The Movie: Mommie Dearest, 1981 (Robert Getchell, Tracy Hotchner, Frank Perry and Frank Yablans, screenwriters, from the book by Christina Crawford; Frank Perry, dir.)
Who says it: Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford
The context: Joan has just come home from an exhausting day of work to find that her adopted daughter, Christina, has hung some of her expensive dresses on wire hangers instead of wood.
How to use: To pitch a totally irrational tantrum.
I didn't pitch any tantrums yesterday, but I did go down to Renys to buy some coat hangers -- only to find that the store had closed at 2:00 p.m. because of the weather.
The weather wasn't nearly as bad as anticipated. It snowed hard in the morning, but by afternoon it had stopped, and the temperatures stayed warm. I went down to the Loads of Fun Laundromat and caught up on some light reading, including a month-old issue of The Weekly World News whose cover story reported -- yes -- a tragic case of spontaneous human combustion. If I ever win the lottery, I will pay The Weekly World News to let me work for them. I'm serious.
I've gotten some interesting responses to yesterday's posting -- most of them not posted to the blog -- and I think I was not clear about the nature of my own list, which was an exercise in alienation. I deliberately tried to think of things that the rest of the world seems to like (Cadbury creme eggs, that latest Lenny Kravitz single) that I cannot stand, thus isolating myself even further from a community I might otherwise belong to. A good friend of mine, for example, hates "scenes from next week's episodes," which baffles me -- I love scenes from next week's episodes.
So maybe today I will list ten popular things that I do like:
1. Bacon.
2. Bruce Springsteen.
3. George Clooney.
4. Impressionist paintings.
5. Mozart.
6. Nora Roberts' novels -- most of them.
7. The Outkast single "Hey Ya" -- never got tired of it, never.
8. The Simpsons.
9. Starbucks.
10. Taco Bell.
These are not necessarily my favorite things -- that would be a harder list -- they're just things that public opinion suggests I should like, which I do like.
So go crazy, post your own lists...
2 comments:
Ah. Mea culpa. I kinda misread yesterdayt's post. So I'll try to be more on point with this list. Popular things that I really like too. oK.
1) The Simpsons
2) U2
3) Lucinda Williams
4) Stephen Sondheim (esp. Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park, and, inexplicably, Bounce)
5) Scarlett Johannsen in anything (though preferably in nothing...)
6) The poetry of William Bronk
7) A Pattern Language and The TImeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
8) All About My Mother and Talk to Her
9) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas AND Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
10) The new iMac G5 all-in-one desktop computer.
Tom, you crack me up. Only in Cambridge would the poetry of William Bronk be something you feel you're "supposed" to like... and I had to go look up those Christopher Alexander books. How can I feel I'm supposed to like something if I never even heard of it?
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