Tomorrow begins the week of midterm exams. It’s quite stressful for my students, but very boring for me. I would far rather actively teach and lead discussions than just sit there and watch people filling in little bubbles, erasing frantically, and occasionally bursting into tears.

I want to tell them not to worry so much. It’s just a piece of paper. No piece of paper will ever be as important as YOU are. Relax. Breathe deeply. Stand up and stretch when you feel the need. Go get a coke out of the machine, and maybe a Snickers bar, too. Chocolate won’t hurt your scan-tron sheet; it’s graded by a machine, and a little sugar might be just the energy boost you need. Get up and walk around the parking lot for a few minutes; clear your head. Look at the trees behind the college. Watch the squirrels. When you come back inside, take a few deep breaths, pick up your #2 pencil and begin again. Read carefully; you KNOW these things. I know you do. I’ve heard you talk about these topics for half a semester and you KNOW them. Don’t let your fear of the test itself overcome the knowledge in your head. Don’t let a piece of paper take you down. USE the piece of paper to prove your knowledge of these things. Let the piece of paper encourage you to express what you know. You are the boss of this piece of paper. This piece of paper cannot defeat you.

Actually, I did tell my students those things, last week. I hope it registered with them. Students occasionally fall apart because of the dread of a big test. The test itself is never as awful as the dread of it beforehand.

In other news, my kids have gone back to their respective homes, there are little wads of multi-colored chocolate-scented foil all over my carpet, and I have a feeling that I’ll be sifting Easter grass out of the litter box all this week.

Also, my house smells like frazzled catfish balls.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

Once again, I present to you all my rant about Easter baskets!

It’s been updated for 2008, but it’s the same rant.

Mom always created our Easter baskets herself, piece by piece, each little object carefully selected and each little foil-wrapped chocolate placed in exactly the right spot in the basket. Our Easter baskets were art. No other child in the world had Easter baskets like ours.

I create my children’s Easter baskets myself, piece by piece, each little object carefully selected and each little foil-wrapped chocolate placed in exactly the right spot in the basket. My Easter baskets might not be considered art, as Mom’s were, but no other child in the world has a basket like my children’s own individual baskets.

Mom went out and bought an Easter basket before each of her children’s first Easter, and she used the same basket for each child every single year, up until we grew up and moved away. The only reason she doesn’t still create an Easter basket for us is that we’ve all got spouses and families and NOBODY could afford to make an individual basket for that many people. People that wealthy probably don’t bother, have the nanny do it, or cop out and do it the lazy, easy way buy ready-made baskets, put together by a stranger who knows nothing about the children who will be tip-toeing into the living room Sunday morning to see what the Bunny left for them.

She considered creating one big basket for us to share, but we’ve never shared well and I doubt we’d start now.

I use the same baskets I have used every year that my children have existed. I would never even consider using a new basket, and I think, even now, that the kids would be horrified if I did. My children’s Easter baskets, like their Christmas stockings, are unique and are re-created yearly only for them.

My children aren’t even children, except they’ll always be my children. They’re in their twenties now, but I still create an Easter basket for them, every year. The eggs are boiled and cooling in the refrigerator so the kids can mix the food coloring to get all kinds of colors (science and art and holidays mix, you know) and I’ve had the basket goodies stashed away for weeks.

I think the main reason I create my children’s Easter baskets from scratch every year goes further than just admiring the way Mom did it. I don’t want to give my children something put together by anyone but me. I plan their Easter baskets long before I begin to put them together. I can see them in my mind’s eye, before they even exist. It was so with the children themselves, and it is so with the things I do for them that separate special days from ordinary days. I believe that Charles Dickens said it best:

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

The baskets in the picture are from Easter last year, AFTER the children were finished with them. That Easter grass is almost thirty years old, and all those little dangly things are, too.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

When I was a kid, there were two movie houses in town. Both were very old theaters, quite ordinary-looking on the outside. Once inside, however, there was nothing ordinary about either of them.

We bought our tickets at the booth outside the theater. Nobody entered the lobby without a ticket. Once in the lobby, the magic started, but the lobby, draped in red velvet curtains and gold trim as it was, couldn’t hold a candle to what was waiting for us through either of the two draped doorways into the theater itself.

Most old theaters, on the inside, looked like medieval castles. Since I live in The Limestone Capital of the World, our theaters were stone, inside and out. The stage itself was a genuine stage, where live plays and concerts could be performed, not just a wall with a screen hanging on it. On either side of the stage, in each of those corners, were turrets and towers and colorful flags on long poles, that made everyone in the audience feel that he/she was in a palace. There was often a real balcony by these turrets, large enough for an announcer or emcee or soloist to stand. In my mind’s eye, everything was stone, or red, or gold, or velvet, inside those old theaters.

Lining both sides of the theater were real balconies, where people who wanted to be seen could sit, but the view from the side wasn’t all that great.

The seats on the bottom floor of the theater began about a foot from the stage and extended all the way back to the opposite wall. If we sat in the front row, we had to look absolutely straight up to see the screen. Above was the main balcony, which started around the middle of the theater and went all the way up to the back wall.

