Dennis Miller: I don't wanna go on a rant here, but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowulf having sex with Robert Fulton at the First Battle of Antietam, I mean when a Neo-Conservative defenestrates, it's like Raskolnikov filibustered deoxymonohydroxinate Peter Griffin: What the hell does rant mean?
So for the last couple of years, I’ve been doing a Memorial Day post that’s been largely photos, with a little bit of side information thrown in. This year won’t be a lot different, but let me start with a little history:
Memorial Day was originally the brainchild of a pharmacist in Waterloo, NY named Henry Welles. Noting that New York State had experienced greater losses in the Civil War than any other state, he organized a community-based memorial in 1866. A parade was held, and people gathered to decorate the gravestones of the men who had died. This became known as “Decoration Day” and spread to many other communities until, in 1868, General John Logan proclaimed May 30 to be a day of commemoration for the Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Meanwhile, a judge in New York’s Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) named Francis Finch was inspired by his tours of the South following the war, and wrote a poem titled “The Blue and the Gray”, which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. This led to a widespread interest in a national movement to establish a single day of commemoration for the soldiers who had died on both sides in the Civil War. New York became the first state in the Union to recognize Decoration Day as a holiday, beginning in 1873. By 1889, “Decoration Day” had become “Memorial Day” and was a national holiday celebrated on May 30 every year until 1971, when (like so many other holidays) observance was moved to the last Monday in May.
Some editorial cartoonists’ take on Memorial Day. I’ve tried to choose a bunch that didn’t take too left or right a slant. With one exception I think I succeeded. In that last case the overall message was the thing that shone through, and the political angle was a side note:
John McCutcheon, 1900. The caption for this cartoon is: “You bet I’m goin’ to be a soldier, too, like my Uncle David, when I grow up.”
Robert Satterfield, 1919.
Hy Rosen, 1963.
Chan Lowe, 2003. Not much has changed in this arena, unfortunately.
Ted Mosby: That's it. I'll have to move to another country, one where they're not showing The Wedding Bride. Robin Scherbatsky: Good luck, Ted. That movie has gone worldwide. It's huge. Lily Aldrin: Maybe North Korea. Robin Scherbatsky: No, I heard Kim Jong Il saw it and it's his second favorite movie, right behind one of him running in slow motion in a field of turnips.
—How I Met Your Mother, “The Wedding Bride” (5/17/10)
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It’s often fun to go to the movies, if only for the immersive experience that they provide. Plus, there’s the popcorn with the butter-flavored grease (or, if you went to the Senator when Kiefaber was running the place, “real creamery butter”). What I don’t like about them is the excessive hype. You really get the idea sometimes that the guys who are making the ads are being creative about what they pull out of the reviews. For instance, this comes from a real review of The DaVinci Code:
Akiva Goldsman, otherwise not particularly inspired screenwriter, does a solid job with surprisingly faithful adaptation. This is probably due to Brown’s source material not being something exceptional. The novel is nothing more than rehash of secret histories like THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL, neatly packed with some New Age ideas and rather generic conspiracy thriller plot. Goldsman kept most of novel’s flaws, but he, thankfully, didn’t succumb to the usual Hollywood standards of sacrificing exposition in order to provide audience with more brainless action. The exposition is actually the best and most valuable part of the film, providing viewers with more food for thought than they were accustomed to expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. (draxblog movie reviews, draxreview.wordpress.com)
This becomes:
Akiva Goldsman…does a solid job…surprisingly faithful…something exceptional…the best and most valuable…film, providing viewers with more food for thought…a Hollywood blockbuster.
Sprinkle in a few exclamation points and you get the idea. So that gets to be a drag, so I’m pretty careful nowadays about the films I see, and more often than not I just wait until it’s on video or cable. Nice life for a former Communications major, huh?
Some films do manage to rise above the hype by living up to it, however. And we’ve all seen a bunch of the “One Million Greatest Films Of All Time” or whatever kind of lists, and they all bring something to the table, I guess. But they don’t necessarily convey what it is that makes the movies named so special. So herein, I present to you, in no special order, a list of Movies That Changed The Way Movies Are Made.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Kane is one of those films that gets an awful lot of credit for a lot of things, and rightly so, which is probably why it’s tough to remember that it was a box-office flop the first time around despite the good reviews it received. During its initial run, Citizen Kane lost about $150,000, which was roughly 20% of what it cost to make. And it’s not even that Orson Welles invented the techniques used in the film; in fact he didn’t. What he did do was use them to such effect that they became staples of filmmaking: deep focus (sometimes using special lenses, sometimes using in-camera mattes); curtain wipes, miniatures, J-cuts (when the audio transitions ahead of the picture in a scene change), flashbacks and montages. It almost doesn’t matter that the movie begins with a huge hole in the plot. I’ll also concede that it’s not such a compelling movie that it’s an automatic stop if I catch it while channel-surfing, but I’ll usually stick with it for awhile just to bask in the awesomeness of the film techniques.
Here’s a weird little Kane story: when I was in college and taking the “Art of Film and TV” course, we were assigned to go to the library and view the opening scenes of Citizen Kane so that we could discuss it in class next time we met. During the scene where Kane dies (not a spoiler, it’s at the beginning), the nurse comes in and pulls the sheet over Kane’s face. As she does so, the soundtrack for the clip we were viewing encountered a glitch, so that as the sheet came up, the music slowed and ground to a halt, so that we had a moment of silence in the film. It synchronized so well with the action on the screen, that those of us who hadn’t seen it before thought that that was supposed to happen, and we all marveled at this cool audio technique. It wasn’t until the next day, when the teacher showed the clip again as a means of review, that we saw something wasn’t quite right. “Hey! That’s not what happened in the library!” The teacher didn’t realize that the clip was bad and qsuestioned us about it. It made for a great discussion.
