There were three baptisms in church on Sunday, including our favorite baby Avery Rose.
There was nary a peep out of either infant and the third-grader practically plunged his head into the font. I am always amazed by the composure of the kids at our church.
Speaking of babies, I know you are wondering about our twins. Well, it’s a boy
and a girl!
We are so happy!
In other news, I watched a very good movie this weekend–Free State of Jones (2016) starring Matthew McConaughey as a Confederate army deserter who returns to Mississippi and leads an armed rebellion against the Confederacy. Like the majority of southern soldiers, Newt Knight is not a slave owner and he becomes disillusioned with fighting for a government he does not support.
I liked it a lot.
Now we are on the verge of November. Zut alors! Where did October go? (I seem to say that a lot.)
but I do know that we all need a break from bitter political campaigning. And what better way to avoid reality than by dressing up for Halloween? Be adventurous. Go for horns and green skin.
son #1 as Lorne from Angel circa 2010
If you’re not into dressing up, you might try watching something creepy (but not too scary). I’d recommend the 1961 film, “the Innocents”, with Deborah Kerr,
or perhaps the 1945 thriller, “The Spiral Staircase” with Dorothy McGuire and George Brent.
Movies can be incredibly deceptive, however, so beware. Shortly after discovering extremely cute Albert Finney in the delightful Tom Jones,
I remember tuning in to “Night Must Fall” only to discover that he plays a psycho-murderer. That was an unwelcome shift and a very disturbing movie. I’ll never look at a hat box the same way again…
Whatever you decide to watch, find something diverting. As for me…I’m not coming back to the present reality until after the election, and I’ll be very happy while I’m away, thank you.
Halloween is upon us and we have not posted once about it. I guess that reveals my true enthusiasm for the “holiday” and also the level of my being too busy to notice. If it weren’t for the piles of Halloween candy I have been trying to ignore at work all week, I probably wouldn’t even know that it is around the corner!
That being said, the weekend is upon us and I have a few things scheduled, chief among them the “gender reveal” get-together daughter #3 has planned. Did I mention that the boy and daughter #3 are expecting twins? Well, yes, they are. We have been focused on the boy going through chemo/recovering from cancer all year, but in the background daughter #3 has been working on her own project. Ain’t life amazing?
So in view of these exciting developments, here are three movie suggestions for you.
Anything starring those famous real-life twins, Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen:
Certainly this one would be appropriate this weekend!
Any of those movies about these fictional twins:
And how about Double Impact (1991) starring not one, but two (!) Jean-Claude Van Damme(s)…
Note how I cleverly chose films which feature two girls, two boys and a boy/girl set. We are all wondering whether our twins will be two girls, two boys or a girl and a boy. I am voting for a little Luke and Leia, but que sera, sera! Anyway, I’ll let you know what we find out–stay tuned!
And, oh hey, this is interesting, although not as surprising as they make it out to be.
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
I went to a memorial service yesterday at the Unitarian Church on “Holy Corners” in the Central West End.
You can see the Christian Scientist and Methodist churches in the background, built in better days around the turn of the 20th century.
The Unitarian Church was built on a more humble scale and added to accordingly. It turns out it was the church of William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder of my flyover university and also of the girls’ school I attended. Not that he would recognize this congregation.
Anyway, I had never been to a Unitarian memorial service before. The music was pretty bad and there was only one scripture reading–a terrible translation of Psalm 39–and one prayer. (We never even said the Lord’s Prayer.) The minister gave a long homily about the mystery of life and how everything dies, and a long eulogy about the deceased, and the husband of the deceased gave a long eulogy. Like her parents, she was a lifelong member of the church and a serious Unitarian and social justice warrior. She and her husband were also big supporters of their partner church in Transylvania–yes, there are Unitarians in Transylvania! They are the second largest group of Unitarians in the world! It is amazing what one doesn’t know about people.
Well, it all got me thinking about old Walt Whitman’s lines about death in Song of Myself, which seem very Unitarian in spirit to me but are more meaningful than anything I heard in the service. I like to think that my friend is alive and well somewhere, although I guess that’s not what she expected.
*The painting is “Moonlight” by Fausto Zonaro (1854 – 1929)
How awesome is Dolly? I mean she really gets it done. One million books per month! Now there’s a woman to admire.
Of course, readers of this blog already know that we are big fans of the beautiful and talented Dolly and have been for years. Remember when daughter #2 was in sixth grade and had to pick a person who was a “creative producer” to report on? She picked Dolly (with encouragement from her mother). She won first place as the most creative producer!
Daughter #2 as Dolly Parton, holding a shoebox replica of the Grand Ole Opry.
And she taught her teacher a thing or two about the great Dolly Parton!
Anyway, it’s great to see that Dolly is going strong at age seventy–another lesson for us all.
Til the wheels fall off
Til the spotlight fades
I will lift your banner high
Lord, I will lift your banner high
And til the walls crash in
For the rest of my days
I’ll lay it all on the line
Til the day I die
Til the day I die
Til the end of the line
Til the day I die
It’s Your name I’ll glorify
I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something–whatever you like–you will be on the way to knowing more about Him; that is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence; and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.
Did you have a quiet weekend? I researched whether this pumpkin spice thing really has gone too far. And I got a lot of things around the house done and that felt good.
I went to church and read the first lesson–a not very inspiring passage from Sirach (one of those second-listed wisdom books from the Apocrypha). The second reader got to read from ITimothy–no fair.
