Alabaster Van Gelt
1861 A.D. - 1922 A.D.

Playwright

Penned Kilsa's Lament  in 1882, an opera about a girl, Kilsa the Off-key,  cursed with a great thirst and Intercontientius and the 20 Firkins, a musical in 1905.  Firkins  told the story of Intercontientius Appetitus and his founding of the annual Easter Beer Hunt. 

Other works includes Kegs of Anarchy (1906) & Eyes Dilated (1888)

He is also believed to have written a musical about Rufus the Light Fingered  called Terror of the Undead though the Libretto does not exist today. 

The only evidence that such a script did exist is this production photo found in a Rhode Island library circa 1905 with this postscript on the reverse.

 
Alabaster didn't hit his stride until he traveled to London and fell in with the Decadence Movement, which focused on the isolated role of the artist, hostility to bourgeois society and a taste for the morbid and perverse.  They held a belief in the superiority of the artificial over the natural. 

The Movement had all but come and gone from Europe when Alabaster discovered it and was on the wane in England.  Oscar Wilde is one of its most prominent members.

Upon finding it, the young writer wrote his family that he had found his muse and scribed the Lad of Shallot, a tale of lad who's melancholy was marked by continual weeping to the point of dehydration.

The publication brought him notoriety, a limited market, and an unlimited variety of critics.  One wag went so far as to dub him the "Libidinous Laureate of a Pack of Satyrs."

During this time he met a Decadent painter named Swyberg (oft times nic-named as "Swineburg") who convinced him to go on a Grand Tour of Europe to complete his studies.

He even ventured down to Egypt where he spent some time with Young on his Tut dig and accidentally gave rise to the mummy myth.

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