Seven Samurai (1954)
Wife hates this film, because of the subtitles (she doesn’t dig any film that’s mostly subtitles), but I love Seven Samurai. And I don’t understand a word of Japanese, but I like to listen to the actors speaking, so I’ll actually keep the volume up even though it isn’t really necessary. Most people know by now that it’s the inspiration for 1960’s The Magnificent Seven, but the biggest contribution by that film was its theme. Seven Samurai was probably the first film to bring a disparate bunch of characters together to achieve a common goal (cf. Ocean’s Eleven or The Dirty Dozen). It’s also the first film to give us the very end of the main character’s previous adventure before moving into the current one (cf James Bond and Indiana Jones). Part of the success of this story is that director Akiro Kurosawa wrote an entire backstory for any character who had a line. It clocks in at 207 minutes, but it’s worth the trip. Fun fact: the Japanese language has no definite article (“the”), so translation of the title into “The Seven Samurai” is idomatically correct, but not a literal translation.
The Godfather (1972)
At the top of so many lists because of its compelling story, The Godfather improved upon the Gangster Movie genre in two important ways. Prior to this film, mafia films in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not doing well at the box office, despite all the star power they poured into them. Paramount head Robert Evans decided that the problem was that none of the people making these films—on either side of the camera—were Italian. Consequently they suffered from a certain lack of verisimilitude. It was at his insistence that most of the actors in the film were Italians. (Can you imagine Ryan O’Neal as Michael Corleone? It almost happened.) It’s a well-known story that Evans, upon seeing the first cut of The Godfather, sent Coppola back into the editing room to make the film LONGER. Evans was looking for “the spaghetti”, the family end of the story that ties the whole thing together. Later mafia films did the same: length plus a family of some sort. If The Godfather hadn’t happened, GoodFellas wouldn’t have come along to improve on the model.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
This is another film in the realm of Citizen Kane for me: it’s not necessarily an automatic stop, but it’s so beautifully shot, and some things are done so technically well that you have to admire this piece of work. 2001, like Kane and most of the titles here, is where we get to say “film” rather than “movie”, if you catch my distinction. Part of the attraction, again, is verisimilitude: silence in space, the design of the spaceship Discovery, the little mundane touches like the phone call home. Perhaps the only scene that’s deliberately funny involves Heywood Floyd nervously studying the detailed instructions on the Zero Gravity Toilet. What’s cool is that those are real instructions; it’s not as though Kubrick put some placeholder text on the sign because nobody could read it anyway. Click on the picture to get the full text. Sure, things like Pan Am and Bell Telephone don’t exist anymore, but those companies weren’t the point of the story.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
One of the things I really enjoy about this film is the “slow burn”. It’s a movie that takes place over a long period of time, and offers all kinds of tiny little clues with regard to the way the relationships are developing, what could come along later in the story, and so on. People who are easily bored could conceivably tune out quickly, but for those who manage to hang in there, the payoff is fantastic as the story picks up speed and refuses to let up. I don’t think that this film affected other films so much as it did the television industry. Shawshank paved the way for shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire, which took a long time to set the table and then knocked you on your back with the resolution. The plot line also gave us a denouement that we didn’t necessarily need, but allowed us to breathe a little and see the “ending beyond the ending”.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
How did a film from 1903 change moviemaking forever? Because it was the first film to have a plot. It was a series scenes, laid out in a specific order, that together told a story. And if you don’t think it’s had any influence on modern-day film, consider the scene in the picture at left. Justus D. Barnes shoots directly at the camera—and therefore the viewer—in a scene that appears either at the beginning of the film or the end, (it was up to the operator where it went; all of the known prints have it at the end). It was a scene that terrified audiences, who weren’t used to the “language” of film yet, and reportedly got out of the way. Both Goodfellas and American Gangster did the same thing; Goodfellas does it right before the closing credits and in American Gangster it happens right after the credits. You could also argue that the idea of rounding up people in a public place and taking their money (rather than stealing from the train) had its influence on the diner scene in Pulp Fiction.
Incidentally, some people would put Pulp Fiction on a list like this one, but I’m not inclined to, mostly because while the nonlinear narrative was groundbreaking in its way, it’s not something that’s influenced the way other movies have been made, which is the criterion for this list. Oh, and Kane did it first.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Truth be told, I kept going back and forth on this one because I didn’t really like the film that much. But whether or not you like it, I think it has to be conceded that this film had two major influences on film making: first, they demonstrated that you can make a decent film on a very small budget and still manage to make a few bucks ($20,000 to make, $250,000,000 in earnings). Second, and perhaps a little more controversial, was the extensive use of the handheld camera. Now, in Blair Witch Project it makes sense, since the camera is proving a specific point of view throughout the movie. But this also inspired many other directors to take a similar approach to their own films, perhaps in order to give their movies a kind of cinéma vérité feel that they haven’t necessarily earned (Public Enemies, I’m looking at you). So there’s good and there’s bad in this one, but I don’t think anyone can argue that this one has had its effect.
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Not the whole film, but the one scene that takes place on the Odessa Steps. In this scene, the Czar’s soldiers march down a huge flight of stairs, firing into a crowd of people. At the bottom of the stairs are Cossacks, marching upward. People are shot, people are trampled, and a baby goes sailing down the stairs in his carriage. There are multiple points of view presented, numerous instances of parallel action, close-ups that emphasize the horror of what is going on, and ultimately we are lulled into feeling exactly what director Sergei Eisenstein wants us to feel. It’s a brilliant piece of propaganda that’s so good, it hardly matters that, in this otherwise historical film, the events in this scene never actually took place.
I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch, and I know a few of you are also former Communications majors. What would you add to the list, and why?
