I write this from Hilo, Hawaii. And I am so glad I am here! I was expecting the weather to be hot and muggy, and it is hot but not as much as I expected, and it is muggy but not that bad. Fans make life great.
Well, I got to Denver to get onto my first standby flight to Salt Lake City. Then, once I was in Salt Lake City, I found out that I was the fourth in line with two extra seats. In the words of Princess Bride, Do you think it'll work? It would take a miracle!
The miracle happened and I made it onto the plane, and flew to Hawaii. The next miracle happened in the Honolulu airport: I heard somebody call my name and it was Elizabeth Proko! I was amazed. We had been on the same flight from Salt Lake City and didn't even know it. We were both travel-tired, so we went to the bathroom and washed hands and brushed teeth and whatnot in the bathroom and caught up. I think it is amazing that we have both been though so much in the last year and ended up in the same security line in the Interisland Terminal at the Honolulu Airport. Whew...that was really a miracle!!
So I got on my interisland flight to Hilo (I could look out the window and see Hawai'i as we approached) and when I deplaned...I realized the airport had no walls! The whole thing was open-air, and the air was so soft and warm.
The scenery here is lovely. The plants are big and jungly, much, much junglier than in Colorado. I went to Wallyworld and Safeway the other day, and today I am at school trying to quell the panic. It comes in waves, and right now I am ok. But when I think of all the work I have to do...whoa. Then I have to calm down.
Things are good.
...are my two favorite heroines from Lucy Maud Montgomery's books. Anne is, of course, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. She is also in Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and Rilla of Ingleside, but is not the primary character from the last three. This series chronicles Anne's life from her adoption into the Cuthbert household, her adventures in college, as a teacher, in university, and her changing experience of life.
The other favorite series of mine is the Emily series: Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily's Quest. These are less sunshile-y and Pollyanna-ish than the Anne books. Emily is a writer whose father dies, and whose aunts adopt her and take her to New Moon, the family farm. She loves her family farm and the cats and her aunts, though it taker her a while to learn how to relate well with them. As I said earlier, the Emily books are more complex than the Anne books. For one thing, while both women finally find love, Emily almost loses her love because of her pride and stubbornness. But in the end, all is well, and Montgomery is a truly Canadian author. (There is, after all, a difference between America and Canada.)
An article today in the Colorado Springs Gazette was about aliens and what we feel about them. There was a list of 'beloved' alien movies, which sparked the idea for this list and commentary, in the tradition of Lilly Moscovitz and Mia Thermopolis.
Fire in the Sky. This was one of the first alien movies I remember. It was one of the first to inspire my irrational and deep phobia of aliens. The scene where the man wakes up in the alien womb-like pod is particularly memorable.
Asteroids (I think that is the title.) This was a made-for-TV movie, in the format of a newscast. It was powerful for my young (10-year-old) mind because of its newscaster-reality. The gist was that some alien group was sending asteroids to earth as a test of our fitness for 'first contact.' Of course, we were not. And so, we were destroyed.
Another TV movie; I don't even remember anything about this one (so I can't search for the title) except that there was a scene where the woman went to her doctor because she has sinus pain, and she was told that she had extensive surgery! And she had never has surgery...at least not on earth! And THEN that night, an electric-line work crew woke her up, and she called the power company. They told her that they had no crews out...and when she looked out her window, all the workers were staring at her with their big black eyes! She ran downstairs to lock the doors and the aliens started to walk through the walls!!! When I was 8 with an undisciplined imagination, that was a terrifying image...and still is, to some extent.
Contact. This Sagan movie featured a debate between science and religion. I remember the scene where Jodi Foster was testifying to her experiences at Vega: nobody believed her testimony. You just had to have faith in her. Ironic, because she didn't understand faith before her peculiar travel experience.
Stargate. An interesting movie that posited that we are the aliens here. Supposedly we were placed here by some alien whose ship was a huge pyramid and that the Egyptian culture is the original culture. The best part? The nerd Egyptologist becomes the hero.
