Binging on Fred

When I was a kid, we had a copy of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie "Top Hat", which we watched together one night and which resulted in my immediate adoration of Fred Astaire. A few days later, we went down to a family get-together. My mom brought it with us. The night we planned to watch it with everyone I was extremely excited, until I saw that it wasn't "Top Hat" but a different movie with what I thought was a similar title: "Topper".

Over the years I have seen and enjoyed other Fred movies - The Gay Divorcee, which I watched with some family friends while we visited them in Birmingham, and Daddy-Long-Legs, which is based on one of my favorite books, and I can't be mad that the leading man isn't the young handsome type he is in the book - because it's Fred Astaire, and what's not to like about him?!

(I've seen "Funny Face" too, but that one's not very good, so I don't like to count it.)

I always loved musicals in general - some other favorites were "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort" (with Catherine Deneuve and Gene Kelly) and "Meet Me in St. Louis" (which I tried, unsuccessfully, to convince my choir instructor to take on for the spring musical. She didn't, but I remember singing some of the songs heartily in the car with two or three other girls on the way up to Seattle for an annual choir trip). The first time I saw "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" was in the theater with I believe my mom and my paternal grandmother. That evening I had a sleepover with my friend and neighbor and, at the video rental, immediately convinced her that we should rent it. When the movie finished, I remember galloping up and down the length of her parents' large room with flowers doing our best to reprise the song "June Brides".

Well, it comes and goes. I love all the revivals of the genre, the remakes currently coming out of Hollywood such as "Hairspray" and "Mamma Mia". I have a huge weakness for the three High School Musical movies (and I'm no longer embarrassed to admit it).

In the days before I came back to Middelburg, I browsed the movies available for rent from iTunes and decided to get "The Gay Divorcee" for the flight. I hadn't seen it in years and was very pleasantly surprised - I even laughed out loud while sitting at the boarding gate waiting area in Chicago. These old movies all of the best sense of humor and the cleverest little jokes.

When I got back to Middelburg, I went on an internet hunt for Fred Astaire movies and was extremely successful. I had only seen those two Fred-and-Ginger movies but I'm currently working hard to up that number. The other night I watched "Top Hat". My favorite joke from that one - though there are many great ones - is when Horace says, "Are you sure you didn't forget yourself in the park?" And Fred Astaire's character Jerry says, "Positive. If I ever forgot myself with that girl, I'd remember."

Last night, I spent the evening with friends for birthday celebrations. We drank wine and ate cheese and crackers and birthday cake, and listened to pop/hip-hop/rap music on too high. That sort of ruined the image for me. Me, who has watched nearly a musical a day for the last week and a half and been listening either to musical soundtracks or Nat King Cole. It was a bit of a shock. The whole time - except when we did a sort of karaoke to the Black-Eyed-Peas' "Don't Lie" - I kept thinking how bad the music was and how if we were doing this at my place, the music would be on a much lower volume and it would probably be jazz.

Oh and how maybe I should have been born about 80, 90, 100... years ago.

For the complete inventory of my recent movie watching, consult below:

"The Gay Divorcee" (1934): a classic Astaire-Rogers mistaken identity film. Very amusing!

"Swing Time" (1936): another Astaire-Rogers, apparently Rogers' favorite of the ten they made together. If you've never seen this one, I recommend it; Fred's father-figure adds a lot of amusement. Also features the song "A Fine Romance".

"Funny Face" (1957): not worth it. Hepburn can't sing and Fred doesn't tap dance much (probably so that he doesn't look that much better than Audrey!) Put it back on the shelf and check out one of the other ones I list here.

"Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954): Not a Fred Astaire movie, but a classic musical! The cast is stock full of Portlanders, the most well-known being Jane Powell. Really, really fun.

"Royal Wedding" (1951): Fred Astaire and Jane Powell! Lots of fun dance scenes (on a rocking ship, on the walls & ceiling, etc.) This film is based on/inspired by Fred's roots doing Vaudeville acts with his sister Adele.

"Top Hat" (1935): Fred 'n' Ginger, at least as good as I remember it. It lost a little sparkle for me when I read that Fred didn't like the closing number, "The Piccolino", and therefore let Ginger do almost all of the performing. But there are some really good Astaire solos, and this one is full of funny moments.

"Follow the Fleet" (1936): Another Fred and Ginger. Another cute and fun flick. This time, Fred wanted to get out of a tux and top hat to change his image a little and prevent being typecast, so he's a sailor named "Bake" Baker who always chews gum and leaves his mouth hanging open at the end of every dumb joke while he waits for the punchline to settle in - very cute. I also love the opening number, "We Saw The Sea", which is full of clever lyrics.


Up Next: "Carefree" and "Shall We Dance". Plus, I've rented "Singin' in the Rain" to watch with my housemates, who have never seen it (gasp!).

Mama Said

Since I left home for college, my mom has given me a lot of advice, much of it concerning food and cooking. One of the ones that I always remember is to keep tot he perimeters of the grocery store - all of the essentials are there, and once you go in towards the center you'll find all of the gunky junk food and useless objects.

Well, today, I ignored that rule, and it came back to bite me.

I was almost done doing my re-stocking shopping trip, having returned to Middelburg only hours before, but I waited to get greens - located in the front of the store just as you enter - so I could check and see if the frozen spinach selection had improved.

It hadn't.

I did all of my other shopping in between, and got to the freezer section at the end, to find that there was still your regular assortment of chopped spinach and creamed spinach, all in cardboard, not plastic, and doubtless freezer-burned.

So I doubled back to the produce section to grab a bag of organic mixed greens for salad and - the key mistake - cut through the center aisle of the store.

"cut through" might be a little misleading, though, because I was actually lengthily distracted not halfway across the store by an enormous table with seven or eight "BONUS!" signs.

Usually, these don't get me, but today, I saw the object on bonus was books.
Books! In the Netherlands! For only 2.50!

Since I'm moving in less than six months, I KNOW I should not be adding to my already rather large library. But I can't resist a deal when it concerns books.

I shuffled through, and found a thinnish, silly, trashy-looking novel, but one that was written in Dutch. (The others were mostly translated.) That might do me some good; I'm taking advanced French this semester but I really need to work on maintaining and improving my Dutch at the same time. Just your typical chick-lit, really; two girls trying to lead decent lives in the big city, only in this case, Nicki and Petra live in Amsterdam, not New York. So I put Yoyo van Gemerde's "Sushi & Chardonnay" in my basket.

With considerable will power, I set the translated copy of The Nanny Diaries back on the stack (reminding myself that I HAD already read it, and even if I didn't remember it very well, there was probably a reason for that).

Moving on, the next part of the table caught my eyes. CDs! After another few minutes spent shuffling through these, I finally pulled myself together with the intention of bee-lining it to the produce section...

...only to find that the end of the table housed the DVDs.

Mostly BBC miniseries, for the low price of 5.99. But good luck keeping me away from the classics.

I skimmed over Pride and Prejudice (1980 version, not '95), Great Expectations, He Knew He Was Right (though I considered that one), and Persuasion. Then I saw The Barchester Chronicles.

Bingo.

What's not to love? I loved Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, as well as the relatively recent mini-series of the book. So the Barchester Chronicles can't be bad. And second: It stars Alan Rickman. One of the best actors around. Who I especially love in period pieces (such as "Sense & Sensibility").

The fact that it's a 385 minute miniseries, not a two-hour movie, sealed the deal. Once my subtotal had ballooned to an uncomfortably high price (I had to buy phone minutes and I treated myself to the fresh-squeezed orange juice and some parmesan cheese for my pasta; that seems reasonable), I packed everything into my "Ga Rode Sokken" bag (thank you thank you Franny!), and headed home.

