Foxwoods

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Partner and I went to Foxwoods, the gigantic Connecticut casino, a few days ago. When you approach it from the east, it's impossible to believe that they didn't plan the view: you're driving through a pretty-but-dull New England landscape, and then you come around a corner, and there, framed perfectly straight ahead of you, is a Disney castle of cream-colored brick, with a roof of angelically beautiful blue.

 

 

Welcome to the Mashantucket Pequot Nation.

 

 

I hated it the first time I went there. There's the continual din of slot machines chiming in C major, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke, and the grim spectacle of people with oxygen tanks riding from slot machine to slot machine in their scooter chairs. And you don't see a lot of smiling faces, oh no children you don't.

 

 

But it's fascinating nonetheless. And you might win a million dollars.

 

 

We go a couple of times a year. The food ain't bad, and once in a while you leave with more money than you arrived with. (Not this time, unfortunately.) I love watching the table games, especially things with names like Pai Gow and Dragon Poker and Caribbean 21. Also, I am amazed at the security staff, which is mostly made up of overweight men over seventy years of age with ambulatory disabilities. I think I could have kicked their asses, for the most part, if I'd wanted to.

 

 

Partner tells me that business is off at the casinos, and I think it's true. It felt – empty. Foxwoods is an enormous place, and normally it's swarming with people, but the other day there were big lonely spaces. And the machines weren't paying. You could tell that all the machines were set to some slightly-lower payoff point; you won a little, once in a while, but never enough to inspire or encourage you. The grim faces were a little grimmer than usual.

 

 

It's beginning to feel like a fancy upscale mall on the verge of going into decline.

 

 

Next time we're going to Mohegan Sun.

 

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Rango

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Partner and I saw “Rango” recently. Johnny Depp voices the deeply delusional title character: a chameleon thrown from his terrarium into the depths of the Mojave Desert and into the innards of every movie ever made. “Chinatown.” “Star Wars.” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” “The Lion King.” All of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises.

 

 

It's a kids' movie, full of sight gags and physical humor. (I especially liked the cigar-plus-cactus-juice flaming burp, but I'm a very vulgar character. Ask Partner.)

 

 

But it's also absolutely beautiful. You see the ripple and shimmer of every scale and feather on these mutant lizards and birds and miscellaneous creatures. There's a scene of a posse riding into the sunset (mounted on road runners, naturally – another Hollywood joke), with their silhouettes shimmering against the horizon, that looks real.

 

 

The voices – Ray Winstone as a big ugly toad, Harry Dean Stanton as something like a mole, Ned Beatty as an evil turtle, Abigail Breslin as a possum (although one of the reviewers thought she was a mouse) – are wonderful.

 

 

It's flawed, of course. After a rip-roaring opening, it slows considerably. There's a lot of screen time in the middle that could (should!) have been chopped out. Running time is close to two hours, which is awfully long for an animated feature (I know a lot of the kids at our showing were getting bored and noisy after ninety minutes).

 

 

But what the hell, kids? It's lizards, and Johnny Depp, and “High Noon.”

 

 

Go see it!

 

 

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The Eastside Marketplace at the end of the universe

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Some scientists say that there are parallel universes and alternate worlds all around us. They occupy the same space we do, but we don't see them.

 

I have found evidence of this at the local supermarket.

 

When I put my groceries on the checkout counter, the cashiers pick them up, scan them, put them back on the belt, take my money – but without ever speaking to me, or even looking at me.

 

Apparently they and I are in different universes.

 

 

The groceries are somewhere in between, I guess.

 

Once in a while, however, there is a glimpse of the other side.

 

The other night, I was buying one item: a bottle of Fiji water. The cashier was a fourteen-year-old girl, and the bagger was another fourteen-year-old girl. “I, like, love this water,” the cashier said, pushing it down to the bagger. (This dialogue should be read aloud with a Valley Girl intonation for full effect.)

 

 

“Whyyyy?” the bagger said. “It's, just, wa-ter.”

 

 

“It tastes better,” the cashier said.

