Sweet Nothings

Valentine Day exchange overheard in a Mass Pike service area convenience store.

in the candy/snack aisle, a young couple in black skinny-jeans and rock tour t-shirts can't decide on their car snacks.

She: I'm just going to get coffee

He (in a cautionary singsong): It'll make you poop...

Now that I know about this Google feature....

...I have lost whatever "free time" I had left.

I don't even have to write anything.  I just need to post this every day and it writes itself

Release the Kraken

Someone is remaking Clash of the Titans, and it isn't me.  But I sure do have a story about that.

Here is what we can tell from the trailer already:
1.  things will fly
2.  people will throw their arms out to the sides with great force
3. there is a big scorpion
4. the editor has had too much Red Bull
5. the ancients, as always, will have British accents

Here is what we know without the trailer:
it has to be better than the 1981 original.

Dodie and I had (2) recurring themes in our play: Gone With the Wind and Greek Mythology.  Say whatever you care to about your Barbie, but mine wore armor and the head of a wolf.  So show her some respect.  We were capital-A APPALLED by this mess of a movie, and I am not referring to the stop-motion special effects.  That is unfair.  While they were not "state of the art," they were not what drove us to write a multi-page screed of what was wrong with it -- from the minimalist conception of Olympus, to the pouty non-hero casting of Harry Hamlin, to the cartoonish inclusion of Bubo, the ROBOT OWL.  I'm sorry, did I shout?  Honey, you had me at Burgess Meredith.

If that white paper still exists, it is in Dodie's General Archive.  What I have is the Casting List of our remake.

This document lives where it has always lived: pressed in the pages of my Bulfinch Mythology. One side is our brainstorming casting session, rewritten and categorized on the reverse, as we had designed the credits to roll.

We would film in Cinemascope, naturally, as we felt the current film had over-used close-ups of very ungood-looking people and missed the majesty of Olympus.  (If I appear to be italicizing more than usual, you must understand that in our girlhood, we always spoke emphatically.)  Keep in mind that we had never actually seen a film in Cinemascope as it was meant to be seen.  We were used to Sunday TV airings of "One With the Win" and "Klahom," where Shirley Jones sings in profile, then cut to Gordon McRae grinning in the opposite direction. We fully expected our stars' names to be cut off as well, and we found this hilarious.

I do intend to run the full credits, but I want to caution that in addition to real actors, we cast other celebrities we liked, and people from the neighborhood.  We figured they could act as well as Ursula Andress, and it was our movie dammit.  We also said "dammit," a lot, which we thought sounded very grown-up, or at least like Guiding Light.  So for the sake of those people from our high school that we cast, I'll just describe them parenthetically, so you can get the gist of the casting decisions.  We stayed with Roman names because Dodie is Italian and insisted.

Please remember that it is 1981.  And we still had Olympic Fever.

======================================================================
The First Six
Jupiter - Richard Burton
Neptune - (the local piano teacher.  I forget why.  Perhaps because he was bald, and we felt that Neptune should be)
Pluto - Christopher Bernau (Shout out, fans.  this is Alan Spaulding from GL, who also had the distinction of being on Dark Shadows)
Juno - Elizabeth Taylor (not yet a car wreck in a dress.  And we thought, Cleopatra AND Juno?  Yeh, that's about right)
Ceres - Vanessa Redgrave (the Zionist Hoodlums boooo)
Vesta - (our Latin teacher in a cameo role)

The Children
Mars - Michael York
Vulcan - Gary Burghoff (if your spit-take is over, let me explain.  We felt this could be his dramatic breakout role and allow him to exploit his withered hand)
Hebe - (one of our classmates - Hebe was a favorite of mine, an obscure descendent that I thought needed more screentime.  And it rhymes with Pheobe, you wiseacre)
Apollo - remains uncast.  I think we could not agree on Parker or Shaun
Artemis - June Allyson (note that we also had the power to cast younger versions of people as we saw fit.  In retrospect I like Susan Hayward better here, or a teenaged Maureen O'Hara.  One thing is certain -- we thought Artemis was a redhead)
Venus - Vivian Leigh
Mercury - Mark  Hamill
Hercules - Christopher Reeve

Prosephone - what's written here is "Hope Bauer."  See how nicely that goes with our casting of Alan at Pluto?  ha-HAH, you're catching on.  For the record, we meant Elvera Roussel.

Bacchus - (Dodie's first kiss.  It was a joke.  oh, how we laughed)

Young Cupid - Ricky Schroeder.  (I really wrote "Ricky")

Cupid - Randy Gardner (don't worry...Tai will play Psyche)

Minor Olympians  Dodie has scratched this and written Featuring
I guess there were Union troubles
Pan - George C Scott (known in our secret twinspeak as "Pig Paws."  His name is never meant to be spoken, so Dodie has written "G.C.S")
Prometheus - Richard Chamberlin (I wanted him shirtless)

The Heroes
We scratched Orpheus here, moved him to a section called The Lovers, then cut that entire section.  It was made up of the A-List couples in school and Ben and Amanda from GL.

Perseus - Harrison Ford.  Seriously.  Harry Hamlin?  Please remember that in 1981, Ford looked like Indiana Jones.
w/Dodie as Andromeda
Theseus - (Dodie's current crush)  w/Eve Plumb as Ariadne.  We wanted to rescue her from Brady Brides
Jason - Timothy Murphy (this is a real one-hit wonder.  He was in the Kent Chronicles movies.) w/ (the English teacher we hated) as Medea.