“Sitting in the balcony” didn’t cover the front half of the balcony. Anybody could sit in the front half of the balcony. “Sitting in the balcony” meant, sitting in the back ten rows or so of the balcony. It didn’t have anything to do with watching a movie, either. Bad girls sat back there. Girls got pregnant just from sitting in a back balcony seat. Once a girl sat “in the balcony,” her reputation was ruined. People gasped if you mentioned that the theater was crowded and you had to sit in the balcony. Girls were asked if they had sat in the balcony, or actually “sat in the balcony.” Boys would always ask hopefully if their date wanted to sit “in the balcony.” Mothers would say, “You didn’t sit in the balcony, did you?” Teachers warned us about sitting in the balcony.

Little boys generally sat in the front row of the balcony so they could drop popcorn and ice on the people below. Sitting in those middle seats down there was hazardous.

Every theater had several ushers, in gorgeous brightly-colored uniforms and goofy hats, whose main job was to keep people quiet while the movie was playing. I sincerely wish that theaters would bring back the ushers.

I don’t remember ever going to the movies as a kid that I didn’t get to watch at least one rowdy get thrown out of the theater. Old people, young people, little kids. . . all you had to do back then was clear your throat a couple of times and the usher would be there, shining a flashlight into your face. It was awesome, and everybody else was always so grateful. If theaters would just spring for a few ushers, there would be no more disgusting chatterers, disturbing gigglers, annoying cell phone talkers or ringing, no crying babies, no climbing toddlers, no rude people at all. What they paid out for usher salaries would be made up in people coming back to the movie theaters who haven’t been in years because it was so noisy. As for offended people who didn’t return because they weren’t allowed to let their kid run wild or talk during the film. . . who cares? Good riddance.

Each theater ran only one movie at a time. A movie was usually there for a week and one, maybe two weekends. Modern theaters run a dozen or more movies at a time, and I think it takes away from the magic that movies used to be. I think studios made better quality movies when they concentrated on making one at a time, instead of trying to release as many as possible in a year’s time. Quantity isn’t the same as quality, as our mothers used to tell us. They were right, too.

Modern theaters have no individual character now, either. They’re just one huge building divided into little cells, each with a different movie showing. The cells could be somebody’s basement. None of them has any personality. Some of them have folding chairs. We don’t even have to plan ahead to go to a movie now, either. Whenever we get to the theater, there will always be some movie or another getting ready to start. Some people, these days, go to the theater and pay to see any movie that’s handy, instead of seeing a preview, reading about a movie that’s about something you’re interested in and being reminded of that preview, hearing someone who’s seen the movie talk about it, discuss going for a while, and then finally, all excitement and money in your pocket for Junior Mints, going to the movie.

Movie trailers, back then, really piqued our interest, too. They were classy and well-done, and made us interested in coming back and watching, without giving away any of the really good stuff. Modern trailers are often the best parts of the movie, including the ending, and then when you do go to see the movie, it’s boring because you’ve already seen the good stuff, or they’ve changed it so much between the time the preview was filmed and the film was released, you don’t even recognize it.

Newsreels were long before my time, but I wish they’d bring them back. It would do people good to know what’s going on in the world. They don’t show a really good cartoon before the movie any more, either, and I wish they would. Disney doesn’t count; they’re just blowing their own horn when they do it. Back in the day – and I don’t remember this either – movie stars would often visit a theater that was playing one of their films, and stand around in the lobby talking with people and signing autograph books. Nowadays, many celebrities are so full of themselves, they charge money for an autograph or brush a fan’s request aside, even when it’s not inconvenient. (Fans who bother a celebrity when he/she is busy deserve a brush-off.)

Movies are fun in any case, but having ONE BIG MOVIE playing, and everybody going to see it and therefore having something in common to discuss in study hall on Monday, was a lot more of a big deal than throwing a dart at the list of twenty-seven movies all playing seven days a week, with a new one beginning every fifteen minutes, and randomly going to see whatever title the dart hit.

I seldom go to the movies any more, mainly because of the obnoxious noisy people who aren’t thrown out any more but are allowed to remain and destroy the experience for the nice people, and because of the price. Movies are just too darn expensive now. I can wait a month, buy it on eBay or Amazon for less than the price of a ticket, keep it if I like it, and sell it back if I don’t. Complicated? Maybe, but not as much of a hassle as trying to keep my temper when I’ve paid to see a movie and can’t because of rude, immature, disgusting loud people who can’t sit still, either, and would rather DIE than turn off their cell phones, and who have more rights than well-behaved people because these days, we are all so worried about stepping on somebody’s personal rights or injuring their self esteem that we step on everybody else’s personal rights and figure the self-esteem of a nice person isn’t worth as much as the self-esteem of a rude beast.

I dream sometimes about those old-fashioned movie houses. It was so easy for a little girl to imagine being a princess, when she’s sitting underneath a bouquet of turrets.

That’s where I was sitting when I first saw Sleeping Beauty in her beautiful BLUE dress.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly