AN UPLIFTING CONFESSION

For various reasons, I’ve gone to an actual movie theater and seen more films this year than ever before.  That may be bucking the current home theater trend, but market conditions have converged to convince me that the higher ticket costs aren’t always an extravagance.

Specialized cable television packages are convenient, but not a great deal IMHO.  I was a Netflix customer for awhile, but my angle was to join once or twice a year for a couple of months and “catch up” on all the films I hadn’t seen.  But then the price nearly doubled, and the service was tiered so that the convenient PC streaming membership offered a more limited selection than the physical mail-in DVDs.   I find it well worth the savings to order a movie online and pick it up at the convenience store a mile away for about a dollar.  The theater is reserved for either films that are best enjoyed on the big screen format or those that I just didn’t want to wait to see.

So this year, I had more interest in watching the orgy of self-congratulation better known as “The Oscars”.  I haven’t seen the big winner, “The Artist”, yet.  Perhaps it will surprise me, but I don’t know how excited I can get about a movie with virtually no dialogue.  With that said, it follows that most of the stars and movies I’d seen went winless.  Except for “The Help”.

I touched briefly on this movie in an earlier blog (“Cry Me a River…or a Poopy Chocolate Pie”), and I really wanted to see both Octavia Spenser and Viola Davis take home a statuette.  Davis lost to perennially amazing Meryl Street, whose performances I can rarely fault.  Am I alone in feeling there ought to be a limit to the number of Oscars awarded to the same person in a lifetime? 

And then I heard Spenser state what she wanted to do if she won the Best Supporting Actress category:  to get her “girls” lifted.  She described it as having them stapled to her shoulders, so that when she turns 70, they’ll be in just the right place.  Her refreshing candor was especially striking in a setting where enhancements and augmentations are much more the norm than the exception.  Signs of aging are often the kiss of death in any business where the perception of beauty is synonymous with a youthful appearance.  Somehow, I don’t put Ms. Spencer in the Botox/Restylane/liposuction crowd.

When one of my books hits the New York Times Bestseller list, I’ll confess my own plans.  But in the meantime, go ahead, Octavia.  If it pleases you, if it improves your self-image, just do it!

CRY ME A RIVER....OR A POOPY CHOCOLATE PIE

Usuallty I read a book before I will see the movie based on that book, but I made an exception when I went to see "The Help".  As I sat in the theater, alternating between laughter and tears, I wondered what it is that makes people cry.  Well, I can't speak with any authority about anyone other than me, but I've come to realize that it is the human face and the written or spoken word.

When I was much younger, I didn't cry about much, other than tears of extreme frustration when I couldn't figure out how to do something...usually math.  To this day, I still think algebra sucks.  Once I reached adulthood and had a baby, something happened.  Some sort of biological switch was flipped.  After that and even today I cry over too many things and not all of them deserve the salty exudate.

I can't stand in a crowd and sing "The Star Spangled Banner" without feeling the moisture brim in my eyes.  This makes no sense to me as I'm not a USA-chanting zealot.  When I took a trip to Italy a few years ago with my sister-in-law to her ancestral home of Boiano, we visited a nearby cemetery and I was overcome, hurriedly wiping away tears.  There wasn't a soul there that I knew or loved, but the Italian custom of embedding photographs on the grave markers was heart-rending.  If the grave's occupant hadn't lived long enough to have a formal photograph taken, as was often the case with children, the photos were taken after death, with their little bodies surrounded by floral tributes.  All I could think of was the broken lives of the parents and families left behind.

Yesterday I drove to Gettysburg, PA to visit some old friends who were traveling the country in an RV.  We saw a film and visited a magnificent museum dedicated to the tens of thousands of soldiers who died there during the civil war.  The faces of the young soldiers, so many in their teens, whose bodies lay with diaries and pictures of wives, girlfriends or children in their uniform pockets tore my heart to pieces.

Sometimes the mind creates a visual, prompted by reading something sad.  You may think it ridiculous, but I can't read E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web" to myself or aloud to a child without my voice breaking when I come to the part where the spider dies.  The first time I ever heard of this classic story was when my then three-year-old son watched the movie on television.  When Charlotte expired, he turned to me and asked in an unsteady little voice, "Did Charlotte die?"  I nodded numbly as tears rolled down my cheeks and he ran from the room, crying "I'm never watching television again!".  Even White, the author, wasn't immune to the power of his own writing.  When he narrated the audiobook of "Charlotte's Web", he struggled through seventeen takes before he could get through it without betraying his own emotions.  White paced in agitation, berating himself and mumbling, "This is ridiculous.  I'm a grown man, crying over an imaginary insect."  And yes, spiders aren't insects, but that's what he reportedly said.

Things don't even have to be sad to make me cry.  If something is funny enough, I'll laugh until I cry.  If you've seen or read "The Help", and recall the chocolate pie scene, you'll know a prime example of that.

So go ahead......post/share something strange or unexpected that makes you cry.  Just don't expect me to sit here dry-eyed while I read it.