While visiting relatives we ran into this contraption parked on a main thoroughfare in the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad and at first thought it was some kind of a food truck. We couldn’t read the sign on the back from across the street and were standing, squinting, and wondering aloud what the sign might say when a middle aged man walking his dog in front of us turned and said.
“You are about to pass the author of 101 Ways to Tell the World to Kiss your Ass.”
At first I thought he was a resident of that area who was miffed that a vehicle other than an Audi or Porsche was parked in his well-manicured, HOA maintained, gated community. He seemed the type: clean-cut and dressed as a southern Californian does for most of the year, in shorts.
But I was wrong. It was David H. Scott, the author himself. Here he is standing next to his 1929 1.5 ton Chevy. Here’s a better shot of the front:
The little boy about seven-years-old knocks on my door, in the trees all the birds are waking, chirping about cats and water
I need help, he says, so we walk hand-in-hand to an empty house a few streets over, I get the rusty latch open and he goes in with a smile
A few hours later, he returns and seems to be at least 10
He asks if I can let him use the phone, sure I say and then he calls his mother in a thin voice to come and get him…mommy, mommy please…and then he hangs up and stands on the street corner like a crushed sheet of paper
Sometime in the afternoon he returns and seems to be a girl maybe eighteen-years-old, but somehow the same…hi, remember me, she asks…sure I do, come in and we talk for a while
You left me all those years ago and now I am without your dreams of turning stream pebbles into light, without your technical drawings of how stairs to the clouds can be built with smiles
I toss and turn with my new face
It’s difficult to move around on this bed
It’s like living inside a tree, everything silent and tightly wrapped as if the night is cut up into large black safes and the steel combinations spin into place, leading me into yet another hollow brick where I suffocate and grow old
In general I don’t correct other people, especially in public. So what if someone doesn’t know a Monet from a Manet? Who cares? Not me!
However if someone says “I love this song from the musical Carousel” and thenproceeds to name a song from the musical Oklahoma, I become an obnoxious know-it-allwho must correct this hideous injustice posthaste and with no sympathy for the miscreant.Embarrassing confession but there it is.I can be a bitch. But there’s a reason why. As a kid I had most of the songs from the musicals written by Rogers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe memorized.
Rodgers and Hammerstein – true geniuses
I had no television growing up.Just a record player and a father who loved musicals. As a girl, I was vaguely aware that some of these musicals tackled serious issues however my focus was on the romance.Would Nellie Forbush overcome her prejudices and accept Emile?Would Eliza Doolittle take old Henry Higgins down a notch or two?
Now when I happen to catch one of them on Turner Classic Movies, it’s definitely not the romances that pique my interest. Let’s face it, there’s not much chemistry between Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn!
I mean really? He’s ninety-nine years older than her.
I’m more interested in how the source material was altered for the musical and why. For example, South Pacific was based on James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, a collection of stories set during WWII.One of the underlying themes is cultural intolerance. Can an army nurse and young lieutenant from Little Rock Arkansas overcome their prejudices towards those “they’ve been carefully taught to hate”?
The nurse eventually does but in the original story, Our Heroine,the man she loves has four mixed-race children from four different women none of whom he married. Horrors! An audience in the early sixties would definitely have trouble seeing him as a hero. So in the musical, R&H gave Emile de Becque only two mixed race children and they are both from his deceased wife making his sin (marrying a heathen) in part redeemable.
R&H had a similar dilemma when writing the musical Carousel.It was based on an earlier play called Lilliom by Ferenc Moinar.In Moinar’s play, the main character, Billy Bigelow kills himself after being caught during a robbery but is still given a second chance to enter Heaven. Recognizing this might make Bigelow less sympathetic to some in the audience, R&H revised the storyline.In Carousel Billy Bigelow falls on his knife while fleeing and thus is eligible for heaven.
I could go on but I’m sure you get the point.Which brings me to The Music Man. This musical is not based on a previous publication but on Meredith Willson’s childhood band experiences in small town Iowa.For the life of me, I do not understand WTF he was trying to say. See if you can.
