Month: August 2012

The Lydster, Part 101: The Litigator

If she doesn’t become a librarian, like her father and maternal grandfather, maybe she’ll become an attorney.


The Daughter needs to join the debate team at school if it has one. I’ll say I NEED to cut the grass, she’ll say, “No, you WANT to cut the grass,” which I will dispute. But then she’ll say, you WANT the neighbors not to complain.

We’ve had similar conversations about going to school. Since she LIKES school, it’s something that she WANTS to do. I might say, “That may be true, but even if you didn’t like it, you’d HAVE to go.”

We end up agreeing that she wouldn’t HAVE to go, but would suffer the consequences of the truant officer calling or visiting.

Do I NEED to go to work? Well, no, although being able to pay for food and the mortgage IS something I WANT to do.

If she doesn’t become a librarian, like her father and maternal grandfather, maybe she’ll become an attorney, who can argue either side of the case.
***
The Daughter had TWO dance recitals in June. The first was step, at her school – think STOMP, not Michael Flatley. The second was ballet at UAlbany. She’s always nervous, but she always does well.

40 Years Ago: August 26, 1972 – Ceremony

At some point, we broached the subject of getting married. My parents thought it was a terrible idea.

After my arrest at IBM in May 1972, and her parents’ ultimatum about me, my girlfriend the Okie, inexplicably in retrospect, ended up living at my parents’ home. Sometime during my freshman year in college, my parents and sisters had moved from the tiny house on Gaines Street in Binghamton to the much more roomy house on Ackley Avenue in Johnson City, the next municipality over. She stayed in my sister Leslie’s room while Leslie spent six weeks with our great aunt Charlotte and some of Charlotte’s siblings. (Leslie should write about those adventures; I would post them here.)

From the money I had made working the year before, I had lent my parents some cash for the down payment on the house, the first one they ever owned. The house where I grew up was owned by my maternal grandmother, a source of tremendous ego irritation for my father, I’m sure. (My loaning my parents money became some odd big deal to my sisters when they found out only a year or two ago, and I’m still puzzled by it.)

The Okie and I were young (19) and very much in love. At some point, we broached the subject of getting married. My parents thought it was a terrible idea.

So the Okie and I went to Pennsylvania, just across the border from Binghamton, got a blood test, and got a marriage license in Susquehanna, PA. Baby sister Marcia made the cake, and with sister Leslie, and my friends Carol and Jon present, we got married by a justice of the peace.

Yes, we WERE too young, and fights over money and religion meant that, a little over two years later, the Okie moved to Philadelphia by herself. To this day, I’m still not 100% sure why.

The failure of this marriage put me into a major funk for the next three years, longer than we were together. One of the worst days, shortly after our divorce became final, was when she let me know she was getting married again.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hope Springs

The movie depends largely on the acting of Streep, Jones, and Carrell.

While The Daughter’s away with the grandparents, apparently making videos with her twin cousins, her parents get to go out to The Spectrum Theatre to see Hope Springs.

I totally agree with the reviewer at IMDB who decried “the trailer and marketing campaign…[as] a collection of sound bites making a film seem like something that it is not. This is NOT a geriatric sex comedy. In fact, I would not even call it a comedy.” Though it is about, among other things, sex (or lack of same) between Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), and it is occasionally quite funny. Their lives after 31 years of marriage apparently are fine with him, but she is wanting more. Kay goads Arnold to travel 1500 miles to see a therapist, Dr. Feld (Steve Carrell), and it is often tough sledding.

Although there are other characters, such as Kay’s friend (Jean Smart), the innkeeper (Damian Young), and a sympathetic bartender (Elisabeth Shue), the movie depends largely on the acting of Streep and Jones, who are excellent, and of Carrell, who is surprisingly solid.

A number of critics compared the movie to an Ingmar Bergman film, usually Scenes from a Marriage, which I think is unfair. I don’t think it sought to be that ambitious, just be a tale of one particular stuck couple.

If there’s something I didn’t like about the film, it was the too familiar music. Why did they use Annie Lennox’s “Why” again? I know I have at least a couple of soundtracks at home with that song on there.

Conversely, great use of the end credits, making it virtually impossible for the audience to leave.

Still, I thought it was a solid three-out-of-four-stars film.

The play’s the thing

The eleven brothers of Joseph often sat so that the letters on their shirts spelled out words, such as SIN.

 

As part of a busy summer, The Wife and I managed to see all three plays in Albany’s Washington Park, the latter with the Daughter and a couple of friends.

