The Nancy Awards

My friend Jeannie can predict the Oscar winners every year.  Most years she has seen every movie nominated in a major category.  Most years I go to one movie max.

I went to see "Lincoln" at the movie theater, and enjoyed it greatly. The last time I'd gone to a movie theater was to see "The Conspirator" a year and a half ago.  Seems like Abe has to go to Ford's for me to go to Cinemark. I loved Daniel Day Lewis' interpretation of Lincoln as storyteller.  Sally Field was amazing--I completely believed her, but still remembered to go home and take my calcium pills. I never could cross over into total suspended disbelief for Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens.  Curmudgeon Tommy Lee was still crusty Tommy Lee, just with a bad wig and no sunglasses.

But now I present the Nancy Awards for the best new books I read all the way through during 2012.  I will have to add poetry, children's literature, and audiobooks to the awards in 2013, and maybe an old timers hall of fame.

Fiction

   


Nonfiction
    

I would laud on the praises for these memorable reads, but I need to fold laundry, make the Krunch, walk, make soup, vacuum, pay bills, and Skype with my grandbaby.  I'll just say they made me cry, get angry, laugh, feel wrapped in a cocoon of wonder, understand myself and others better.

Happy Sunday.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Moving on up

Drainage is good.

Elevation is, too.

I am thinking about homes in the Fifties and Sixties after watching the powerful movie, "Tree of Life". As a Sixties tree-climber, I loved being able to see a long way to the east from the hill in our backyard. I loved riding down the hill from our house to the swimming pool on my blue Schwinn, but not pedaling back up.





Having a house on a hill was important to my mother.  Fritzi had vivid memories of flooding on the farm where she grew up.  The farm was in the vicinity of Marion, which was never much more than a "populated place" on Little Beaver Creek between McCook, Nebraska and Oberlin, Kansas in the Republican River Basin.  According to Mom, it was a dismal spot to be a child during the drought and Great Depression.  Her stories always included kerosene lamps, mean roosters, and stinky flood waters.

My eldest, Mr. Speech-Debate, is experiencing the soggy Joys of Home Ownership in a rapid immersion program.  After buying a starter home in Salem, Oregon last fall, he is dealing with flooding in Marion County in the Willamette River Valley.  More particularly, there is flooding in the HVAC ducts of his home's crawl space.  There is little I can do for him, beyond directing cosmic blow-dryer thoughts in a northwesterly direction.

Dad also needs cosmic blow-dryer thoughts directed his way, but he's a bit better today.  He swallowed tiny bites of chocolate pudding and Gerber baby peaches, but couldn't manage mashed potatoes.  He swallowed a couple ounces of water, then said, "little bit" when I asked if he would like to try some coffee.  He moved his arm to adjust his eyeglasses, lifted the Styrofoam cup to his lips, and pointed his finger toward the photos on his bulletin board.

To bring this weekend story full circle, my youngest, the Woolly Mammoth, is moving to a new apartment in Washington, D.C.  After a year and a half in a basement apartment, he is excited to have windows and city views.  D.C. is, of course, the city of Marion Barry.  I'll be glad not to fret about basement flooding if the river of Republican presidential candidates overflows in an rush of hot air and polluted water.

Dad is awash in oral secretions that clog the back of his throat.  This problem has escalated over five years, although it is considered a symptom of the final stage of life.  We keep the head of his bed elevated to promote drainage.

And for the polarizing film "Tree of Life", there is much to admire in the sets, costumes, locations, and glorious photography.  Much, too, to consider about doing the best one can as a parent in any decade.








© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

"Your blog is too wide."

Only a true friend would say that to your face.  Does this template make me look fat?  Please let me know if you can't fit my blog on your screen.

"Your hair is too scary.  You look like an electrified Chia pet."  At the staff holiday white elephant gift exchange I received a Prussian blue (old Crayola color) comfy-huggie-snuglee-cuddly blanket-with-sleeves.  The fabric is amazing.  It does NOT breathe.

I fell asleep on the couch watching "Midnight in Paris" under the blanket-with-sleeves.  What happened to Owen Wilson's nose? I need to spend more time in waiting rooms with old People magazines so I know what's what. As a person with deviated septum issues, I kept fixating on the nose.  Also, he walked like a guy I had a crush on once.  Sigh.

There were some great costumes and cars, but the movie was sadly ordinary.  Never thought I'd see the day when some input from Rodney Dangerfield could improve a Woody Allen movie. I pulled the comfy-huggie-snuglee-cuddly up over my head.

Woke up in 2012.  Maybe it will be a new Belle Époque.  More likely just it's another era of Chia pet hair.

Praise be.  It's 2012.