Now I just gotta find enough time for a lot of television-watching.

'Tis the Season... to Write Poetry

Photo:
Sinterklaas receiving his honorary degree from Roosevelt Academy, November 2006

Last year, at about this time, I went to my last French class of the semester. The teacher had arranged for a little Christmas celebration, so we ate some candy, sang “Petit Papa Noel” (4 or 5 times if I remember correctly), and wrote Christmas poems. Most people wrote 2 or 3 rhymed couplets, but after four or five minutes and a few “Attendez! Attendez!”s, I finished this composition:

Venez, tout le monde, et célébrez,
Parce que le Noël est arrivée
Nous ne faisons pas les études
Nous pouvons laissez les habitudes
N’importe pas en quoi on croit
Maintenant, on pense aux trois rois.
Nous cherchons un sapin de Noël
Pendant que la niege tombe du ciel.
Après, nous chantons de belles chansons
Nous rions et nous dansons
Toute la famille est en attendance
Et, si on a de la chance
On mangera une bûche de Noël
Très délicieux, et douce comme du miel.
Ouvrez, alors, tous vos cadeaux
Et buvez de la champagne et pas de l’eau.

But this year, I take Dutch. Tomorrow is one of the last classes, so we’re having a little Sinterklaas party – Sinterklaas being the Dutch Saint Nick. We drew names and got a present for someone, and we have to write a little gedicht, a short poem, to go with it.

And I am struggling.

I get two lines to start, because the gedichten usually begin this way:

Sint en Piet zaten te bedenken
Wat ze ______ nu eens zouden schenken.

But what comes after that, I don’t know.

Making it all the more difficult is the subtle clever way you are expected to hint at the present you got.

So I think this may be the new test for fluency: if you can throw together a Christmas poem in a given language within a few minutes. I wonder if I can do it in Spanish?

Something to try over winter break.

One week till vacation!!

Winter Break Reading List

What better place to keep track of it?

1. My Antonia by Willa Cather
2. Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
3. Little Women, considering a Marxist perspective
4. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
5. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (in preparation for "Reading Lolita in Tehran" next semester, but then again not sure I really want to.)
6. Something wintry, i.e. A Christmas Carol
7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as recommended by S. Winter
8. Inevitably lots of shallow fun, such as early Betsy-Tacy books, and the ridiculous S.A.S.S series...

Yes. Vacation is a wonderful thing.

Armchair Travel

I'm not a big chick-lit kind of girl. From time to time, I pick one up for a little fun. But in most cases, if I wander past Meg Cabot, I get annoyed. The writing is artificial and the plot is Disney with a bit of "Adult content" thrown in. Everything is contrived and overworked and unrealistic.
Every once in a while, though, I come across a more bearable one. I think the thing that makes these books more enjoyable is when the offer some little multi-cultural twist. Frangipani succeeded because it's a study of cultural and generational differences. (Though some would argue that this belongs in the group of books unpleasantly labeled "mum-lit", not chick.)

Coffee and Kung Fu made it only because of this. In most ways, it's your typical young-woman-in-the-big-city-with-a-boring-dead-end-job. Her grandpa is the only one who understands her. And she's dating a guy who's obviously a jerk.

But she's a missionary kid and she grew up in the Phillipines, and despite the books title, she's really more of a perfectly-prepared-jasmine-tea-served-ceremonially kind of girl.

And the ending - I trust none of you are really going to run out and read the book - is satisfying, because the girl dumps her stuff on her parents, buys two plane tickets with the money her grandpa leaves her, and jets off to Hong Kong, expecting the barista guy she hardly knows to follow her in a few days. Which we all know he will.

But that's not the point. The point is, she goes somewhere to be happy. So despite the love lesson that is necessary in every chick-lit novel, I find this one to be a bit more realistic. I guess it's just closer to home for this reader.

