This video is from Sesame Street’s very earliest days. I used to watch the show (though I was much too old for it) because I was fascinated by the creativity of the puppetry and animation and videos, and I was (at least dimly) aware that there was often a more mature humorous subtext.
This video is without subtext: it is what it is. I’ve never forgotten it, or the song in it. I can still sing it in my sleep, and I probably do.
“All I know how to do is teach a hundred cows some manners.”
Enjoy.
I told my friend/colleague Amelia that I’ve been stealing her stories about her little boy and retelling them. “You want more?” she said. “Here’s the latest.”
Okay. So her son is about three or four, and he’s been in the same day-care for the past couple of years with a little girl named Natalie. (“I’m sure they’re smitten with each other,” I said. “You have no idea,” Amelia said.) Natalie’s birthday party was coming up, and Amelia’s son was invited to the birthday party. “What should we give Natalie for a present?” Amelia prompted her son.
“Princess stuff,” he responded immediately. “A princess dress.”
Aha, thought Amelia. A hundred bucks plus at a Disney Store, or something pretty plus something sparkly at a regular store.
So they go to a local store, which happens to be having a promotion for little girl’s dresses. Amelia’s son is entranced. Pink! Purple! Red! Yellow! “Mamma,” he gasped, “we have to buy her one of each.”
“Let’s just get one for now,” Amelia said steadily. “What color is her favorite?”
“Pink,” her little boy said.
(This is Amelia speaking: “Now, I know he doesn’t know what I mean, but I asked him: What size is she? And he said, Well, she’s just a little bit bigger than me.”)
So Amelia takes a pink dress from the rack, and holds it up against her little boy, to see how it will fit.
And she notices that all of the other mommies in the store are looking at her strangely.
This story goes on and on. They bought shoes, and glittery sunglasses (princess sunglasses) to go with the dress, and the little boy had a wonderful time picking out things for his friend Natalie’s birthday.
About halfway through this story, I fell into a deep reverie about how lucky Amelia’s son is, to have a mother who doesn’t judge, who doesn’t censor, who isn’t silly about these things.
God bless Amelia, and all the mommies like her.
Maybe there’s hope for the world after all.
We got an email about a month ago from our landlords, informing us that there would be a Verizon FIOS meet-and-greet in our apartment courtyard at the end of May.
Our longtime internet / phone / TV carrier (which began with C and ended with OX) had excellent customer service, but had been getting progressively more expensive over the past few years. So, we thought, why not go have some punch and pie, and hear what the nice FIOS man has to say?
As it turned out, we were pretty much the only people who turned up at the meet-and-greet. (I had a very small Italian cold-cuts sandwich.) It was hosted by a cute young salesman, who talked us into switching from C + OX to FIOS. (He also offered us a whole boatload of gift cards, which very much sweetened the deal for Partner and me. We love gift cards.)
The actual conversion happened about a week ago. Poor Partner: he was home alone when the Verizon installer came. It took the installer forty-five minutes to find the place where the cabling enters our apartment. (It was in my clothes closet, incidentally.) Then it took another four hours for the installer to set everything up.
Then it took us another three hours in the evening after the installer left to get everything up and working.
The process wasn’t perfect, but then: what is? I got the master account working, and then started creating email accounts. I bogged down for a while, but finally figured it out.
Conclusions:
· The FIOS network is faster (slightly).
· The TV service (especially in HD) is clearer and has less interference.
· We get more features (like caller ID and voice mail) for less money (at least for the next two years).
· I vaguely recollect that, ten years ago when we went from ATT to C+OX, we went through the same kind of hell week.
More than a week has passed. I’m getting pretty much the same amount of email I was getting before; everyone has found me, even some of the spammers. I’m getting used to typing my much longer (but very descriptive) email address. And did I mention how much faster the Net is?
Shop around, kids. Shop around.
There’s gift cards in them thar hills.
My friend Tab and I were having one of those meandering conversations the other day. We went from RuPaul to Laura Linney to “The Big C” to Idris Elba, the extremely versatile (and very handsome) actor who played Laura’s hotter-than-hell boyfriend in the first season of “The Big C.” “I appreciate him,” I said. “Wow, do I appreciate him. It’s a shame they covered him up with so much fabric and costume jewelry in ‘Thor.’”
“Who was he in ‘Thor’?” Tab asked curiously.
“He was Heimdall,” I said, both proud of my knowledge and ashamed to show how much of a comic-book geek I am. “The guardian of the Rainbow Bridge.”
Tab giggled. “Rainbow Bridge,” he said. “Seriously. How gay can you get? All the gods and warriors are wearing accessories.”
I began to see his point. “Asgard’s sort of the biggest baddest gay club ever,” I said. “It fairly pulses with bad house music. And Heimdall’s the bouncer.”
“And,” Tab said, “do you remember that beam they travelled around in? I mean, my god, how phallic was that?”
“Also,” I mused, “Thor has a very big hammer. And he likes to hit things with it. Also he likes to go out drinking.”
(Side note: Thor does seem to like girls, or at least Natalie Portman. Natalie Portman is, however, a little – hm – boyish, especially with that short haircut. Also there’s a brief scene in the movie of Natalie and Thor serving their friends breakfast. Or could it be – gasp! – brunch?)
My god. Why didn’t I realize all this before?
No wonder I liked that movie so much.
Partner and I saw the preview for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” several months ago. We began salivating at the mere sight of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, and agreed on the spot that this was a must-see.
We made our pilgrimage to see it this weekend, as did lots of other oldsters. (I heard the lady behind us say: “It looks like an AARP meeting in here!”) We were seated behind a whole row of Red Hat Society members, who’d pulled out all the stops fashion-wise: not just red hats, but red scarves, red feather boas, red sequined purses, red fascinators. Throughout the theater there were wheelchairs, and walkers, and lots of querulous discussions about not being able to hear the dialogue.
