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Casual Sundays with Mr Curry
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"There's another woman."
Are those the words every wife dreams of hearing one week after her twenty seventh wedding anniversary?
No, they are not.
"What?" I cleverly replied.
"I love another woman."
"Don't make me kill you."
"I'm sorry, but I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher."
"Oh!"
He indicated our latest copy of Imprimis, laying on the kitchen table. It's titled Margaret Thatcher: A Legacy of Freedom. "Have you read it yet?" he said. "I highlighted my favorite parts."
I picked it up and read Lady Thatcher's list of Vigorous Virtues. "...such qualities as self-reliance, diligence, thrift, trustworthiness, and initiative that enable someone who exhibits them to live and work independently in society. Though they are not the only virtues--compassion might be called one of the "softer virtues"-- they are essential to the success of a free economy and a civil society, both of which rely on dispersed initiative and self-reliant citizens."
"Wow." he sighed, with a dreamy look on his face. "I love her." Then he looked sort of sheepish. "I was talking some trash about her the other day, wasn't I?"
(It was before Hillary had dropped out of the race and he had said that he would never vote for any woman.
"Yes you would!" I retorted. "You would've voted for Margaret Thatcher if you'd ever had a chance."
He had denied it and said something else stupid which I didn't bother to remember.)
"Yes, but I knew you didn't know what you were talking about." I absolved him of his ignorant transgression.
"I know she's like, eighty five years old," he said fervently "But I would leave you for her!"
"That's okay." I nodded. "You can have Maggie and I'll take Thomas Sowell."
"WHO THE HELL IS THAT?"
What, I'm just supposed to wait around while he cavorts with the Iron Lady? Not while there's a hot, old, brilliant economist I'd love to get my hands on!
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Last week we had an open house for Zack, to celebrate his graduation from high school. It was a great party, like all the ones we've had in the last few years have been. We've been throwing open houses since Ty graduated from South west seven years ago. We've gotten good at it.
There are a million ways to have an open house and I've been to most of them. Some are catered, some are home made, some are fancy full dinners and some are all desserts. They are all fun.
Somewhere around our third one, Jay decided that we had to find a simple, easy way to do it. Here's what we came up with; all finger food. No utensils; no mess. We serve brats and hot dogs. No cake; cake needs forks. We make bars. That was actually Ty's idea a few years ago. He said he preferred rice crispy bars to cake any day of the week.
There are also a lot of little kids in the family and I really hate finding mostly full pop cans all over the house and yard, so no pop. We do a huge barrel of koolaid for the kids. (There's usually pop and beer hidden in the garage fridge for grownups. Grownups almost never take one sip of a beer and then leave the can hidden behind the recliner. No, they finish the beer and then pass out behind the recliner.
We no longer serve tequila at our shindigs. Not since Jay's 50th birthday party a few years back. No tequila around here til 2055. That's when the moratorium will be lifted.
At one point in the afternoon, one of the cousins on Jay's side of the family noticed the picture of my brother JP on the fridge. This cousin knows JP but hasn't seen him in years.
"Is JP still using that publicity photo?" he asked me, "That thing must be twenty years old!"
"This one?"
"Yeah."
"That was taken last year."
"I hate him."
JP is aging better than most of us.
The open house was fun, the weather was perfect and most of the family showed up. Unlike many of our earlier parties, this one actually ended at a reasonable hour. The last of the guests left when it started to rain, right around ten o'clock.
Later in the week, Jay and I celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary. He had class that night so we went to Cafe Maud, a nifty little place right up the street that opened a few months ago. Jay had brunched there before, but I hadn't eaten there. I had a grilled chicken panini and Jay had a salmon blt. Both were delicious. He was home from class early enough for us to drink some champagne while watching the sunset from our hill. Then we had a late dinner of pork chops. My brother and his wife live a mile away and their anniversary is the day after ours. Sometimes we drop over there with a bottle of wine to toast both days but this year we'd downed too much champagne to be driving around the neighborhood at night. So Andy and Vi, I hope you cracked your own bottle of wine!