Major Strasser: We have a complete dossier on you. Richard Blaine, American, age 37. Cannot return to his country. The reason is a little vague. We also know what you did in Paris, Mr. Blaine, and also we know why you left Paris. [hands the dossier to Rick] Major Strasser: Don't worry, we are not going to broadcast it. Rick: [looks up from the notes] Are my eyes really brown?
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid. How this is the case, I’m not sure, since filming started in MAY of 1942 and the film wasn’t widely released until January of 1943.
Stories about this film are myriad: a lot of the writing was done during shooting, many times the actors weren’t quite sure what was going on, the film had a very low budget and had to make a couple of cost-cutting moves (perhaps most notable was that the plane at the end of the film was made of cardboard and used both little people and forced perspective to make it look larger; this also explains all the fog), the director’s Hungarian accent often made things tough for the crew, and so on. But the undeniable fact is that it all came together to create one of the finest, most perfect films of all time. Like so many others that get that designation, it’s a very rich tapestry of characters, plot, humor, danger, love, sex (mostly implied but that’s OK), drama, acts of heroism and complicated bad guys.
Last night, to mark the occasion of the 70th anniversary of it being six weeks before the first day of principal shooting—that’s all I can come up with for this date—Turner Classic Movies staged a nationwide big-screen showing of Casablanca. Locally, it took place at the Egyptian Theatre in Hanover, at the Arundel Mills Mall. So last night, I took Wife and Wee One out for A Sold-Out Night In Casablanca.
The Egyptian is the largest movie theater in Maryland and possibly on the East Coast. And, given the décor, they really took the name to heart: columns abound with hieroglyphics on them (they also have “cracks” in the facades to make them look older), a statue of Anubis guards the entrance from the parking lot, and there are murals of desert scenes everywhere. Once you’re into the theater area, it’s strictly a modern setting, with stadium-style auditoriums of about 500 high-back rocker-style seats. It’s a pretty sweet setup.
Because it was put together by TCM, the show itself begins with an introduction by Robert Osborne. This one, however, was more extensive, featuring interviews with some of the actors and production staff, including the woman at Warner Brothers who talked Hal Wallis into buying the unproduced play script. This was interspersed with LOTS of clips from the film itself. It got to the point where Wee One finally asked, “Are they going to show us the whole movie here?” From my standpoint, it seemed as though nearly everyone in the audience was not seeing the film for the first time, but I can imagine many of those clips being spoilers for someone who hadn’t seen it before. It also made it sound especially disingenuous when, at the end of the introduction, Osborne says something about, “Whether you’re seeing it here for the first time, or the hundredth time…”, clearly oblivious to the fact that the film was kind of ruined for the ones seeing it for the first time. (Frankly, I’m not positive that Wee One had seen the film in its entirety before last night; I know she’s seen pieces of it.) Most of those clips could have been cut shorter, or replaced with production stills, and nobody would have minded.
Wee One has been taking some art classes in school, specifically concentrating on pencil drawings lately, and this came through at one point during the film itself, when she looked at one particular shot of Ingrid Bergman with the gauze filters and the catch lights (they make her eyes sparkle), and said, “I want to draw her.” Then she pestered me to find a still from that specific scene after we got home. But for a kid with attention issues, she really stuck with the film. Even if she didn’t necessarily get all of the politics involved, she got most of the jokes, she caught a lot of nuances, she pointed out a couple of production issues (specifically Dooley Wilson’s piano “playing” and Bogart’s coat miraculously drying as he got on the train), and came away with a generally positive experience about a truly great film.
Woody Boyd: Most of my furniture comes from the interior of cars. I got to be careful when I shave, ‘cause objects may be closer than they appear.
—Cheers, “Rebecca Redux” (10/4/1990)
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I have two methods of shaving: either using a rechargeable electric shaver in the car (at traffic lights; I’m no fool), or while I’m in the shower.
In both cases, I don’t use shaving cream. You don’t do that with an electric shaver, of course. And when you’re in the shower, if you wait until the end, then the hot water and steamy air has saturated your beard enough that you don’t need it in the shower, either.
But this story, oddly enough, isn’t really about me. It’s about my grandfather.
My grandfather was a greenskeeper, one of the guys who takes care of golf courses. They get up very early in the morning. In my grandfather’s case, that was at roughly 4:00 every day, even on the days he didn’t have to work. He’d go out front and get the newspaper. Occasionally this meant waiting a few minutes for it to come flying out of the passing car that delivered them. He’d take the newspaper inside and open it up to the comics section first. “Always read the funnies first,” he’d say. “The rest of the news is so miserable that you should start your day with a laugh.” That’s advice I took to heart, incidentally. He’d read the paper and eat his breakfast, which was invariably a bowl of Special K cereal. I don’t know why he liked that cereal so much, but I do know that he was kind of bummed when they changed the shape of the flake. And then, off to work he’d go. .
But this story isn’t about my grandfather’s morning routine. Not exactly.
The point is, he had a job which required him to be out on the links around 5:30 or so in the morning, ensuring that the grass got watered, that the greens were trimmed (greens are done every day; tees and fairways less often), that the sand traps were raked, and so on. The course had to be ready to go when the first golfers arrived. So the only people that my grandfather typically saw were his co-workers, and the occasional early riser whose house backed on the course. He didn’t have to look good for anybody, so he didn’t bother shaving his face every day. Once every three or four days usually did the trick.
I guess it was because he did it relatively seldom, but my grandfather made a real ritual out of shaving. He had a shaving brush, but he also liked to use aerosol shave cream (Barbasol, specifically). He also used a safety razor, the old style where you twisted the bottom and it made the top open up, and it held a single blade that was sharpened on both sides. He’d remove the blade from a piece of tissue paper in which he’d stored it, and put it into the razor handle. Then he’d wash his face and apply the lather, keeping it shallow but really working it into that three- or four-days’-worth of beard growth.
As I recall, he made two passes with the razor. First he would go “with the grain”, essentially shaving downward on each stroke. Then for certain spots he’d reverse and go “against the grain”. But “with” always came first. If he cut himself (rare), he’d use a styptic pencil rather than the bits of toilet paper you see occasionally in older movies or TV shows. Styptic pencils are tough to explain, but if you have a pet whose nails have been trimmed a little too deeply, and you’ve seen the groomer dip the nail into that powder? Same stuff. Finish up, wash the face again and then rinse and dry off the razor and the blade thoroughly. Then, he’d wrap the blade back up in the tissue paper. This whole bit took almost twenty minutes.
Now, here’s the part that I presume belongs uniquely to him, but let me give you a little bit of backstory: my grandfather liked esoteric bits of information. Shortly after he and my grandmother moved to Florida, the St. Petersburg Times printed a map of the state with the different counties outlined. He took the time to count them and then cut the map out of the newspaper and stuck it to the refrigerator. For years—I’m talking at least fifteen years—I’d walk past the fridge and get a reminder that Florida has 67 counties. (Go look it up.) Why was he interested in that fact? I have no idea. But there it was, stuck to that Avocado Green fridge.
So the last detail my grandfather would do before he put everything away was, he’d take a pen and mark the tissue paper with a tally mark, indicating another use of the blade. For whatever reason, he got into a habit years earlier of counting how many shaves he got out of a blade, and it stayed with him until the end. For the most part, he’d get about a dozen shaves out of a blade before it got dull and started irritating him. Often he’d get more.
Related story: when my uncle—the same grandfather’s son—got married, his father-in-law was a career Navy officer. So his approach to shaving was a little different. Get in, get it done quickly, get it done well and get the hell out. What’s more, as a career officer he had to shave every single day. Needless to say, his razor blades didn’t last as long as my grandfather’s did. Every once in awhile, at family gatherings, these two fathers-in-law (is there a word for their relationship to one another?) would chit-chat, and, as my grandfather’s story goes, they got to talking about their shaving habits. As you do, I guess, when the alcohol starts flowing. My grandfather mentioned that he keeps track of the number of shaves he gets out of a blade, and cited some number of shaves that he usually gets. “It was bad enough when I told him that a lot of times I get 20 shaves,” he said, “but when I told him that I once got 83…”
“Eighty-three!” I said.
“Yeah, one time I got eighty-three shaves from a single blade. So when I said that to Carl, he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and—” and it was at this that he pantomimed Carl, putting his hand to his forehead. Not smacking himself but rather just raising the hand and placing it there, as if testing to see if his head was about to explode. “Of course, he wasn’t going to get that many, because he had to shave every day. But every now and again, we’d compare notes. But I’ll never forget him putting his hand up to his head"—and here, he pantomimed it again—“because he couldn’t believe that number.”
The Conductor: The thing about trains... it doesn't matter where they're going. What matters is deciding to get on.
—The Polar Express (2004)
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Last week, I got an invitation to what sounds like an interesting event.
Tonight, the National Aquarium, down at the Inner Harbor, is hosting a Meet-and-Tweet of The Polar Express, starring a motion-captured Tom Hanks and numerous, less-famous others. They’re promising this to be a “4-D Experience”. What that means, I don’t know. Could be Smell-O-Vision, could be a guy sneaking up behind and tickling you. The most they’re saying is that there are “special sensory effects”. I imagine that it’s much like the old Captain Eo movie they had down in Walt Disney World several years back. But I guess Wee One and I will find out for sure in a few hours.
Everyone who attends is expected to bring smartphones, cameras, laptops, and so forth, and is expected to live-blog or live-tweet the event. Wee One and I will be doing a little of both: she’ll be commenting via Facebook, and I’ll be live-tweeting (you can follow me @claudecall if you’re so inclined). My tweets will automatically carry over to Facebook, and in another day or so I’ll do a blog post here.
Patty Bouvier: I can't believe Homer ruined another family barbecue. Homer Simpson: [offended] Hey! Everybody pees in the pool! Patty Bouvier: Not from the diving board!
Wife and I are planning to take a trip in a few weeks. For the second time, we want to go see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the flesh, then have our Thanksgiving Dinner in a restaurant. Friday will be a Tourist Day for us, although given that I’m a transplanted native, it won’t be especially touristy. But I’ve already digressed and the story hasn’t even started yet.
Thanksgiving Dinner is typically hosted at the Parkville Palace (i.e., our house), but since we’ll be away, Wife wanted to do a nice family dinner before the holiday. Everyone’s calendars matched up nicely for last night, so sometime last week she set the date.
This meant some high-speed meal planning for me, but Wife advised that I not make it as fancy and multi-course as our usual Turkey Day offering. Oddly enough, I was more than comfortable with that idea. So when I spotted a Safeway circular in the newspaper that offered up some complete meals for a reasonable price, I said to myself “Hey, this might do the trick.” There was a choice of the turkey dinner, the ham dinner or the prime rib dinner. (I would have loved the prime rib, but Wife’s family has this habit of ordering their meat overcooked, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.)
Now, the turkey dinner has all of the typical trimmings, with the mashed potatoes, the gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce among a couple of others, but the prime rib and the ham have the same side dishes. If you can’t see them in the picture, it’s Scalloped Potatoes au gratin, Corn Medley (what kind of songs do you hear in a corn medley?), Green Bean Casserole, a dozen dinner rolls and an apple pie. All you have to do is warm it up. Simple, right?
On Friday afternoon I called the toll-free number in the ad. This is actually where the trouble started, only I wasn’t smart enough to read the warning signs. The guy who answered the phone was, to be generous, not the brightest bulb on the string. The first thing he asked for was my first name, which is reasonable. My name is not something that people automatically know how to spell, so I immediately spelled it out for him. He didn’t get it on the first try, so I spelled it for him a second time. On this second attempt he read it back to me; it came back as something like “C, R, L, E”. I asked him, “Does that look like anybody’s first name to you? Let’s try it once more.” He finally got my name, then my phone number. OK, says I, we’re sailing smoothly now.
The next question was my zip code. From this information he deduced that I was located in Baltimore City. Based on this fact, he asked me which of the four stores in Baltimore City I wanted to use: Lauraville, Canton, Charles Village or the one out on Baltimore National Pike. I told him that I didn’t want to use any of those; I wanted to use the one in Parkville. This, he couldn’t find. As it happens, part of the reason he couldn’t find it was because he was looking for a Safeway in “Parksville”, but even after I straightened that out, he still couldn’t figure it out. Then he suggested that if I do a Google search, it’ll show me where the four stores he’d mentioned are.
I said, “I know exactly where those four stores are, and I’m not going to any of them when there’s one less than a mile from my house.” Then I asked him if he had Google. When he responded in the affirmative, I suggested that he do a web search for “Safeway 21234”. Lo and behold, he located the store in Parkville. I was kind enough to spare him the necessity of trying to pronounce “Waltham Woods Road”. Then he asked me again if I wanted the store at Waltham Woods Road. I told him “Yes, and if you ask me a third time I’ll probably say ‘yes’ again.”
A few more seconds of typing, then: “And what was your phone number again?”
We’d been on the phone for eight and a half minutes and, of the four pieces of information he’d gathered from me in that time, he’d already lost one of them. “That’s it,” I said. “I need to speak to a supervisor.”
Another eight minutes, this time on hold. Finally the supervisor came on. I’m not going to recount the entire conversation because you probably have that part figured out. It’s all apologies and obsequiousness and “We’re sorry you’re not having an excellent experience” kind of crap. But he did take my order and confirmed that I’d have to go to the Deli to pick it up, 24½ hours hence.
And I went there the next day and everything went perfectly.
Ha, Ha! I was just yanking your chain, there! And so was Safeway, apparently!
At 4:05 I arrived at the store, grabbed a cart and headed toward the Deli. The clerk behind the counter asked if she could help me. I told her that I was there to pick up a dinner. She looked at me blankly. I tried again: I ordered a Ham Dinner for pickup at four o’clock. She still didn’t know what I was talking about, so she turned to a co-worker: “Do you know anything about a Ham Dinner?” The co-worker nodded, then said, “but we don’t have it.”
Excuse me?
She then started saying something about how they have the ham, but they don’t have “the kit”. The kit is apparently a package that contains all the other parts of the meal that aren’t ham. No package means you don’t have the meal. (Remember also that this means they don’t have everything for the Prime Rib Dinner, either.) This second clerk then disappeared into the walk-in refrigerator, but she emerged empty-handed and shaking her head. Again she told me the thing about the ham and the kit. Oddly, I didn’t find a repeat explanation comforting. I saw a sheet of paper in her hand and asked, “Is that my order? May I see it?” I looked at the sheet only long enough to establish that my name and phone number had been correctly recorded. That IS my phone number, and I haven’t gotten any calls from you.” I was getting a little more strident by this point. “I have a bunch of people en route to my house and I have nothing to give them. What am I supposed to do? Calling you guys was supposed to take the stress out of this whole deal.” She suggested that we talk to the manager.
I followed the clerk over to the manager’s office. In this office is a woman—the assistant manager—and I swear to god she’s eating an entire pepperoni pizza out of the box. I mean, it’s sliced and all, but she’s clearly doing this thing some serious damage. She continues chowing down her pizza while the deli clerk tells her about how “this man ordered the ham dinner and we have the hams but we don’t have the kit, and now he’s yelling at me because it’s not here.” Because it’s apparently my fault that I’m upset about placing an order that A) nobody filled; and B) nobody contacted me about a problem. Between bites, the assistant manager suggests that, rather than looking for a kit that isn’t there, she gather up the discrete pieces and give those to me. Because part of this was said with her mouth full, she wound up having to repeat it to the clerk, who heaved a big sigh and walked back to the deli area.
Hey, you know what? If I’m such a bother to everyone, I don’t need you either. I walked out of the store, not bothering to see if the deli clerk had even noticed I’d left. Given that I stopped immediately outside to text Wife about what had happened, it doesn’t appear that she did.
So here’s the Postscript to this tale: I went to the Shoppers Food across the street and put together a meal of my own: Spiral Sliced ham (about 8 lbs), frozen corn and a red and green pepper for chopping up into the corn and sauteéing slowly in butter; frozen Stouffer’s macaroni & cheese, frozen broccoli for steaming, an apple pie and a couple of tubes of biscuits. Dinner was about an hour later than we’d planned, and the total cost was nearly $10 cheaper than the Safeway meal.
This morning I mailed a letter to the Safeway folks. We’ll see what they have to say.
Bart Simpson: You should treat yourself. You work hard for us, or at least you're out a lot. Homer Simpson: You're right. I have been acting like Telethon Jerry Lewis, when I should have been acting like rest-of-the-year Jerry Lewis.
—The Simpsons, “Million Dollar Maybe” (1/31/10)
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Well, the 2011 Muscular Dystrophy Telethon has come and gone. If you were with me on Twitter and/or Facebook during the show, you pretty much have my opinions. After all, I nearly doubled my total Twitter output. (To be fair, it’s a new account.) However, I wanted to get in a few extra thoughts before I let it go for good, and perhaps clarify a few of my tweets besides.
I realize that, given what I’ve seen on websites everywhere in the past day or so, many, MANY people feel that Jerry Lewis was screwed over with regard to his hosting of the telethon this year. Given that both MDA and Jerry have been kind of tight-lipped about the details, this is a debatable point, but I’m thinking that they’re right. Yes, Jerry is 85 years old and won’t be around forever, but between May and a few weeks ago, this telethon was to be his swan song, a genuine passing of the torch to someone else. As a result, the notion at the beginning of the show that Jerry “retired” felt disingenuous.
A lot of people are also calling bullshit on the fact that the donation total for this year—which never appeared on screen but was instead reported the next day—was over $61 million. I’m willing to accept that figure as more or less accurate, even if the final take winds up being somewhat less (it always is). I’m thinking that a lot of the corporate sponsors and other groups (e.g. firefighters) pushed extra hard this year, thinking that it was Jerry’s last year, and trying to ensure that he’d go out with a big bang. Next year will be a different story; that’s my guess.
There are several elements of the previous telethons that were missing from this year. One of the things we didn’t get was an array of “old-school” performers coming in and doing their thing. I’m willing to bet that a lot of today’s adults were first exposed to people like Norm Crosby, Freddie Roman or Henny Youngman through the telethon. Their heyday was over but there was still some respect for their brand of performance. Stars who were on the way up and down came by. Take a look at this clip from 1968, the first year of the “Love Network”, when the telethon appeared on four stations. Joan Crawford—who may be a little drunk, I’m not sure—comes out and reads a rather maudlin poem. I don’t remember this appearance, but I do remember when the telethon ran multiple phone numbers on the screen so that everyone’s phone call would be local:
or, check out Jerry’s reunion with Dean Martin in 1976, as orchestrated by Frank Sinatra. There’s a bunch of unscripted clowning going on that could only happen here:
The other thing that happened back then was, Muscular Dystrophy was very mysterious and absolutely untreatable, never mind curable. So the focus of the telethons then was more of a “pity these poor children and let’s fund a cure” mindset. As the years wore on, the focus moved into “look at the good your money’s done”, with the short films showing all kinds of Science Going On Here. But I still remember one film they showed when I was a kid, in the early 70s. A YouTube search didn’t turn it up, unfortunately, but it went like this: an older gentleman, sitting on a stool and with a black background, starts talking about Muscular Dystrophy. It quickly becomes clear that this guy is Muscular Dystrophy, personified. He says stuff like, “I am Muscular Dystrophy, and I hate people, especially children. I love to make their limbs shrivel up.” Next we see a small child sitting on the floor, playing with a toy. This man walks over to the boy, tousles his hair a bit, and walks off. A few seconds later the kid lays down and dies. This film absolutely scared the shit out of me. If I’d had an income, I’d give it all to MDA just so the guy wouldn’t touch me and make me die.
As a side note, I also mention this story from a couple of years later: I was in fifth grade so this would have been in 1974. I woke up one morning and, as I got out of bed, I fell to the floor. My thigh hurt and wouldn’t support my weight. I couldn’t walk! I worked my way down the stairs and tried again. I still couldn’t walk. It actually went through my head that I might have Muscular Dystrophy. The guy from the film came by in the night, touched my leg and now I’m crippled. I’m eleven years old and I’m going to be in a wheelchair; soon I’m going to die. By the end of the day, my leg had loosened up enough for me to walk, if still in a bit of a gimpy fashion, and I figured that I really wasn’t at death’s door. So that’s my story of how I beat Muscular Dystrophy, I guess. (In retrospect, it was probably a Charley Horse, but how I got one in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess.)
Let me say something about the acts that were on during the telethon this year: really, none of them were all bad. Some of them were weird, but Jerry would have some weird stuff going on at about three, four in the morning too. I could have done without the Singing Tampon act called VocaPeople, but this is the sort of thing you get from the telethon. But it’s what comes in between the acts that holds the whole program together, and the four people who’d teamed up to replace Jerry just weren’t getting it done. Everyone simply handed off to the next act without linking anything together. And it was pretty clear that Nigel Lithgoe was cashing in a lot of American Idol chips.
The best on-camera personality throughout the show? It was absolutely Abbey Umali, the 12-year-old MDA National Goodwill Ambassador. Her clumsiest moment was probably when she tried to identify 7-Up as her favorite soda, but even that came off as a little charming.
So with Jerry’s untimely removal from the show, I think we’ve lost an important part of show business in general. It’s not as though Jerry was going to hand the reins to someone else who would continue in a similar tradition, but I think that, with this event, we’ve been given an actual date for the end of this particular brand of showmanship, and we’re all the poorer for it.
Scott: Alright, well then maybe you're not her type. She's into stuff like old school Elvis Costello, she listens to obscure podcasts, she reads Dave Eggers. You know, she's deep, man. John Tucker: Dude, I'm deep. I'm dating the poetry club.
—John Tucker Must Die (2006)
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This is going to have a little bit of a “me-too” feel to it, but that’s all right with me. Pretty much everything that happened to me this past week is more all right than it looks on the surface.
The reason this feels “me-too”, however, is that in this post I’ll be sharing some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately. As it happens, I’ve been with most of them for awhile but it feels like they’re really starting to swell in popularity lately. So, not to get all hipster on you, but some of these were cool to me before they were cool for everyone else. There are a few others I listen to, but not as closely or as often. And two which bailed out on me before I gave up on them, the bastards.
In no particular order (click on the pictures to go to each show’s website):
This one is the newest to me and, in fact, the newest of the bunch. Larry Miller takes a topic or two and just appears to spout off the top of his head for a half hour. There are still different elements of the show which are evolving, and Miller carries us through that evolutionary period by explaining its genesis, sometimes repeatedly. This show has been running for nearly a year and is starting to hit its stride. The stories that Miller tells are generally a warm brand of funny, and since he and I both grew up on Long Island, some of them are perhaps a little more relatable to me than they might be to others, but non-LIers will enjoy them nonetheless.
This isn’t the oldest of the bunch, but it’s got the biggest back catalog because they produce five shows each week. This podcast grew from the Mike O’Meara radio show, which I don’t think ever aired in Baltimore. But I was a fan of the original Don & Mike Show (which did air in Baltimore), ever since they first aired in New York City. I discovered the podcast quite by accident only a few weeks after it began. The show runs for a little over an hour, and is edited to be broadcast-friendly, as the show does have a radio affiliate. This is a show that you need to listen to a few episodes to, in order to get into the swing of things, but once you do it’s a daily romp.
WTF with Marc Maron seems to be the one that’s really exploding onto the podcast landscape lately. It’s part interview and part therapy session, and once in awhile there’s a pure comedy show (the “Live WTF” shows). Maron generally hosts the shows out of his garage, and while most of his interviews have been of comedians, you can’t expect the entire show (which runs anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half) to be a Laff Riot. On the other hand, it’s not a Deconstruction of Comedy session, which would be incredibly dry. The interviews are fascinating, and I think many times the guests themselves wind up discussing things they had no intention of bringing up. Some of the more famous interviews include Judd Apatow, Louis CK, Carlos Mencia (during which he actually cops to some of the stuff he’s been accused of), and of course the infamous Gallagher interview, which ended a little earlier than originally planned. With this podcast, I’ve been playing the new ones and playing catchup with the old ones in reverse order, so while the interviews themselves aren’t especially time-sensitive, the introductions he does will delve into his personal life. Consequently I’m following both Maron’s evolution and de-evolution at the same time. He breaks up with a girlfriend, then later on she’ll move in with him.
Actor Steven Tobolowsky is one of those guys who, when you see him in a movie, you'll say, “Hey, it’s that guy!” because he’s been in something like a couple of hundred movies and similar number of TV shows, including Heroes, Glee, and Californication. Probably his best-known role was that of Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, but I really liked him as the Klan leader in Mississippi Burning. Tobolowsky tells “stories about life, love and the movie industry”, and if I have any complaints about this one, it’s that he tends to over-prepare and read his stories from written scripts. It’s a shame only because when he goes off-script, or when I hear him in interviews, he’s great at telling stories extemporaneously. Having said that, this series, which runs in “seasons” and takes occasional breaks, contains personal accounts which are funny and touching. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Tobolowsky manages to choke himself up a little, bringing back these memories. This series I’d recommend listening to in episode order, since there’s a bit of a running narrative thread going on. You know, sort of, how the story ends, and you still root for it to go in a different direction.
While I’ve linked to the shows’ websites, all of them can also be found via iTunes. Just type the show’s name into the search bar and they should come up without any problem.
What about you? Heard anything fascinating lately?
Prof. Sebastian DeWitt: When you were a student in the department, I could never picture you as a waitress. Diane Chambers: Oh Professor, you're forgetting I played a waitress in your production of "Bus Stop". Prof. Sebastian DeWitt: Yes, I know.
—Cheers, “Homicidal Ham” (10/27/83)
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The last several days, Wife and I spent more time than usual eating in places other than home.
I’m sure this happens to every household from time to time. Every now and then your schedule catches up with you or something, and all of a sudden you realize that the last four meals you’ve had spent some amount of time under a heat lamp. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often with us. However, on Friday we were kind of bushed and, despite the horrific rain, we decided to go out for dinner.
We went to Glory Days Grill in Towson, a place I didn’t even know existed until we stumbled upon it one fine evening about two years ago. It’s a typical bar-and-grill-type place, with numerous TV screens all over the place, nearly all of them tuned to a sporting event. The restaurant, like many others of its type, has a lot of hard surfaces, so it’s consequently pretty loud all the time, even when it’s not especially busy; otherwise we’d eat there more often. Presumably because of the monsoon, we were seated right away.
The waitress came up to our table pretty quickly and took our drink orders: vodka martini with a lemon twist for me, fuzzy navel for Wife. “OK, I’ll put those right in and come back for your food order,” she said.
Several minutes later she came back: she’d forgotten what our drink orders were. She got them again and disappeared.
When she arrived with the drinks, she took our meal orders. We ordered one appetizer to share and two entrées. Given the previous exchange, we should have been nervous that she wasn’t writing our order down, but we were so young and naïve then. Our drinks weren’t especially good, but that’s probably not her fault. After a reasonable interlude, our food arrived.
More accurately, our entrées arrived. The appetizer? Nowhere to be found. At that point you don’t necessarily want it anymore, so we began our meals.
I know what you’re probably thinking: the appetizer arrived afterward, or she suddenly remembered it and offered to bring it. Nope, and nope. It was completely erased from her head. My guess is that her head passed too close to a strong magnet. In addition, her subsequent visits to her table were more like drive-bys: “How’s everything going that’s great…” She was an awesome example of the Doppler effect at work.
When we were finished, she came by and offered to clear the plates, then asked us if we wanted any dessert. We declined, and she took the plates away. Again, it was several minutes before she came back: “Would you like the check, now?” Uh, yeah.
Let me pause a moment to note that I’m not a bad tipper—18-20% is my norm, and I’ve been known to go higher for extraordinary service. (Also for breakfast. Always overtip breakfast servers, that’s my rule. I don’t know where I first picked that up, but it WASN’T “Life’s Little Instruction Book, which seems to be the #1 Google hit for that sort of thing.) I realize that these people ordinarily work pretty hard for the money. So when I leave a bad tip, I’m sending a genuine message. Here’s another rule I have: if you leave no tip at all, they can always rationalize it as my forgetting somehow, or maybe I’m like that guy in Reservoir Dogs. So, for me, bad service = bad tip. In retrospect, I’m not sure it was bad enough, if that makes sense; I left 10%.
On our way out, I asked to speak to the manager. I made a point of telling him that we waited till everything was over because we weren’t trying to scam a free dessert or anything; we just felt it was important for him to know what had happened. We also noted that all of our other visits (maybe four times/year) had gone very well; this was definitely an anomaly for us. He thanked us for talking to him and asked us to wait a minute. When he returned, he had a couple of gift certificates in his hands. Our next meal would be nearly free. So, good on him. He didn’t have to do anything at all, and we didn’t really expect anything other than acknowledgement at that point.
The next day I decided to surprise Wife with a day trip to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area. We spent some time at Kitchen Kettle Village (as fine a place as any for Kettle Corn and Shoo-Fly Pie), and spent some time at the outlets (naturally). Oh, here’s a handy tip: if you see any Amish people, it’s considered bad form to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving. That’s not their gig.
On the way home we popped into the Texas Roadhouse restaurant in York, PA. There was a short wait for our tables, but what the heck: it’s Saturday night. Once we were seated, we had a waitress who was the polar opposite of the one we’d had the night before: attentive, friendly without being overly chatty, helpful with suggestions. At one point I’d asked someone (not the waitress, someone else passing by) for a new fork because the tines on the one I’d been given were bent and I was getting all compulsive about it, and she was back in a heartbeat with new silverware and lots of apologies. Consequently the meal was enjoyable, the experience was great and, even if our visits to that area aren’t frequent, they’ll likely be seeing us again. And, of course, I tipped well: the two meals were less than two dollars apart pre-tip but when the dust settled, I’d probably tipped five dollars more at Texas than I had at Glory Days.
Do you have any stories of great (or not-so-great) service? Share in the comments section!
Jay Pritchett: Where's my good underwear? Gloria Delgado-Pritchett: The question is, why isn't all your underwear good, Jay? You make a nice living.
—Modern Family, “Family Portrait” (5/19/10)
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Saturday was the day that Wife decided that it was time to go shopping for back-to-school outfits for Wee One. She specifically wanted to go to JC Penney in order to take advantage of a sale, and since only I have a Penney’s card, that meant that I was coming along, too.
We left early in the day, in order to arrive shortly after the mall opened. It’s bad enough I have to be at the mall; worse still that I have to be there on a weekend. With any luck we can pretty much get in, get clothes and get out.
I was so naive , then.
We did get to the mall early, no problem. The first issue cropped up when it turned out that, in addition to school clothes, Wee One needed to get some underwear. Specifically, she needed to get a couple of new bras. Having me there would clearly be too traumatic (for her), so I decided to just get the hell out of there and told Wife to just call me when they were done and ready to pay. I headed down to Borders Books to take advantage of their merchandise sell-off.
I was in Borders for a little while, to the point where a sales clerk offered to take my books behind the counter while I continued shopping. It was at that point that my phone rang. “I think this means I’m done shopping,” I said, and I was right. I paid for my books ($80 for about $115 worth of stuff) and headed back to JC Penney.
Unfortunately, they weren’t done. They’d gotten the bras and a couple of other pieces, but Wife thought I wanted her to call when the bra shopping was done. We (and by “we” I mean “they”) looked through a bunch of other stuff, and then Wife decided that this would be a good time to hand me the stuff they’d picked out so that they could go pick out some more stuff. This, of course, meant that I was going to be carrying the bras, still on the hanger. Being the Good Dad that I am, I immediately walked over to a nearby window and showed them, plus the other stuff that we were purchasing, to the parking lot outside. Naturally, nobody was really within sight of this window, but it was enough to freak her out: “DAD! Get AWAY from there!”
Wife, of course, was much more practical with her “The more you freak out, the more he’s going to do it” argument, but Wee One was beyond that point. “He doesn’t have to show it to the whole store!”
“I wasn’t showing them to the store,” I protested. “I was showing them to the parking lot.”
Naturally, the longer we shopped, the busier the store got until it was just so many mothers and their tween daughters, just milling about. I really hate it when people are milling about. Usually it means that I’m not getting to where I need to go, because there are so many people just…MILLING. And they’re milling IN MY WAY. Note also that I was surrounded by mothers and daughters. The other dads were clearly much smarter than I am, having gotten their wives their own JC Penney cards and they were all, no doubt, over in Buffalo Wild Wings, eating manly foods and washing them down with huge quantities of beer, scratching and burping and, no doubt, laughing at their memories of the guy they saw standing there in Penney’s, forlornly holding his daughter’s underwear.
I will say this: the sales staff at JC Penney, at least in the White Marsh Mall, were quite pleasant that morning. They usually are. In fact, I often to go the jewelry counter at this store for two reasons: one is the sales staff, who are invariably helpful and polite, and the other is because it doesn’t seem to matter what I buy there, there’s usually some kind of sale on the item I’m buying. I rarely go to that counter to take advantage of a sale, but when I go, whatever I pick out happens to be on sale. That’s tough to beat.
I’ve already made the call to JC Penney’s credit department. Wife’s own personal card is on its way. And I’ll be eating wings and drinking beer next time they want to buy underwear there.
Our next-door neighbors. Their given names begin with neither S nor B, although the names that everyone calls them do begin with S and B. Go figure.
Wee One
GF's daughter, who is twelve years old and, like so many others of her age, going on twenty. A cheerleader, artist and aspiring actress who spends an inordinate amount of time in the ER.
Daughter
My 20-year-old daughter, now a Junior at SUNY New Paltz. Go Hawks!
