Good n' chewy! Good n' chewy! Good n' chewy! Good n' (blplgfffggtfhhht)

Let's chew dem-dar caramels, shall we? Don Draper it ain't, but this is interesting copy reflecting the spirit of the times (maybe late '50s? I have a dim memory of this one.) Some ad exec somewhere must have thought that aggressive repetition (and inane comments about the wholesomeness of pure sugar) would drive home the urge to stuff your mouth with these things. They were worth exactly one cent, so you got a lot of them with your allowance (though not as many as jaw breakers, three for a cent, or those jaw-breaking coconut balls). Your little brown paper bag would be overflowing. Ah! I want a caramel, right now.

If you want to dive into the world of candy, nostalgic or otherwise, this is one of the best blogs I've ever found. You can get lost in it, and the candies are even rated. Great fun, and gorgeous photography.

http://www.candyblog.net/

Mysterious lady

Somewhere. . . man

Not that I have any particular way with images, except that I love to manipulate them. I found an astonishing picture of John and Paul early on in the Beatles, sitting like mirror images of each other, both playing the same chord and strumming furiously. This picture begged to be played with. Here are a few of the results.

John Ono: One

This is one of those experiences that is impossible to describe. Just a manifestation of my desire to connect with a meaningful God? You decide.

After much anticipation, I finally went and saw Nowhere Boy, the movie (drama, not documentary) about John Lennon's youth and his troubled relationship with his Aunt Mimi (who raised him) and his mother Julia, an unstable but charming woman who gave him up due to complicated circumstances. At the same time, the musical ferment that gave rise to the Beatles begins to bubble and seethe. John starts a crude, amateurish "skiffle" group (Liverpudlian folk/rock), of which he is definitely the leader, though his guitar skills are poor, and his classmates from art school are worse.
Then he meets a baby-faced 15-year-old named - well, do I need to tell you? Paul holds the guitar left-handed, and plays rings around everyone else. Jealous, John at first turns him away, but soon starts to work on his skills with him.

The movie was slow to start, and the actor who played John (not a name I'd heard of) was not very convincing at first, as he seemed sort of passive. But as the story unfolded, you bought him more and more. When he picked up a guitar, a fierceness came over him, and by the end I was thinking, that's John Lennon.

Of course we know what will happen. John's wayward Mum Julia dies at the end, hit by a car, just as she is making peace with the family. Paul has just lost his mother to cancer, so now they are brothers in nearly every sense.

The movie was powerful, and I was quite moved to see Yoko Ono listed as a consultant in the credits, which kept it honest. It was reviewed as a "kitchen-sink drama a la Coronation Street", and it did have elements of that. But Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi was spot-on perfect in establishing sympathy for an unsympathetic character. She deserves an Oscar for her courage and skill.

But the weird thing happened at the end. During the credits I started to cry unexpectedly, then I was really sobbing. Fortunately, nearly everyone had left. Then I felt this - I will try to describe it. A "presence" behind a sort of screen or very thin veil. It was slightly to the left, about halfway between me and the front of the theatre, and angled a little bit, slightly diagonal. Something like very thin gauze, or a translucent veil. I heard a voice without words that conveyed something very powerful. In essence it said, how can you not believe in me when I am right in front of you? You have stopped believing in a God, and yes, that God may not be in a church, but he's right here, Margaret, right here (indicating my chest) in your heart.

I was stunned and doubtful and electrified and wondered what it really meant, but I was not going to turn it away. It wasn't the first time I've had experiences that I can only describe as psychic, but I wondered what in the world this "voice" (undoubtedly his) would ever want with a nothing like me. The presence was so large it filled the whole theatre and extended past the walls. I can't really describe what it was like. Any words seem wrong or inadequate. I finally left and went to the ladies' room (fortunately empty) and just sobbed and sobbed, wondering if this was somehow connected to my brother Arthur's death in 1980, only two months before John Lennon was shot and killed.

I never expected this, didn't want or need or call for a lesson in theology or the true nature of God or whether or not we survive our bodies. In fact, I'd just about given it up. I was beginning to think we just die, get put under the ground, and that's it, it's all over. I was starting to really believe there's nothing there, nothing that loves or cares about us as individuals. For a former practicing Christian, this sort of spiritual abyss was agony, but I could not fix or change it. This presence, familiar yet strange, didn't really explain all that, but just manifested and asked me: I am right here, so how can you not believe?

I can try to worry this down to nothing, or intellectualize, or throw it out. I've had a bit of time to process it. I will accept it as valid, whatever it means. I have been told, apparently, that we DO survive our bodies and that that individual energy still exists very powerfully. As with all these things, I was afraid that If I told anyone they'd just scoff and say, why was it someone so famous? What makes you think - ? But why not? I'm receptive, and after that heartbreaking movie I was wide open, all defenses down.

