Two Thumbs Down on the Oscar Telecast

The closing credits are rolling on the Oscar telecast.  I am underwhelmed, to say the least.  What a colossal snooze fest!

Ixnay on the ostshay, okay?  Franco has the personality of a sedated gerbil and Anne Hathaway is so damned adorable it’s sickening. Who yells “Woooo!!!!!” after each introduction? No Oscar host I’ve ever seen.  I say bring back the old school hosts.   Pronto!

Since all the money was on The King’s Speech, I was hoping for at least one or two upsets to spice up the telecast.  Not one time was there a surprised gasp from the audience.  Did I say gasp?  Hell, there was barely any applause, mostly due to lack of interest, I’d say.  I think I saw that madcap Roberto guy – the one who walked on the backs of the theater seats and jumped up and down a while when he won for Il Postino that year – nodding off in the fourth row.  

The one thing I could always count on for Oscar night entertainment in the past didn’t even happen tonight.  I didn’t see one Bork-worthy get up.  Even Helen Bonham Carter looked half-way put together…well, for her.  I never thought I’d live long enough to say this, but I miss Cher and her Bob Mackie nudie costumes.  Tonight there were only gorgeous, colorful and well-fitting dresses.  Well, I did wonder what milkmaid Cate Blanchett

 Photo:  HuffPo

 

mugged to steal her dress.  The silly Ms. Hathaway did set a new land-speed record for costume and hair-style changes in one telecast, I suspect. 

 

What happened to all the shtick?  Remember Palance and his one-handed pushups?  How about Billy Crystal riding a horse to the microphone?  Oh, and remember this:  Uma, Oprah…Oprah, Uma?  The only thing that happened off-script tonight was the decidedly inelegant F-bomb lobbed by Best Supporting Actress winner Melissa Leo for The Fighter. (Which, by the way, I predicted in an earlier post)

There were moments in the production that left me totally confused.  No less than Celine Dion sauntered onto the stage with no introduction and started singing “Smile” (you know…when your heart is aching)  And because there were pictures of people who had died during the year flipping by on the screen over her left shoulder, no one applauded.  Awkward.   

The last dead person’s photo on the screen was Lena Horne.  Suddenly, Halle Berry is standing there in all her splendor reciting…no, make that reading…words to the effect that Ms. Horne had opened the doors of Hollywood so that people like her and Denzel and Jennifer Hudson and Whoopi Goldberg and Cuba Gooding, Jr. could win Oscars.  Well, okay, but…  Do you think they did that because of all the hoopla about there not being any actors of any color other than white among this year’s nominees? Awkward.

Surely, the Academy of Motion Pictures blah, blah, blah can do better than this.  Even I could have produced a show that bad.  Sheesh!

Automotive Living Large

LC Neal posted a hilarious story today about her recent morning commute.  Among other colorful persons and things, the account involves a Maserati.

As so often happens when I’m reading posts here, I was reminded of something in my own life.  This time it was my own encounter with a truckload of Italian sports cars. 
 
In 2005 I demonstrated my notorious inability to forecast much of anything, much less The Great Depression of 2007-Eternity.  I went out and ordered a new car to replace my 1993 Mazda 929.  Although it had a mere 65,000 miles on it, the car was only worth $1500 as a trade in.
Since my son, who lives in Los Angeles, had always loved driving that car when he lived at home; and since he was still a struggling and dirt-poor actor who had managed to lose his car to the repo man, I offered to give him the Mazda if he could find a way to get it from Atlanta to LA.

The Actor may not have “made it” yet, but he was nothing if not well-connected.  The man knows everybody.  When I visited him to be his honorary date on the red carpet for the premiere of the first movie in which he had a role, he was able to march me ahead of a block-long line of patrons at the iconic Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, give the bouncer guy a Hollywood hug and get a table, just like that!  This, from a man who has no car.

Anyway, The Actor was beyond thrilled to have the offer of wheels and promptly got to work figuring out how to get it there.  About four hours after that conversation, he called back and said he had found a “hook-up.”  That’s his way of saying he knows a man, who knows a man, who owes a man, etc.  There would be a truck coming to my house on the following Tuesday afternoon to pick up the car for “only” $1200.

“What the hell kind of hook-up is that?!?” I crowed, stunned.  Call me stupid, but I thought a hook-up was a situation where something was gotten for nothing much more than a you-owe-me-one.

“Mom, the regular price to ship a car would be at least twice that much.  He’s giving you a big break.
”
“Giving ME a break!  What’s this have to do with me????”

“Well, you know I don’t have $12, much less $1200.  I thought you could lend it to me until I get a check.”

“Ah, the same check that you are waiting for to pay me the $2500 I sent last month, and the $500 I sent the month before, and the $1000 I sent…”

“I know, Mom, I know.  But things are going to happen soon.  I feel it.  All I need is one good break and we’ll be set.”

“We?  We’ll be set?”

“Now, Mom, haven’t I always told you we were a partnership?  You and me against the world, right?”

Sigh. 

Anyway, the truck driver called at the appointed hour on Tuesday and said he was sitting a block away on the major cross street because his truck was too large to drive into my street.  Would I mind driving the Mazda around and pulling it up to the loading ramp?

When I stepped out of the car and handed the driver the keys, I was standing beside the longest 18-wheeler I had ever seen in my life.  The driver, clipboard in hand, began to inspect the Mazda and make notes about body damage.

I laughed.  “Sir, that car is 13 years old.  You don’t have enough paper on that clipboard to write down every scratch and dent you’ll find on that thing.”

“Ma’am, there are $2 million dollars worth of automobiles on that truck.  I am required to make a thorough inventory of every vehicle.”

My laughter changed to howling.  I walked up the wheel ramps to take a closer look.  Two Lamborghinis and two Maseratis were tethered to the sides of the trailer, just sitting there in all their splendor.

“Well, sir, now you have $2,001,500 worth of automobiles on your truck. I hope these beauties don’t catch anything from my Mazda!”

Nothing but first class for my kid!

Why Planned Parenthood SHOULD Be Funded Federally

Having just read Deborah Young's latest post about Planned Parenthood, I am reminded of how lonely it can be when amongst a crowd with different views.  Although her writing was a little shrill, she didn't deviate much from any other conservatives' points of view on all services provided without charge to Americans.  So I've resisted any kind of knee-jerk reaction I might have had to the assertions in the post, and have left her comment thread to others.

Instead, I have a question.  Deborah is free to answer, but the question is addressed to any other OS blogger who happens to agree with  Ms. Young's statement that Planned Parenthood should be privatized.  I'm trying very hard to forget the fact that she cited figures and sources in her essay that included this:


In A Social History of Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon, she is famously quoted as saying, "We don't want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."  Sadly, Sangers (sic) vision isn't too far off course in 2011.
According to the Pro-life Action League website, abortions by race of the mother are broken down: 
·       White 40%
·       Black 31.7%  however, they are only 12.9% of the U.S. population.
·       Hispanic 20.1%
·       Asian/Pacific Islander 6.4%
·       Native American 0.9% 
So 12% of the population is having 31% of the abortions. This has not gone unnoticed in the Black community.
 "Let's be clear. Funding Planned Parenthood with U.S. taxpayer dollars is equivalent to justifying the use of tax dollars to help the Ku Klux Klan buy rope so they can secure their victims in the backs of their wagons," writes Walter Hoye of the Issues4Life Foundation in 2011. 
 
As I said, I will be kind.

But here's the question:  For the millions of women who
1) don't have health care insurance (and won't if the Republicans get their way)  AND
2) don't have jobs and therefore cannot afford to PAY the fees that a privatized Planned Parenthood would be compelled to charge for their services,
how do you propose the babies that are born from unintended pregnancies be cared for?

Don't say adoption.  That's not going to work, because before they are adopted, they'll have to be carried to term and delivered.  How does that work without access to healthcare?

Don't say public aid.  Even though that would be handled on a state level, you won't rest until all social welfare is axed.

As Deborah was quick to point out, many abortions are currently sought by African American women, so we know each baby they are forced to carry to term without access to healthcare and without access to information about legal abortion, now that you have succeeded in ending the funding, is going to be at least half black.

Since so many American families who are open to adopting children who are of a different race tend to go outside the U.S. to adopt them, American children who are all or partially black land on that well-known Difficult to Adopt list.  What happens to them?   Are there  enough African Americans in the country who are qualifed and financially capable of adopting to absorb all those babies?  I seriously doubt it.  I have no reason to believe the Latino and Native American babies will fare any better.

So which is worse, conservatives?  Terminating a pregnancy in the earlier weeks or allowing the child to be born and killing it via neglect, starvation, drug addiction, child prostitution, and poverty-induced violence?

Our Song Still Gets To Me

Do you and your Honey have a song? Which melody sparks in you that sweet memory of the moment it became the anthem of your connection to that human being who made your stomach do a round off at the very thought of him or her?

Songs have marked each and every relationship of any substance and/or duration in my lifetime. Since none of those relationships endured the air-pockets of life, succumbing as they did to whichever brand of turbulence challenged their survival, it surprised me this morning when I realized I could hear, hum or whistle any of them today without excessive sadness or remorse.

First Love

(Play while reading)

Larry H. was a Big Man on Campus in my high school; football and high hurdles were his passion. He was gorgeous and worldly and two whole years older, almost a man in my sophomore eyes. We went to a drive-in movie to see Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee take their star turns in A Summer Place. He kissed me for the first time and we fell in love. We "went steady" for three years, even after he went off on an athletic scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. That's where he decided to become a two-timer, got his campus girl pregnant and broke my heart into a zillion pieces. For years, all I had to do was hear the first two or three notes of this song to have my eyes well up and my spirits dive. Not any more. Now it just makes me smile with the memory of that night in 1959 when my teenaged heart felt the quickening that signaled the arrival of First Love.

First Marriage

(Play while reading this section)

Bradley Carr was introduced to me by my co-worker, only weeks after I moved to Milwaukee and started my first real job out of college at A. O. Smith Corporation. Standing 6'4" with a dazzling smile and enough charm to whip a cobra into shape, Brad swept me off my feet. Roberta Flack's song was probably number one on the charts at the time and it became Our Song. When we were married on December 17, 1966, it was the music for our first dance. But Brad was all too willing to spread his charm around, even while married. My stupendous son is the best and only thing that remains of the union, except when I hear the intro to "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." My reaction always reminds me that I was truly in love with my son's late father. That makes Steve very happy.

First Giant Leap of Faith

(Play while reading this section)

T.B. was a co-worker and friend at the office. I had been a single Mom for seven years by the time we met, and I was convinced that marriage and I were incompatible. We worked together on projects and went out to lunch frequently with other members of the team. Everybody in the office seemed to be aware that we were falling in love except me. I was both shocked and thrilled when he let me in on his feelings. We both love Barbra Streisand and waited hopefully for the announcement that Our Song, "Evergreen" had won an Academy Award. It was the song I walked down the aisle with when I threw caution to the wind and married him on February 18, 1978. The failure of this relationship nearly put me in my grave, and this song for years had the ability to send me back into the chasm of depression I suffered when it ended. Currently, it makes me mostly glad to remember how much I felt loved at the time it was playing for Us.

Happy Valentine's Day

to All My Funny Valentines

When Words Fail

It's not about me. It has never been about me and I know that. So why do I feel so responsible?

I just learned that my former next-door neighbor was found dead in the mountains of north Georgia this morning. He killed himself and I knew he would someday.

Beau and his partner Mark lived across the driveway from me for the 7 years prior to the sale of my house last July. The shared driveway between our houses almost required a reasonably close relationship between us, but we became friends.

Beau was a landscape architect and a good one. When the economy went to hell, he like so many of the rest of us, found himself unemployed. At first he was kind of glad to have the time to lollygag around the house. He worked in the yard, planted vegetables in our postage-stamp sized back areas and worked out at the gym.

But when he eventually started his search for a new job, his world started unraveling. There were no jobs. At around 55 years of age, he began to feel outdated, irrelevant and under-educated.

Beau's was a melancholy personality to begin with and he was always a glass-half-empty kind of a guy. His efforts to manage his unpredictable swings in mood with psychiatry and psychotropic drugs never really produced any long-lasting results. As one year of unemployment became two, he sometimes couldn't manage the climb out of the darkness. He cried. He sulked. He raged. He drank.

Beau knew I had struggled with depression in my lifetime and he knew I would never judge anyone for having mental illnesses. We spent hours over lunches at favorite haunts talking about how miserable he felt. I listened, mostly, and offered ideas about ways to ease his feelings of worthlessness -- lots of them. He would listen intently and even seem to be interested in a few of my suggestions. But he seldom did them.

Deep in my soul I've always known the way this story would end. Beau was so tired of feeling so useless. But last week I saw his partner Mark out walking their adorable beagles and he told me Beau had landed a month-long contract to work on a project for his old company. We both thought we could stop worrying for at least the next month; Beau always seemed to perk up when he was gainfully employed.

This past Sunday morning, Beau told Mark he was going into the office to do a little work. Since Mark is the cook in the family, he asked what time to expect him back. Beau said around 6 p.m. At 7 p.m., when the garage door hadn't whined to signal his return, Mark became more than a little concerned. Why? Because earlier in January, Beau attempted to end his life by taking a handful of his prescribed drugs, something he hadn't shared with me.

Mark had to endure the required 3-day wait before the authorities would take a missing persons report. They accepted it last night, located Beau's unoccupied truck beside a stand of mountain pines this morning, and organized a search party immediately. Mark is waiting to hear from the Lumpkin County, Georgia Medical Examiner to learn the cause of death.

I know I tried every way I knew how to help Beau. I also know what it feels like to be so low as to not want to take another breath. I'm even relieved for him that his pain has now ended for good. But...

If only I could have found the right words.

I'll never again hear that North Carolina drawl or see his slump-shouldered silhouette slowly walking down the driveway, dogs in tow. I'm sorry, Beau. I really tried. Please rest in peace.

A Super Bowl Almost Ate My Career

Super Bowl Sundays are for me a collection of colliding memories, expectations, disappointments and anticipation. In other words, I'm not sure I like 'em.

For one thing, the last time I watched a football game from kickoff to the last down was in 1965, the last time I did a split jump on the track inside the Ripon College football stadium. Cheerleaders were required to at least have a vague idea of what was happening on the football field behind us; wouldn't want to start the "First and ten, do it again" cheer, when it was fourth and goal.

After my last college down, though, my easily distracted mind found it very hard to keep my eyes on the game. At the dozens of professional football games I have attended, I was far more attentive to weirdoes who populated the stadium seats. That, and watching to see myself on the Jumbotron when the cameras swerved for "babe shots."

My son was a second-string quarterback on his high school team, so the only time I really paid attention to those games was when he was at the line of scrimmage. Even then, I spent half the time with my hands covering my eyes while I prayed he wouldn't fumble.

I hosted a few Super Bowl parties while I was married, which was fun, I guess. I would listen for the increase in the TV's volume that went along with commercials so I could watch the much-anticipated and bally-hooed Super Commercials and stop filling bowls and trays long enough to watch. Same with the half-time entertainment.

Then came my transfer to AT&T's Atlanta Public Relations department. Not that I'm complaining, but as Community Relations Manager it was my duty honor to attend just about every public event that required a corporate presence. This was back in the olden days, when corporations made commitments to function as good corporate citizens of the cities in which they had a corporate office. We wanted Atlantans to believe we saw ourselves as *locals.*

Super Bowl XXXIV was scheduled for January 30, 2000 in Atlanta. It wasn't enough I had to attend to all the hysteria surrounding the turn of the millennium and its likely destruction of the world due to computer glitches caused by the sudden change from 1999 to 2000. Now I had to coordinate AT&T's Atlanta-based Super Bowl activities as a major sponsor of the game.

For the entire year of 1999, my life was consumed by Y2K preparations, distribution of Super Bowl tickets, begging the NFL to send "real stars" to our $250,00o customer party the Saturday afternoon before the game, and handling all the maddening details of throwing a party of that magnitude.