It's no wonder I'm exhausted. June is too much fun. |
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I just finished reading The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. I haven't read any of her stuff before but I had heard of the Handmaid's Tale. My daughter read that one while still in school (English lit. degree) but she didn't like it much. She gave me the Robber Bride but hasn't read it herself.
Apparently Atwood is considered some intellectual, feminist icon in the English lit community.
My take?
Peh.
The difference between "Feminist Literature" and chick lit is that Femlit has no sense of humor. And the women in femlit are really, really stupid.
The Robber Bride was an okay story along the lines of a Judith Krantz. It was really no more than a Danielle Steele novel without the romance. What's left, you may ask?
Suffering.
If I had to come up with one word to describe this book, it would be "irritating."
Atwood writes it in the present tense, as in "Tony walks to the book case and removes a volume." I find that irritating. Shtick like that bugs the crap out of me. It takes me out of the story and shows the heavy hand of the writer on every page. Like that book I read a few years ago that was praised for using no punctuation; why not just print the whole darn thing on photos of the author's face? The result is a book that may as well come with a sound track of the author yelling "Hey, it's me! I wrote this! Remember me?? HELLOOOOO!"
Alfred Hitchcock liked to appear in brief cameos in all of his movies. Imagine if, instead of just being the guy who missed the bus, he always looked right into the camera and winked.
That's what this writing is like.
Also irritating is the fact that the three protagonist's in the story behaved so idiotically that by the end I was thinking "Good! You got what you deserved!"
I've read books where the author succeeds in presenting the character's motivations to the point where even their bad choices make sense at the time. In The Robber Bride, the antagonist practically hypnotizes every other character to do her evil bidding.
It actually reminded me of an urban legend I heard when I was in fifth grade.
One of my friends told us all a horrible story of a guy who stopped off at a bar one night after work and drank until two a.m. and then drove home. When he got up in the morning, his wife accused him of driving drunk and he denied it, until they went out to the garage and there was an eight year old girl embedded in the grill of his car!!!
All my friends gasped at the horror and folly of drunk driving.
I said "What the heck was an eight year old girl doing out at two in the morning?"
It's no wonder they stopped inviting me to their slumber parties.
Oh, and instead of actually coming up with an ending, Atwood just conveniently stops the action. Imagine how you'd feel if the big finale of Return of the Jedi, instead of having Luke and Darth go hand to hand, Vader just suffered a massive stroke.
Bleah. |
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The phone rang at 3:34 a.m.
Nothing good ever happens at 3:34 in the morning.
If I were president and the phone rang at that hour, I think I'd probably have a standing order to nuke whoever was calling.
Good thing I'll never be president.
So the phone rang and woke us up. When you are the parents of three adult kids, your first thought is that it's the police or the hospital.
Nobody calls with good news at that hour.
Then I remembered that MJ is due any second now and that one good thing actually does occasionally happen at 3:00 in the morning.
It wasn't MJ or Kent.
By the time Jay got to the phone, the voice mail had picked it up. The caller ID said Tyler. So Jay called him back.
"Oh, hi Dad." said our oldest. "I hope I didn't wake you. I almost died tonight. I'll call you in the morning."
what?
"You did wake me, it is morning and what do you mean YOU ALMOST DIED TONIGHT???"
Short story; Ty got bit on the foot by some kind of insect which caused his foot to swell and then turn into hives which climbed right up his legs and then his lips went numb and his respiratory system began to shut down. His friend Tiffany rushed him to the emergency room where they intubated him and pumped him full of adrenalin and benadryl. We were the third message they sent out.
First ,Ty called his brother Zack to tell him what was going on.
Zack's reaction; "I don't care! You woke me up!"
So Tif texted Katie. Her reaction; "Why the fuzz Tifini tes me na middla night to tell me Ty's allergic to ants?"
Ty said he called us so that we'd hear what happened from him instead of one of his knuckleheaded siblings but I think he was hoping for more sympathy from us than he got from them.