Sphere. Ok, I never saw the movie, and it's not really about aliens, per se. This commentary is about the book, and I think it's interesting that an alien weapon just creates each person's secret fears. Now that is a powerful weapon.
Independence Day. I thought this was cool when it came out (because Data was the kooky alien 'doctor'!), but I watched it this year on July 4th...and it was a too-predictable movie. The end especially was such a phallic-symbol overload, I laughed till I cried. And anna grace brown was here (she is a film student for those who do not know her), so that just made the enjoyment of the gratutitous scene with torpedos and long skinny bobms galore that much more silly.
Muppets from Space! Gonzo finds his family. Muppet jokes yuk it up in this not-as-good-as-The Muppets' Christmas Carol Muppet movie. Still, it is a Muppet movie and has all the requisite characters.
Lilo and Stitch. An alien lands in Hawaii. The aliens are more advanced than we are (as always) except for Experiment 626. But the love and loyalty of a Hawaiian family changes him and he becomes Stitch, a beloved pet/family member. Includes good music.
Who can forget ET? I don't remember it well, except that the plant and Eliot are connected. And ET loves Reeses' Pieces. And the bike ride with the huge moon.
These all are part of my idea of aliens. I am totally over my disabling irrational fear of aliens, but this is the root of the fear.
On tonight's episode of the Isaac Mizrahi Show. (I am assuming these rules apply to women.)
Here are things I feel I need to buy when I get to Hawaii. My apartment is furnished (furniture, dishes, silverware, pots and pans), so this list is just stuff that I need to see if I need to buy.
Food/Kitchen supplies
Any other ideas? Anything I am missing?
Note: this entry has spoilers, so if you haven't yet read the book, go read it before you read this.
This is the story of Francie Nolan, the daughter of two Irish-American Brooklynites. She was born in 1898 and grew up during the beginning of the century.
It's not really one looong narrative, but more a series of vignettes or snapshots that show us all the interesting facets that make her who she is.
First we find out about a typical Saturday for her and her brother Neeley (short for Cornelius). They have been collecting junk all week long and drag it to the junk man, who pays preset prices for rags, tin, copper, and other stuff like that. It's Francie's job to take the junk into the junk man's barn, because if she doesn't flinch while he pinches her botttom, she gets an extra penny.
The family pinches pennies, literally. They have a secret bank, made out of a tin can a nailed to the floor of the closet, that each family member puts half thier earnings into. The father, Johnny, is a singing waiter and he tends to spend most of his money on drinks, so the bank is a secret from him.
He tries to be a good father but he was too young when he married and was totally unprepared for fatherhood. When Francie came along, Johnny suddenly was responsible for a child, and that dragged him into his cycle of drinking.
Francie's mother's family was a strange and difficult place for Katie to grow up. Her father was an old embittered man who refused to speak English. The mother refused to let the children speak German, which limited the girls' relationship with their father. This was acceptable to their mother, who often claimed she was married to the devil.
Katie's sister, Sissy, was desperate for a baby, and went from one 'marriage' to another to try to get one. She eventually had 10 children...all stillborn. Katie's other sister, Lena, is also married to a dreamer, but unlike Katie's husband, Willie is silly and impotent. Nobody in the family laughs about Johnny, but Willie is the family's standing joke. Francie is part of this group of women who gossip and philosophize out loud, who take life's hard knocks and make the best of them.
She is also part of her father's family. Johnny Nolan is a dreamer and has an artist's temperament. Francie is an artist, a writer, and has a way of looking at her poverty-ridden life that takes that edge off it. She has hope for something better at the same time that she loves Brooklyn and is a child of Brooklyn.
The family totters along, Johnny making money, loving his waiters' union, and drinking; Katie working as a janitor to earn the family a flat to live in; Neeley scraping by in school but better loved by his mother; and Francie going to school, wondering about life, and savoring her moments of beauty. However, Johnny eventually loses his place in his beloved union and finds out about the new baby. This sends him into another tailspin, drinks himself into a stupor, falls asleep outside in the cold, and contracts pneumonia. He dies before Katie can get to the hospital.
