The Sunrise on Sunset

My Mom has been a subscriber to Sunset Magazine since I was a kid. I didn't give it a second thought. What did I need to know about gardening, cooking or travel in my own back yard?

Flash forward 20 years and the bourgeois dreams of Sunset Magazine are mine. I still don't cook or garden, but I like seeing other people do it so well. And, having traveled the world, the West has cities, forests, mountains, lakes, canyons, deserts, and an ocean of its own worth a look.

In a sidebar from the September 2007 issue, I learned about Craig Calfee who builds bamboo bikes. How cool is a strong, light, resilient and eco-friendly bike?

With my new appreciation for Sunset, I realize that it's the original DIY mag.

Check it out aging baby boomers.

Sanctioned Movies

Every night for the last nine years and counting, my partner and I fall asleep with a tape or DVD of a movie playing on the television. It's not my favorite way to drift off. In fact, "Drop me; pluck me like a goddamn whatever-it-is...creeping vine, and throw me over your shoulder like an old shoe" isn't the last thing I want to hear before drifting into slumber land. But it is the brilliant Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" That's why it's a sanctioned movie. A sanctioned movie is one that's allowed to lull us to sleep.

There are rules. It's not all anarchy at bedtime. One of the rules is that some movies are only played during their season. There are summer movies and winter movies.

Summer Sanctioned Movies:

Body Heat, 1981, William Hurt watches a waitress pull on her uniform in a stuffy hotel room as a natural gas fire burns in the red sky outside.

The very cacophonous Father Goose (1964) that I loved as a child but wakes me every time with crashes, mega phones and a screeching whistle of a theme song.

Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

Winter Sanctioned Movies:

Gosford Park (2001)
Moonstruck (1987)
One True Thing (1998)
Howard's End (1992)

Then there are the dreaded Christmas movies: Jim Carrey in The Grinch, Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation, Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, and the obnoxious Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.

I try to subtly encourage my favorites, The Jane Austen quartet.

Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice (any version including the 6 hour BBC or the luminous Keira Knightley but miscast Simon Woods (I wig wouldn't have been overdone)).

There's a Saturday Night movie, The Odd Couple, a film for all seasons.

The Woody Allen's and the Doris Day's all have their say.

But, along with the Jane Austen's, my favorite are the quiet films. Alfred Hitchcock qualifies. Vertigo has little dialogue and long passages of moody music. Rear Window is the same. Set up. Story. Suspense. A beautiful, simple construction.

Strangely enough, my other favorites are kids movies. Having loved being read to as a little girl, I can listen to any Harry Pottery or Lord of the Rings movie and pass right out.

The truth is, that my partner is a writer and, with the exception of Mildred Pierce and the mystifying Frank Sinatra picture Hole in the Head, the dialogue of our dreams is wonderful.

Two for the Road (1967)



Best Friends (1982)
All About Eve (1950)
The Goodbye Girl (1977)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sideways (2004)
Brideshead Revisited (1981)

Looking at the list, I'm struck by how each film is perfect. The directing, acting, and writing. They are perfect gems and I'm lucky to take them to bed.

What I Know for Sure

In the tradition of Oprah's last page of O Magazine, I know for sure that after reading the New York Times society page for many years, if you're a third grade teacher in New York and surrounds, you will marry an investment banker or lawyer. Ladies looking for stay-at-home mom positions, put "grade school teacher" on your eharmony, jdate, or Match.com postings and you're in. The other way couples meet is in college. There are lots of Harvard grades, both magna cum laude, starting their young lives together.

I justify reading the society page because I look for interesting jobs. Admittedly, my eyes glaze over when I see "investment banker" and "lawyer." Obviously I missed my calling as a stay-at-home mom.

By far the most interesting couple are Anjali and Chuck. Anjali's father is a photojournalist living in Paris. Great job. Great city. Her mother sells real estate. Well, someone has to make a living. Chuck's mom is a life coach. (Most moms on the society pages are on the board of charities, social workers, therapists or teachers. Of course, as I'm looking up Mother jobs to make my case, I'm finding all the exceptions to the rules: the parents that worked in tape recording and motorcycle factories in the Ukraine, and the mother retired as executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies in New York.)

Chuck studied everything East Asian (Princeton, Rutgers, Swarthmore) and Anjali edits books for Vintage after graduating from Brown.

While in Taiwan finishing his dissertation, Chuck wooed Anjali by narrating a tape of the sounds he recorded of Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, Swallows baseball game, and gaming parlor.

Isn't it romantic?

Big Love

The August 29, 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, "Not much to like in 'Big Love' finale," Patrick Day complains that Barb, wife number one in a three-wife polygamist family trying to live a middle-class life in Utah, has been griping at and questioning her husband Bill's decisions all season only to turn 180 degrees during the finale to support Bill. What Patrick misses is the theme of big love: power. Bill wants the invisible hand of power over the compound because he was kicked out and became a "lost boy" as a teen. Barb wants power as first wife. Wife number two, Nicolette, tries to manipulate Bill and the other sister-wives to keep power but without the security of the compound where she grew up and knew the power structure, is imploding into a gambling addiction. Third wife, Margene, was so young when she married into the family that she's just growing up and trying to figure out what she wants and how to get it.

Why did Barb back Bill in the last moments of the show? One of Barb's sister-wives, Nicolette's mother (played with intense gravity by Mary Kay Place) gives Barb advice. You lose power when you work against your husband. Barb took it to heart. In for a penny, in for a pound. That's how she'll go into next season and I'll bet the other wives will feel the shift and connive and manipulate to get a bigger piece of Bill. Something I want to see.

As another article in the Times reported recently, the only place to find actresses in their prime, 40's and older, is TV. Actors want to work and the best scripts are for the small screen. And "Big Love" is full of complicated, self-interested women trying to get what they want at any cost, just like the men.

Walk About

Years ago, my friend, Theresa, and I worked as word processors at a law firm in San Francisco. We always listened to the radio as we worked. One day we had our earphones in listening to Fresh Air. Terry was interviewing a woman who had gone to Australia and ended up in the outback with a group of Aboriginals telling her that they had a dream telling them that she would lead the entire group on a "walk about" to find water.

You can imagine the tut tutting and gasps as our fingers flew on the keyboard typing some boring legal brief as we listened in horror to this story. Days went by in the desert and the woman and the tribe were near death with ants crawling in their noses and thirst making them delirious. The woman's thinking, what on earth is going on? I'm going to kill these people and myself. She begged them to stop trusting her, but they insisted and were willing to die in their belief. She ended up dreaming of an ice cube and found water the next day. Since then, "walk about" has been Theresa and my code for "hell no, we won't go."

Funny Mommy Blogs

Having no kids myself, but with lots of friends with little ones, I believe that women go stir crazy as stay-at-home moms. That's why my two favorite blogs are mommy blogs.

http://www.dooce.com/

http://www.qcreport.blogspot.com/

They are funny and grouchy, my favorite kind of folks.