With apologies to Lana Turner

There are movies I like that I didn’t expect to like. Usually it’s a movie starring someone for whom I do not care. Someone who is a STAR. There are certainly STARs who can act, but it seems most of the time that a STAR’s talent is secondary or even tertiary to the fact of their STARdom. I’m not totally sure they have any talent at all, but then I see them in a film and I can’t believe how totally different they are. How unlike their usual crap and I wonder, if they can generate the acting they do in this film, why don’t they do this all the time.

Take, for instance, Will Ferrell. I do not care for Will Ferrell. I don’t “get” the comedy he does, I don’t find it funny and I really don’t think he acts the comedy very well when he’s doing it. He tends to overdo everything. Then I saw “Stranger Than Fiction.” I have to wonder where he found this amazing performance? Was it the director he had?

I had a similar experience with Peter Sellers. I might be in the minority, but I do not find the Pink Panther films at all funny. I don’t care for slapstick and I don’t care for Peter Sellers. Then I saw “Being There.” Wow. Where was the person who played Chance the Gardener hiding for all those years?

My third person who turned in a performance better befitting an amazing actor instead of a STAR is Mickey Rooney. He is always all over the top in the “let’s put on a show” movies and in the Andy Hardy films to which I’ve never been able to relate. Don’t even get me started on his acting in “Boys Town.” For me, Mickey Rooney was all broad strokes, no nuances. Then I saw an old black and white movie called, “The Human Comedy” and even though the movie tended toward over sentimentalization, Rooney’s performance was outstanding. I couldn’t see “Mickey” anywhere in the role of Homer Macauley. He was nominated for Best Actor for this role and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen him do. Did the studio keep sticking him in films that made them money instead of taking too many chances on their STAR, their investment? I have to think so.

Last, but not least, Lana Turner. If ever the studios produced a STAR, it was Lana. She wasn’t allowed to do any role that might diminish the polish and the glitter with which she was surrounded. It is truly was a shame and a waste of the talent she rarely got to use. Yes, she did a great job in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” but she was astounding in “The Bad and the Beautiful.” And I’d no idea Lana was so freaking funny until I saw “Slightly Dangerous” and watched the long section that starts when she is walking down the street trying out possibilities for new names through when she gets clobbered by a can of paint and wakes up to notice there is red paint in the hair on which she just spent her last dollar to have dyed blonde. Her reaction is priceless.

So, here’s hoping there are more opportunities for STARs to act.

Survey says......

(My answers are not nearly as fun as Em's!)

1. What’s the last thing you put in your mouth?
Beer washing down salad. Obviously I’m a health nut.

2. What does your last incoming text say?
Your Attention Is Required

3. The last song you listened to?
Every Breath You Take by the Police. There was something playing on my husband’s favorite radio station on the way home from the bar, but the question specifically said, “listened to.”

4. Where is your best friend right now?
Can’t pick a single best friend. One is in Pennsylvania, couple in Michigan and one is in the other room doing his own quiz answers.

5. What did you do yesterday?
Watched old movies, read, drank coffee.

6. Pick a scar on your body. Where’d it come from?
Too many scars and too many stories to list them all here.

7. What do you really think happened to Steve on Blues Clues?
Something happened to Steve on Blues Clues?

8. If you could change your name to anything what would it be?
Queen Elizabeth III

9. What would you say if a guy told you, you were the most beautiful person in the world?
I hear that all day long and my response is always, thank you. I try to be gracious.

11.How often do you curse?
Whenever I can get maximum laughter out of it. Or when I’m by myself in the car. Or when I’m with someone else in the car.

12. Do you trust all of your friends?
Not really because, apparently, one of them stole question 10.

13. Would you move to another state or country to be with the one you love?
For a long weekend, sure.

14. Have you ever talked on the phone while in the shower?
No, but while I’m on the phone I sometimes imagine I’m taking a shower.

15. Which one of your friends do you think would make the best prostitute.
Depends on your definition of best.

16. Are you afraid of falling in love?
Why, are you afraid of loving me?

17. Is there someone that popped in your mind after that question?
Yes, but he popped out again so fast I didn’t see his face.

18. How many kids do you want to have?
Just finished that beer and salad, too full to have any right now. Maybe later?

19. Would you make a good parent?
Sure unless there were children involved.

20. Where was your default picture taken?
Probably to a deep dark cave where it’s been left to fend for itself.

21. Honestly, what’s on your mind right now?
How many more questions there are in this quiz.

22. If you could go back in time and change something, what would it be?
Election results approximately 7 years 2 months ago.

23. What are you wearing right now?
A tiara. See answer for question 8.

24. Right or left?
Right where I left it.

25. Can you make a dollar in change right now?
No, but perhaps one of my staff can help you.

26. Have you had a sore throat?
I knew there would be a trick question. I had one, but it went away.

27. Who knows you the best?
See answer for question 15.

28. Do you wear contact lenses or glasses?
Not contacts and I only wore a wine glass on my head once. Really.

29. Ever been to Mexico?
I’ve made it a point to stay as far away from Mexico as possible.

30. Last thing that made you laugh out loud?
Reading what others wrote on this survey.

31. Would you show your boobs to a midget on roller skates?
In public they are referred to as staff, not boobs, and if they want to let a midget on roller skates see them, that’s fine, as long as they bring back my mocha latte with an espresso shot in a timely fashion.

32. Did you miss anyone yesterday?
No, I got every one I aimed for.

33. Last person to lay in your bed?
Any man who would lie to a woman in her bed is just a scum sucking b’tard. Oh, LAY.

34. What are your plans for the weekend?
Watching the Super Bowl commercials!

35. Who do you think will repost this?
Only someone very, very witty. Or very, very bored.

A group of pathologists is called?

I once bought a book for its title, An Exaltation of Larks, which turned out to be a fun book on the names we humans have devised to describe groups of animals. A pride of lions, a herd of elephants, etc. I have since given away the book, but I still find fun in how freaking hilarious we are with the English language. A murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens and a sleuth of bears are particular favorites right now while a congress of baboons just makes me nod my head sadly. In addition to a pack of hounds, we also have a cry of hounds and, just to complicate things, a mute of hounds as well. I must say I like a charm of hummingbirds and a scold of jays as well as tidings of magpies. Someone hit the naming right on with a mischief of mice, a plague of rats, a glint of goldfish, a leash of greyhounds, a prickle of hedgehogs, an ambush of tigers and a lounge of lizards. Should you see a rogue band of wild emus around, they are properly called a mob and if gnus are gathered together on the corner, you could aptly report this as an implausibility of gnus.

As to the answer to the question in the title of this blog, according to the Inspector Morse series that ran on BBC, a group of pathologists is called, most appropriately, a body of pathologists.

Time traveling

I sometimes wonder if I’m like other people. I don’t mean, am I normal, heaven knows I’m not and proud of it I am. I mean, do other people live with one foot in another time, too? For example, in my modern car taking the back roads to work, I listen to the radio classics channel on satellite radio. The voices that fill the car and fill my head and provide much of my internal narration for the day are those of Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Frankie Remley, the Whistler, Lamont Cranston as the Shadow and many, many more. And those voices and the stories they tell are brought to me by virtue of a satellite circling the Earth. At home I read a lot. Usually I’m stretched out on the sofa reading my books of choice, those which take place in the past. If I can find a mystery actually written during the 30's and 40's so much the better. Many of those books I read were ordered online and they arrive without my having to leave the house to get them. The movies I watch on the 42" flat screen HD television with DVR (a form of TiVo) are old black and white movies that transport me back to another time.

Maybe it’s not so much that I time travel as I have, for me, found the best of different times.

Running for President

In the midst of the current efforts of the populace to winnow down the presidential hopefuls to one from each party, one and half once the vice presidential candidate is added to the ticket, I offer myself as a possible alternative choice for President of These United States. I will run as a member of the Write-In party. I will use big words like populace and winnow in order to sound more intelligent than I, perhaps, actually am. I am tall enough that I will not need a platform and, thus, will not take up your time telling you about the planks. I am an ideal candidate because I am too busy with my regular work to get the country into much trouble. Much more trouble anyway.

I am running for president and I approved this message.

Red light, green light

Waiting at a traffic light while watching a car drive up the hill ahead, I thought about how I wasn’t actually paying attention to the light, but that when it changed, I’d notice. If I didn’t notice the light change, I’d notice the horn of the car behind me. This is my point. What we notice most is that which changes.

I believe this is a very human thing. We float along on auto-pilot most of the time because so many of the details of everyday existence are boring. We are attuned to change, to the different. There probably aren’t too many people who didn’t know the Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series a few years ago, but they won again this past year and while it is certainly nice for them, I probably won’t be interested in the Series again until the Cubs have a chance at winning. This presupposes the Cubs will ever have a chance at winning, but that’s a dilemma for another day. My point is, this was a change that impressed itself even on my non-sporting world.

Change can be good. We don’t generally enjoy being in a rut, same-o same-o every day, but change for change’s sake might not be the best thing. Just because there is something new on the market, some new gadget bigger or better or faster or smaller than what it’s meant to replace doesn’t mean we should chuck out the old. I actually heard someone say the other day, “That’s so 2007.” Yeah, so?

We’re almost always going to notice that which changes though not always in real time. We don’t notice the subtle changes as we and those around us age unless those around us are children. Real children, not just those who act like children. Children grow so fast it’s practically a crime. For the rest of us, the changes over time are usually brought home by looking through old photographs or when someone we haven’t seen in a while looks so much older and we realize we look older to them as well.

So, if you happen to be behind me when the light changes and my car doesn’t move forward, tap your horn and I’ll be on my way. I haven’t changed so much that I need a hearing aid.

At least not yet.

School, yikes!

I’ve started an online chocolatier class. A class with assignments due on time. A class for which I paid money to be given said assignments to complete. A class which will last three months.

Yikes.

Fortunately, the class is about chocolate and about learning how to set up a successful if not downright thriving chocolate business. I expect, at points along the way through the three months, to be literally dripping with chocolate. I expect, at some point after the class is complete, to be a successful chocolatier. I expect to work very hard. I expect to have a lot of fun.

I’d better have a lot of fun, ‘cause if I don’t, I’m not doing it.

Home Sweet House

I’m a nut for old movies. There are those who’d say I don’t need to qualify the “I’m a nut” statement, but this is my blog so I will. My list of favorite old movies has many subsets and categories including one with only four members . It is the subset whose members are movies with houses I absolutely and totally adore.

All That Heaven Allows - a ‘woman’s’ movie from the 50's with odd cinematographic colors, but with an old mill that is turned from a wreck into a freaking masterpiece. It is the space for which I would spend years taking classes in carpentry in order to rehab if I owned the old mill and had the money.

Christmas in Connecticut - a fun holiday movie with a woman who writes a cooking and homekeeping pre-Martha Stewart column in a magazine without knowing how to boil an egg or make a bed. Her stretching of the truth concerning her abilities snowballs until she is put in the position of entertaining a war hero on her perfect farm in the country. It is this perfect farm I adore. There is a huge room for entertaining, bedrooms galore, a front staircase and a back staircase for sneaking down into the kitchen for a late night snack as well as the coolest den ever. And every room except the kitchen has a wood burning fireplace. Since the house exists in Holly-world and not the real world, fires burn in all the fireplaces all the time.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir - the first of my two ghost movies to make the house list. Gull Cottage with all its nooks and crannies, turrets, window seats, fireplaces, outdoor balconies and old paintings.

The Uninvited - my favorite ghost story as well as my favorite movie house, Windward, is from this wonderful little gem of a movie. All of the houses in this movie are great, but Windward is the best. Tall ceilings, wide floor to ceiling windows, carved wooden trim, a sweeping staircase and fireplaces, including one in the bathroom. Candles, firelight and wonderful tall oil lamps with etched shades, too, because this house does not feature electricity. And Windward is haunted by not one, but two ghosts. What more could I ask for in a house?

The book you save might be your own

We are all the hero or heroine of our own story. At least we should be. None of us hopes to look back and say, “I followed.” There need to be moments, many, many moments when we lead. We don’t need to lead an army, but we do need to lead ourselves. Sometimes, true, we lead ourselves down the path of temptation or the path of least resistance or even hopping down the bunny trail, but none of those routes give the feeling of exhilaration as when we forge our own path through life or, at the least, when we take Frost’s road less traveled.

In writing the story of a life, there are chapters we’d like to edit. Huge disappointments or missteps that we’d rather not revisit, but that may have served to nudge us in a direction not previously considered or cause us to reevaluate the story we thought we were writing. Sometimes there are gut-wrenching moments when we realize someone with whom we thought we were co-writing the Great American Novel has penned their own epic, a bigger story in which we are a sub-plot, or worse, a foot note. We find we’re in a farce when we thought we were in a romance.

One needs perspective when looking at a life, especially one’s own. There should be farcical moments, mystery and suspense, at least one great romance even if it ended and became a tragedy as well as moments of high drama and times of low comedy. There need to be times when things happen that you could not have made up. This is called non-fiction because, unlike fiction, it does not have to be believable, but there will also be many bits you rewrite. All these little stories add up to the big story and if you can also work up a hilarious narrative to your life, it’s better. Maybe not better, but laughter does make much of the rest easier to take.

As for how your story ends, there may not be too much you can do to make this exactly how you'd like. The best you can hope is that your end will be colored and shaded by how you lived your life, by the story you wrote. When you are all said and done, ended, finis, the book finally completed, the story of your life from beginning to end will be viewed by others.

So go write your story and do your best to make it a good read.

Everyone

2008! Happy New Year!