 

“Whyyy?” the bagger said again. “It's, just, wa-ter.”

 

“Nooooo,” the cashier said. “It's delicious. It's, like, from a mountain or something.”

 

“It's from the South Pacific,” I said.

 

For a moment her eyes flickered up to my face. I think she actually heard me, across the universes. “Yeahh,” she said to the bagger.

 

I think this is a tremendous breakthrough.

 

Someone please notify Stephen Hawking.

 

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Cascadian Literature 101: Betty MacDonald

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One of my earliest memories is of lying on the couch and watching the movie version of “The Egg And I” on a black-and-white TV. Even as a kid I loved the dumbfounded look on Claudette Colbert's face when she first sees the dumpy chicken farm that's her new home.

 

 

Betty MacDonald, the zestily brilliant comic author behind “The Egg And I,” grew up in a genteel but highly eccentric Montana family. Her first husband, a jerk, dragged her to Washington's Olympic Peninsula because he wanted to be a chicken farmer. Betty did not want to be a chicken farmer, but she went along with the gag. She cooked and canned and kept house and had kids, and was (as you might imagine) pretty unhappy there. She broke up with Mr. Chicken Farmer at last, lived with her mother and sister for a while, got tuberculosis, got better, remarried, and moved to an island in Puget Sound with her new husband and her two chicken-farm daughters.

 

 

She transformed that peculiar life into amazing hilarity.

 

 

“The Egg And I,” in which she describes her childhood and her first marriage, is her classic. Among other things, it gave the world Ma and Pa Kettle. Far from being the clodhoppers they became in the movies, the Kettles were pretty interesting; they had too many kids and not enough money, but they were also smart and endearing. (I'm partial to the scene in which Ma receives a Christmas gift from her citified sister: an oil painting of herself in a low-cut gown. “Look at us!” Ma sneers. “With our dinners as bare as a whore!” She hangs the painting in the outhouse. That scene didn't make it into the movie.)

 

 

Later, Betty wrote up her stay in a Northwestern tuberculosis sanatorium. It's a chilling book, which recounts the medieval methods being used to treat TB in the 1930s, but Betty manages to make it funny.

 

 

And that was her genius, really. She describes misfortune and illness in great detail, but she makes it funny. She's like a mother making a bee-stung child laugh, to take the pain away.

 

 

Her last book, “Onions In The Stew,” about Marriage #2, is mellow and sweet. (My friend Apollonia, a big MacDonald fan, is especially fond of the handyman in “Onions” who misses work because he has “back door trouble.”)

 

 

Betty died a month before her fiftieth birthday, in 1958.

 

 

She is one of the pillars of Cascadian literature.

 

 

Children: find her books where you can. Ebay, used bookstores, whatever.

 

 

And someday soon I'll tell you all about Peg Bracken.

 

 

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As you (may or may not) like it

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Partner and I went to see a production of “As You Like It” at Brown last weekend. Now, before I continue, you must know that I am not a Shakespeare snob. I only remembered that “As You Like It” was the play with Rosalind and Celia, and the Forest of Arden, and the “seven ages of man” speech.

 

 

As we seated ourselves, we saw some tables, chairs, and scripts lying around onstage. I am not Walter Kerr, but I know metatheater when I see it.

 

 

The first few scenes were done as mock script-readings. The characters were only approximately in costume. All the entries and exits were read aloud. This was okay, if not terribly original. But some of the scenes, especially the Rosalind/Celia dialogue, were delivered in what I think of as “Shakespearean blabbering," with the actors speaking as quickly and affectedly as possible, for "comic effect."  (Think of Michael Keaton in “Much Ado About Nothing.”)

 

 

At least they didn't use fake British accents. I still have painful memories of a production of “Comedy of Errors” some decades back, in which all the actors twitched and squeaked as if they were on heroin, with bad British accents no less. It made me want to knife myself.

