A belle dame is missing in Kevin Brooks's "Black Rabbit Summer," too.
In the series, adapted from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell about a northern town on the brink of radical social change, Dame Judi played Miss Jenkyns's sister, Miss Matty.
The international contests would, naturally, have to fall into line, and the next dream we have will feature Dame Edith Sitwell, a Miss Universe sash draped across her shoulders, majestically walking the length of some floodlit runway.
Though the search for this Laura Palmer-esque missing dame ends significantly less gruesomely, and more coffee-ad appropriate, these snippets of hyper-charged Lynch magic still tend to those flames of anticipation for the upcoming new series.
In fact, she is a different Lisa Rose Byrnee): a nurse, or an actress, or something rum, who seems to wear the same coat and live in the same place as the missing dame.
You can tell Barbara Gowdy's new novel is a literary thriller because it doesn't feature a cop, a private investigator, a young lawyer, a bounty hunter, a medical student or an infectious-disease specialist caught up in a hunt for a serial killer, a missing dame, an escaped con or vial of germs.
The real-life hearing may be missing Dame Judi but it still will, in part, be about theatre and performance.
The Lady Vanishes (1938) -- When elderly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) disappears without a trace on a train en route to England, her acquaintance Iris (Margaret Lockwood) searches every cabin and corner -- without success.
Miss (later Dame) Louise McIlroy, the first professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Royal Free Hospital, and Miss E. Bolton, surgeon at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, also joined the committee as co-opted members.
Only Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), the courageous little old lady, is there to carry the torch for Britain and bear the vital MacGuffin (in the form of a state secret encoded in a piece of folk music) that may save the nation.