Resolution #4--Stay more informed about pop culture.  

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Sleeping through his day

Father's Day was not a big event for Dad.  He slept through the whole thing, although he let the aide spoonfeed him breakfast with his eyes closed.  If not for the miracle of hot coffee, an aide would have to spoon my breakfast, too.  

When I told Dad there was nothing in my fridge but watermelon, he got out a whisper that he never got watermelon.  So I took him some today, and left it on his tray next to the homemade cookies and card from my son and daughter-in-law.

Unsuccessful connecting with my father, but I've been in touch with my siblings and with Mother Earth.  Read the news.  Relaxed with my muse, making photo connections between student art and my 365 Project photos.

Instead of reading more of The Big Thirst, I watched "Temple Grandin".  Instead of ironing I just didn't.....

Om

Moo

Yum

Making eggplant parmesan and hummingbird food.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Hummusketeers

Tomorrow it's my turn to take a special snack to school.  I am planning to bring my blender and make hummus with the preschoolers. I will bring the ingredients, plus Reduced Fat Wheat Thins, baby carrots, jicama and bell pepper strips. The preschoolers will choose their own veggies and crackers for dipping, and choosing is always a big deal. 

I read a funny word, "hummusketeers" in a blog comment. That's when I decided on my special snack. I will go easy on the garlic. Kids will help use the garlic press, measure the liquid reserved from the Reduced Sodium Garbanzos, squeeze lemons, use the strainer, fish the roasted red pepper out of the jar, maybe help with the can-opener, scrape down the blender with spatulas ... Plus we can all dance to the noise of the blender. 

Then we can talk about the Food Pyramid.  The latest nutrition education materials call the pertinent group "Meat and Beans".  That seems to leave out eggs and nuts.  I prefer "Meat and Protein", but that's a bit abstract for young children.  I'm taking my kitchen cat since it was pouting about not being included in the fun. 

M-I-C See you real soon.
K-E-Y why? Because we like you.
H-U-Double M-U-S

In other developments, Dad says he will be twenty-two on tomorrow's birthday. Since he will really be eighty-eight, I wonder what in his head made him divide by four. I'm not sure there is method to his madness, but he does seem to know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly.

Slowly reading Viki Kind's book, The Caregiver's Path to Compassionate Decision Making:  Making Choices For Those Who Can't.  This morning the section on "care-grieving" hit home on two levels.  First, I could recognize myself as a poster girl for that telethon.  Second, I could reconsider Dad's experience while Mom was ill in 2004.  How very overwhelmed and exhausted he must have felt!  My parents were both totally compliant with whatever doctors said during that time.  It is a fair turnabout that Dad chooses noncompliance as his default mode these days.

....Care-grieving... "the grief that comes with caring for and caring about another person.  Not only is caregiving exhausting, overwhelming, frustrating and emotionally draining, it is also associated with profound grief."  (Kind, p. 105)

• Dad isn't the person he used to be.  The person he is now is often unpleasant, and frequently nauseating.
• Our intense link of father-to-eldest daughter with a shared birthday is gone.
• The father who nurtured my creativity and curiosity is long gone.
• Facility staff members keep asking if Dad was always impatient, aggressive, and combative as if I'm supposed to reveal a deep family secret.  I just want to scream at them, "No!  He was judgmental, sarcastic, sometimes belittling and occasionally  intolerant.  He was hopeless at teaching me to throw a ball, but good at teaching me to fish.  He had impeccable table manners.  He was not abusive or violent!"
• While I don't physically take care of Dad, managing his affairs is time-consuming.  He resents his loss of independence, and I resent this big chunk of my time.  Sometimes his private room can't hold all our frustrations.
• It's really difficult to make time for self-care and managing my own messy life.
• Dad is going to die, possibly soon.
• Dad is not going to die as soon or as easily as either of us might wish, which is not easy to admit.
• People who aren't in my shoes give me a lot of advice, and sometimes they are coworkers.  Fortunately, people who are in similar shoes commiserate with me, and sometimes they are coworkers.
• I'm going to die, too.
• I'm going to die without being able to afford it, so I sure better not linger!
• The people whose support I most need are far away with busy lives.  I often feel like I'm performing without Annette.

It had been over a year since I saw a movie in a theater.  Danger Baby gave me an AMC movie gift card a few months back.  Today I needed to go sit in a dark suburban mall megaplex theater by myself through all the darn ads and previews to see "The Conspirator".  Since I found Gore Vidal's Lincoln in a library at least thirty years back I've been drawn to novels and nonfiction about Lincoln's assassination from various viewpoints.  Except for Kevin Kline's Edwin Stanton, the performances were persuasive. 

