dual personalities

August 5, 2013

Flyover road trip and weekend update

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? We had some (much-needed) rain on Friday night, but the rest of the weekend was lovely. Perfect, in fact, for a road trip–which I took with some friends over to Boonville to attend a wedding.

Yes, a destination wedding in Boonville, Missouri. And, yes, they spell it without an “e”. Don’t judge. The bride is from St. Louis and the groom hails from Steelville. No one seems to know why the wedding was in Boonville, but, hey, now I can say I’ve been there. Five hours in the car–well worth the effort.

Boonville is a town of about 8,000 in Cooper County on the Missouri River. Nothing much has happened there since a skirmish early in the Civil War when Union forces defeated a small and poorly equipped force of the Missouri State Guard in the first Battle of Boonville.

There are quite a few interesting buildings in town which are on the historic register, including the Thespian Hall, which is the oldest theater still in use west of the Alleghenies. Check out those brick columns!

The wedding took place in this lovely Episcopal Church.

I wish it had been held in the First Presbyterian Church in town, because–wow–I was dying to go inside this striking buff brick structure built in the Spanish Baroque style in 1903 with corner towers and a variety of classical motifs. What were those Boonville Presbyterians thinking?

As I have asserted before, the traditional Episcopal wedding service is hard to beat, but the organist played his instrument like a calliope and raced through the hymns. I’m not sure what the rush was–there wasn’t anything else going on in town. Perhaps he had a date at the local casino, but I digress…The bride was pretty and the groom smiled a lot, and that is always a good thing. (Don’t get me started on bridesmaids with tattoos.)

The reception was in the historic Hotel Frederick which had a nice vintage ambience.

The food was excellent as were the pear basil sipper cocktails, and there was cake.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we continue to enjoy a cooler summer than we are used to. The flora continues to put forth bounty at a time when usually everything around here is burned up and nothing blooms but a few hardy roses. I really can’t believe this weather.

Carla’s lush front yard

I hung up some vintage curtains which I got on eBay in my laundry room and put two new shades in daughter #1/#2’s old bedroom with the help of my husband assisted by the boy.

The latter job took two weekends and the purchasing of a new tool. Things are never as simple as they look.

I am enjoying my current reading material.

Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin is surprisingly well written and chock full of fascinating characters who are not of the cardboard variety. What are you reading this summer?

5 Comments

August 3, 2013

Confessions of an internet junkie

by chuckofish

Not that I really qualify. But it is SO easy to waste time wandering around online. I recently discovered an English charity called “Friends of Friendless Churches”, which you can join for a mere 35 pounds a year.

Forlorn American church

We obviously need to start an American chapter. But take heart, dedicated preservationists are at work in just about every state and most have web sites!

Not everything I do on the internet is so altruistic. Sometimes I just need entertainment. On youtube, the great time waster, I found this wonderful video of every Simpson’s reference to Missouri.

Clearly, some people have too much time on their hands.

Honorable mention also goes to another Simpson video that boy #2 showed me, a wonderful montage of all the movie references in the Simpsons seasons 1-5. You can find it here

And, finally, let’s not forget ebay, where one can spend an infinite amount of time looking at everything from guitars (for boy #3)

a Gibson es 335

to heat guns (I dream of stripping porch paint with ease — or inspiring someone else to do it).

I can also indulge my fondness for antiques and vintage furniture without even leaving the house. I’m not being that lazy. It’s just that in north country parlance antique store really means junk store.

Wouldn’t that look nice in my dining room?

Oh, look, it’s already nearly noon and I haven’t done anything except drink tea and fool around on the computer. I’m burning daylight!

4 Comments

August 2, 2013

Happy birthday, Peter O’Toole

by chuckofish

Peter Seamus Lorcan O’Toole (born 2 August 1932) is an Irish actor of stage and screen. His mother was Scottish.

My dual personality and I became big fans of his after seeing him in the re-release of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in 1971. We saw it on a very hot day in the summer. During the intermission, following heroic trekking across the desert, our mother bought us sodas at the movie theater for the first time ever. It was a Big Day.

Peter O’Toole has made some good movies, but his career has largely been a disappointment to me. Like his Irish compatriot Richard Harris, he started out strong, but dissipated by drink, his career has been spotty. We can only wonder what might have been.

However, I like him in Lord Jim (1965) and in How to Steal a Million (1966)–he and Audrey Hepburn made a lovely and well-matched pair. And I will always have a soft spot in my heart for his portrayal of the angels in The Bible (1966)–a pretty terrible movie much enlivened by his presence.

This angel reminds me of…Lawrence of Arabia!

So let’s drink a toast to Peter O’Toole (preferably with something with ice) and watch some favorite scenes from Lawrence of Arabia. Hut, hut, huuuuuuuuut!

