GoodBye to All That by Tom Tomorrow

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Full Disclosure

Just ate an M&M off the floor. Also, can't stop thinking about "The Sound of Music" which aired on network tv last night. You all know the story, right? Young Fraulein Maria Wants-to-be-a-nun is sent by her convent's abbess to be governess for the emotionally dead dead dead Captain Von Trapp and his seven resentful offspring. Maria immediately brings MUSIC! back into his life. The Captain is so grateful he dumps his savvy, svelte rich blonde Baroness to marry the boyish Fraulein Maria with her love of sensible shoes and syrupy Tyrolean ballads. Sadly, I missed the first ten minutes of the movie so I didn't get to hear the gang of nuns back at the abbey dissing Maria in that song called How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria which incidentally we hear them sing at her wedding a mere three hours later! It's a fairly passive aggressive little ditty in which the other nuns all bond by making up mean stuff about Maria (...underneath her wimple...she wears curlers in her hair!--oh she does not--her hair is like two inches long!) before the Mother Superior kicks her out and sends her off to catch a bus to the Von Trapp compound. For her trip away from the convent Maria carries a carpet bag she stole from Mary Poppins and wears an odd, pieced-leather hat, sort of a snug fitting beanie with a huge floppy brim. Perfect for warding off rain and sun and attention from the opposite sex! I kid. She's totally cute and the hat is actually kind of appealing in a Curious George Man With the Big Yellow Hat kind of way

Anyway, I noticed a few little things I hadn't before, in all my many, many viewings of this classic musical starring the lovely and sexless Julie Andrews. Such as--oh my god, the butler is a Nazi! And an informer! He's constantly prowling around the Von Trapp mansion lifting an eyebrow and then before you know it there's a Nazi officer at the door asking probing questions about the Captain's sex life. Also, every single male cast member is outfitted in snug pants and was definitely directed to play it homosexual. Captain VonTrapp? Prissy and gay. Uncle Max? Flamboyant and gay. Fourteen-year-old Friedrich? Repressed and gay. Ten-year-old Kurt? Adorable and gay.

The movie is endless and is full of disturbing close-ups of Maria in which the Gaussian blur is so thick I kept turning the TV volume up so I could hear through it. Oh, but then the Captain gets behind the blur so they can smooch--just a little!--and rub foreheads together because that is spelled out in Julie's contract--"for every event where my lips must meet those of my co-star I stipulate no less than four(4) instances of upper cranial contact lasting at least twenty seconds." You just know Julie's kinky, in a sleep-with-stuffed-animals-until-she's-forty kind of way.

So what got me through the long, long LONG three hours of prancing and sneering from Captain Von Trapp (played by the perpetually annoyed Christopher Plummer)? Three solid hours of watching all seven Von Trapp children parade around outfitted in amazingly ugly "playclothes" that gifted needlewoman Maria whipped up from her bedroom curtains (um, Scarlett O'Hara ripoff or what)? Incidentally the "children" include a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old girl who spends the entire movie plotting to get her junior Nazi boyfriend (panicky and gay) to notice her. Tip--lose the chartreuse paisley-patterned apron-front dirndl, honey.

I don't know. I lay back on the pillows of my bed, tossing back cough drops in a contented stupor. The Sound of Music is just a beautiful movie. Those damn awesome alps, the camera swooping us here and there up amidst the clouds and down amongst the edelweiss. The charming town of Salzburg with its, its --is that a Roman Coliseum the family performs in? Amazing. The cobblestone streets and the old buildings and the perfectly symmetrical VonTrapp family house... just perfect. Oh and the gorgeous wedding in the enormous Gothic Abbey--sigh. It is all so ornate yet simple and lovely. I couldn't tear myself away, not even to watch Battle Tomato on Iron Chef. And when the entire family trudges across the Alps to Switzerland to escape the Nazis I sat straight up and drank in every detail of the scene. I cheered for them. They're going to make it! Hurrah for freedom! And lederhosen! Hurrah for strudel and schnitzel! And warm copper kittens! (Wait--how does that song go?)