But, my goodness, once the film started, you could have heard a pin drop in there.
The movie is a lot of fun. It follows seven people who decide to take a chance on a retirement hotel in Jaipur, India: Judi Dench as a sweet impoverished widow, Maggie Smith as a tough bigoted hip-replacement patient, Tom Wilkinson as a retired judge with a haunted look, Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a married couple on the lines of Richard and Hyacinth Bucket, Celia Imrie as a sassy flirt, and Ronald Pickup as a funny old satyr.
I’m not going to give you too many spoilers, but I can safely tell you that everyone finds India to be a life-changing experience. I can probably tell you also that there is at least one death, but (if you’re like me) you’ll be surprised when it happens. Dev Patel, from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is the hyperactively charming hotel manager; he’s adorable, if a little puppyish and bouncy. (Of course, in comparison with his co-stars – who have about 500 combined years of stage and movie experience – he’s bound to seem a little juvenile.)
The movie’s a fairy-tale, naturally; it’s absurd; it would never be like this in real life. India is presented as a kaleidoscopic whirl of life and color; one character refers to it as “squalid,” but we never see the squalor, only the charm. As an American, I found the setting charming; I don’t know how I’d have reacted if I’d been an Indian. (I felt this way about “Outsourced” too, both the movie and the TV series; I thought they were great fun, but I wondered uneasily the whole time if I was enjoying the culture-clash stuff in the wrong way.)
But, back at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, pretty much everything ends happily, and even dinosaurs like Partner and me need our happily-ever-after movies.
So pop in your dentures and grab your cane and go see it.
I grew up with this song on the radio. I really wasn’t listening to it very carefully.
Then it turned up in “The Big Chill,” and – ooh! – everybody thought it was great.
Then the song died into oblivion again.
Listen to it. It’s the percussion that does it. That compulsive drumbeat (which is perfect for the whole “grapevine” idea). And those raspy lyrics. It’s a wonderful end-of-relationship song.
Enjoy.
I have written before about bad customer service. In my young-and-foolish days I used to put up with it, thinking that I was a poor humble sap and that the cashiers and tellers were treating me badly because I somehow deserved it. As I’ve aged, however, I’ve gotten smarter and crankier. I have actually made a couple of customer-service people burst into flames when I focus my anger onto them.
A TD Bank recently opened in downtown Providence. I was curious, and went in for some casual transactions. They have lollipops! They have dog biscuits! They open the door for you! They’re almost invariably cheerful! (I’ve seen one of the tellers looking a little melancholy once or twice, but she didn’t take out her bad feeling on me, and I felt sympathetic for her.)
So I decided to join the TD revolution.
I could not have done better. The folks at my old bank (whose name begins with a CITI and ends with a ZENS) were snarky and unpleasant when I closed out my account. The customer-service representative (a football-hero type, beefy and bluff) tried to talk me out of my decision, until I pointed out to him that he’d kept me waiting for several minutes while he chatted and flirted with a couple of the bank’s other employees. At this point he became rather chilly with me.
I am deliriously happy with TD Bank. They’re cheaper, for one thing; their fees are much lower than those at my previous bank. And the staff are cheerful, and they actually make a point of being helpful. If I see someone in the bank wearing a nametag, I can actually ask him/her a question, and he/she will actually answer it, fully and helpfully, with a smile.
I think my head might explode with joy.
Now: if they opened up a few more branches in Rhode Island – preferably up here on the East Side of Providence – my life would be complete.
(Can this be true? Can the world actually be getting better?)
(I doubt it.)
(But I’ll take whatever I can get.)
We were a gun-totin’ family. My father had at least half a dozen hunting rifles, of which he was very proud. After his death, my mother kept one (loaded) in her bedroom, for emergencies.
Yes, I know. Mammy Yokum. Ma Kettle. But she knew how to use it.
She continually fought moles in her beloved garden; she set traps for them, mean little miniature bear-traps, stuffed down into their burrows. (If you’ve ever seen a mole, you know how small and delicate they are. But, to my mother, they were Lucifer incarnate, because they ruined her garden.) Sometimes, however, they triggered the traps and then ran away unharmed, and this infuriated her. So she came up with the idea of chaining the trap to a metal post.
One morning she looked out the window to see the post rocking back and forth frantically. Moles (as I said) are pretty small. She’d obviously caught something much bigger.
It turned out to be a big mean angry badger. It was caught fast, and it growled at her and ran back and forth, and tried to get free
.
And she shot it dead.
Story number two:
On one of my visits to her in the earlyt 1990s, I woke in the middle of the night to hear an odd scraping sound outside. Mom’s house was miles from anywhere, out in the woods, so there was normally complete silence outside, apart from wind and rain and the howling of coyotes. I mentioned this at breakfast. She looked grim. “I heard it too,” she said. “Goddamned porcupine. Chewing on the back steps. I’ll get it one of these days.”
(Editorial note: porcupines like to chew on wood that’s been handled by human beings. The wood gets impregnated with salt – generally from our sweat. And porcupines are infatuated with salty wood. They will eat the handles of axes and mallets and hammers, just to imbibe all the delicious salt that’s in there.)
Within a few weeks after my return to Providence, Mom told me the following story:
She started waiting for the porcupine, and finally one evening, she surprised it, and came out of the house toting her rifle. Being a smart little porcupine, he flattened himself against the house, reasoning that Mom wouldn’t be so stupid as to shoot into her own house.
He didn’t realize how resourceful she was. She put down her rifle, picked up a broom, and started spanking him.
Squalling, he ran from her, out into the yard.
And then she shot him.
I come from tough stock, people.
Beware.
