The Duke of Diamondville

The Duke of Diamondville brought his family for a visit.  The kids are just as adorable as their dad was when he was little.

Bridger Pete (I'm pretty sure that with that name we are going to get a pirate in our family yet) is three now, so he's much more entertaining than the last time we saw him.  I think he's the heir to Aunt Bessie's legacy of knowing who everyone in the family is and how they are related.  Several times during his visit he turned to me and said, "You are Grandma Carla's sister."  Even though he calls his cousin Hamad "Momo", he carefully referred to him as, "your son" when speaking to me.

He absolutely delighted a couple of old Cambodian men down on the pier when he asked them how the fish they were pulling in were flying.  They tried to get him to touch the flopping mess of fish in their bucket, but he quietly declined.

Here is a picture of the kids doing what kids from Wyoming do in California no matter how cold the water is:

Edgar

A couple of weeks ago as we were returning from some outing, a young man approached our house.  He didn't want to speak to the boys on the porch, he wanted to speak to "the lady of the house".  I was inside getting Papa settled, but I came out as soon as I got done.  He was standing on the walkway looking like he was getting ready to make a break for it.  My son was sitting at the table having a cigarette so I sat down too and invited the young man to come and join us.  He declined.  He proceeded to launch into his spiel a mile a minute.  He had the very uneasy look of someone about to make a break for it.  He explained that he was from Compton and that he was in some kind of program for parolees trying to improve their lives etc. etc.  Hamad and I nodded in appropriate spots to let him know that we were sympathetic and approving.  He stopped and asked me, "What do you think about Compton?"

That's a good question.  I certainly know a lot about the reputation of Compton both from the news and the gangsta rap that the boys listen to.  Most of that is not very positive.  When I am talking to a person who is from a place, I try to think of positive things to say about it.  There is no point in rubbing salt in a person's wounds because they are from someplace with an unsavory reputation.  I'm usually pretty good at it.  You're from Bosnia?  It seems to me that some of the most beautiful men I've ever seen have been from Bosnia.  If I know something that is genuinely good about a place, it usually makes the confessor of origin give an audible sigh of relief.  Thank goodness she isn't going to ask me about the war.  But Compton?  I've got nothing.  So I admit to our fast talking salesman that I really don't know what I think because I've never actually been there.

No sign of relief but a pause of surprise.  He then tells us that some of our neighbors know what to think about Compton and have told him in no uncertain terms to go back there.  That seems a bit uncalled for.

He continues his pitch which mostly involves a litany of past transgressions.  When he gets all done I ask him what he is selling.  He's selling newspaper subscriptions.  I surprise him by telling him that I will buy one.  Now, you would think this would make him relax and make him a little less jumpy.  Nope.  But there is now paper work that I must fill out and he has to venture tentatively onto the porch to hand it to me.

Now here is where something weird happens.  He's already told us that he's on probation, and that he came from a pretty violent background, but now he starts to spill everything that could possibly make us distrust him. He tells us that his father and brothers are in jail.  He looks cautiously at my son who is olive skinned and has a huge Jew-fro and tells us that he was in juvi because he stabbed a black man.  (People often mistake Hamad for an African American.)  He tells us that he wasn't born in this country.  (I guess he was testing the anti-immigration waters of our front porch.)  He tells us that his mother is white, to which I respond by pointing to Hamad and telling him, "This beautiful man is my son."  His eyes go wide with disbelief at that.  Hamad chuckles and confirms it.  Then he tells us that most of his family in Mexico works for the drug lord Chapo Guzman.  At this point he's kind of run out of life points to horrify us with and we still don't seem phased.  Hamad asks him once again if he wouldn't like to sit down.  This time he perches on the edge of a chair that isn't too close to the table.  I ask him if he'd like something to drink and he declines.

During this pause, I return my attention to the paperwork.  Edgar, his name is on the paperwork, finally gives the sigh.  Then he asks us, "Is it always this chill around here?"  Yep.  It's a nice chill neighborhood.  He relaxes enough to look around at his surroundings and then asks, "People of different races just sit around and talk to each other?"  It turns out that that doesn't happen in his neighborhood.  I start to say something cliche about lack of opportunity in some communities, but he cuts me off.  The paper work is all done, the check is written but he lingers for a moment longer.  This time he tells us that he wants to be a lawyer, but that everyone tells him that he's such a fast talker that he should be in sales.  He tells us that he hates sales.  We agree that we aren't all cut out for sales.  He's finally calm as he leaves and we encourage him to go off and be a lawyer.

Voting for our Princess

When I decompress at  the end of the day, I will sometimes turn on the TV and do what my father refers to as channel flopping.  Every once in awhile my son comes in when I have the show Toddlers and Tiaras on.  He can't believe I ever watch that.  I guess it draws my attention the same way a train wreck would.  It's a show about little girls with obsessive mothers who play the kid beauty pageant circuit.  [Disclaimer: when I hit puberty I still was wearing my hair in braids, wearing my brother's old cowboy boots and wondering if there was anyway to realize my dream of being a swashbuckling pirate.  I suppose this partly explains my horror.]  So far the only balanced child I've seen so far [Another Disclaimer: I only happen on this show during flopping, so I in all fairness, I have not seen all the kids.] was a little girl who was being coached by a drag queen.  The two of them were having oodles of fun bringing out their inner divas.  Mostly though, the families portrayed on this show make the family from Little Miss Sunshine (trailer here) look fairly functional.  The point of being for most of these people is that they (or their daughter) want to win the biggest crown which will be awarded to the young child who can best look and act like a drag queen.  It's a bit over the top.  Fake huge hair, fake tans, fake teeth and incredibly fancy dresses turn, what in the before pictures look like perfectly cute little girls, into the epitome of shallowness.  Both mothers and girls spew vile remarks about their competition in front of the camera, that I assume they realize will rebroadcast their remarks across the country.  These little girls may never be able to live down the nastiness that is being coaxed out of them at this time.  (hmmm... maybe that's what the artifice if for... it's just a clever disguise?)

The show I actually watch in its entirety is Chopped on the Food Network.  It's a timed contest in which chefs must prepare a meal from a basket of seemingly random ingredients.  It's fun to watch because the whole time you're watching you are wondering things like, "What does one do with star fruit and tofu skin?"  Sometimes amazing dishes are created and sometimes you learn that probably you just shouldn't cook some things.

Okay, third line of thought (I promise to bring them together in a minute): last night Benjamin (the ninja who lives here) went off to babysit his sister's girls.  He was going to show them the movie Mulan (which I have not seen) in hopes to coax his toddler niece into wanting to be a real person instead of a princess.  In the context of Toddlers and Tiaras, I totally support this.  As a child who was weaned on fairy tales, I have a difficult time with it.  My mother didn't raise us on Disney fairy tales, she raised us on real fairy tales.  Tales that were so frightening she had to hide the books from my older siblings when they started having nightmares.  My mother and I were made of sterner stuff and enjoyed finding new tales right up until her death at a wise old age.  She taught me that life is hard and princesses must struggle, often for a very long time, in order to be true to the things they value and to increase the quality of life for those they love.  She taught me that sometimes the prince never comes, or if he does, he doesn't make things easier.  The important part is to maintain that purity of heart that makes a princess a woman deserving of respect and valued by others.  One of the stories we liked was The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  That little girl learns from the beautiful sari clad mother of her childhood friend, that all women are princesses and their husband is their prince.  The little girl remembers this even as her life enters a downward spiral into desperate orphaned poverty.  She not only remembers it, she tells the tales she learned in India to the other girls and puts them in touch with their princess selves.

Last night as I was flopping, the Home and Garden channel had a show called "Million Dollar Rooms".  One segment of it had a woman showing off her five million dollar closet.  Brides had come to have their wedding photos taken in this woman's closet.  Her parting line was that she wished that every woman could have a closet like that.  Wow, what a weird wish.  Not a wish that no woman would ever have to watch her child die of starvation?  No woman would be sold into sexual slavery?  A five million dollar closet?  Because it made her feel like a princess.

I'm not voting for the closet lady for princess.  I'm not voting for the hyper sexualized twisted children with giant crowns for princess.  I'll tell you who I would vote for for princess.  She was on the cooking channel and I don't remember her name.*  She was a very heavy cafeteria lunch lady at an elementary school.  She would not win at a beauty pageant.  But she was the picture of grace on this show.  She was pitted against other lunch ladies from around the country.  She never lost a chance to encourage them.  At one point she told her sisters in lunch, "We've already won just by being here.  Who would've imagined that as a lunch lady we would be competing on the cooking channel!"  (Or something to that effect.)  In the snippet of interviews it came out that in addition to creating tasty food for the kids with her limited budget, she also packed back packs for the more impoverished children to take home on the weekends so they wouldn't have to go two days without food.  She never expected to be there.  She never expected to win $10,000 for her cooking.  But she had been a princess the whole time.  I'd vote for her.

*Google says her name is Cheryl Barbara and for an excellent review of that particular episode you can click here.

Risk

When I was a kid, my younger brother and I decided that we would like to join a circus.  We realized that the circus probably doesn't just hire kids who have no skills, so we set about creating an act.  We enlisted one of the girls down the street and started practicing each day.  I had a green Stingray bicycle with a banana seat and butterfly handle bars.  It was a beauty.  Well... except for the scraped paint and the stitches on the seat, but that kind of led an air of being a kid who had been somewhere and done something.  Our act consisted of one of us peddling like mad while someone stood on the handle bars with arms outstretched like a tight rope walker.  The third kid would stand on the back of the seat with arms also outstretched.  We practiced all of the positions, because you just never know what you will have to do in the circus to make sure that the show goes on.  When we got pretty good, my older brother John would throw rocks at the feet of the peddler just to make it more exciting.  We weren't keen on this part, but he thought it was fun, and it's hard to argue with someone when you're all balanced on your bike like that.  At dinner each night we would discuss the pros and cons of the day's practice in front of our bemused parents.  As it turns out, the circus never actually came to the town and none of us were really interested in actually running away.  But there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that, if they came, we would be ready.  Luckily nobody had thought of bike helmets yet.  And I'm grateful that they hadn't thought to take out all the fun rides in the playground either.  I kind of feel like James Bond when I tell the elementary school set what a life of danger I led.

Sadly, we now live in a society that tolerates no risk.  Several months ago I heard that 3,000 people a year die in the United States each year from carbon monoxide poisoning.  At first I was vaguely impressed.  But then I started wondering how many of us there are.  I didn't actually wonder enough to Google it, but luckily, a few days later I was reading about something else in the LA Times and they actually had bothered to look up the number.  The population of the US is three hundred and eleven million.  Oh perfect, now we can figure out the actual risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Okay... if you live in the US you have a .00000964% chance of dying of carbon monoxide poisoning this year.  Call my simplistic, but I translate that into no chance.  Nonetheless, our diligent land lady purchased a carbon monoxide detector so we can all sleep easy.  

If TSA disappeared tomorrow (this is not a threat... just a what if), how worried would I be that on my next flight somewhere someone would blow up their underwear?  Not really worried.  I do have a devil may care attitude when it comes to the odds of geese flying into the engine as well.  

I do feel really bad that we have given up so much as a people because we are afraid.  The latest thing in the news was the Supreme Courts decision that the police can pretty much strip search anyone they want.  Doesn't that sound a bit police state-ish?  When you were nine years old and careening down the gravel hill on your bike, would you have believed that that would be part of how America looks when you became middle aged?  I can just imagine how the grownups would've reacted if you had predicted that.  They wouldn't have been able to imagine it.  Go outside and practice your circus act, America is the land of the free and the home of the brave.    

Movie: Footnote

Yesterday I went to see the Israeli movie Footnote for the second time.  The boys had taken me into LA to see it for my birthday, but it's playing in Long Beach now so I could sneak off for a matinee.  Click here for the trailer. 

It was sweet of the boys to take me the first time, but they made it very clear that they didn't want to see a movie about Talmud scholars more than once.  Big sissies.  I loved this movie the first time for the insights it gave me into that particular world of academia.  I have friends who live in that world, but I've never gotten to see the back life of it.  We think about this modern world of computers and the near total access that we have to certain information.  It certainly has changed the way that we study Torah.  Once I asked Rabbi Gersh a question and he answered, "Find out the same way any rabbinical student does... Google it."  But even with all of the ease that we have in searching out some information, there is still a need for the kind of mind that can pull from memory a word from a text, a kind of mind that sits in a room with books to the ceiling and can put his (gender neutral "his", I'm not going to edit my thoughts to accommodate people who can't make that leap) hand on the book with the word and flip to the page he needs.  Those are rare minds and it is amazing to see them in action.  It brings up thoughts of Rashi and Ezra and their near encyclopedic knowledge of all things Torah.

So that was what I took away from the first viewing, that and where the story goes.  When you sit down to see a film a second time, you already know it's going.  The second viewing lets you observe how it got there.

Footnote is a beautiful film.  There are layers and layers of complexity that manifest in lovely ways.  Even in the trailer there are some resounding images... the old man throwing away reams of writing in a place filled with the debris of countless other writers (somehow a shot of someone throwing away a thumb drive wouldn't give us the same emotional hit), or the son somehow accidentally ending up in a fencing costume (how better to illustrate the sparring he has stumbled into unwittingly?).  It isn't a gauzy fairy tale of a movie.  It's a movie about letters and words.  Any good movie about Talmud scholars would be though, wouldn't it?