The Iliad

I would think I had added this on my own, if not for Dodie's handwriting in the casting of Paris.  I made sure Parker got in the movie by putting him here.

Achilles - Parker Stevenson
Helen - myself.  I cast myself as Helen of Troy.  I looked like this at the time.
Paris - Robin Cousins
Aeneas - Clark Gable (maybe with a moustache.  definitely with an open shirt)

There follows another section of cameos of people we just liked, like our World History teacher, my next door neighbor, the spinster/sister school teachers who all lived together and probably were Graeae already.  ("GIMME THE EYE!")

There is also a note that Katharine Hepburn and George Cukor should be "Associate Directors."  Cause that's a thing.

Like most great films....it is in permanent Turnaround.

115 days

I didn't count them all along.  I didn't even count them correctly in the beginning.  I suppose John Kennedy would have done more in 100+ days than I did while laid off, but then I sir, am no John Kennedy.  But what I did do was turn around unemployment within 3 months, with an entire holiday season thrown in.  Made a gross of cookies.  Ate a LOT of lunch. Took a vacation and turned 46.

What have you been up to?

I am not really here to toot my own horn (though, ya know.... Toot).  This production number comes with some credits, and they are these:
- The team down-the-Mill who packaged a painless layoff and made it possible to leave them laughing.  (Well, I was, anyway.) 
- Financial Dan - the first person I called
- Smurph, who hooked me up with Outlook before I went into the DTs
- The at-home moms, dads, and self-employed contractors who make Facebook the best malt shoppe to hang out in
- The unemployed Emersonians network, including those who are re-employed, and came forward with a lot of advice and encouragement
- The People's Republic of Massachusetts.  If this is what a Nanny state feels like, well tuck me in.
- All your kids.  Everything seems possible with a little Lego.
- Everyone who made time.  Fuh li'l ole me.
- Memphis.  Still.  I can't tell you enough how right place/right time that trip was.
- NaBloPoMo, for somewhere to put all the brain energy.
- Miss Read, for the project
- The dear dear Readership.  You know who you are.

It hardly felt like a hardship.  Just the leave of absence I needed that might have forgiven a host of sins.  But that is not how we do, is it?  Instead we work 1900 days at full throttle until we are too flooded to keep in the garage.  I rounded up, because there were a damn lot of Saturdays.

Signing on to the New Mill on Monday.  Please flip your calendars.



*Ouija Lunchbox by Paul van Scott, available at etsy.com

It is really OK for you to watch the Super Bowl for the game

You don't have to pretend anymore.  In fact, if you are still telling yourself  (and others) you are watching the Super Bowl for the ads, you are unneccessarily making  Football Dip.  Because you have ample opportunity to see these ads before the game ever airs, and you will be unable to get away from them after it does.

Here are my Top 4 reasons for missing the game if all you say you are interested in are the commercials.

Super Bowl Ads are not really relevant
They were once, it is true -- in a Ad Game Sweeps Day of sorts.  For about 20 years, the big companies saved their top dollars and high-concepts for late-January (when the game used to air) and we could look forward to them like the prom theme and the yearbook cover.  Which were also, in the scheme of an academic year, irrelevant.

SuperBowl splash no longer launches an annual campaign (because there rarely are any anymore) or a slogan or logo shift, and they are hardly considered game-changers.  Advertisers and PR big names admit that they look to the zeitgeist first and make their ad based on that, rather than try to shake up the culture.  Hence, watch for send-ups of YouTube videos you have already seen, and inside jokes from Facebook.  They aren't abstract impressionists, they are advertisers.  Remember that scene in Nothing in Common, where Tom Hanks says, "I don't have a novel in my drawer.  I like advertising."  Showing you something that already makes you feel good is a sure thing.

Super Bowl ads are too expensive to bother
The price came down this year, by half a million dollars.  Super Bowl ratings are up, it's true, but for all the talk of "we watch for the commercials," there is little evidence of return on the investment.  Do sales go up, does market share increase, does anyone remember the product in question?  When the contest involves middle America (as it does this year), the major markets check right out.  For $3M, even a multi-billion corporation knows it can get more impressions elsewhere.

We don't always remember the product
When we do watch it, and talk about it, and parody it, we can't always remember what it was for.  Recently, a radio host described an entire storyboard from last year's game, but didn't know what it was for.  (In fact, it was Pepsi, the big player who elected not to buy this time.  Now that's a game-changer.)

We don't have to watch the game to see the ads
Morning news magazine love them the most, and will show them all, and discuss them to death in the days before and after they air.  I suspect that the "controversial ads" we hear about are in fact made up.  Why pay 3M to say your company's name for 30 seconds when you can pay the cost of making one, tell the news outlets you think America "is not ready" for it, and let them say your company's name 50 times in 3 minutes, 5 times before 9am.

In fact, Apple, Monster, CareerBuilder, Snickers, Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, and e*Trade enjoy the residual-free luxury of having their commercials replayed every year when we talk about legendary Super Bowl ads.  It is true that if you tell a story often enough for long enough, it becomes -- by definition -- a legend.

(nice to see that Coke in a glass bottle, ain't it?)


If you really do watch the game to see the ads, good on ya.  TiVo the game and skip through to the ads.  Nothing would make the advertisers happier.  Then spend your Sunday where it really matters" catching up on Oscar nominees.