Late in July, we saw Cabaret. The reviewer in the local newspaper called it the best show Park Playhouse has ever done, and that’s over a span. I’ve gone to the vast majority of them, and I would tend to agree. What was frustrating, though, was this ongoing commentary from some guy who “seemed” to know what he was talking about who was picking apart. “The woman playing Sally Bowles is too old” was the only one I specifically remember. No, it’s not the Cabaret that I saw at the movies in 1972 with a young Liza Minelli and a fascinating Joel Grey, but it still delivered a wallop.

A couple of weeks later, we saw Hairspray, which, of course, was a 1988 movie that was turned into a Broadway musical that was turned into a movie musical. I’ve only seen the original 1988 movie, the John Waters flick with Divine, which I’ve recently borrowed from the library. The show was fine, but what was really lacking was a live band. The singers were obviously performing to a soundtrack. At least on one song, the track skipped like a defective CD. To her credit, the person placing Tracy’s mom, when the music as shut off, finished the song a capella. The sound was also mixed too low; I think Tracy’s dad, who was otherwise great, missed a sound cue, I suspect because he couldn’t hear it.

The following week, it was Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, performed by teenagers and a few tweens. I know this only from an LP that came out over 40 years ago. The actual musical has far more distinct songs, but, in the main, not better ones. The performances were uneven but fun; the five muses who essentially narrate the story had two girls who sang quite well, two that were uneven, and one not so good. Joseph and the Pharaoh as Elvis were quite good. The eleven brothers of Joseph often sat so that the letters on their shirts spelled out words, such as SIN, when they lied about Joseph’s “death” and GRIN, when they are all finally reunited.
***
From the movie Cabaret- Money.
The trailer for the original movie Hairspray.
The Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat movie, starring Donny Osmond.

From CBS Sunday Morning:
“Shakespeare in the Park” turns 50
“Star Trek” in the Park

Kind of stupid stuff

This is actually a legitimate scientific theory…of the 18th century and before.

SamuraiFrog was complaining about some burnt-out rocker claiming President Obama was behind the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin so that he can get a gun ban bill passed. And it wasn’t even Ted Nugent, this time. Yeah, it might have bothered me if I had heard of this guy, other than by the stupid things he blathers.

I’m actually much more peeved with the British. Diplomats suggested that they could invoke a little-known law to strip Ecuador’s embassy of diplomatic privileges, meaning police would be free to move in and detain [Julian] Assange. Does this mean that if, say, Iran, decided to threaten to void the diplomatic immunity of some Western country, that would be OK? I am guessing not. Oh, the Brits were just discussing options? Then do it in private. Where’s the “diplomacy” here? And, off topic, but I love the headline of this article: Assange to break silence amid diplomatic stoush. No American media source would use the word stouch – yay, ABC News, i.e., the Aussie version.

Roger Ebert has a good piece about what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church & State. He writes: “That’s why it’s alarming to see so many politicians proposing to tear down that wall. It’s most evident in the eagerness of states to permit the teaching of Creationism (in the guise of Intelligent Design) in public schools, despite the ruling of a Pennsylvania U. S. District Court that ‘the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.'”

Of course, the Republican candidate for US Senate from Missouri is so lame that the Republican Presidential and VP candidate had to distance themselves from him. “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” said Todd Akin in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” This is actually a legitimate scientific theory…of the 18th century and before.

I’ve been following a discussion about the scoring in Olympic events. I must say that the yuckiest moment I saw was when some poor Romanian girl lost her bronze medal when the American coach was able to lodge a protest which went in the American gymnast’s favor. So many of the sports have these somewhat subjective, or at least somewhat mysterious, scoring system. I appreciate the effort by the diving folks, who throw out the highest and lowest scores. It’d be a dull (and short) Olympics if they only included the sports in which people ran the fastest, jumped the highest, threw the farthest, etc., and I am not advocating for this, but I do understand the sentiment.

This whole blog post, though, was really inspired by a trip Saturday to the Altamont Fair, the regional fair in the Albany, NY area. It’s a great event – we spent over six hours there. But on the rides were signs a bunch of rules, all of which made sense. Still, the necessity of the last two lines pained me:
DO NOT FORCE A CHILD TO RIDE IF HE OR SHE IS FRIGHTENED.
A SCARED CHILD ON THE GROUND MAY PANIC IN THE AIR.
The necessity of such a warning suggests that some parents are tools. sad.

So, to return to SamuraiFrog, let’s Dare to be Stupid.

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