His Dad couldn't figure out why none of it could wait til morning, seeing as the danger had passed and Ty was on his way home by then, but I understood. I know how scary it is to have your own body try to choke you to death. It freaks you out and not in the fun way.
So that's one more member of the family who has to have an epi pen and carry benedryl everywhere he goes.
Thank God for Big Pharmaceutical! |
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Entertainment Weekly just put out it's "new classics" addition. The mag lists classic tv shows, movies, books, stage productions and records from the past 25 years.
The #1 movie was Pulp Fiction.
I couldn't find Braveheart on the list anywhere.
For my money, Pulp Fiction is a nice piece of entertainment but Braveheart is a masterpiece.
Everyone has their own idea of what "Classic" means. To me, it doesn't simply mean "favorite". I think that in order to be considered a classic, it needs to do more than simply be a great, groundbreaking work of art. For me there are two more criteria that a movie, in particular, needs to fill to be considered a classic.
It must stand the test of time.
It must speak for itself.
While watching StarWars on dvd a few years back with Josie, I never once had to say "see, this is cool because no one had ever tried to do that in a movie before." Nope, I didn't have to say a word and the movie made her head spin right around on her neck.
Citizen Cane, on the other hand, while a very well made movie, doesn't stand the test of time. I watched it a couple of years ago with Zack. He had no idea that it was based on a real person and didn't care 'cuz who the heck is William Randolf Hearst, anyway? Without a tutorial on the groundbreaking new ways to light and shoot scenes that Wells came up with, it's just another old black and white film. And kind of a dull one at that.
I know most movie buffs consider Citizen Cane one of the greatest movies ever made but I disagree. I'll buy that it's an extremely important movie but it doesn't make the cut in my classic movie list.
A classic is not always appreciated in it's own time. It's A Wonderful Life was a box office flop. No one knew back in 1939 that The Wizard of Oz would look just as good in seventy years as it did then.
Gone With the Wind, Singin' in the Rain, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons and The Sting need no explanations. From thirty to seventy years old, these movies will take your breath away today just as they did when they were first released.
25 years ago was 1983. A lot of really good movies have been made since then. Every once in a while you see a movie in which every scene is perfect. Driving Miss Daisy was one such movie when it won for best picture back in '89. I watched it again last winter and it was just boring. Not a classic. Glory, which the academy ignored that same year, I've watched a dozen times and it blows me away every single time. Classic.
Here are some movies from the last 25 years that I consider classics;
The Sandlot
A Christmas Story
The Princess Bride
Tombstone
Roxanne
Die Hard
Jurassic Park
The Passion of the Christ
Groundhog Day
Office Space
I could probably think up a lot more but I have to go watch Hellboy now, to see if I liked it well enough to go see the second one when it comes out. |
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This week Barack Obama has opted out of matching federal campaign funds. I happen to be opposed to the whole idea of matching funds. It really means that we all contribute to the campaigns of candidates we wouldn't give cold water in the desert, much less money to.
So good for you, Barack. You don't need my money, so you won't take it.
Not until you're elected, anyway, where you apparently plan to take all the money any of us will earn up through the year 3008.
Although I offer tepid support to McCain this year, if he should lose due to campaign finance laws, that would be an irony so beautiful I can't help wallowing in the thought.
It's not the laws themselves that prevent McCain from raising the dough; it's the fact that he wrote the laws, which constitute such an egregious assault on ALL OF OUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS that have put McCain in this position.
It's darn near impossible for us conservatives to whip up much enthusiasm for a guy with so little regard for the Constitution.
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Turns out the only way to get me to give my house a thorough cleaning and hang all the pictures I've had stacked in corners since February is to throw a party and invite all my family and friends.
I've known we were having this open house for two weeks. That's when I sent out the invitations.
So, this week, I kept looking around the house and saying "I should probably do something about that..."
Today I finally did something and it didn't even take all that long.
The place was fairly clean since we've been making the kids do some housework since school let out.
