3, nope, 4, nope, 5 Items
1. My friend A told me the other day that her sis, who has two little kids, bellows a ceremonially operatic “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?!” when the kids reach the 100th exclamation of “Mommy!” every day. I am thinking of instituting the same policy, although I am currently deriving some satisfaction from answering Eliza’s “Mommy Mommy MOMMY!” with “Eliza Eliza ELIZA!”
2. Fresh from the Department of GET OFF YOUR @$$, the following inspirational tale: My friend C has loved to sing her whole life, and as a high school and college student, did her time in choral groups and other musical endeavors. Work and marriage have gotten in the way since, and aside from the occasional karaoke rendition, she hasn’t sung much since I’ve known her. After several years of saying to herself, “Self, I should really get back into singing,” C spotted an announcement to audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus (for those who aren’t out our way: Tanglewood is the BSO’s summer performance venue, and performances there are big events with audiences in the 1,000s). She wasn’t sure what kind of a shot she had, but she went for it anyway and hey, guess who’s singing in both concerts on Tanglewood’s opening weekend? In French? From memory — 400 pages of it?
Jim and Eliza and I will be there, since Tanglewood is about as kid-friendly as classical music gets. There is a shell for the serious concertgoers, but the lawn is huge, and people bring picnics, read newspapers, nurse babies, play wiffle ball or even nap in a beautiful pastoral setting to the sound of gorgeous music.
3. Jim and I watched Control, about the doomed singer of Joy Division, this weekend, and I recommend it, in spite of its downbeat ending (Psst, spoiler alert: he DIES). We vacillated between sympathy for and annoyance with Ian Curtis — troubled doesn’t begin to cover it, but who gets married and has a kid at 18 and THEN joins a rock band? Isn’t one of the points of being in a rock band to be able to sample the best groupies have to offer? Jim expressed much righteous indignation, also, over the scene where his wife has just given birth and he’s all, “I’ve got to have a cigarette!” “Like he did all the work!” Jim said. As the guardian of accent accuracy I was pleased to have correctly called it that the actress who played his mistress was German, not French-speaking Belgian. A minor quibble, though. Beautifully shot, although I wouldn’t expect any less from Anton Corbijn, who is one of my favorite photographers and proved to be something of an actor’s director as well, because he got great performances out of everyone involved. He was also smart enough to play up the wit of their manager to leaven some of the gloom. At one point, he promises someone money, and when the person comes to collect it, he says, “It’s right here, in my fuck-off pocket!” I don’t know, maybe you had to be watching it, but this amused me to no end, and I am determined to work it into a conversation as soon as possible.
4. Eliza refers to my current haircut as “Mommy’s sticking-up hair.” The other day, she called it, “Mommy’s silly sticking-up hair.” I told Jim about that this morning, adding, “I don’t think she likes it much.”
Eliza heard me and said, ”No! I LOVE Mommy’s sticking-up hair!”
5. Wall-E was really good, y’all. I am not ashamed to say that I got seriously choked up at several points. I took Eliza to see it yesterday since Jim was having a golf day. She was mostly into eating the popcorn and the seats that fold up if you’re not sitting on them, but she made it through the entire movie, which is an improvement over last summer’s attempt at seeing Ratatouille (I was also smart and arrived as the previews were wrapping up, since she has no use for those). I think it may actually be a little over the smaller kids’ heads, and certainly the broadside against consumerist culture will be largely lost on them, as will its fairly apocalyptic overtones, but amid all that, it was a very sweet, heartwarming, ultimately hopeful story, both for the robots and the humans involved. I give it the thumb!