 

 

The first half of "As You Like It" had some nice scenes nonetheless. One was done as a short series of black-and-white silent movies, speeded up, with the actors live on stage providing the missing dialogue in rapid paraphrase: “No, I'd love to let you in, it's great to see you, but seriously, you can't come in, your brother wants to kill you!” Later, the curtain rose on an actor dressed as a panda bear, who stared at the audience for a moment, then retreated. I think the message was: “Welcome to the Forest of Arden. It’s not a normal forest.”

 

 

Partner and I escaped to the terrace at intermission. “It's not too bad so far,” I said.

 

 

“Hm,” Partner said.

 

 

The second half of the show was less successful. The actors blurted and shouted and waved their arms. The panda came back a few times, but he/she wasn't quite so cute after a while. (This is called the Law of Diminishing Returns.) And it was long. Three hours of not-very-well-staged Shakespeare is quite a lot.

 

 

So: not so great.  But nice try.

 

 

I hope they do “Titus Andronicus” next year. That’s the one with people being baked into pies.

 

 

I’d love to see that on stage.  Maybe with a panda for comic relief.

 

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Hail Cascadia

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The Japan earthquake made me wonder if the Pacific Northwest coast is/was okay, so I checked the Daily Astorian and the Oregonian online. I grew up out there, and I still have fond (if cold and foggy) memories of those long sandy beaches in Washington and Oregon.

 

 

There was little or no tsunami damage in the Northwest, as it turns out. But reading those papers made me nostalgic for the dark rainy hillsides of my childhood. I used to pretend that the Northwest was its own country, not part of the United States but a sort of dim anarchic zone, lost in the swirling Cascade fog.

 

 

I'm not alone in this. Ernest Callenbach, back in the lawless 1970s, wrote a novel called “Ecotopia,” in which Washington, Oregon, and northern California break off to form a rebel republic, based on gender equality, ecological awareness, and fierce independence.

 

 

Yes, I know. But still.

 

 

There are actually lots of people who enjoy pretending the same thing. They have given their new nation a name: “Cascadia.” They have a flag, and maps, and bumper stickers, and even stamps! I especially love the geoduck stamp. (Geoducks, as you can see above, are giant alien-looking Northwest clams. The word is pronounced “gooeyduck.” My great-aunt Julia was famous in the family for sitting on the the beach with a rifle, waiting for the geoducks to fly over.)

 

 

Julia was a genuine Cascadian.

 

 

We have our national authors too. Callenbach is one of them, I suppose, though frankly I've never been able to plough my way entirely through “Ecotopia.” There's Ken Kesey, most especially for writing “Sometimes A Great Notion”; Betty MacDonald, who deserves a whole blog entry to herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist / essayist / short-story writer, ditto; and Sherman Alexie, member of the Spokane Tribe (well, Spokane's a bit east of the mountains, but Alexie's a crazy Cascadian all right).

 

 

Some Cascadians have set up a Sasquatch Militia. Others are trying to protect the rare tree octopus.

 

 

From the grizzled loggers of the North Cascades, to the sunburnt huckleberry pickers on the slopes of Mount Adams, to the ultra-cool hipsters of Portland and Seattle (not to mention the expatriates like me), we are a nation of (mostly) amiable lunatics.

 

 

And no matter how far we roam, we can still hear the geoduck quacking in our hearts.

 

 

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The Bobbsey Twins; or, Merry Times in the Children's Literature Section

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A million years ago, back in the early 1960s, my grandmother gave me some old books. One of them was “The Bobbsey Twins; or, Merry Days Indoors and Out.”

 

 

 

I was hooked.

 

 

The series, putatively written by “Laura Lee Hope” but actually written by many different people, goes on forever. The books are full of simple images and situations that are bound to appeal to impressionable children (they certainly appealed to me). The publishers update them from time to time, but they're really a lot more fun if you read the older versions; otherwise you miss details like the train ride to the seashore (on what is most definitely a 1910-era train), and Mrs. Bobbsey telling the children that “train ice cream may not be good to eat.”

