dual personalities

The last of the Hibiscus unfolding…beautiful!

How was your weekend? Mine was pretty quiet. Daughter #1 returned from her conference in Salt Lake City, but she went home on Saturday to attend to things in Jeff City before leaving again on Monday. I practiced driving the OM’s new car. I am so used to driving my little Mini Cooper that it takes quite an adjustment to get used to a large SUV with all the whiz bang updates. My car doesn’t even have a rearview camera much less a buzzing seat to tell you when you are drifting over the line!

This is an interesting piece about the Unifying Power of Singing. I have mentioned how nice it is to attend a church again where everyone sings–and sings with gusto. I grew up at a church where everyone sang and we all sang in morning chapel at my private school. But increasingly (in the Episcopal Church anyway) it seems that singing has been left to the choir. It is part of the show, something to be appreciated, but not to be participated in. Maybe the small congregations feel self-conscious singing, who knows. But singing is good for the soul.

I recorded Paper Moon (1973) on TCM and watched it the other night. I had not seen it since 1973 when my Aunt Susanne took me to see it when I was back East visiting colleges the summer before my senior year in high school. I liked it then and I liked it this time around.

Well directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who keeps it simple, it was shot in Kansas and Missouri in black and white. It feels authentic to the 1930s without being precious. Ryan O’Neal plays an itinerant con man, Moses Pray, who meets nine-year-old Addie Loggins at her mother’s graveside service, where the neighbors suspect he is Addie’s father. He denies this, but agrees to deliver the orphaned Addie to her aunt’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri. O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal work well together and Tatum steals the show without any Margaret O’Brien-style showing-off. I liked her. In reading about the movie, it seems that Bogdanovich had a hard time pulling a performance out of her, sometimes taking up to 50 takes of a scene (which sounds like borderline child abuse), but it doesn’t show. 

Tatum O’Neal won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but clearly she is not a supporting actress. She was only nine years old, however, so I guess they thought that award was appropriate. Madeline Kahn was the supporting actress in the film and, as usual, she is terrific. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

Here is Paul Zahl’s next list of “to watch” movies on TCM. As usual, he is right on target, but I do disagree about Vertigo (1958) which I find hokey and unwatchable. C’est la vie. I love it when he says a movie “is worth seeing once.” Quelle burn.

Here is a summer reading list of books on historical subjects from Albert Mohler, whose opinion I respect.

And finally, Baruch dayan ha’emet, Jackie Mason, who died on Saturday at age 93.

*Stuart Hine, “How Great Thou Art”