A southern gal is always ready to entertain

So it's 11:30 pm, and I should be heading off to bed, but I'm up still baking pw's vanilla scones for an event tomorrow (delish!). It's been a long day, I changed into my sweats and comfy shirt long ago. I pulled my hair back...but I did put on my fav super-cute, orange & teal, polka-dot, ruffled apron I bought at a vintage shop in Florida.

So I'm waiting for the scones to cool so I can ice them, and I'm washing a few dishes, and I look up to see my reflection in the window (remember, it's 11:30pm), and I laugh out loud as I see that I'm still wearing my fancy, dangly earrings from work today!

And I start thinking about it and realize that my cute apron hides the grungy clothes, and my dangly earrings make the hair look alright...between that, the scones, and my favorite kitchen appliance (my instant hot water boiler),...should there be a knock at the door, I would instantly be ready for afternoon company with tea and perfect Southern hospitality.

Of course, it's not the afternoon, it's 11:30 pm, and if there was a knock at a Southern girl's door at this time of night, tea would be served up with a baseball bat!

All I need now is bright red lipstick and a poma-tini, and I'd be channeling Lucille Ball (or pioneer woman... #shoutout).

A southern gal is ALWAYS ready to entertain!

The UnSocial Network

So I watched The Social Network the other night, even as it was winning a Golden Globe for best picture. And surprisingly, the movie was really good...Jesse Eisenberg was incredible. Who knows what Mark Zuckerberg is really like, I've seen some interviews with him. But if I were going to imagine the inventor of Facebook, Eisenbergs' character would have been perfect...and apparently, it's not far off the truth. And ironically, for hype about the story being very one-sided and perhaps unkind to Zuckerberg, favoring his former-friends-turned-enemies, I actually found myself quite endeared to the awkward, idea-obsessed character. In fact, I felt the movie often favored him and made his "friends" who ended up suing him look like whiny left-behinds.
People have said that this movie shows the obsession for money and success that drives much of the young Silicon Valley crowd, but in fact, if any of this movie holds truth, it's that Zuckerberg's obsession was truly the success of his ideas and nothing that came from those ideas. The mark of success for him was the brilliance of the ideas....and they are, and we've all been suckered into it. You know, in our daily lives, no one goes around saying, "man I feel so sorry for that millionaire," or "I'd really hate to have the life of that billionaire"....but see this movie. You really feel sorry for all of them, and they're all rich today....no matter which side they were on.
It's not the whole story, it's a movie based on real-life people, and the average movie-goer can't separate the reality from the fiction or exaggeration. But the big irony this movie shows that I'd say has a high-probability of truth, is just how "unsocial" these founders of Facebook were (and prob still are).
But it's a great movie with good acting, and does serve as an interesting "source" of information on what has become a standard facet, if not obsession, of all of our every day lives.
I recommend.

I have HP7Part1. Is there a shot for that?

I cannot wait for Harry Potter 7 (Part 1) to come out. Spana and I are going to see it Nov 20th. I know, I know....but I realized that I cannot attend HP on opening night a few years back b/c I get legitimately angry at all the little pre-teens in their costumes and glasses and fake scars who cannot even appreciate the depth of the story. I'm re-reading again to get ready!

I'm not LOST anymore!

So here goes, hope I tick some people off....if you didn't like the finale of LOST, then you didn't understand the show, or at least really missed the point. For those of you that are now mad at me...here's your wakeup call. They didn't call it LOST b/c they were all lost on an island, they called it LOST because the survivors of the crash were all LOST in life. The show was about their search, finding one another, finding answers, finding themselves, and ultimately, their redemption.

If you could bear with me for a moment to call the writing of this show "literature", then I make the case that once again that literature relies heavily on our most precious story in all the world, the story of what Christ did, and thus our faith that lives out from that.

Jack in this final episode, plays the role of Christ. Don't take me wrong here, I get that it's a TV show, I'm not likening it to great theology. I'm just making the point that when great writers need a great ending, they are over and over inspired by the most beautiful and precious of all stories, that of true self-sacrifice, laying down one's life for those loved, doing the thing none other could do for the benefit of all. It's been done for centuries, but in modern times in hundreds of stories from The Grapes of Wrath to the recent Harry Potter. It gets us every time, because every human created by God, knows that feeling deep in his heart as the truest of all stories, the story of our own creator, thus of our own redemption. Even those who never acknowledge Christ as a their Savior, know this story because He has placed it in us. And though many would not acknowledge it as true, they do acknowledge it as a beautiful idea, the truest sense of how we should all love one another, which again, comes from our inherent desire to have the relationships with one another that God wants us to desire, and most specifically with Him.

And so, brilliant writers know that this will get 'em every time. Sacrifice the hero, by their own choosing. Jack chooses the role because his loved ones have put their faith in him. As I watched the last few weeks, the minute he chose to be the final candidate for himself, I knew he was going to die. I saw it coming, the beautiful Christ imagery in the end. And when it happened, I cried, and I loved it and thought it was beautiful.

And then to further the idea of our faith values in the show, the redemption of so many in the end was also equally beautiful. Ben, so deserving and equally undeserving, was given an instant moment of grace by Hugo, and therefore redeemed. And we could go, character by character, but I won't here, and talk about their redemptions in this ending season, but I will mention probably the strongest, Jin, who at the end was unwilling to leave Sun behind.

Ok, but so away from the strong themes of faith that wove so deeply into this show, let's return to the fact that was just TV, and let's just address it more superficially. If you wanted all your questions answered, then you didn't get it. Here's a hint: LIFE DOESN'T ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS! In my short 35 years, I've asked God "why" more times than I can count. 4 of them were yesterday. There are things I don't understand, people I don't understand but love anyway or dislike anyway.

There was no way they were going to answer all our questions, and there are questions we have that weren't worth their time to answer. Some of that was just what made the show so stinkin' cool. The Dharma shark?? Who cares now, we all freaked when we saw it! Who was Dharma, who were the others? Does it really matter? They did answer an amazing amount of questions, and they took us to the heart of the matter...I mean, island.

And again, they took care of the relationships, of the characters who had become our friends, of the ones who were LOST. And that's what mattered. And for that I applaud Damon & Carlton. I applaud them for their bravery NOT to answer too many mundane questions, for their brilliance as writers, for their passion for being creative and unique, and for their openness to being inspired by the most brilliant writer of stories of all time.

I loved it. I loved my time with this show over the past 6 seasons, I will probably watch it again from beginning to end sometime in the future (I keep saying that about Lord of the Rings too). If you didn't like it, perhaps you should re-evaluate your love for the show, and then go back and take a second look.

Feelin' WICKED! And actually quite good.

So total surprise, got a call from mom at 4:30 last Thursday, "aren't you having a girls' night out tonight". "Yea," I say, "we're going to dinner." "Want to go see WICKED instead?" "What? Of course!" And then, there we were with the worst best seats at WICKED. Stoked. Beyond stoked.

Absolutely one of the best shows I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. Among my top two for sure. And the scene Defying Gravity is the best scene of a show EVER, musically, technically, etc. I'm a techie nerd when it comes to shows, I watch the lights & the set changes, and I'm so critical and look for mistakes, etc. This was an amazing technical show!

But so here's the thing, it's also an AMAZING story. I'm a huge fan of out-of-the-box stories. Anyone (well maybe not anyone) can write a great love story and set it in war-torn and class-impacted France (Les Mis). Or a love story set amongst racial Russian families (Fiddler). And even stories like RENT, that are very out-of-the-box, but tout really political and social agendas aren't nearly as enticing to me.

But this...this crazy story of what if's. I am not just in love with this show, I'm in love with Gregory Macguire (the guy who wrote the book, Wicked:The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch). I mean really, this is how my brain works. Like him, I could watch the Wizard of Oz, and then wonder for the rest of the night, how did she become so Wicked, and why was she green? And he wrote the story. And it's genius.

But really, on a spiritual level, here's why it's so genius...not only does he wonder to write the answers to these questions, but he goes so far as to create a story where the "Wicked" witch is entirely GOOD! She wasn't wicked at all, she was moral, brave, courageous and does the right thing by everyone to the very end. And she was someone who life set out from the beginning to be against.

What if we lived our life like that? Seriously, how many people TODAY did you write off b/c they were different, unusual or too much for you to deal with? How many people did you stereotype as mean, cruel, evil or just plain "bad"? What if you were wrong? What is that persons' backstory? What if their entire life is based on their attempts to be good, but at the points your lives intersect, your perspective on their life is bad.