Time now to prepare the dipping veggies, pay bills, and iron.  Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmelites" is in the cd player.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Into the Wild

Awake at 4:42, I made the pot of coffee (with no bats), and wrapped in my "vision quest" quilt to watch the rest of "Into the Wild". Something made me check out the dvd when I worked at the library Saturday. Since then I've watched a bit of the movie each evening. Several times I discovered tears sliding down my cheeks.

The movie is so beautiful, so well played by Emile Hirsch and Hal Holbrook. I'm am trying to recover my limited understanding of "aesthetic distance" from Nelson Potter's philosophy class of thirty years ago. The story seems only an onion skin away. Finishing my viewing left me with a raw, scraped feeling, and again the tears.

We each want for our children happiness, of course. I hope they find wisdom, as well, and enjoy self-motivation and self-discovery and great contentment, as I do for myself. Still, as a mother, I can't imagine the pain if one of my sons felt he needed to disappear to find those things.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

The Oil Spot is Gone

Long Live the Oil Spot!

My youngest left for college today in his oil-dripping Infinity. I blessed his departure. I wasn't losing a son. I was regaining a parking space.

The Infinity has been parked and dripping in my condo guest space for over a year while the Woolly Mammoth was studying in Italy. Before that, the guest space was the home of an oil-dripping Dodge Intrepid when Danger Baby spent his year in Italy. My condo neighbors have been very patient with my automobile storage, for which I'm grateful.

The photo doesn't show the rainbow sheen on the pavement that gives the stain its angelic aura. The faithful haven't arrived to venerate it yet. I can't auction it on e-Bay. Maybe tomorrow I'll try using the Zep Driveway & Pavement Concentrated Cleaner.



Saw the trailer for the Luke Wilson movie about holy stucco. Maybe Hollywood will discover the oil spot! If I squint it looks kinda like the Exxon Valdez.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Tom Howard

Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give haunting and completely convincing performances as the title characters in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford", a very long movie I'll remember for years. Broke my own rule and saw a movie based on one of my favorite novels. I can't recommend it to just anyone, though, because:

• It is nearly three hours long.
• It has a bad case of time-lapse cloud photography.
• If you're not an outlaw junkie, you can't tell the players without a program.
• At moments you may feel stuck in a cross between "Hotel California" and the History Channel.
• It's not Marshall Dillon's wild west.
• There are no good guys in white hats.

I can recommend it to people interested in the highly unsanitary 1880's, to photographers, and to folks who still wonder how John Hinckley, Jr.'s mind worked when he thought shooting Ronald Reagan might impress Jodie Foster. The photography is gorgeous:

• Rocking chair shadows on a wood floor.
• A locomotive's headlamp through the Missouri trees.
• Cold pump water in a stoneware bowl.
• A betrayer through a frosted window.

When everyone knows how the story ends, it is difficult to know where it should start or conclude. The movie needs more back story to understand the familial and psychological ties between the gang members. It needs either more or far less focus on the Ford brothers after Jesse's murder.

If you have the patience and endurance, this movie drags you into its world to observe the psychological drama between two legends in their own minds. If not, you might be better off borrowing a Hansen novel from your public library.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to be so boring

Milos Forman's film, "Goya's Ghosts," has believable costumes by Yvonne Blake. I was raised on, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything." Yvonne Blake designed the costumes for "Three Musketeers" and "Four Musketeers" in the Seventies, and for many other movies since.

"Goya's Ghosts" makes less sense than those flicks with none of the fun. Someone thought he was making an Important Statement. The movie is melodramatic, but we don't get to throw popcorn at the villain.

Stellan Skarsgard in completely unconvincing as the artist Francisco de Goya. He was completely unconvincing as Bootstrap Bill in the second "Pirates of the Caribbean", but at least then he could blame it on the barnacles encrusted all over his face.

The main character of the film is Lorenzo, a monk of the Spanish Inquisition, and later an obnoxious Napoleonic prosecutor with good hair. Lorenzo is played by Javier Bardem, who looks to be the psychopathic brother of Tom Jones. I expected him to burst into song in the dungeon with, "It's not unusual to be raped by creepy monks..."

Lorenzo's speech is slower than that of Andre the Giant playing Fezzik in "The Princess Bride." I very much wanted Mandy Patinkin to pop onto the scene to start repeating, "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father prepare to die. "

You will leave the movie with less understanding of the Inquisition and the Napoleonic Era than when you entered, and no insights into the art of Goya. You will not be transported by cinematic beauty as you were in "Girl With Pearl Earring." You won't have a sense of Spain as you would listening to "Carmen". You won't ponder genius or evil as you do every time you watch "Amadeus." It's possible you might remember times when you wanted to hang a dinner guest from the chandelier. You might imagine the worst that could happen when Darth Cheney takes over during Dubya's colonoscopy. You may be reminded to make an appointment for a dental check-up.