4 Comments

August 1, 2013

A new month and a few things to keep in mind

by chuckofish

A new month, a new calendar page and the end of summer in sight. For those of us in this flyover state it has not been a bad summer weather-wise. Indeed, we have had lovely long stretches of Michigan-esque weather. By this time, usually, we are counting the days ’til fall, but not this year. I am in no hurry for school to be back in session full throttle. I plan to enjoy the dog days that are left of summer 2013.

The August TCM star of the month is old Humphrey Bogart, film idol and Episcopalian.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother had a preference for Warner Brothers stars, such as Bogart and Errol Flynn, because she went to see all those movies at the Lewis J. Warner ’28 Memorial Theater at Worcester Academy (which I blogged about here). Like my mother, I feel that same thrill when the Warner Brothers logo appears and their rousing theme is played at the beginning of all their movies. TCM is not showing anything that I haven’t seen a million times and my favorite Bogart film, The Petrified Forest, is not on the line-up, but oh well. They are all still better than anything you’ll see on network television–reruns and commercials!

Tonight, however, they are showing my second-favorite Bogart film Key Largo, which is also one of my all-time favorite movies. I just saw it again recently and it really is fabulous. John Huston and Bogart were a good team and the star is at his best, ably supported by Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor and Lauren Bacall. So be sure to tune in or (at the very least) set your DVR.

August 1 is also the birthday of Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891), American writer and author, of course, of Moby-Dick.

This would be a great month to read the great book! You know you’ve been meaning to. Here’s a little something to get you in the mood.

“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:– through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”

August 1 is the birthday as well of Jerome Moross (August 1, 1913 – July 25, 1983) who composed works for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists, musical theatre, and movies. He also orchestrated motion picture scores for other composers. His best known film score is that for the 1958 movie The Big Country, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Original Music Score.

The winner that year in that category was The Old Man and the Sea, scored by Dimitri Tiomkin. Hold the phone! Are you kidding me? Jerome Moross was robbed! But why am I never surprised? Anyway, you might want to watch that movie–it’s a good one. It misses being a great western because of the annoying plot and the super annoying character played by Carol Baker. Nevertheless, it has some great people in it: Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, and Burl Ives (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). And the score is probably the best ever.

So here’s to a good August filled with great movies and great books! Let’s all have a good one.

5 Comments

July 31, 2013

No instructions

by chuckofish

This is how I felt yesterday trying to think of something to blog about.

Thomas Eakins’ “The Artist’s Wife and His Setter”

I tried to get excited about Thomas Eakins, the artist who painted this picture,

but I couldn’t.

Even the babies in his paintings were thoughtful and looked depressed.

So I will just offer you this thought for the day from Anne Lamott:

“You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained everything important to other kids. They said, ‘Look, you’re human, you’re going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.’ And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don’t know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.”

4 Comments

July 30, 2013

One more anniversary post

by chuckofish

Reblogged from Bless This Mess who reblogged it from somewhere else.

Who knew July was such a month for wedding anniversaries? My dual personality’s. The boy’s. And our brother celebrated one back in June.

Well, it’s okay to be proud of some things. I ran across this picture on a blog and I thought it was worth sharing with our readers. Something to aspire to, as it were–the long marriage, that is, not the shirts!

I know a couple who has been married for 70 years–they’re in their nineties! This is mind-boggling to say the least. And awesome.

Likewise awesome is this poem by Anne Bradstreet (the 17th-century Puritan who was the first poet and first female writer in the British North American colonies to be published.*)–To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

I better end this post before I get started on Puritans. Most the people who read this popular poem at their own weddings nowadays probably don’t even know who Anne Bradstreet was and that she was a Puritan! Zut alors!

*According to Wikipedia.

2 Comments

July 29, 2013

Our big fat wasp wedding

by chuckofish

Hard to believe, but it’s been a year since the boy got hitched!

On Saturday the old married folk came by and retrieved the top of their wedding cake which had been residing in our freezer for the past year.

Looking back, the great event was a wonderful one indeed.

Almost all the cousins (minus Foster) were together for the first time in a long time.

The old fogies partied like it was 1980.

A good time was had by all. We hope that all parties involved live happily ever after!

2 Comments

July 27, 2013

Brush up your Shakespeare

by chuckofish

— stop misquoting him now. As you know last Monday was my anniversary. So I thought I would at least mark the occasion with a card. Easier said than done; all the anniversary cards were either extremely sappy or overtly vulgar. Eventually I found an attractive “all occasion” card with a nice quote identified only as Shakespeare (the play was not mentioned):

…and we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies…
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies…

Well, thought I, that’s a nice sentiment and I can make an anniversary card out of it. My husband, who is less ignorant than I, recognized the passage and was rather bemused. Not only is it from King Lear (Act V, scene 3), but the card left out some important parts. In the original Lear speaks to Cordelia as follows:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

Perfect. Let’s enjoy life imprisoned together — just the sentiment I wanted to share with my husband on our anniversary. The moral of the story? Never take a greeting card at face value and always check your sources!