Anyway, so many people want or desire or ask for psychic experiences and think they'd be really wonderful, when in fact they can be a bit of an ordeal, in that you question your sanity or at least ask yourself if it was merely a projection of your own desires or your imagination. So I share it with you, just as it was.

I think I'm going out of my head

Ah yes, Georges Melies. I keep encountering him, this odd little Frenchie/genius. The other night (I still have a hangover from it), Turner Classics had a special on him. Sixteen short films. Sixteen. Ay-ay-ay. These are hallucinatory otherworlds, the strangest things I've ever seen.

He started in France, a hotbed of early film, around 1896, when the medium was so new it was mostly seen as a form of amusement, a toy. No one saw the potential in it. An accomplished magician and visual artist extraordinaire, Melies began to film some of his more potent stunts. Audiences loved it: and to this day, more than 110 years later, they still ask themselves, "How did he do that?"

This weird and funny business with the heads, technically remarkable for its day, was made (incredibly) in 1898, back when a sneeze or an unromantic kiss was considered filmworthy. The unbelievable split-exposure film in his one-man band was later ripped off by no less a personage than Buster Keaton, who was credited with inventing it. Much, much later, Oscar Levant tried the same thing in An American in Paris. Ho, hum.

The Melies experience last night wasn't entirely pleasant. Those early, quick, magical stunts were fun, though filmed in a static manner, with one camera in long shot pointing at a stage. (Please forgive the horrible cropping and truncated music in this clip: it wasn't me.) This seemed to indicate that Melies' imagination sometimes ran ahead of his skills as a cinematographer/director, so that he never attained the revered status of a Fritz Lang or a Murnau.

As his films evolved, florid sets made of cardboard and papier-mache seethed and quivered visibly in the background. Leaping devils (a Melies favorite) appeared and disappeared, and lovely maidens in white gauze tiptoed in and out (or flew through the air in a way which seems to explain the inspired lunacy of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. I don't know how much Melies Gilliam watched, but maybe he was infected with the same moonstruck folly.)

Or folie. These little weirdies had little or no discernable plot, to the point that a man with a French accent thicker than mayonnaise had to narrate the incomprehensible action. While we listened to his bizarre Clousea-esque pronunciation, with the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble, we (or I) became more and more disoriented. Things were blowing up. People were winking out, or jumping out of things. Man went to the moon in a giant bullet, landing in the eye of a nasty-looking guy with white icing all over his face.

I didn't last the full sixteen films, but kept fast-forwarding my PVR recording, skipping over some florid hand-colored things in which the color wavered and strobed like some sort of acid-inspired hallucination.

Obviously, this fellow colored outside the lines of reality.

I don't know a lot about Melies, and right now I'm too exhausted to find out. Robert Osborne, who must be very ill because he is 50 pounds lighter and could barely speak, told us something I had already read somewhere.

Most of Melies' 500-or-so films were destroyed, and for a very practical reason. His studio went bankrupt in 1913 (for Melies had lost his audience, too baffled to sit through all that escalating strangeness), and his movies were stashed away, only to be confiscated by the French government when World War I broke out.

His films were made of celluloid (or -lose, can't remember which), a substance that had real value to the army: they were melted down to make boot heels for the soldiers. So all those men, dying in the trenches and singing "inky binky polly voo" (just kidding - that was the Americans) were literally walking all over him.

A sad and ignominious end for a unique and very strange artist, who seemed to want to do Spielberg-esque effects with cardboard and smoke bombs. But these two little gems are enjoyable and, in true Melies style, a little bit creepy.

And no, I don't know how he did that.

L´homme orchestre George Melies

Peter Pan: once upon a time

Once upon a time, and long ago

Every year, around the time of my birthday, the anticipation began to build. For some magical reason, the Mary Martin stage version of Peter Pan would always be broadcast on TV, either on my birthday or the day before or after.

My next-door neighbor/on-again-off-again friend Ann Peet had her birthday the day before mine. In those days, kids didn't go to those big video-parlor/jungle-gym/Build-a-Bear-emporium type of places for a birthday. In fact, my own kids, raised in the '80s, usually celebrated with a few friends (and ancient home movies reveal that they were the same friends, year to year) and a bucket of chicken.

My celebration back in the early '60s was even more basic, but no less magical. Ann and I would always exchange presents which (our mothers decreed) had to cost no more than $2. One year, all unawares, we gave each other Cinderella shoes with high heels made out of clear pink plastic embedded with gold glitter. These were held on with torturous pink elastic bands that left deep welts on your feet. Mine broke on the first day, and Ann had a near-concussion from a bad fall.

My mother made spare ribs. That's what we called them then, not ribs, and decades before all those so-called falling-off-the-bone southern recipes. Through hours of slow baking, she turned out ribs that melted in your mouth. You didn't even have to pick them up. Then a cake, made from scratch, on a glass pedestal. Toffee Swirl, or Spice Cake with buttercream icing.

