ll just assume Mickey was distracted and didn’t look too closely at the tube (or thought it was pretentiously packaged hipster lube; thanks for that idea, Deanna!).

Mickey calls Davie “Nurse Ratched” as a reference to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; the actress who played her in the original movie, Louise Fletcher, played Frank’s mother in season 2 of Shameless.

Nerve pills: These are fictionalized (I don’t know how well they worked or what they tasted like; probably not nice!) but they’re based on Carter’s Little Nervine Pills, the active ingredient of which was extract of hyoscyamus, which (if my Googling is correct) is henbane. Henbane is quite toxic and can cause hallucinations. It was commonly associated with witchcraft, since ointment made with it could cause people to see things and feel like they were flying. Never change, early 20th century medicine.

Another one of the compounds in henbane is scopolamine, which can be used to treat motion sickness. This worked well for my purposes because I had decided that the sickness Ian and Mickey experience when they stay in the wrong time is a cousin to motion sickness (if traveling through space too fast can make you feel sick, why not traveling through time?).

The concept of quantum entanglement is the other one in my mind when I think about what “connects” them each to their own time, but don’t ask me any follow-up questions on that, because honestly I’m not great at physics and I don’t totally understand it. Storytelling-wise, I just like the idea of things being connected to each other on a submolecular level. I refer to this in Two of Your Earth Minutes, as well, for the same reason.

Mickey also makes a reference to the idea of the observer effect. (Lotta quantum mechanics in this dang ghost story!!)

The new movie Ian is going to audition for is A Woman of Paris, directed by Charlie Chaplin.

I think he would have gotten it, don't you?