eventually finds a gold key that unlocks the book of Grimm's Fairy Tales in their transformed state. Scene 2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – The vanity, fragility and naiveté of Snow White ("a dumb bunny" who must be protected by the dwarfs) eventually lead to her becoming the mirror image of her wicked stepmother. Scene 3. The White Snake – Sexton satirizes marriage as a kind of "deathly stasis", writing of the young husband and wife, "they were placed in a box and painted identically blue and thus passed their days living happily ever after – a kind of coffin". Scene 4. Iron Hans – The wild man, Iron Hans, eventually freed from his cage becomes a parable for Sexton's own struggles with insanity and society's ambivalence to the mentally ill. Scene 5. Rumpelstiltskin – Sexton's sardonic view of motherhood, "He was like most new babies, as ugly as an artichoke but the Queen thought him a pearl", co-exists with an urge to identify not with the protagonist/winner of the tale (the former miller's daughter who becomes Queen) but rather with the antagonist/loser (Rumpelstiltskin), a theme which recurs in the following scene, Rapunzel. Act 2 Scene 6. Rapunzel – Sexton portrays the witch, Mother Gothal, as a lesbian in love with Rapunzel, the young girl she has imprisoned. In the opera, Mother Gothal and Rapunzel sing a duet to "A woman who loves another woman is forever young". Roger Brunyate, who directed the 1999 production at the Peabody Institute, also sees clear allusions in the story to Sexton's beloved great-aunt, who died in a mental institution. Scene 7. Godfather Death – Sexton's version sticks fairly closely to the Grimms' narrative, and is used to explore the simultaneous desire for and fear of death. The first stanza portrays death as a state of sexual frustration rather than the beginning of an afterlife: "Hurry, Godfather death, Mister tyranny, each message you give has a dance to it, a fish twitch, a little crotch dance". The theme is reinforced by the explicit sexual desire which leads to the physician's fatal defiance of his Godfather. This poem is set, in contrast to the rest of the opera, as an entirely solo piece, a jazz ballad sung by Sexton at a microphone. Scene 8. The Wonderful Musician – In the introductory lines to the tale, "My sisters, do you remember the fiddlers of