Here’s the plot for those of you who’ve never seen it.A flimflam man who calls himself Dr. Harold Hill is looking for a town full of people gullible enough to scam and decides River City Iowa might be the ticket. His modus operandi is to play upon people’s fears (sound familiar?) but the good folks of the River City seem content and so he decides he’s got to create a problem that only he can solve.The arrival of a new pool table gives him his hook.
He decides to convince that townspeople that the pool table will ruin the town and turn all their children into shiftless bums. The first thing he does is whip up fear.Then hatred.Finally he proclaims he alone can save them by creating a wholesome boy’s marching band.
Of course, Harold Hill knows nothing about music.But by the time he’s finally revealed as a con man, the whole town has been brainwashed into believing they can have a world class marching band.They no longer care that they’ve been lied to and manipulated.They just want to march happily through the town behind their savior.(I’m not sure what he saved them from – their rationality?)
What are we supposed to make of that? What’s the underlying theme? Was Willson predicting a future where we no longer care if we’re lied to as long as we’re given a good show? I just don’t get it.
There are some movies I will watch again and again for just one scene.
In the movie The Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill rides the Underground for the first time as his advisors urge him to surrender to the Nazis. The bulk of the British army is surrounded at Dunkirk and the Americans are refusing to join the fight. Surrender seems to be the only way to avoid catastrophic defeat. Those politicians on the side of surrender have talked themselves into believing they can come to reasonable terms with a depraved madman butChurchill knows otherwise.The scene I love in that movie opens with Churchill gazing out at ordinary Londoners trying to escape the rain from his limousine. It’s a stark reminder that wars are begun by men in chauffeur-driven limos but it’s the man on the street who pays the price. Suddenly he disappears. When next seen he is trying to figure out the system map much to the surprise of the commuters. Aristocrats don’t ride the Underground everyday. Once they warm up to him, he asks how they feel about surrendering to Germany and to a man, woman and even a child they say “Never Surrender.”
And of course Churchill weeps and I wept along with him.
After the movie I made the mistake of watching the news. Good grief.Today a senate committee questioned some muleheaded nincompoop determined to stonewall them unless he could expound upon the dignity of human life (code speak for “take away a woman’s right to choose.”)Any time a committee member came up with a reasonable question about his credentials, some jackass from the other party interrupted their time by yelling “point of order” which actually had nothing to do with order but had more to do with defending a nincompoop put into enormous power by a madman and I wanted to yell “NEVER SURRENDER” loud enough that it could be heard in Washington D.C.
On a lighter note, here are a few favorite scenes from movies I’ll take the time to watch just for a few unforgettable scenes:
Mortimer discovers his dear sweet aunties are serial killers.
Ralphie gets a rude awakening from Santa
Winger and Ziskey discover they’ve joined the “wrong” army.
There are many more of course.And we need them these days, we surely do. Is there a movie you’d watch again just for one scene or am I the only one addicted to sentimentality?
Apparently, President Trump and the Republican Party do not believe that everyone deserves to have a happy Valentine’s Day, Modern Philosophers.
The Republicans today vowed to shoot down Cupid’s proposed plan for Universal Love.
According to the plan set forth by the little archer in the diaper, love would be made available to all, free of charge.
The members of the GOP, which I’m assuming stands for Gang Of Partypoopers, said there is no way such a plan would be allowed on their watch.
“America is a country of freedom and independence, not socialism,” President Trump reminded everyone in a Tweet. “Love is not a right. It is a privilege, and wealthy white males get first crack at it. Cupid can’t just demand that everyone gets love. Free love was outlawed after the sixties, and it’s going to stay that way!”
like the purple veins on the exposed rock of a river bed
I ask them if the bus is going downtown
I ask them where is the driver
the woman looks at me as if the earth is rising up and the #10 bus is about to be pushed down the street and into the sound with garbage containers and trees and shoppers from Macy’s and young pan handlers and Native American alcoholics whittling in doorways
Let me just say this fast so it’ll be like a ripped off bandaid and only sting for a few minutes.
Pretending to be a hero.
John Wayne, you should be ashamed. You were an empty vessel for fear mongering propaganda. You were a barbarian parading as virtuous. You shouldn’t have an airport named for you;your name should be on toilet paper.
There I said it. Readers, are you still with me?
I was a mere whippersnapper when John Wayne made his last films and, since Westerns interested me in the least,I watched most of them as an adult and thought they were rather silly. Real cowboys don’t act or look like the Duke. They’re almost never clean, they spit a lot and some sleep with their horses. But, John Wayne was a frequent visitor to the town where I grew up and even rode in Nevada’s annual parade celebrating statehood.He cut a mighty fine figure, even in his sixties, and I was proud to share a birthday with him (different year lest you try guessing my age.)But alas, some things I was too young to know.
In the clip above, the empty vessel mouthpiece, John Wayne, claims that Congress can override the Bill of Rights for the purpose of national security.Sounds like a lofty principle but what he meant was, Congress can imprison or blacklist anyone suspected of discussing subversive ideas, such as communism.Suspected, being the key word.Not tried.Not found guilty. Suspected. If you didn’t like your neighbor, all you’d needed to do during that deadly time was call up the FBI and say you saw a Communist pamphlet in their house and voila!You could ruin their life. But, like John Wayne, America’s hero, you would be upholding a lofty principle.
In the 1950s a successful screenwriter named Dalton Trumbo was accused of being a communist by a less successful colleague. This led to his imprisonment and subsequent shunning by friends, neighbors and potential employers.A punishment known as “blacklisting.” Desperate for income, he organized a group of fellow blacklisted writers and together they convinced the producers of B movies to hire them incognito and far cheaper than the going rate.And since no one much cared who wrote such masterpieces as This Female is Deadly, they were able to survive.
Until Roman Holiday.That movie won an Oscar for best screenplay and convinced Otto Preminger to ignore the fear mongering, anti-communists and openly hire him.
The above scene from Spartacus, written by Trumbo for Kirk Douglas is a rebuke to the name-calling and finger-pointing that went on during the McCarthy era, a time when the Bill of Rights was ripped and trampled and few people stood up and said “I am Spartacus.”
There’s a sound in your head and it’s driving you crazy
You complain to the photos, but it doesn’t matter and then you start feeling guilty for things that happened somewhere unexpected in the night
Skin and face close over an African hole like a book in your bag and you’ve carried it your whole life, reading from time to time, trying to see where the plot falls, hoping the end is good enough to warrant the effort
You know the end
A fly lands on your hand
It’s wearing six high heels and four thousand pairs of sunglasses
You flip it away and turn on the light to write an email
The dark edge tells you to stop like a cop on the sidewalk and you do, because strangers and friends have no interest in things without meaning
You remember the woman who carried her dead child around for…
Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. While many people would have been happy to have reached that milestone, my father would have been miserable. He was a very active man.
Dad with his good buddy, Captain Wug, daredevil pilot and war hero
My early memories of him were brutal. He could not tolerate weakness.Illness was a weakness. Bad vision was a weakness. Even breaking a bone was some kind of a weakness. And you never admitted you were in pain, or sick, or depressed. To do so was weakness.
The house he built and never finished in rural Michigan
He was a hunter who expected his family to eat the animals he’d shot and hung to bleed out in the garage.
I went to bed hungry many nights.
When we went backpacking in the wilderness we always pitched camp near a stream where we were expected to fish for our dinner.
To this day, I hate fish.
But, because of his refusal to buy a boob tube when I was a child, I know a decent amount about classical music and, if given the title of a show tune, I can tell you which Broadway musical it’s from. And I adore books. I probably own over a thousand.
I wouldn’t want to relive my childhood but he raised us the way he was raised. In fact, I suspect his life was far tougher. Anyway, I’ll miss calling him today.
If you want to follow his adventures (he’s currently planning a kayaking trek across Mongolia) his website is at: http://www.1indsob.com. Who knows, maybe at some point you’ll run into him and say: I know you. And it’s all because of Norm Frampton’s weekly #ThursdayDoors challenge.
They towered over us!
Saying nothing in particular 