What You Can Learn at the Movies

Face it: most of what we know about famous figures we know from movies about them. In fact what notable figures haven’t had a movie made about them? Dian Fossey you say? Wrong: Gorillas in the Mist. Howard Hughes? Nope: The Aviator.  Moses? The Ten Commandments. Certainly not Jesus who’s had TWO movies made about him just in the last 20 years, one starring Willem Dafoe and one starring Caviezel who at least looked a little mid-eastern (AND spoke Aramaic. The whole movie had subtitles, remember?)

But let's look at the life of Mozart just because we’ve been thinking about him these last few days. Most of what I know about Mozart I know from seeing Amadeus. Here’s the trailer for it now with Mozart being played by Tom Hulce fresh from his star turn in Animal House:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-rD2QL1Pc]So too , most of what I know about Beethoven I know from seeing Immortal Beloved and here’s that trailer :[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9MTQqVUFY.]It leaves you really hoping that the writers of all these screenplays stuck to the facts. I mean you try to learn about all the great figures but it’s a daunting task. Our lives are so short and here’s this ever-growing tail of human history. In a way it’s a wonder we remember anything at all of what went before.Anyway here’s  the movie that taught ME the most about a  historical figure and  then sent me right to the bookstore for the 400-page book about him (which, come to think of it, I should probably take down from the shelf and read again.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVwCeGxTN-A]

The Week in Review

I found the bird who was flying all around my house over the weekend. She was lying against the window-glass, a soft glove of feathers on the  bookcase. Also point of information: she was never the same bird as the one on my windowsill having sex in public for the last two months and just about runnin' the place. That one never came inside. This one was all over the house: went to the bathroom in the kitchen, the powder room, on my favorite bright red raw-silk sofa cushion etc...Also, that isn’t really Gandhi in yesterday’s post. Gandhi is dead now. That is actually a statue of him next to me at Madame Tussaud's House of Wax in London. I myself am not yet dead but when that picture was taken I had not yet heard about beauty products. I look like the scene in the first Batman movie where the news team is afraid to wear makeup on account of how the Joker poisoned the Gotham’s City ‘s whole supply.Also, I posted the wrong picture of me looking down at my own chest at age 12 in The King And I . The right picture is up now if you scroll down. This picture, that picture: they both make me cringe.And speaking of pictures,  another awesome picture of busty Christina Hendricks up now too.Ok that’s it. Driving 300 miles now, meetcha at the second the rest stop....!

Cuss-Free Zone, or, It's Tough Living with Gandhi

No more swearing in the workplace says Goldman Sachs but when I was growing up no one in my house swore - unless you counted Mom yelling  “God!” now and then, followed by the immediate disclaimer that she was praying for patience.Later on, my sister Nan took up swearing bigtime, though never while angry . Only while telling a funny story and the swears were strung together in such original fashion you felt like Mark Twain was in the room, emptying the dictionary on some fool he had in his cross-hairs.Me, I never swore – until that time I was carefully bundling an armful of wire coat-hangers and dropped them all again. OUT came that ugly one-syllable expletive. IN came Mom who scared even grown men when she rose up and fluffed out her fins.“IS THIS THE KIND OF LANGUAGE YOU’RE LEARNING FROM THAT DAVID?” she roared.I was 19 and David was the boy I had just said I was going to marry.But Dave never swears as I well know after all these years. In fact just a few months ago in a conversation about cursing I asked him if people ever swore at his place of business.“Not really,” he said. “Why, in this foul-mouthed day and age?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I don’t?” (He’s the company president.)So hmmmm.  Maybe that whole Be-the-Change-You-Wish-to-See-in-the-World thing Gandhi said really DOES work....Anyway, I just Googled my name together with the ‘sh-’ word and 2 hits came up, in each of which I’m quoting somebody else. Maybe I'll have to stop doing even that.

Because after all I'm not just livin’ with Gandhi here on earth, I've also got Mom up in Heaven now, hearing everything I say. a hot summer day long ago, with Gandhi and the women who raised me

Gandhi was not Bald: Poofy Coifs

When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.

Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.

Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.

So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began.... and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.

It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of '93 when I actually  'met' Gandhi at Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week's column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine

(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)