Movie musicals

I like those old Watner Brothers musicals from the 1930s in black and white with choreography by Busby Berkely.  Footlight Parade has this great story about impresario James Cagney and his secretary Joan Blondell whom he doesn't notice loves him--until the happy ending, of course. (If you removed the musical numbers from that movie you'd still have a great comedy.) I also like those Fred Astaire musicals:  Ginger Rogers is one actress who could play start women!

When I was young I enjoyed a lot of '60s blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins and Oliver! and Fiddler on the Roof.  And Bob Fosse's Cabaret is in a class by itself!  There's a great number where a teenage boy at a beer garden starts singing this sweet song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," and it turns out he's a young Nazi!  Then the crowd starts standing up and singing along with him, except for one old man who doesn't get it. (Or maybe he sees it all too clearly.)

There haven't been so many good musicals in recent years.  Prince's rock musical Purple Rain is worth seeing just to watch Morris Day and his band steal the whole show.  It's funny about Dirty Dancing: I found the first half cheesy and predictable, then the second half was also cheesy and predictable, but I no longer minded!

Insurance

I don't really have any experience with insurance, but the subject interests me, the way companies use statistics to calculate odds. (A bit like bookies!) I love the film noir Double Indemnity, which is about insurance salesman Fred MacMurray (intriguingly cast against affable type) scheming with femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck to sell her husband a big policy then murder him and get a big payoff, without arousing the suspicion of Edward G. Robinson, company investigator and MacMurray's friend.  It all turns out badly in the end, of course, but in an unpredictable way.

The script, adapted from James Cain's novel by detective novelist Raymond Chandler, has lots of great dialogue.  Like the best film noirs, it makes good use of Los Angeles locations.  In the scene where the husband gets killed, the camera sticks to a closeup of a clearly turned-on Stanwyck.  Really chilling stuff.  This was just Billy Wilder's third movie, but he was already an expert director!  He originally filmed an extra scene showing MacMurray's execution, but he cut it because it wasn't needed.  That's confidence.

Waiting rooms

When I was about ten I went to the dentist and got my teeth drilled.  As I was waiting I read in the newspaper that the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner had just sunk in Hong Kong harbor.  So whenever I read about the Queen Elizabeth, I think of dentists.

I remember in one dentist's waiting room they some Sergeant Rock World War II comics.  At my current Czech dentist's place, I think I spotted a Victoria's Secret underwear catalogue. (Didn't that happen on Seinfeld?) My barber is Hungarian, so you can read some Hungarian magazines while waiting there.

My Arab psychiatrist's waiting room has National Geographic and Reader's Digest.  One of the only things I read in Reader's Digest is the Word Power quiz, except that I go straight to the answers!

Most of time in waiting rooms, of course, I'll bring my own reading.

January

January in Toronto isn't so cold compared to the small town in New Brunswick where I grew up.  I remember when your hands got so cold that they'd feel hot!  But there was lots of snow, and I miss that a bit.

Even here in the big city cold weather can get to people.  I'm an organizer of Meetup groups, and there's always a problem with people who say they'll come but don't show up. (As Mary Poppins says, "That's a pie-crust promise--easily made and easily broken.") If I knew of more dependable people I'd invite them.  But there have been a couple of times on cold January evenings when nobody but me showed up!  I guess the weather has something to do with it.

In the Toronto City Opera where I'm in the chorus, January is the time when we go on stage and start blocking the shows so we'll all know exactly where to be during the February performances.  Fall is my favorite time because we're just learning the singing.  But the blocking is less fun, because you start thinking about all the ways you can screw up. (I'm sure it's even harder for the soloists.) Back when Giuseppe directed the shows, you could see him getting more exercised as the premiere approached.

Now Beatrice is the director, and I don't know how she can be so patient.  Last year we were dress-rehearsing the finale of Don Giovanni, with the chorus in demon costume.  There's a point where we come out on stage, and some of us were supposed to form a line from left to right backstage and other surround Don Giovanni, then we drag him down to hell.  But when that point came, nobody came out!  The people at the front balked, and the ones behind them couldn't move. (There was one guy they relied on to go out first, but he was looking for a demon mask.) It isn't easy being a director!

Aunts & uncles

I had a red-haired aunt on my mother's side, who lived in a suburb of Sydney, Nova Scotia.  Her husband was a radio engineer who was smart with money.  He was a cousin of this woman who was a nanny for the Ford family in Detroit. (When Henry Ford II remarried and started a new family, they brought her out of retirement.) The Fords were generous with people like her, and she had quite a bit of money, but in her last years she came under the influence of some shady people.  When she died, they expected to get her money, but my uncle went to court and got most of it. (We don't know how much they got from her while she was alive.)

I had an uncle, also on my mother's side, who got polio when he was young and always needed crutches.  But he became the town clerk and even served as magistrate.  He also played piano in a jazz band and wrote some poetry.  A factory in his town burnt down and he heard through the grapevine that it was a case of insurance fraud, and that he'd better not pursue the matter if he wanted to show his face in town again.

Rebellion

I'm not really a rebel type.  Micro-managers are annoying, but I try to work with them.  What I don't like is when you have to guess what people want without being told.  Like when they ask, "Would you like to..." but the only acceptable answer is "Yes." I have a tendency to figure that out only after I've said no.

A little while ago when young blacks were rioting in Baltimore over a police shooting, Dr. Phil asked, "Where were their mothers?" Really, someone ought to give Dr. Phil a punch in the nose!  I respect people who'd rather do something than do nothing.  What annoys me is liberals who come up with an option that amounts to "Do nothing but pretend you're doing something!"

My brother says that if he'd been an Iraqi, he would have been fighting against the American occupation.  As for me, on the other hand, I'm all talk.  I'm sympathetic to the idea that some causes are worth dying for, but when the chips are down I'm not so sure that I wouldn't just chicken out and put self-protection above all else.  Most people don't know what they're capable of until they face the crucial choice.  People talk about how the common people in Germany let the Nazis murder millions, but would most of us have behaved differently?  What would you have done?

My first computer

When I was a teenager, we got a TRS-80 microcomputer from Radio Shack.  It had a pretty tiny memory compared to today's models, but I learned the Basic language for computers from it.  You could also play a few games, like one where you were trying to land a spaceship on the moon, and had to calculate things so its downward speed would be zero or just over when it reached the surface.

In the early '80s when IBM released the PC, my brother went down to Boston to buy one.  But my father didn't get one of the new ones until 1987.  He bought an Atari model because it was the cheapest in the store. (You have to fight him before he'll buy the second cheapest!) Unfortunately, it malfunctioned several times.  In 1989 we got a Mac, and that's my preferred brand to this day.

It was in the early '90s that I first bought a laptop.  We finally going the online world in 1996.  I now have a desktop in my room and spend too much time on it. (I don't have time for TV any more!)

I've never got one of those iPads that you can carry around with you.  For me, going out of doors is a time to get away from computers.  And text messaging is a mystery to me.  But I kind of like emoji!