Life Is A Banquet
Mamacita says: My real life is so, well, ordinary. I mean, doesn’t everybody have a human skull in the linen closet and singing wall art? I had children, and a job, and I felt obligated to set some kind of example. I greatly fear, though, and more so with each passing year, that the footprints my children are actually following are the ones I have tried all my life to cover up. I have never been an “in the box” person. Rulemongers and inflexible people have a hard time dealing with me. I do not suffer fools lightly, and I don’t think YOU should, either. I really do believe that if everyone would just stop whining, buck up, show some spunk, behave himself/herself and insist that others behave, too, the whole world would be infinitely more wonderful than it already is, for those who have the eyes to see and the wit to see it.
Exclusively what and restricted to whom?
One of my icons is Auntie Mame; not that worse-than-insipid movie musical with poor, miscast Lucille Ball (The Broadway play with Angela Lansbury was terrific, though), but the 1955 novel and the 1958 movie with the fabulous Rosalind Russell. Most of the time, as you all well know, I am not pleased with film adaptations of beloved books, but this one is an exception. Even though they had to clean up the language for the film, Auntie Mame is still magic.
LIVE! Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches suckers are starving to death!
Movie Etiquette 101
Mamacita says: Very few musicals translate well to film.
Even when the film – The Sound of Music, for example – is wonderful, it’s still not as good as the stage play. Often – as in The Sound of Music – it’s barely even the same story. Or songs. Or characters.
Sometimes I wonder why the scriptwriters even bother to keep the show’s name, when they’ve changed everything else.
Oh, and you really don’t want to get me started on favorite books made into films. Occasionally, someone will do it right, but even then they leave out too much. coughcoughharrypottercoughcough
I LOVE those films, but far too much was left out. I WANT PEEEEEEEEVES! And an explanation of why and how Lupin knew about the Maurader’s Map would have helped people who didn’t read the book first, which is beyond my comprehension, but I know such beings do exist. How boring they must be! How infinitely and everlastingly boring. . . . .
I mean, don’t these movie people understand that someone who truly loved the book will pay even more to sit through a four or five hour film fest, if it means nothing important is left out?
People with miniature bladders: sit on the aisle in the back, if you would, please. That’s only good manners anyway.
Eat dinner before you come to the theater, that’s a good girl/boy.
And shut up. I love the previews, too, and people who talk when the movie screen is flickering are scum.
Those mean ushers who threw the talkers out the door? I wish they’d bring those back.
Theater etiquette: Sit still, shut up, watch, and listen. If you can’t do all of those, stay home.
Eat and pee before you leave your house.
Why, no, I’m actually NOT in a bad mood. I really do believe it ought to be this way. I’d pay MORE to watch a movie in a theater with rules like this.
Are you listening, Kerasotes?
Mamacita Says: Cursing Over Cursive, Or, Rather, The Lack of It
Mamacita says: It really bothers me; it bothers me way out of proportion; it bothers me TERRIBLY, that so many elementary teachers refuse to teach cursive handwriting now. There are many reasons for this, the three biggest being lack of time due to standardized test prep and the bullshit standards thereof, lack of incentive because some teachers don’t think handwriting is necessary in this day and age of computers, and rampant stupidity lack of any understanding of the artistic extension of personality that handwriting conveys. Yes, I know that standardized test prep is a crock of shit important to some people, but frankly, I think a standardized test that tested the students’ retention of accumulated learning, rather than crammed trivia, would be far better, more accurate, and less stupid redundant.
Test the students at the end of each school year and the beginning of the next. That’ll show who’s retaining knowledge and who isn’t. It shouldn’t be rocket science, and it sure as heck shouldn’t be the freak show show that it’s become. Let each teacher teach as befits his/her personality, and let the curriculum develop as the students and teacher best need and want it to develop. Spend TIME on the wonder and magic of learning; don’t let it keep on being nothing but a year-long cramcycle, the goal being a weighed regurgitation of uninteresting facts and a contest to see who can be the best echo in the system. We don’t need any more echoes; we’ve got more than enough of those in administration already.
And the very black-and-white fact that an awful lot of our kids have never been taught how to write in cursive? Shame on. . . . well, somebody. SHAME on somebody!
Parents, sit down with your kids tonight, and ask them to show you their cursive. If your kid doesn’t know how, go to school and raise calm, reasonable, bloody hell. Call the newspaper. Make a gentle, educated scene. Chances are your child’s teacher was ordered not to teach cursive because there simply wasn’t time thanks to test prep. I’m all for standards, but prepping for a test that’s supposed to be an assessment of retained knowledge from the previous year? Or, if your school system gives THE TEST in the spring, of retained knowledge from the current year? Your kid needs CRAMMING before a test that’s supposed to measure naturally retained information over a period of time? Why would their school think that? Are they not doing their job?
Oh, Hemingway, where are you? My built-in shock-proof shit detector is going to wake the dead!
Distinctive, individual, readable cursive: where did it go? I’ve got college students whose cursive in worse than any doctor’s writing; there’s no excuse for that! Many of my younger students don’t even know how to write their own names in cursive. Parents, were you not paying attention?
Most documents require a readable cursive signature, even nowadays. Many colleges are now requiring a short handwritten essay, in cursive, along with the application.
To which I say, Write On!
