Tag: entertainment

I cry foul on my naysaying friends!

Once again, sorry to my Instagram followers for being repetitive, but let’s talk for a few minutes about Somewhere in Time. I mentioned on Instagram how surprising it was that I’d never seen this 1980 movie because who’s more beautiful on film than Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve and they are together! And it’s romance. And it has love that transcends time and separation. But mostly, it was surprising because I have listened to the score of the movie for decades and love it.

Oh, everyone said, YOU MUST SEE IT. (Except Puterbaugh, such a film geek, but he hadn’t seen it either.) So I ordered it. It came on Valentine’s Day, and from the moment Tom started the DVD, I wanted to cry. Okay, maybe I did cry. I didn’t even know how things would play out or what would or wouldn’t happen, but it’s that MUSIC.

SORT OF SPOILERS AHEAD (because you won’t see the actual end of the movie and I won’t provide it):

Near the end, when anybody’s heart would be breaking, and I definitely was crying… well, here. Here’s a four minute and something clip. Go ahead. Watch some heartbreak.

Now as I was watching that, there was no way I couldn’t think of another scene from another movie and how many times my friends who’ve been forced to watch it with me complained and carried on about how LONG it was, how torturous to see, oh, she should snap out of it. Let’s view the scene that makes them squirm and carry on.

It’s not that long! Christopher Reeve’s adult Richard Collier is grieving a love of like two days that he thinks is lost forever. Kristen Stewart’s teenaged Bella Swan is grieving a love of what, a year’s duration?, she thinks is lost forever. And though three months may pass in Bella’s scene, it’s just a little over TWO MINUTES on the screen.

If we can cry through four minutes of Richard’s agonizing sense of loss, Bella should get at least two.

I do wonder if Chris Weitz the director of New Moon thought of Christopher Reeve/Richard Collier at the window. It IS a truth internetly acknowledged that author Stephenie Meyer cites Somewhere in Time as one of her influences.

Also, I have imagined with some amusement Superman time traveling to Forks and making Vampire Girl forget Mr. Sparkles.

I ship them.

Flash and trash

Some days in rescue are harder than others, and yesterday and today were tough ones. I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to break hearts plus I have shed enough tears myself.

While I worked my job today, I also sporadically colored to give myself a space to breathe and escape to the world inside my imagination, where there are characters who have accompanied me for decades. I’d started coloring something last month because it reminded me of dialogue from a fictional, fated meeting that I once wrote and sometimes mentally revise.

Tom had gone to a baby shower for a friend, so when the magic hour came that I knew there’d be no new email for a while, I dashed out of the house. I don’t ever want to go to the Galleria–I’m not a shopper–but there used to be a certain merchant there who I visited when I was looking for something very specific (specific silver charms, in case I sound mysterious, which I don’t mean to be).

He is not there anymore, and I walked the Galleria looking for someone similar, but the merchandise I saw just made me feel sad. It’s a Kardashian-Trump world, with everything too flashy, too trashy, and not remotely for me.

I came home mostly empty handed and finished this.

I wondered if I should work the phrase more specifically into my dialogue. Then I wondered if it came from some other book or movie or song, so I Googled it.

Ugh. Kanye tweeted it on his one-year anniversary to Kim. It probably isn’t even original to him, but still, you can’t escape the Kardashians ever. I’m staying home from now on with my characters.

Transport Thursday!

No animals in the photo today except unicorns. This is Lynn who does the same job I do for our rescue. Completely independent of each other, we ended up wearing identical sweaters on Ugly Christmas Sweater Thursday. We take the word “team” to new levels depths.

She keeps me sane EVERY day, and I’m pretty sure we are the two tiredest people in Houston.

Mood: Monday

My friend and fellow writer Jeffrey Ricker makes me laugh on Twitter which is a place I can go only sporadically because POLITICS, FFS. Jeffrey is a bright spot in part because of his retweets titled “Mood” from the account Hourly Wolves.

I have recently stumbled upon a line of cards that inspire me to use them for a weekly Monday: Mood post. Here’s one that made me laugh and laugh.

Tiny Tuesday!

Something on Twitter took me to an older article about a cafe in Japan where various stuffed “Moomins” can sit with you if you’re dining solo (“nobody has to eat alone”) or if you just want a companion to join you and your family or friends at your table. Of course there was a chorus of, “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING ALONE!” and “Sure, everybody wants to call attention to their loneliness.” I didn’t read it that way at all, I guess because I have never minded having a solitary meal, seeing a movie alone, etc. I just thought it was a fun and engaging thing, even though I didn’t know what the heck a Moomin was.

So I Googled (of course!) and found out Moomins are “the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of white, round fairy tale characters with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses.”

When I was telling Tim about this, he knew immediately what I was talking about–he knows the books.

I’ve atoned for being the last to know by getting this little guy into my menagerie as soon as I could. Welcome to Houndstooth Hall, Moomin!

From “Sixty Years On”: “Yes I’ll sit with you and talk, let your eyes relive again…”

The phone rings. It’s Riley.

“Hey, can I come over? I have a new album with your song on it.”

“I have a song?” I ask, smiling. He always chooses a song that’s mine from every album.

“Yeah, it’s your song.”

“Sure. Come over.”

Later he comes in with his distinctive walk and his smile and his dancing eyes, so very Riley-ish, looking like he has something up his sleeve.

He takes out the record and hands me the album cover. I stare at the photo of someone I don’t know: “Elton John.”

Riley gently lowers the arm to play the first song, and midway into it, I laugh. He’s right. It is “your song.”

We listened to the whole album more than once, and I loved it so much that when he left, he told me it wasn’t just my song. It was my album.

It’s drowned now. I have it on CD of course, and no flood water can wash away the memory of the boy I planned to still be hanging out with sixty years on.

I miss you each day, Riley. You can tell everybody that’s your song.

And I cry every time I watch this.

ETA 2022: I’m not sure which video I linked to, but it’s no longer a good link. Since probably everyone knows “Your Song,” I’ve chosen to try again using “Sixty Years On.”