This news fractures the family. The children get summer jobs and Francie learns that she loves her new friends (her school friends were all young and childishly vindictive). By the end of the summer, though, Katie makes Neeley go back to school while Francie must stay at work. This way, Francie will struggle to go back to school while Neeley will (hopefully) become a doctor.
Once the new baby is born, however, the family has to decide how to live. They decide that Francie will work the night shift at her tele-typist job and stay in the flat with the baby while Katie scrubs the apartment building early in the morning. Francie then spends her afternoons at college summer-school classes. Time goes by, the children grow more, and the stabbing pain of her father's death becomes a dull ache for Francie. Eventually, Katie receives a proposal (which she accepts) and the new stepfather gives Katie a checking account and Franie and Neeley each college educations. They move out of Brooklyn, but in the closing scene of the book, Francie realizes "you can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the girl."
This book is filled with symbols. There is the secret bank, the Tree of Heaven, the shaving mug, and the hypodermic needle, just to name a few. This is a wonderful book--one of my all-time favorites--that I can read over and over and it gives me a new insight each time. I am wiser for having read it.
Here is a wonderful review, with discussion questons.
This is a pretty cheezy movie but I really like it. It's a dance movie and it showcases the personal journey of one dancer who has bad feet but loves to dance, while it has about 3 secondary storylines going on.
The star of the movie is Jody Sawyer, the girl with the bad foot. She is also very pretty. She works had for a year to become a dancer of perfect technique. She fails at that, but gets seduces by the young upstart dancer (Cooper Neilsen) who is the pretty boy of the company. He then casts her in his dance where she gets to dance a non-traditional ballet. Her dream her whole life has been to be in the American Ballet Company, but she ends up turning down the offer to be in their corps and decides to dance with Cooper in his new company while spurning his attentions. (She finally gets to dance where she is appreciated, and if he loves her only for her dancing then she doesn't want him.)
There is also Maureen Cummings, who has been in the American Ballet Academy since she was 9. She has perfect technique but is a very unkind person whose whole life revolves around making the company...until she meets Jim Gordon, a medical student at Columbia. By the end of the movie, she realizes that there is no point in dancing (even if she is good) if she doesn't have the heart. She also defeats bulimia!
There is Eva Rodriguez, a dancer with attitude. She is from the wrong side of the tracks, and her attitude sets her against her ballet teachers and the director of the company. She eventually shapes up, but by then it is too late for her to get a part in the student workshop. However, Maureen comes to her aid by dropping out of the ballet and giving her starring role to Eva! Maureen gets to quit dancing while Eva gets to dance. Eva is so good that the director ends up giving her a spot in the company.
There is also Sergei, a Russian who ends up going to San Francisco with his girlfriend; Emily, who gets kicked out of American Ballet Academy because she gains weight (and who acts as a wake-up call for Maureen the Bulimic); Eric O'Jones (the O is in honor of Oprah, his idol), who sprains his ankle in the final rehearsal for Jody's ballet but gets a spot in the company anyway; and Charlie, Jody's real love interest who helps her realize that dancing doesn't need to be a stressor, but can be her outlet. He is very cute.
Yes, it is shallow and predictable and cheezy. But I like it; there is dancing and not every movie can be an artsy-fartsy brainiac fest (like Memento or Dark City).
I have 2 favorite parts: one is in Cooper's ballet, the scene where Jody wears the blue dress and she and Charlie and Cooper have a pas de trois. Basically, they fight over the girl. It's really pretty, I think, and I really like the corps' choreography as they walk by, being passers-by. The other part is the scenes at the very end of the movie, under the credits. It shows where everyone ends up after their tumultuous year of school. They are all so happy, finally in the places they belong.
I also like Jody's dress in the scene where she turns down the spot in the American Ballet Company. It's cute.
There was an article in yesterday's Colorado Springs Gazette. It was all about public restrooms and the way we deal with them. Here are the rules they listed for public-restroom behavior: