16 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
ting soil made from Grandma into the
asparagus patch? Lisa Devereau, the
president of the Washington State Fu-
neral Directors Association, said, “We’re
hearing a lot of ‘That’s disgusting, we
don’t want to eat our relatives.’ ” Dever-
eau herself was skeptical until she saw
that the Washington proposal recom-
mends that the resulting soil be scat-
tered in forests or in non-food gardens.
A cubic yard of soil “is a lot of prod-
uct,” Devereau pointed out. “Four large
wheelbarrows full.”
We have time for one last question.
Ma’am?
“And what about us Catholics? Would
being composted consign us to a dank and
loamy perma-Limbo?”
The Washington State Catholic
Conference has denounced human com-
posting, suggesting that it’s an un-
dignified end for a human body. But
Father Dick Sparks, a Paulist priest in
Vero Beach, Florida, said that a case
can be made for it. “Given that Pope
Francis wrote ‘Laudato Si’,’ a big en-
cyclical about climate control and the
environment, I could see human com-
posting being accepted by the Church,
as long as it’s done with love and in-
tegrity and not primarily for money. ”
Thank you all for coming. Ashes to
ashes, dirt to dirt.
—Henry Alford
1
THEBOARDS
MEDLEYB
az Luhrmann, the Australian film
director known for his more-is-
more aesthetic, sat in a Manhattan re-
cording studio one recent Tuesday af-
ternoon, at a table strewn with sheet
music and water bottles. A monitor
showed the actors Aaron Tveit and
Karen Olivo, who were in side-by-side
sound booths in the next room. Tveit
and Olivo are the stars of “Moulin
Rouge!,” a Broadway adaptation of
Luhrmann’s 2001 movie musical, which
pairs a Puccinian plot set in Belle Épo-
que Paris with songs by Elton John,
Madonna, and the Police, among oth-
ers. The Broadway version has addeda slew of hits from the intervening
years: an absinthe party now bursts
into Sia’s “Chandelier,” and cancan
dancers do a mean cover of Beyoncé’s
“Single Ladies.”
Luhrmann, who is fifty-six, was
mostly hands-off with the stage show,
which opened last month, but he had
swooped in to produce the cast album,
which comes out this week. He had a
silver mustache and wore a cap embla-
zoned with the word “Surfrider” (from
a boutique motel in Malibu that he vis-
ited while working on his next film, an
Elvis Presley bio-pic). It was one o’clock:
time to record the big Act I duet, “El-
ephant Love Medley,” a mega mashup
of some twenty pop songs, in which
the bohemian-poet hero and his world-
weary courtesan inamorata argue over
the nature of love in her elephant-shaped
dressing room, sampling lines from U2,
Whitney Houston, and Phil Collins.
Whether you find “Elephant Love
Medley” rhapsodic or cringe-inducing
probably determines how you feel about
“Moulin Rouge!,” and, by extension,
about Baz Luhrmann. “We were laughed
at a lot,” he said of the movie version.
“We thought it was kind of laughable.”
Tveit recorded his first blast of dia-
logue: “But love is like oxygen to me!
Love is a many-splendored thing! Love
lifts us up where we belong!” “Jolly her
along,” Luhrmann advised over the
mike. When he and his writing part-
ner, Craig Pearce, made the film, they
envisioned a classic sparring-lovers-fall-
ing-in-love duet, like “I’ll Know,” from
“Guys and Dolls.” (The two met doing
a high-school production of that show
in Sydney, with Luhrmann as Sky Mas-
terson and Pearce as Nathan Detroit.)
“At first we did it with one song. Then
we sliced it into two songs,” Luhrmann
recalled. “And then came the idea: Well,
what if he sang every great love song
and she countered it?” Next came the
arduous task of acquiring rights. “In
those days, publishers wouldn’t give you
a piece of a song next to another piece
of a song, and so I had to physically
connect with all the artists,” he said.
“That’s how I met Elton.”
For the Broadway version, the show’s
thirty-three-year-old music supervisor,
Justin Levine, revamped the medley.
He started by brainstorming a list of
thirty or forty love songs (“Take Oncomposting is an accelerated form of
decomposition by which a corpse is
placed in a vessel with wood chips, al-
falfa, and straw. Oxygen is pumped in
to increase thermophilic, or heat-loving,
microbial activity. After a month, a corpse
will yield about a cubic yard of fluffy
soil, which will then be given to the de-
ceased’s family or to a conservation group.
The process, which will cost five thou-
sand five hundred dollars, uses an eighth
of the energy that cremation does. Peo-
ple who have suffered from prion dis-
eases will not be eligible.
Anyone else? The man in the cap?
“Why not just use an Instant Pot? ”
Fair enough. Recently, a correspon-
dent called Instant Pot’s toll-free help
line and asked if a human body could
be decomposed in one of its products.
A representative said, “Oh. This is some-
thing I need to check on.” He offered
to transfer the call to technical support.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said,
“Do you have an Instant Pot?” The cor-
respondent said yes. The representative
asked, “Can you tell me the model?”
The correspondent could not, as he was
calling from his office, not his home.
A woman in tech support was able
to answer the question: “No,” she said.
“You’d end up cooking the body in-
stead of decomposing it. You’d have
cooked meat.”
Uh, any less macabre questions?
“What about Luke Perry? ”
That’s slightly different, but related.
In March, the “Beverly Hills, 90210”
and “Riverdale” heartthrob was laid to
rest in Tennessee wearing a “mushroom
burial suit,” which, according to the
Web site of Coeio, the garment’s man-
ufacturer, is made up of mushrooms
and other microorganisms that help
decompose the body, transfer nutrients
to plants, and “neutralize toxins.”
(Human composting does this as well.)
According to the biological anthropol-
ogist Daniel Wescott, when internal
organs liquefy, “this purge fluid has a
lot of ammonias, or nitrogen.” Nitro-
gen, untreated, can “kill off all vegeta-
tion near the body for over a year,” Joan
Bytheway, of the Applied Anatomical
Research Center, at Sam Houston State
University, said. Humans: deforesting
the planet any way we can.
But will consumers be able to over-
come the psychological hurdle of put-