A big kiss to my sweet sister for cheering me up with a phone call yesterday just when I needed it. She’s right, Jonathan Winters is hilarious!

8 Comments

July 26, 2013

“I was surrounded by phonies…They were coming in the goddam window.”

by chuckofish

Some time back I wrote a post about those historical figures with whom it would be awesome to share a meal. You may recall that daughter #2 brought up fictional characters and I said that that was a whole ‘nother post.

Well, it being mid-summer and Friday, I thought I’d get the ball rolling on that post. Here is a list of fictional (literary) characters I would invite to dinner. (Note: this list does not include any film or television characters and definitely no phonies.)

1. Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
Any members of the Glass family would be welcome to stand in for Holden if he was AWOL and couldn’t make it.

2. Philip Marlowe, numerous books and stories by Raymond Chandler
He really is my perfect man and no one, even Bogart, has done him justice on film.

3. Mr. Knightley, Emma (Jane Austen)
Sigh. Understanding, sensitive, handsome, humble, and rich.

4. James Burke, Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad)
In addition to Jim, I would invite his friends Stein and Marlow. One of the quotes on my senior page was from this book.

5. Shane, Shane (Jack Schaefer)
The archetype.

6 and 7. Captain Call and Augustus McCrae, Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
Some people might only invite Gus, but I love Captain Call just as much.

8. Starbuck, Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Ahab’s Quaker first mate, who, alone among the crew, has his doubts about the captain’s motives. He just wants to make it home.

9. The Fool, King Lear (W. Shakespeare)
The great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all.

10. Judah Ben Hur, Ben Hur (Lew Wallace)
He was devoted to his mother and his sister–in addition to being awesome.

11. Francis Crawford of Lymond,The Game of Kings et al (Dorothy Dunnett)
Living by his wits and his sword-arm in 16th-century Scotland…

12. Dick Summers, The Big Sky (A.B. Guthrie)
Mountain man and gentleman. Such a great character–the author had to bring him back in The Way West.

13. Father Tim, At Home in Mitford et al (Jan Karon)
I’ll admit he’s a bit of a goodie-goodie and it’s true that he and his wife can be a bit much, but I do love this series of books and what would they be without Father Tim Kavanaugh at the center of them? Also he would probably agree to bring the main dish to the dinner and would offer the blessing.

14. Owen Meany, A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
A REALLY GREAT GUY!

If we wanted to spice things up a bit, maybe I would invite Raskolnikov, the young, stressed-out ex-student of law in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I’m not sure if that would be a good idea.

I did not intend for this list to be all male, but that’s the way it ended up. In order to give equal time (not quite) to the ladies, I’ll add:

13 and 14. Lady Dona St. Columb (Frenchman’s Creek)

and Mary Yellan (Jamaica Inn) by Daphne DuMaurier

15. Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

16. Precious Ramotswe, The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith)

and from the animal kingdom: Miss Bianca, The Rescuers (Margery Sharp)

and Charlotte, Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)

All these ladies are smart, resourceful, brave, and do the right thing. Charlotte was also “a true friend and a good writer.”

As you can see, it is really easy to get carried away with an exercise such as this! I could go on and on. Who have I left out? Atticus Finch? TinTin? Richard Hannay? David Copperfield? Pippi Longstocking? Who would you invite?

10 Comments

July 25, 2013

You took the words right out of my mouth

by chuckofish

“I want less love of money, less judging others, less tattling, less dependence upon external appearance. I want to see more fruit of the Spirit in all things, more devotion of heart, more spirit of prayer, more real cultivation of mind, more enlargement of heart towards all; more tenderness towards delinquents, and above all more of the rest, peace and liberty of the children of God.”

Elizabeth Fry (21 May 1780 – 12 October 1845) was an English prison reformer, social reformer and, and a prominent Quaker of her day. She had many admirers, among them Queen Victoria, who granted her an audience a few times and contributed money to her cause. Another admirer was Robert Peel who passed several acts to further her cause including the Gaols Act 1823.

Since 2001 Fry has been depicted on the reverse of £5 notes issued by the Bank of England. She is shown reading to prisoners at Newgate Prison. The design also incorporates a key, representing the key to the prison which was awarded to Fry in recognition of her work. However, as of 2016, Fry’s image on these notes will be replaced by that of Winston Churchill.

3 Comments