What if you could live life assuming that everyone wants to do good at heart? Or at the very least, has the potential to be good at heart? What if you started treating people that way? No more stereotyping, no more writing anyone off. Everyone gets treated the same, with love & respect, as if you understand that they are only trying to do their best by what they believe. What if you showed everyone LOVE? Hmmm....sounds like someone else I know, someone I try to be like every day.....yet fail miserably at. (I'll keep on trying, JC)

Try an experiment. Spend a day thinking about everyone that you encounter and that they have a back story, a personal story, that's nothing like what you think or know. How does that change how you treat them, how you interact with people? What if you treated everyone as if they were all GOOD at heart? Can you do it? Does it make a difference for you? It does for me!

It's brilliant.

MTV, really?

So I did it, I got sucked in and watched two episodes of Jersey Shore. There are so many things wrong with that show, I don't even know where to begin. Should I start with the people who actually went on the show, the producers that put it on TV or the fact that someone even came up with the premise?

I don't know if I'm more mad at the show or at myself for WASTING two hours of my life.

JUNO (Not like the town in Alaska)

I loved this movie. It’s destined to be a cult classic. One of those that you own on DVD b/c you can’t get enough of the one-liners. That you and your brothers sit around the dinner table and relive scenes from over & over. You have to see it 3 times just to hear all the great lines.

The first 20 minutes of this movie was some of the most innovative and brilliant writing we’ve seen since, well before the strike. No really, since old Woody Allen, Bananas. It’s better than that. It’s right up there with HBO’s Award-Winning Series, Entourage (which by the way, I do not condone or encourage watching!)
The interchange between the storeclerk (Rainn Wilson, or as we know him, Dwight) and Juno is solidly the funniest 5 minutes of film in years, and then the writers take us straight into the minds of the modern American teen girl. The fast-paced phone conversation is hilarious and barely comprehendable, which as I consider myself something of an expert on teenage girls, the writer nails dead-on! 30 minutes into the movie, you know you’ll be back to see this again.

My other real delight with the film was its capture of the modern American High School. Gone are the days of strong stereotypes. Sure there are Prom Queens, Football Hereos and Goth Kids, but in the today’s culture, they mesh & meld. Vegan Punkers rock out shows where the audience is filled with razor-cut hair Emo girls and girls in pink & pearls. Cheerleaders dress like they bought their clothes at a garage sale when not in uniform. Kids are classified more often by their musical interests than their clothes or interests. In fact, most of the time, on a Friday night at the mall, you can’t tell which “group” of my day these kids would belong to. Now, don’t get me wrong, the personalities are the same. Mean kids, nice kids, smart kids, athletic kids, there all there, but they don’t look like they used to. This movie, unlike all the loser-becomes-popular teen flics, gets it. Juno looked into the modern suburban high school and captured the image in real-time.

So, before you think I’m sending in my vote for an Academy Award, let me tell you that as much as you think I loved it from my previous comments, I don’t think any teenage girl in America should be allowed to see this movie! I know, too late. But here’s the bottom line, we have enough pop-culture that makes heroes out of sinners. At the end of this film, Juno has become Joan Of Arc. She’s such the martyr. Sure there’s that line about the burning heartburn, and the parents wish she was into hard drugs over this, but it’s all so soft. Finding the couple in the Penny Saver, how convenient. Did you know it can take up to10 years for a couple in America to adopt an American newborn? Nothing about Juno’s ordeal ever got too difficult for this sardonic, but still cute, 16 year old. I’m pregnant, but I’m still mad you didn’t ask me to Prom. That’s just not real life. The teen fathers don’t pine over their pregnant sweethearts. They don’t typically even stick around, and often the families on both sides don’t want them to. Pregnant girls are scorned, often quitting from the sheer weight of judgement passed on them. We barely see a glimpse of that in this movie. And for goodness sake, get real about labor. 20 seconds of screams to get to a funny line doesn’t get through to our teen audience that having a baby is PAINFUL & DIFFICULT and you feel like your body is going to split in two. I didn’t get that from the slow motion moment in Juno where her cute best friend and her sarcastic but supportive mom help her push the baby out. Perfect endings just aren’t that common for teen pregnancies. Hollywood gave us a new martyr to admire in Juno. I mean, thank God they chose for her to be against the abortion, that the baby had fingernails. But what we got instead was a hero for young girls to look up to: “I’m tough, but sensitive, I can handle it and make good decisions and find my own adoptive couple, and oh yeah, I have to pee all the time and it sucks, but in the end my boyfriend is boss and I play the guitar and write cool songs! “ What teenage girl won’t admire that?