When they were all little I used to make each one of them clean one room every morning before any fun was to be had. They grumbled a lot at first but after about three days there was never more than five minutes of picking up to do and the house stayed clean all summer. I haven't really kept that up since Ty and Katie moved out but I do ask Zack and Josie to clean a room now and then and they do it.
But I decided to vacuum the living room and sweep behind all the furniture and break down the dining room table and put the leaf away and finally hang some art on the last wall which I never did after I painted the whole room orange well over two years ago. I found six pieces, including a large, framed charcoal drawing I did while I was in high school. It's the first piece I ever did at Atelier Lack, with my first great teacher, George Hermann.
George used to be King Henry at the Renaissance Festival. He loved playing that part and he did it for decades. He was a great drawing instructor. He pushed and pushed you until you got it right, or at least as close as you possibly could get to right. He was also really funny although some students couldn't take it. If you walked into his class convinced that you were already an accomplished draftsman, you weren't going to like George very much. It was never enough to render an apple or a bottle; if you hadn't drawn that apple and that bottle, he would make you start over again.
Some students didn't understand why he did that, but I did. He was training us to see, to understand what we saw and training us in such a way so that someday when we were inspired to draw or paint something really wonderful, we would be able to nail it, and not just get into the general vicinity of what we were trying to express. This is what a classical background does for you. What you choose to do with it is completely up to you. It's like sports; no one can teach a kid to be Tiger Woods, but Tiger wouldn't be either if his Dad hadn't taught him to swing the club properly and to read a green.
George's critiques were the most brutal yet hilarious things I've ever been through. We worked sight/size, which means you set up your drawing board next to your subject and drew it exactly the size it looked to you, depending on where you were standing. Everything was marked with tape. Everything; easel, board height, foot positions. You'd work for an hour or so and then he'd come and stand behind you. You'd hear him breathing back there and the flop sweat would start.
"Well..." he'd say "I'm probably not going to vomit." But he never said those things in a snarky way, so I never took offense. After such a promising start, he would critique every speck of charcoal you had applied to the paper, explaining why every last molecule of it was in the wrong place or the wrong value.
One time a student tried to convince him that her drawing looked better if you stood back a bit.
"Then I hope you have a tree in your back yard you can hang it on." he answered.
Some students would cry at that, but she laughed, sighed and grabbed her chamois to erase it and start again.
It got to the point where if George said "It's not the worst thing I've ever seen," it made your day. The best critiques of all were when he stood behind you breathing heavily for awhile and then moved on to the next student without saying a word.
I think that happened to me once.
But maybe I dreamed it. Kind of like that time I went sailing with Jimmy Buffett. Turns out I never did.
George is the teacher who told me that every artist needs two things to create a great painting;
Inspiration to get started
And someone to shoot him when he's done.
That drawing has been stuck up in my office for the last seven or eight years. Time to hang it up again. I rehung all the pieces I'd had to take down in the tv room which I repainted a few months back. I put everything in different spots. With the new big tv, the room has been reconfigured and the wall is shaped differently. My vintage StarWars poster had to be moved to a different wall and that meant everything else is moved, too.
I hung five watercolors around the charcoal drawing. Two are of sunsets. One of those is a study of another painting and one I painted in Antigua. Then there's a small floral and a sketch I did of Zack, years ago when his baseball team was playing at Nokomis and a tiny still life of a china sugar bowl I did in a class with my other great teacher, Rick Kochenash.
The only thing Rick has in common with George is that he was just as funny.
Rick is exactly the same hieght as I am so critiquing my work was easy for him. He always tried to point out everything that was good about a sketch or painting rather than what was wrong with it. He was always very kind to his students.
But he pushed me just as hard as George did and I learned a ton and a half from him. Huh. Four of the paintings in this room I did in Rick's class. That's not surprising; I studied with him for ten years. His class was how I kept from murdering all my kids when they were little. Some people do yoga; I did watercolor.
Then the kids got bigger, I didn't feel so crazy all the time and now I haven't taken a class in years.
No wonder I suck so bad.
It's not like riding a bike. It's like a sport; you have to do it all the time to stay good.
At the moment I'm too busy to care. When I do care, I'll just sign up again.