I finished the book, finished my tea, and rushed off to school to finish the draft of the analysis section of my IRP. As you can probably guess, it isn't going that well. No one really wants to read about people stopping caring about consequences and rushing off to do something exciting and gutsy when they have to put on their coat, walk across a common room with gluey floors from last night's birthday party, and sit in a computer lab that is hospital-like in its whiteness.

I'd much rather fly to Hong Kong.

And then you'd all be reading about something more interesting than my ventures into chick-lit reading.

Elections, Expat-style

A lot of people around here are sick of hearing about the U.S. elections. But more of them aren't. Since RA specializes in social sciences, and Middelburg is home not only to RA but also to the Roosevelt Study Center, an unrelated research center, and the new Middelburg Center for Transatlantic Studies, news about the election has been a pretty big deal here.

So RA and the Study Center got together to organize an All-Night American Election Party, complete with pub quiz, youtube spoof videos, CNN coverage on a big screen, live music, DJs, and let's not forget, Hertog Jan beer for only 1.80/glass.

It was a happening event, to say the least, but we went two hours late and missed the fun pub quizzes, etc. Instead, we caught my housemate, Romy Uitdehaag of 4y-d, performing Pink's "Dear Mr. President"; an RA band featuring a saxophone solo by Dr. Herman Lelieveldt, and entertaining MC work by an exchange student from Nebraska.

Unsurprisingly, Obama won the mock vote. I was a little surprised that McCain actually received as many as 4 votes, considering the audience.

The place was overwhelmingly Obama-y. Everyone had hats, pins, posters, shirts, you name it. My friend told me I had to put on my pins, like the ones my mother sent to my friend Joy, and I had to explain that my mom didn't love me enough to send me a "My mama loves Obama" pin.

But my mama did send me an "Obama chick" t-shirt, so I wore that, and paired it with a PDX pin. I figure a Portland pin, aka "Little Beirut", is more or less synonymous with "Obama supporter". No one knew what it was, but a bartender asked about it and liked it.

Joy and I realized that, since I'm American and she's Kenyan, put together we make Obama.

At 2, the crowd decided they would rather listen to music than CNN, so they muted the television and the DJ spun some retro stuff, and my friends and I decided to head back to Liana's place and watch there. We ate popcorn and I knit and everyone was in a different state of semi-sleep, waking up to talk about the silly holograms and the new percentages and statistics pouring in. At about five, we were confident enough to go home and sleep, knowing we'd wake up smiling.

The next day, I'm looking over post-election coverage. I remember the morning after the 2004 elections. Everything was gray, like Portland had put on a black veil of mourning. My mom and I went out for coffee and the barista said, "I feel like blacks are still sitting on the back of the bus." I'm never going to forget that.

In English class that day I wrote a poem about it, but today, I'm blogging. That, and regularly checking the news to find out about the Oregon results, and scrolling through facebook to look at people's post-election statuses. A high school friend "is on the streets of Chicago celebrating". Two people are waking up knowing that it's not a dream. I'm watching footage of the celebrations in the streets and semi-wishing I was there.

But on the other hand, I'm even more happy to be here. Pretty soon, I might stop emphasizing the half-Czech part of me so much. I have more reason to be proud of being American than I ever have since leaving the states.

Trained

Time for one of those procrastinatory updates.

I got back from Edinburgh on Wednesday. My flight arrived at about 6 and I felt very relaxed and rejuvenated, although I had a little anxiety for the return to school without any vacation until the semester ends. It is going to be high-stress.

But the funny thing was taking the train back to Middelburg. I noticed, after a few stops, that I wasn't exactly happy or excited to see the familiar NS yellow and blue or take the train again, but I felt a strange variety of comfort.

It was the realization that I am so completely comfortable with using the NS trains that hit me then. I move effortlessly from ticket machines to timetables to platform to train. I can't even remember when I last asked a conductor for something - probably not since I went to Haarlem last summer.

It's getting more and more homey here. Which is going to make things more and more tricky.