Now Murphy's Law is not lost on me. Since my mother raised no fools, over the years I had learned to include the anticipation of everything that could possibly go wrong at every step of a plan. What to do if a celebrity cancels. What to do if the caterers’ truck gets in an accident on the way to the party. What to do if the liquor store sends the wrong brand of vodka. What I've never been able to figure out, though, is what to do when Mother Nature decides to take a dump on the geography.

On Friday evening, January 28, 2000, I was pacing the floor in front of the television, watching the radar as a giant swath of white rapidly approached Atlanta. Everything for the party had somehow come together, although my hair had gone from about 15% grey to a full 30% grey. The temperature was hovering around that critical point where the forecast changes from too much snow to too much freezing rain.

After the fitful few hours of sleep I managed to get, I awoke to a surreal vision of spectacular beauty. And then I screamed.

There was not a surface outside my window that wasn't coated in at least an inch of transparent, glistening ice. The sun was shining brightly through a very high overcast sky, dancing and bouncing off the lacy brilliance of the trees. Oh my God!

I turned on the television just in time to watch a city bus slide sideways across the expanse of a boulevard and slam into a parked car. In another scene, a car started down a hilly street, did a 180 degree spin and slid backwards into the intersection at the bottom of the hill.

This video of a recent Atlanta ice storm replicates the conditions we had in 2000:

As I fumbled through my Day-Timer for the AT&T regional president's phone number, visions of dollar signs danced in my head. A quarter of a million dollars. Oh my God!

We talked. We groaned. We discussed alternatives. Then I raised the spectre of L I A B I L I T Y. Would we be subject to lawsuits if employees accompanying AT&T customers to our corporate party were involved in accidents on the way to and from? That did it. We decided to cancel the party, which was scheduled to begin sometime (2 p.m.? I can't remember) that same afternoon.

You don't want to know what the scramble that ensued looked like. It wasn't pretty. I have never been yelled at by so many people on the same day in my life, before or since. When it was finally done, I sat in the middle of my kitchen floor and sobbed. I just knew my career was over for wasting all that money. It had been spent; it was much too late to recover most of it.

As it turned out, no one expected me to pay for the mercurial antics of that mother, Nature. But ever since, I have had very mixed emotions about Super Bowl weekends.

GO PACKERS!

 

80 is the New 50 in my 'Hood

 If 80 sounds to you like an age when people should be rocking in chairs and taking  naps, there is someone I want you to meet.

 
Today is my friend Josie's 80th birthday.  She lives in the next block, in the house next door to her daughter's elegant Victorian, the Sugar Magnolia Bed and Breakfast.

Josie is one of the most intriguing characters I have ever met.  Born in the hills of Tennessee to a mother who died when she was very young, Josie describes her childhood keeping house for her father in the same terms used to define "indentured servitude."  In fact, it could be said that she had no childhood at all.

So, because of an unparalleled love of life combined with an energy level that puts mine to shame, Josie is living her childhood now. She drives around in a canary yellow 1979 Cadillac Coupe DeVille; wears one of her dozens of crazy hats at all times; loves baubles, bangles, beads and sequins -- the more the better -- and crashes parties without batting a lash.
Josie is an Inman Park legend and a force of nature.
It was only fitting that her daughter would organize a Surprise Parade and Party featuring the Kelly's Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band, of which Josie is an enthusiastic  member. She is a pom-pom girl.


While Josie and her daughter's family were attending church at the Inman Park United Methodist Church, I, along with some 200 of her other closest friends, scrambled to put the food and beverages in place at the Sugar Magnolia and to assemble the band outside the church.  When the service was over, Josie opened the church door to see

That's Josie in the solid red suit, in the distant center.

Coqui and I joined the rest of the cheering crowd behind the band to march the quarter mile to the Sugar Magnolia,

 

Where the band played on and clowned around,

 

And Josie did what Josie does., every chance she gets:

Rock out, rock on!

Happy Birthday to Inman Park's Favorite Country Gal!