 

 

So you have two sets of twins. First there are Nan and Bert, who are around nine or ten, sandy-haired, smart, diligent, alert, All-Around Good Citizens. Then there are little Freddie and Flossie, maybe five years old, with golden curls, lisping, adorable. There's a supporting cast: Freddie's cat Snoop, the black cook Dinah and her husband Sam (the family's “man-of-all-work”), and the school bully / all-purpose villain Danny Rugg.

 

 

The Bobbsey Twins solve mysteries! They get locked in department stores after hours! They get accused of things they didn't do! They march in the Fourth of July parade! They grow radishes! They go skating and ice-boating on Lake Metoka! They get captured by gypsies!

 

 

Flossie, in the old 1930s edition Grandma gave me, has a doll collection, which she tends carefully and keeps in a bureau drawer. Sam and Dinah give her a little black baby doll. She adds it to her collection, but puts a cardboard shoebox lid between the black doll and her other dolls, just to make sure there's no mixing of the races.

 

 

Even as a kid, I thought this was creepy.

 

 

But here's a high point, from (I think) “The Bobbsey Twins at Plymouth Rock”: Bert and bully Danny Rugg are on a train together. Danny pulls out a candy bar and starts to eat it. And I've never forgotten this line:

 

 

“He did not offer any of the candy to Bert.”

 

 

Oh, snap!

 

 

Danny Rugg is evil incarnate!

 

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Sunday blog: Daylight savings time

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Here, as a public service, is a little video from the FDNY about changing your clocks and replacing the batteries in your smoke detectors.

 

 

I think the funny little fireman is cute.

 

 

Thumbs up!

 

 

 

 

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Annette!

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I used to wear my Mousketeer ears (brought back from Disneyland by my brother and sister-in-law, with my name embroidered on them) and watch “The Mickey Mouse Club.” I was terribly in love with Annette. I knew she was too old for me (I was around six at the time), but I didn't care. She was beautiful.

 

 

She and I stayed close during her Beach Party years, though I never really understood what she saw in Frankie Avalon. Or in Dwayne Hickman, for that matter.

 

 

We lost touch for a while in the 1970s and 1980s. We were both seeing other people.

 

 

Back in the 1990s came the sad news that she had multiple sclerosis. Tough as ever, though, she made “Back to the Beach” with Frankie and with Connie Stevens, and I fell in love all over again.

 

 

Now, a few days ago, comes word that her house in Encino has burned down. But she's okay.

 

 

Annette: if you need a place to stay while your house is being rebuilt, let me know. We’d be happy to put you up.

 

 

And just so you know: I still have my Mickey Mouse ears.

 

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Nutty for neti

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A neti pot is a little teapot you use to snort salt water up your nose. “Cougar Town” featured them recently; one of the characters tried to use one, aspirated all the water, and ended up in the emergency room. He referred to it later in the episode as “the Indian death pot.”

 

 

Mine is a little white plastic Aladdin's lamp. I mix up a little salt and bicarb with warm water, and I lean forward over the sink, and breathe through my mouth (this is very important), and stick the spout up my nostril, and pour.

 

 

I can feel the warm salt water tracing its mystic journey through my sinuses. Then it comes out the other nostril, which is a little gross, but – hey, kids, Circle of Life.

 

 

Then I repeat, using the other nostril.

 

 

It's supposed to be excellent for sinus infections and such. The Times recently published an article citing medical evidence that the technique is sound.

 

 

(Also, it feels amazing. You are actually cleaning the inside of your head. You can practically feel the negative energy draining away into the sink.)

 

 

So far I have not been able to con Partner into trying it. He thinks I am trying to do away with him, a la “Cougar Town.” But I've found that many of my acquaintances are secret neti users. My friend Sylvia warned me that sometimes the water builds up in your sinuses, and if you should lean forward during (let's say) an important meeting, water might start gushing out of your nose.

 

 

I mentioned this to another acquaintance, a Brown University policeman. He looked startled. “That actually happened to me during a morning briefing,” he said. “It was pretty embarrassing.”

 

 

This hasn't happened to me yet.

 

 

But I'm sure it will.

 

And it will be awesome.

 

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