Since it is that stewardship time of year, we had our weekly “stewardship moment,” which was delivered by a parishioner who is the producer of a weekly TV show. She was nervous about her testimony, so the two stars of her show came along for moral support and were seated in the congregation. Kind of sweet.
I went to an estate sale in the neighborhood and bought an “antique” wash stand which I put in my den, switching out a table that has never really fit there. I rearranged things and am pleased with how things look.
(Apologies for not having styled an appropriate vignette yet.)
I read quite a bit of Prelude to Terror, an old thriller (1978) by Helen MacInnes. After reading several books by Shirley Jackson, I was having trouble finding something to read. (Karin Fossum’s latest dreary Swedish mystery did not make the cut.) Helen seems to be just what I was looking for.
I watched Genius (2016) about the great editor Maxwell Perkins and the writer Thomas Wolfe. It was disappointing, despite having quite a primo cast.
Sigh. Well, here’s a little Wolfe to make up for the disappointment:
Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.
The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air–these things will never change.
The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry–these things will always be the same.
All things belonging to the earth will never change–the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth–all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth–these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.
—You Can’t Go Home Again
So it is Monday again and we are back at the salt mine. Make the most of your day.
Since there is NOTHING worth watching at the movies or on TV, and Netflix and Amazon have both let me down, I turned to Youtube, where one can often find classic films in their entirety, albeit sometimes not the best quality print. This time I got lucky and found the 1936 delight, My Man Godfrey, starring William Powell and Carole Lombard. It’s a hoot. William Powell plays Godfrey Smith (ahem), who lives in a shack down by the river with other victims of the Great Depression. Carole Lombard and her mean older sister, while competing to win a scavenger hunt, show up at the shanty town to find a “forgotten man”.
The lovely but ditsy Irene (Lombard) falls for the older, scruffy Godfrey (Powell) and promptly hires him to be the family butler. Hilarity ensues. This is no ordinary family; the Bullocks may be rich but the women of the family are also wild and rather eccentric. The supporting cast is superb: Eugene Pallette plays the long-suffering father; Alice Brady the flighty, clueless wife; Gail Patrick the ‘mean’ sister Cornelia; Jean Dixon the wise-cracking maid, and Mischa Auer, Carlo, Mrs. Bullock’s Italian protégé. The script is wonderful, too. Take this exchange between the maid and the newly arrived butler, Godfrey:
Godfrey; May I be frank?
Molly: Is that your name?
Godfrey: No, my name is Godfrey.
Molly: All right, be frank.
Or this brief conversation that introduces the audience to both Mr. Bullock and his wife:
Man: Take a look at that dizzy old gal with the goat.
Mr. Bullock: I’ve had to look at her for twenty years!
Man: I’m terribly sorry!
Mr. Bullock: How do you think I feel?
The sets are over-the-top Hollywood. Take Mrs. Bullock’s bedroom, for example.
So, so much satin! Of course, the costumes are also lush. There’s even more satin and gold lamé (at least in the colorized version).
Best of all, there’s no vulgarity, no violence, and we get a happy ending. Frankly, I could use a lot more of that kind of movie in my life, so I’m going to continue looking to the past for my entertainment. What about you?
Francois Truffaut died on this day in 1984 at the age of 52. He was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor, and one of the founders of the French New Wave. You remember them–they all smoked cigarettes and wore black turtlenecks.
He made about twenty-five movies, many of them now considered classics.
His first color and only English-speaking film was Fahrenheit 451 (1966) which I saw at a fairly young age. I was deeply effected by it.
Scary
Another favorite of mine is Day for Night (1973)–or, as we say in French, La Nuit américaine. The title refers tothe ‘filmmaking process called in French “la nuit américaine” (“American night”), whereby sequences filmed outdoors in daylight are shot using film balanced for tungsten (indoor) light and underexposed (or adjusted during post production) to appear as if they are taking place at night.’ I bet you didn’t know that.
Anyway, it is a movie about making a movie and stars the great Italian actress Valentina Cortese, who was so terrific as Herodias in Jesus of Nazareth (1977).
Jacqueline Bisset is in it too, along with some French actors, and it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film that year.
Americans probably know Francois Truffaut best for the part he played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He was Claude Lacombe, a French government scientist in charge of UFO-related activities in the United States. Why, you ask, would a Frenchman be in charge of UFO-related activities in the U.S.? Who knows; it was a movie.
So my Friday pick is to watch a film by Francois Truffaut. Jules et Jim, anyone?
Happy birthday to Viggo Mortensen (b. 1958) who is almost as old as I am.
We made a lot of jokes this past weekend about 28 Days (2000) and how we hoped daughter #1 would make a toast just like Sandra Bullock does in that movie and wear a black bra under her Maid of Honor dress,
and that made me want to watch it again. This movie was the last one Viggo made before he was launched into the stratosphere of movie super-stardom as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
(Yes, we still have that poster hanging in the basement…)
Up ’til then Viggo usually played the second or third or (minor) male part. Frequently he was cast as a heavy and his career was all over the map, veering from Albino Alligator to Portrait of a Lady in one year. We made it a game for awhile finding Viggo in small parts in obscure movies–sometimes the movies were way inappropriate for pre-teens–but it was fun.
Anyway, I always liked 28 Days, even though it was not a hit. Which is typical.
So happy birthday to Viggo Mortensen.
P.S. My dual personality has actually met Viggo, since he is an alumnus of her north country university (where her DH is a math professor) and occasionally returns for events. I always thought Viggo kind of looks like that other north country alum…
Kirk Douglas! The chin you say, but not just that…
dual personalities 