The Crucible

“I'll tell you something about my good name, it's mine alone to disgrace”

Community readers hear the good-name lines echo the close of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), where John Proctor refuses to surrender his name to the court, asking how he can live without it. The song's register of Salem-style sanctimony - the convened elders, the judgemental creeps, the pious public - rhymes with the play's own, and the speaker's insistence that her name is hers alone to disgrace lands as the same refusal to let a self-righteous crowd dictate the terms of her good standing.