My plan for the rest of the afternoon is a better understanding of the French Revolution through Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmélites."


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Pied Octopi

This is a many-tentacled* story, so please hold on tight to your pirate hat:

My job entails wearing many hats, but on the first day of each summer camp "wearing many hats" is my mandate. On these days I escape my art teacher persona to ham it up on stage and "let it all hang out" as we used to say in the Sixties. This is not the right moment for me to get distracted by idioms involving the word hang, but if you've got the time, this is the place. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.



So after I skipped around the stage wearing Little Red's hood and carrying a basket of goodies, I changed to the rat hat. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a very scary story. It ranks right up their with the mice in "The Nutcracker" and the flying monkeys in Oz. "Does anyone know what pied means?" Yes! Yes! I do! I do! One student started telling us the digits, 3.14159265358979323846. No, not that pi. We pantomime throwing a clown cream pie in his face.

Did Harold ever draw a quiche with his purple crayon? What about a Frito pie? Harold did draw the nine kinds of pie that he liked best? And what about Old King Cole with the four and twenty blackbirds?


We are still looking for the meaning of pied. I'm pleased to learn about the Heckle and Jeckle magpie connection.

pied 1382, as if it were the pp. of a verb form of M.E. noun pie "magpie" (see pie (2)), in ref. to the bird's black and white plumage. Earliest use is in reference to the pyed freres, an order of friars who wore black and white. Also in pied piper (1845, in Browning's poem based on the Ger. legend; used allusively from 1942).

pie (1) "pastry," 1303, from M.L. pie "meat or fish enclosed in pastry," perhaps related to M.L. pia "pie, pastry," also possibly connected with pica "magpie" (see pie (2)) on notion of the bird's habit of collecting miscellaneous objects. Not known outside Eng., except Gaelic pighe, which is from Eng. In the Middle Ages, a pie had many ingredients, a pastry but one. Fruit pies began to appear c.1600. Fig. sense of "something easy" is from 1889. Pie-eyed "drunk" is from 1904. Phrase pie in the sky is 1911, from Joe Hill's Wobbly parody of hymns. Pieman is not attested earlier than the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon" (c.1820).

pie (2) "magpie," c.1250, from O.Fr. pie (13c.), from L. pica "magpie," related to picus "woodpecker," Umbrian peica "the magpie," Skt. pikah "Indian cuckoo," O.N. spætr, Ger. Specht "woodpecker" (see magpie).

pie (3) printers' slang for "a mass of type jumbled together" (also pi, pye), 1659, perhaps from pie (1) on notion of a "medley," or pie (2) (see pica).

And so, so, so, so..."pied" means multi-colored.

Went to see Johnny Depp and OrlandoBloom in "Pirates of the Caribbean--Dead Man's Chest" yesterday. I'm fond of pirates, but not of nightmares. How many children will have octopus nightmares after watching the movie's Davy Jones?

One of the best ways to get over nightmares is to learn about the subject. An octopus is a fascinating, curious, smart creature, although difficult to pluralize. I have two books I love to share with elementary students, Karen Wallace's Gentle Giant Octopus, and the Smithsonian book, Octopus' Den.



octopus
1758, genus name of a type of eight-armed cephalopod mollusks, from Gk. oktopous "eight-footed," from okto "eight" + pous "foot." Proper plural is octopodes, though octopuses probably works better in English. Octopi is from mistaken assumption that -us is the L. noun ending that takes -i in plural.


*And now for a little song from Nat King Cole, who may or may not have liked pie.

Love is a many-splendored thing,
It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring,
Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living,
The golden crown that makes a man a king.
Once on a high and windy hill,
In the morning mist two lovers kissed and the world stood still,
Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing,
Yes, true love's a many-splendored thing.

Why Ninety Minutes Is Not Enough

The World Cup games are just too darn short for some of us. It's not the lack of scoring compared to most American sports. It's not that we need to hear yet MORE ranting by the U.S. sportscasters about the proliferation of yellow and red cards. I admit ninety minutes isn't enough time to appreciate the tanned and lined visages of the coaches and refs who have been squinting, analyzing, instructing, calming, and letting go of the outcome of games played by comparative pretty boy youngsters.

I am watching World Cup matches when I can, mainly on the weekends. My tv is not high definition. It is small aggravation. If I sit on the sofa across the living room, the players resemble the VW bugs escaped from Chernobyl down on Chicago streets when viewed from the Sears Tower observation deck. When I sit in the rocking chair and skooch up closer, they look like day-glo orange meerkat finger puppets (made from hunter's fleece) in an bioluminescent green diorama. Yikes. It's the Netherlands again, and time to reach for the remote control.

A new Adam Sandler movie opened this week, and I would rather yank out all my teeth with needlenose pliers than see it. Still, I understand the premise involves having a "universal remote" control of the universe.

Watching the Netherlands in their orange uniforms makes me feel like I'm in need a universal Photoshop program to tame the contrasts and color saturation. The games are in the stoppage seconds before I get the nuclear reactor leakage out of the screen! Too late again. Netherlands, go home!

Step aside, Brad!

The leading men who lure me to the movie theater for a Saturday matinee are Will Shortz and Al Gore. Much as I enjoyed "An Inconvenient Truth," and was moved to become DARTmama, "Wordplay" is my favorite of the two. Yes, I'm a New York Times crossword puzzle junkie, and, yes, I do them in ink. I'm not lightning fast, though. My day doesn't feel right if I can't started it with the puzzle, although I do force myself to read the paper (Dallas Morning News) before I start the crossword or the Sudoku. One of the advantages of becoming DARTmama is extra puzzle-solving time in the mornings.



"Wordplay" has a delightful mix of information about puzzle construction, famous and surprising puzzlers telling why they do puzzles, features on several championship level puzzlers, and the high stakes American Crossword Puzzle Tournament--with no wardrobe malfunctions or bad "interpretations" of Our National Anthem.

Remember Henry, the retired baker/neighbor of Kinsey Milhone in Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries? He's a charming character, makes great cinnamon rolls, and he's a crossword puzzle constructor. What a sexy combination! He should be played by Sam Elliott in a movie version! Parnell Hall's series of Puzzle Lady Mysteries didn't have any such delights, but I did learn about competitive puzzle tournaments from those books.

Maybe the mystery is why I've never tried constructing puzzles, especially given my love of graph paper and dictionaries. Is it too late to start?

In the early 90's our family Sunday morning ritual involved clambering into the minivan and going to the Parker Station Cafe for breakfast. Most Sundays the drive coincided with Liane Hansen's chat with The Puzzlemaster, Will Shortz, on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. We tried to solve many puzzles over our breakfast specials and short stacks. In my mind, Will Shortz' voice is linked with steaming sausage, pancakes, maple syrup, and family togetherness.

Seems to me each "Wordplay" movie ticket should come with a Weekend Edition lapel pin and two eggs over easy.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

My junior high English teacher would be pleased, to the extent that her pinched outlook on the verge of retirement, and pinched toes wearing those black lace-up old lady shoes, could be pleased about anything an eighth-grader might possibly do. I wondered what the title character's name might mean when I went to see Tommy Lee Jones' directing debut, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."

I'm many years from eighth grade, thank heavens. Still, I worry that I might be missing the detail that my essay MUST have to pass. You can't get by on just beautiful cursive in the harrowing world of late-Sixties junior high. You have to have substance! (Nowadays beautiful cursive is a lost art, and substance is cut and pasted from the Internet.)

This is the fodder for those recurring nightmares of trying to withdraw (passing) from the college class in time to get your tuition refunded, but after you've forgotten to go to class for many weeks. Don't lie. You have them, too. It might be Physics, Econ, or third year German, but you are desperate to get out no matter what the subject. [Some other blog we'll try to figure out why your dorm room shape-shifts into a shop in a large enclosed mall.]

Is Melquiades the translation for Melchior, the Wise Man aka Magi? No, but it was worth a shot. Maybe I will get a "makes a positive contribution to class discussions" note on my eternal report card. The Hispanic baby name, Melquiades, means "Rey por la gracia de Dios"; king by the grace of God.

There but for the grace of God go I. Much of the movie is about walking in each other's shoes, either by choice or by force. Not everyone will choose to watch this reverse border-crossing, but it is worth the journey for those who do. I will view U.S./Mexico border issues with a different awareness in the future.

The movie is very quiet despite its violence. The panoramic landscapes give the action space for reflection. While newspaper reviews have cited Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia movie, it felt more like Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove book to me with its themes of friendship, commitment, and redemption. I saw "Alfredo Garcia" on a first date in college, and read most of Lonesome Dove while stuck with a toddler in a customer waiting room of an automotive repair shop, so this is a very subjective comparison.

The movie seemed much longer than the two hours it runs. This is not a negative comment. It is not wishing someone, anyone, please, please, would kill off Wyatt Earp so Kevin Costner's movie would end before I gnawed off my leg. I left Three Burials with the feeling of having been on a long cleansing journey across spare, windswept terrain.