In the meantime, I've got a bunch of people coming over here tomorrow to have a good time and the chances are really pretty good that none of them will even come in the house. The weather is supposed to be great and the yard looks better than it has in five years, which is when a big gust of wind blew over our silver maple and ruined the back yard deck.
The deck's rebuilt, new trees are growing nicely, Jay and Josie spent the week putting in flowers, and we put up the new furniture Jay got for his birthday. No reason at all for anyone to come in the house.
But if I hadn't hung all these pictures now, I would never have gotten around to it.
When I was done with that, I made five pans of every kind of rice crispy bar I know how to make.
And they're all calling to me from the back fridge.
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I have been way too busy these last few days enjoying the perfect summer weather we're having to sit and write anything. Plus, my friends keep telling me horrible, hilarious tales and then saying "Don't write about that."
Fine.
Damn, stupid friends.
I know that Iowa, Illinois and parts of Minnesota are under thirty feet of water, but here in the metro area of Mpls/St.Paul, it's absolutely gorgeous. We've had a bit of rain this month, but only enough to fill the creek and the lakes and make our yards lush. All the water has so far stayed within it's banks and nobody up here is being bothered.
Sorry about Iowa, though. I mean, cereal is already more expensive than gasoline and now that the midwest crops have been completely swept away, it's only gonna get worse.
I will watch with interest to see whether Iowa has as hard a time getting back on it's feet as Louisiana has had. The truth is, if you're going to live on the Mighty Miss, it's going to make you it's bitch every few years. Here we all are, worried about "wrecking" the planet, when it seems obvious to me that the planet can and does wreck us whenever the mood hits.
Mother Nature?
Try Mommy Nature Dearest.
My favorite way to get in touch with nature is to lie by the pool for a few hours.
Oh, I guess that's not exactly true. This morning I made Josie ride her bike around the lake with me. It was wonderful. I like riding. I don't put on bike clothes and I don't have a light weight ultra cool racer or anything. I just have a comfy bike that I like to cruise around on. I want to get a basket for it so I can start biking to the grocery store. I live six blocks from two stores and it seems nuts to be driving there with gas at $4.00. At least until winter, when biking six blocks will seem like the definition of insanity, I think I should do it. The problem of course, is that I never just go to the grocery store. It's always one stop on a long list of errands.
But today we just biked down to the lake and around it. I love that so many people are able to take advantage of a beautiful Wednesday morning to go hang out at the lake. Harriet was packed with bikers, walkers, runners, painters, picnickers, rollerbladers and swimmers. And the best part of Minneapolis is that there's another lake just over the hill (every hill) and it's all happening there too. Sometimes there's live music.
When we got back home, I worked for a bit and then we went to the pool. We hung out til it was time for Zack to get ready for work. When we got home we discovered that my favorite person, who turned 53 years old today, had bought himself a birthday present. The deck was covered with new, all-weather furniture!
Which had to be assembled.
So, Jay and I spent the next hour or so reading directions, lining up bolts and slots and slowly screwing everything together.
It looks great!
I love it when Jay buys himself presents. |
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Last night I was so cold I wound up wearing a hooded sweatshirt while watching tv.
This morning dawned bright and blue and gorgeous.
I walked around the lake with my sister this morning, came home and had lunch and then painted some.
My daughter came over for a few hours between her shifts at work. We spent the afternoon playing cribbage on the deck. She kept making up new rules but I beat her anyway.
Later, I ran out to Sam's club and picked up some tenderloin which Jay will grill up for dinner, when he's done playing golf.
It doesn't get any better than this. |
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I just got one of those emails from a friend that when you open it, wishes you a good day, reminds you that God loves you and gives you thirty seconds to send this out to fifty people or God won't love you any more and it's eternity in the lake of fire for you!!!
I deleted it. But thanks for the thought.
Every month I keep a running tally of how much I've made. I just finished a forty dollar order, bringing my tally for June up to...$666.00
On Friday the 13th.
God may not play dice with the universe, but I sure as hell do. |
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