Monday, December 20, 2004

"I saw something nasty in the woodshed."

The Movie: Cold Comfort Farm, 1995 (Malcolm Bradbury, screenwriter, from the novel by Stella Gibbons; John Schlesinger, dir.)
Who says it: Sheila Burrell as Aunt Ada Doom, matriarch of Cold Comfort Farm
The context: A childhood trauma, barely remembered, gives Aunt Ada an excuse to sit in her room and have her family wait on her hand and foot.
How to use it: As a bare-faced plea for sympathy.

Ashton's mom, Penny, gave him the DVD of Cold Comfort Farm for Christmas, so we watched it last night. Classic. Penny had her Christmas open house, which was lovely, and we had both a thunderstorm and a snowstorm between the hours of 3:00 and 7:00 p.m.

Afterwards, we all (Ashton, Joseph, our friend Brian Cook) piled into Brian's car for some Christmas shopping at Pentagon City. Brian said, "Yes, we're going in 'You're still driving that thing?'" "That thing" is Sweet William, a 1993 Honda Civic in a color that I would call pink, Ashton calls purple, and Brian calls Metallic Cranberry. Brian inherited Sweet William from our friend Jack Hart, who died in 1997, and Brian's driven it across the country east-west and north-south more than once. In fact, I think it was Sweet William that took Anna up to Maine, when she first moved there. It's not just a car, it's a legend.

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