-------
Robert Earl Keen's song, "Mariano"

The man outside he works for me, his name is Mariano
He cuts and trims the grass for me
he makes the flowers bloom
He says that he comes from a place not far from Guanajuato
Thats two days on a bus from here, a lifetime from this room.

I fix his meals and talk to him in my old broken spanish
He points at things and tells me names of things I can't recall
Sometimes I just can't but help but wonder who this man is
And if when he is gone will he remember me at all

I watch him close
he works just like a piston in an engine
He only stops to take a drink and smoke a cigarette
When the day is ended, I look outside my window
there on the horizon, Mariano's silhouette

He sits upon a stone in a south-easterly direction
I know my charts
I know that he is thinking of his home
I've never been the sort to say I'm in to intuition
But I swear I see the faces of the ones he calls his own

Their skin is brown as potters clay, their eyes void of expression
Their hair is black as widow's dreams, their dreams are all but gone
They're ancient as a vision of a sacrificial virgin
Innocent as crying from a baby being born

They hover around a dying flame and pray for his protection
Their prayers are all but answered by his letters in the mail
He sends them colored figures that he cuts from strips of paper
And all his weekly wages, saving nothing for himself

It's been a while since I have seen the face of Mariano
The border guards they came one day and took him far away
I hope that he is safe down there at home in Guanajuato
I worry though I read there's revolution every day

RENT

Do high school English classes still read Romeo and Juliet then West Side Story, and assign that "compare and contrast" essay? Of course the inserted question is do high school English classes actually assign reading at all? My kids still slogged through Great Expectations and Dostoyevsky, but many classes watched videos instead of reading books. I wonder if the video of Miss Haversham's wedding cake is half as creepy as the one I've imagined for over thirty years.

I grew up listening to Broadway musical LPs and 78rpm recordings. I read the synopsis on the record jacket, and imagined a play in my head while lounging on the living room carpet. It was a primitive existence, I know. Sometimes I would go into my cave and paint pictures on the wall by torch light...


In high school my best friend was obsessed with the musical "Grease". We listened to her LP of the Broadway show over and over until we could sing along with all the words. She told me about the show she saw in New York, but I mostly made up my imaginary production. When we saw a touring Broadway production at Lincoln's Pershing Auditorium, it was great fun, but we did not sing along. I never did see the Olivia Newton John movie version. That was probably because I was so disappointed in the Julie Andrew's "Sound of Music" movie compared with the touring Broadway show I had seen with my grandma at Lincoln's old Stuart Theater.

The newspapers are filled with reviews and discussions of movie musicals this week with the opening of "RENT". I will add my two cents worth! I got free passes to a preview screening Monday night because I vaguely knew the play was based on Puccini's "La Boheme". I wanted to do the old "compare and contrast" essay. It's a sickness. Post Lincoln East High School Essay Stress Disorder, we'll call it.

Beyond "La Boheme", I didn't know much about "RENT" except that the Broadway musical was very popular. I was sort of busy in the mid-90s being a single mom, teaching art, sewing costumes for childrens' plays, and trying to pay rent. Guess I missed that the musical was about AIDS and junkies. Didn't realize the screening would be filled with high school students belonging to a sort of RENT cult, way beyond our "Grease" obsession. They were pouring out of the cars in the cineplex parking lot, then popping their trunks for more friends to jump out.

Because it was a free screening, we sat in the theater for an hour plus before the show, through singing contests, radio dj appearances, and t-shirt giveaways. We had a looooonnnnnngggg time to observe the RENT fanatics around us. So much energy, earnestness, insecurity, hormones, enthusiasm, and need to push against authority! Within five minutes I had a raging pep rally headache. Thank heaven the audience couldn't stomp on the bleachers.

Bleachers. Now it connects. Lincoln East won the state class A basketball tournament in 1971. My friends and I were rabid supporters of the Spartans, but anti-rah rah Pep Club. We called ourselves Hardhats, and wore real metal construction hardhats painted in the school colors. We stomped on bleachers and yelled ourselves hoarse for the Spartans. I even made surprisingly accurate continuous line drawings and wire sculptures of the individual team members. Fanaticism. Energy. Enthusiasm. Insecurity. Rebellion. Earnestness. Hormones, even.

Not knowing the Broadway show or the music, "RENT" had to stand on its own merits for me. These are my beefs:
1. Apparently the songs have lyrics. We couldn't tell. The music is very loud, and no words are discernible. At "La Boheme" there are supertitles to read, and this movie needs them, too.
2. The cast looked like a reunion of "Saved by the Bell". Too old for their parts, but too scrubbed into fresh-faced perkiness. They don't look urban, let alone like poor, starving, ill, junkie artists. Reminded me of those old dancing Dr. Pepper t.v. commercials. Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too?
3. I was not enticed to give a damn about any of the characters. Not intrigued, enthralled, empathetic. I pretty much wanted to slap all of them, and tell them to quit pretending. They aren't adults. They aren't artists. They aren't adolescents. They aren't suffering. They aren't shocking. They aren't making a statement. They don't even pretend to look cold.
4. The set looks like a plastic sanitized-for-your-convenience slum theme amusement park. You must be this tall to ride this ride.

I did like the dancing. I got one tiny lump in my throat remembering a real life friend and his horrible AIDS suffering.

Jesse McKinley's NYTimes search for the RENT locales in the East Village made me realize the movie is a nostalgic version of a time, place, and issue. Nostalgia and edginess can't coexist.

Off the eye chart & Off The Map

"Please read the smallest line you can see clearly," said the eye doctor's assistant.

"What lines?," I asked.

"Can you see this light flashing?"

"What light?"

I have some prescription eye drops to relieve the inflammation of my lower eyelids, and I've ordered new bifocals with a "tweaked" prescription. The drops are very creepy as the instructions read:

Tilt your head back and with your index finger, pull the lower eyelid away from the eye to form a pouch. Drop the medicine into the pouch and gently close your eyes. Immediately use your finger to apply pressure to the inside corner of the eye and continue to apply pressure for 1-2 minutes.

Just reading the instructions made me queasy. I was still seeing magenta, yellow, and purple spots from when the doctor looked into my eyes. Inside there, I bet he saw the auditorium at Eastridge Elementary School.

In the upper primary grades of the mid-Sixties we studied Our Senses. We watched black and white filmstrips in our classroom about Our Nose and Our Ears, with the teacher's pet advancing the frames, and the highest reading group taking turns reading the script aloud. For Our Eyes we had to go to the school auditorium walking in two single-file lines, the Girls Line and the Boys Line, following the Supreme Line Leader For a Day, who was following the teacher in her shirtwaist dress. We walked with our hands clasped behind our backs so we wouldn't pinch each other. The teacher set up the film projector, and we were zoomed into what amounted to High-Tech Multimedia Learning! Our Eyes was a color film, with a couple of frenetic splices! The more informed about the workings of the human vision system I became, the more queasy I felt. After the film, we all stood up (too quickly), and filed out of the auditorium into the hallway. The single-file lines walked off down the hall behind our teacher, but I leaned against the wall and fainted, sliding down the chilly pale green cement block wall onto the swirled linoleum tiles. No one noticed. I recovered to find myself alone, and made my wavy way to the School Nurse's Office. Please don't mess with this mama's eyes, or make her study optical diagrams!

First time I met my future in-laws, I was wearing those doctor-issued black plastic shades with cardboard earpieces after my first eye exam. I've always sort of blamed my marriage on those cheap sunglasses.

Saw a wonderful movie this afternoon, "Off the Map", with Joan Allen and Sam Elliott. So many of my own themes cropped up in the movie: solitude, New Mexico, depression, letter-writing, sailboats, credit card debt.



Much of the movie is about a child, but it is not a kid movie. I love the artist using a rusted out bus for a studio. For years my New Mexico artist fantasies have involved using an abandoned Sinclair gas station at an isolated road junction for a studio. I've always wanted to be Sam Gribley in My Side of the Mountain. I've often wanted to returned to La Junta, the meeting of the Rio Grande and Red rivers near Questa, New Mexico.

If you enjoy the movie, you might like to read Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. You might also read And Now Miguel aloud to your children.

That's a mighty happy fish!

One on-going job of an art teacher is helping children learn to respect and enjoy other people's artwork. By the time preschoolers are ready for an art class, they've usually learned to appreciate an object without immediately putting it in their mouths. They've rarely learned to appreciate it without touching or climbing on it, though. As my blog today is about self-control, I will exercise restraint and refrain from making any comparisons to grown men at this time.

We have an ever-changing display of student art at school. Large group collaborations like murals stay on display the longest, since they don't belong to any one student. You saw the seven foot long shark named Larry that we made this summer. Larry swims in the lobby these days, and is in perpetual danger of having his teeth pulled out by children who are at their own wiggly/lost tooth phase.

By happy chance, I was doing a silly cowgirl imitation when I took the new students on a tour of the school last month. At each piece of art I would put my hands on my hips, lean way back, and drawl, "Now that's a mighty fine _______ (shark, camel, jungle mural...)." Pretty soon they were all imitating me, saying, "Why that's a mighty tall beanstalk," or, "Say, that's a mighty colorful zebra," with their hands on their hips. The great thing was, when the kids were mighty-fining, they weren't touching the art. Dang! Why didn't this rodeo clown figure that out a dozen years ago?

My elementary students are collaborating on a treehouse installation. So far our tree is full of squirrels and girls, a ladder, and a bucket on a rope. Soon we will add a tire swing, birdhouses, and birdfeeders. I was very afraid kids would actually try to climb the tree or the ladder made out of toilet paper tubes. Back to teaching a refresher course in mighty-fine!


Seems to me that men should be able to hook their thumbs in their belts, pretend to be Wild Bill Hickok, and drawl the observation, "That's a mighty bodacious female." After all, when we art teachers went to see The Motorcycle Diaries, we were able to put our hands on our cheeks, appreciate Gael Garcia Bernal, and gasp, "That's a mighty superior specimen of a man!," and "That's a mighty lucky hammock!"

http://www.motorcyclediaries.net/

You say you want a revolution

The Motorcycle Diaries is a visually gorgeous, sometimes powerful, frequently funny movie about Ernesto Guevara before he became Che. It is also a reminder of youth, idealism, intensity, false invulnerability, and the decisions we make in our early twenties that shape the rest of our lives.

Decisions I made in my early twenties have been shaping my life for over twenty-five years. Life has a way of slipping from idealism into pragmatism while we sleep, which is a good thing for the continuation of the species. Life slips from risk-taking to caution, too, which isn't bad. If we aren't careful, though, it slips from intensity into lukewarm freeze-dried instant decaf with powdered non-dairy creamer. Perhaps the challenge of our fifties is to remix our personal blends of intensity, curiosity, philosophy, and risk-taking, with our acquired judgment, skills, and long-range view. We've done the radical roadtrips, and we've buckled precious children into safety carseats. Collectively we have more power to change the world for the better than Che and his small group of Bolivian rebels ever did.

Mum's the word

This is so very groovy! I have been invited to Homecoming at last! Steven's friend Stephen went through all the girls on his cellphone list, and decided I was his best bet. Never mind that his classic Datsun 240Z was made after I graduated from Lincoln East High School in 1973. (His car is often as reluctant to start in the mornings as I am!) Never mind that my best friend and I went on a spring break road trip in March of '75 in her 260Z to Purdue and Michigan State.

Speaking of roadtrips, I am going to see "The Motorcycle Diaries" tomorrow. Che+Machu Pichu+Mexican heartthrob actor=diversionary anticipation. When I was a senior in high school I wrote a big research paper over the Christmas break entitled "Cuba After Castro". I typed it on my dad's 1928 Fleetwood (I'm hazy on these particulars) with carbon paper.

Rabbit Hole

Went to an unusual movie this afternoon. I saw What the [Bleep](Do We Know)?. It is about quantum physics, neural nets, anxiety, memory, and brain chemistry, and the big questions:

• Why are we here?
• What is real?
• What is God?
• How do we change our reality?

Adding to the otherworldliness, the movie stares Marlee Matlin, so you have to get used to hearing a deaf person's speech. There are cool animation and visual techniques, and ideas to ponder at leisure. It is only playing at one theater in Dallas, but it is an interesting way to spend two hours.

After the movie I took my car for a free tire rotation and new wiper blades at Sears. I know, don't lecture. I should be able to buy wiper blades at Auto Zone and put them on. I am Woman. Hear me roar. I just don't like doing wiper blades. So I spent an hour and a half wandering around in the mall pondering the same sort of questions as in the movie, plus the unanswerable questions:

• Who buys all this stuff?
• Why is the Goth fad still going?
• Why are all the clothes made of acetate these days?
• Doesn't anyone remember back in the late Seventies when we all did our Scarlett O'Hara imitations and swore, "I'll never wear man-made fabrics again!"?

What the [Bleep] asks all of us to choose how far we want to go down Alice's rabbit hole of mysteriousness. What I will remember most is a quantum physics expert saying that life is not about being in the know, but about being in the mystery.

http://whatthebleep.com/crystals/

Cue up the Hawaii Five-O theme song!

This is the day I've been looking forward to all summer. This is the day we started our giant papier mache shark. I love doing group art projects in my classes. It is a trip!



This is the beginning form for the shark. For more information, click on the link to Itty Bitty Art Projects over there in the sidebar.

I love teaching figure drawing using photos of surfers. I am not a surfer. I'm not a traveler. I've only been to Galveston, Corpus Christi, and South Padre, and then not until I was in my late-thirties. I can teach kids to analyze and draw figures using my collection of photos torn from the wide array of surfing magazines available in Dallas, Texas, though. So I am looking forward to seeing the new surfing documentary, Riding Giants, this weekend.

Is it just a bad dream, or did Lucy and Ethel once sing a song about a surfboard that came back by itself????