She baked as a sort of grim religion, and though most of her cooking was good, she was too tight-lipped to really enjoy it. She was dutiful. She didn't like me, wished she had never had me, and I knew it. Had always known it, without being told.

But every year, there was Peter Pan. I can't tell you how completely enchanted I was - how captured Ann Peet and I both were, leaning closer and closer to the set until we nearly fell out of our chairs. It's essentially a filmed stage play, with the staginess left intact, so you have to mentally translate it into the much more intimate medium of TV. But it works anyway, especially because of Mary Martin's magnificent, heartbreaking performance. She's over 40 in this version, her body still girlish - or boyish - and her face androgynous before the term was even known about. And her voice. Oh.

I defy you to listen to the melancholy little lullabye at the end of this clip without crying. A few minutes ago I was sobbing, tears splashing down my face. I was not a happy child. Ours was not a happy home, though we pretended it was. I pretended Dad didn't get drunk every night and abuse me and tell me he wished I had never been born. I had to. No one can let wounds like that show.

We pretended a lot of things: that Mary Martin was a boy, or else we just didn't care if she wasn't. The loudly-proclaimed theatrical lines didn't matter. And when Tinkerbell began to wink out and die, Peter turned to the audience and said in a voice full of urgency, "Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"

Then we heard something. A faint spectral clapping behind us, slowly growing faster, and louder.

I turned. There was my mother in the doorway, my mother the grim un-nurturing one who looked after me as a mother cat might look after a kitten, except less warmly. And, incredibly, she was exclaiming,

"Yes, yes, I do believe in fairies. I do, I do!"

There is none so blind. . .

I think it started in Grade 3, which is to say, 3 - 4 (I had, in the parlance of the day, "skipped" and was doing two grades in one year). But in spite of my supposed smartness, I was always daydreaming in class, not paying much attention to what was going on.

Miss Wray, the spinster schoolteacher at McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario, kept reprimanding me. "Margaret! Pay attention to the board."

Board. There was a. . . board?

At home, I watched Batman and The Monkees by making a little pinhole with my fingers. One day my mother asked me why I watched in such an odd manner.

"Because I'm trying to see."

After that, my nickname was Four Eyes, and it only got worse from there. Over the years, my lenses got increasingly thicker, and due to astigmatism, the edges were like Coke bottle bottoms. I didn't quite have that swimmy-eyed, distant look of the terminally nearsighted, but almost.

Glasses were made of real glass then, and there were no side pieces, so the bridge of my nose was chronically ulcerated and red, and the glasses fell off when I bent over. The frames were hideous. When I got new ones, kids would snatch them off my face, try them on and yell, "Gawd, are you ever blind!"

About a million years later, now that we have ultra-thin plastic progressive lenses that do everything but tap-dance, you'd think that attitude would have faded, but I've found it lingering in the strangest places. Such as the optometrist's office.

I am what we delicately call "high-index", and I have been all my life. So imagine my reaction when the clerk in Pearle Vision (yes, it was Pearle Vision - don't go there!) looked at my prescription, looked at me, and said, "Wh-o-o-o-o-o-a-a-a-h-h-h."

You know, if I went in for a hearing aid, I don't think they'd say to me, "Jesus, what are you, deaf?" Or maybe they would, who knows.

This is a tangential story, but I have to include it here because it infuriated me so much. It takes me forever to choose a new pair of frames, because I never take them off. They're part of my face. I don't take off my nose, do I? (Do you?). And naturally, even with medical coverage, discounts, etc., I can expect to pay $400.00 per pair, so I don't want to pick something I can't live with.

Last time I needed new glasses, I must've tried on seven hundred pairs in every optical outlet in the mall, until - voila - I went into Dr. Boyco's Image Optometry (actual name: remember it!) and found a pair I really liked, in a delicate blue. (I can't wear the heavy dark plastic Woody Allen things that everyone seems to like now, because they make me look like an elderly nerdette.)

I told them I hadn't had my eye test yet. "Oh, that's OK," the young woman clerk said. "We'll put them aside for you."

Mere days later, I came in to order my glasses.

"Why don't you look around for frames?"

"Oh, no, I already picked a pair. You put them aside for me."

It was the same clerk. She looked blank.

"Oh."

"Remember, I came in the other day and. . ."

"No, I don't think you. . . "

"Could you look around for them? They're blue, metallic, sort of rectangular-ish. . ."

She glanced around behind the counter. "Nope, they're not here."

"But you put them aside for me. You - "

"Sorry. They're not here anywhere."

"Could you, like, ask the other clerks, or - "

"I already looked for them. They're not here."

"So what happened to them?"

She shrugged.

"I guess somebody put them back out on the shelves."

I scoured the shelves. I wanted those frames more with every passing minute. I looked at every single pair, then I did it all again.

"They're not here."

"Oh."

"Could you maybe help me look?"

"But you said they're not here."

"So what happened to them?"

"Oh. Uhhhhhhh. . . I guess somebody already bought them."

So somebody sauntered into Dr. Boyco's Image Optometry, plucked a pair of frames off the shelves (which just happened to be the one pair out of 700 that I wanted), paid for them, and left. None of that getting-the-right-size nonsense. I guess one size fits all, eh? (- and who needs lenses anyway?)

I should have turned on my heel and left, but by that time I was so humiliated and beaten-down that I ordered my (distant) second choice, and I wear them to this day. But I feel bad about it. THEY should be feeling bad, but instead they're simply oblivious and feel nothing. I feel bad because they didn't bother to help me (because they didn't care), and made me feel ashamed of myself for still dealing with them. It was the antithesis of what we so longingly refer to as "customer service", which is supposed to be the very essence of good business.

It's two years later, but there's one thing I know: somewhere, right now, right this minute, in Dr. Boyco's Image Optometry in Coquitlam Centre in beautiful British Columbia, a pair of blue metallic frames is waiting. Waiting for some clueless idiot to open a drawer or lift up a phone book to find them.

Then put them back out on the shelves.

Can I get an eye transplant now?

Across the wide Missouri

This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. I was casting around YouTube to try to find an orchestral version of one of my favorite melodies, the haunting folk song Shenandoah. I couldn't find it, of course. Instead there were some awful versions by high school bands, and innumerable overblown abuses by (mostly) opera singers trying to make it sound Dramatic, Rich and Bold.

This just somehow came to me, sung by one Randy Granger, someone I'd never heard of. He has one album out which is mostly Native American flute music. After hearing this, I wish he would play flute less, sing more.

I can't describe his voice, and describing it at all would be desecration, but I must try. It has a warmth and a complexity, a richness of shivering overtones, and that incredible, nearly impossible stone-skipping (I can't think of the technical term, but it's those tiny, rapid steps up and down between tones - somewhere between a trill and a yodel - can you hear it?). But it's the tenderness, the longing and the caressing of the deceptively simple lyric that I love the most.

I may never find that passionate, roiling orchestral version that caught me up like a dangerous current all those years ago. Instead I found this. A human voice displayed naked, so that every nuance is exposed.

Hands off, Jon . . or not. . .

I'm not used to having my most cherished fantasies come true. As always, there's a story behind this-all.

At some point in my Mad Men worship, I decided I wanted a t-shirt with Don Draper on it. A reasonable request, I thought.

I found what was touted as the Official Merchandise Site for all that stuff, an outfit called Gold Label. Don't be fooled, this should be called Chintz Label. I ordered a "fitted" women's t-shirt which was called "moderately loose". In a size Large, because I didn't want to order an X-Large. I always see that as Size Elephant.

After paying $40 and waiting a few weeks, I got my t shirt. The package seemed awfully thin, as if there wasn't anything in there. I took it out. It would have fit a slim 10-year-old. I should have known from the picture, which was so skinny on the bottom it would never accomodate the most modest female
hips.

It smelled bad, like a synthetic which had been sweated into, real Star Trek stuff. It brought to mind the petroleum-based crimplene of the '70s. The logo was that smooth, paintlike, shiny layer that cracks in the wash.

To their credit, when I complained about it, the company sent a refund and didn't even ask for the shirt back. I'm glad, because they probably would have sent it back out there.

SOOOOOO. . . (Is anyone interested in this? I thought so), I went to Plan B and looked on eBay. Like Alice's Restaurant, in nearly every case, you can get anything you want.

For $20, a black tee, size Large, brand Gilden. It came promptly, and did not disappoint. It was made of real cotton, topstitched shoulders, and the only fit problem was the length, so I had it altered to bring up the hem 4". I got it from tees-aplenty. Remember that name, folks.

But the most gratifying thing about my gorgeous new shirt is the placement of Don Draper's hands. They are squarely over my breasts, and in pinch position.

I can dream, can't I?

The Turkey Song: encore, encore!!

I lost the Turkey Song! I posted it, but I can't seem to find it in my old posts, even though it's listed under Oct. 22.

So here it is again: my granddaughter Caitlin in her YouTube debut. Who needs that little Jackie Whatsername anyway? Brava, encore!!

Quote of the Day/Kitlers

Hermann Goering, one of the worst distortions of humanity ever to live, was once famously quoted as saying, "Every time I see the Fuhrer, my heart drops down into my trousers."

Homoerotic sentiments aside, we just can't lose our fascination with black and white cats who look like Hitler. Or can we?

The jury is still out. What next, I wonder - Persians doing Quaker Oats commercials?