Obama on Beach!

Our President-elect is spending the holidays in Hawaii and the press got a shot of him shirtless on the beach. Everyone's going nuts about it--and so of course I had to follow suit and post! Isn't that Barack a fine fellow? And see that white guy he's sitting on? That's his grandfather, Stanley, who by my estimate is about the same age in that photo as Obama is now.

The stick-wielding urchin in the background worries me, though.

Excellent Cake

Looks a tad squishy but actually it was light and quite tender. And it should be-- it's made with a ton of butter! It's called Nantucket Cranberry Pie and isn't it just like those crazy Northeastern island type folk to call a cake a "pie"? Sheesh. Really it's something of an upside-down cake. (You could use any type of fruit in place of the cranberries but those poor little freaks have so few opportunities to shine that I like to wait all year to make this *ahem* pie, until bags of cranberries are cheap, fresh and ubiquitous. Don't tell the other fruits. They don't need to know.)

Nantucket Cranberry Pie

2 cups cranberries, chopped
1/2 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp almond extract
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a nine-inch cake pan, distribute cranberries and pecans evenly over bottom . Sprinkle with sugar, mix gently.

Mix butter with eggs and milk, add sugar, then stir in almond and vanilla extract. Combine flour, salt and baking powder in separate bowl. Add wet ingredients to dry, mix briefly but thoroughly and pour batter on top of cranberry/nut mixture. Bake approximately forty-five minutes, until golden brown on top. Let cool in pan for ten minutes, then invert onto serving plate, remove pan. (If any cranberries remain in baking pan, just stick back into place on cake.)

Daisy's Sunbeam

I should get up. Go for a walk. Get some shopping done. Do some baking, for chrissake.

It's just that...that...um, I'm kind of tired. And I finally got warmed up. It's like, 10 degrees below zero out there, you know...

So I'll be right here if you need anything. Seriously. Call me! I mean, if it's important... Otherwise...um...y'know...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Hey, remember me? I used to blog here pretty often. And then one day I stopped. I don't really know why--I think I got tired of the sound of my voice. Does that ever happen to you? You'll be halfway through the telling of a good story--speaking with verve and enthusiasm and then suddenly you hear yourself talking as if you're a stranger and you find yourself utterly bored. And you think--oh, my god, just listen to her--UGH!--listen to the droning, the nasal vowels, the incomprehensible sentence structure--OH MY GOD THAT WOMAN SOUNDS JUST LIKE SARAH PALIN! And you curse your Midwestern vocal chords and stop talking as fast as you can.

One quick question--have you noticed that bloggers are being referred to as "citizen journalists" these days? I really like it. It's unwieldy and has a faint militaristic ring to it. It says, prepare for battle, y'all. Heavy shit is about to go down across the land.

Also, I was in the strange land of northeastern Florida last week. My ears popped on the airplane and, since we took an afternoon flight and the sun sets by five o'clock even in the southern United States, we drove from Jacksonville to our rental in St. Augustine in total darkness. Couldn't see, couldn't hear, went out to dinner at a tiny French restaurant run by three handsome but somewhat drug-addled college boys. They kindly gave us the table in the front window and I always like that, except passerbys kept coming up to study the menu taped right there on the other side of the glass. Oh, and then I felt kind of sorry for one extemely stylish couple--stockings, necktie-- who walked in and announced they had made reservations "just for dessert". The restaurant was ninety percent empty but the glamorous duo insisted on a table right next to the only other diners --t-shirts, flip flops--and downed their espressos and spooned up their creme brulees in complete silence. Well, not much going on in St. Augustine on a Thursday night.

Let's Charleston!

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Dance, My Pretties!

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Every Bird Should Have the Chance to Fly

Washington State Lottery came up with this ad gambit and I really love it. Fly little penguin! Strap yourself into a hang-glider and spread your wings and SOAR!