Here are the ornaments on my tree. Of course, you have to suspend your disbelief to imagine the tree. Work with me here.
I don't have an angel to set atop the tree, and Avery has no idea who James Cagney is. But to warp one of Cagney's more famous movie quotes: "Look, Ma! I'm on top of the snow!" And the tree.
As the only girl in the grandchild chain, Amelia is surrounded by boys, which makes her the center of attention. And the tree.
Some day, the Four Horsemen — clockwise from upper left, Vincent, Jack, Patrick and Luke — will get to SEE snow instead of just being flakes themselves. (And they'll find out how c-c-c-c-c-cold it is, and see lights on pine trees instead of palm trees.) For now, though, they are the snowdrift holding up the tree.
I never thought that Melissa would have another bun in the oven, but she surprised me with just that the other day.
Wait, that didn’t come out right. I meant to say one of her buns was in the oven.
WHOA! That’s really off the mark.
OK, I’ll back up and start at the beginning. She called several days ago and invited me and Kate to Jack’s holiday play.
“He’s going to be the gingerbread man,” she said. “He’s nervous, but he’s glad he won’t have to sing. He said he’ll be in the oven when they’re singing.”
(Get it, one of her buns was in the oven, again. GROAN!)
Can’t say as I blame Jack for not wanting to sing. After all, he’s no Justin Timberlake.
A lot of boys don’t like to sing except for, well, maybe Justin Bieber, and I don’t understand that phenomenon. From the first time Vincent, Jack, and Luke have stepped onto stages for pre-school and school activities, they’ve either not sung or mostly mouthed the words. Oh, besides Bieber, they do know another singer, Cousin Anthony had a star role in a musical during his senior year of high school. Who KNEW he could sing? We all thought he was just a star athlete.
As I recall, Brendan didn’t like to sing much, either, and he spent a lot of his acting career as Joseph, or one of the Wise Asses, uh, I mean, Wise MEN, looking out at the audience.
But I digress, the same way my voice splits from notes when I try to sing myself. Who could resist such an invitation? We showed up bright and early — in fact, early enough to get front-row seats if we hadn’t been so casual and that rude woman wouldn’t have selfishly called dibs on the whole dadgum front row.
As the singing started, I had to smile when I thought of Jack being snug as a bug in the rug behind the colorful façade of a gingerbread house. But then, I spied someone in a brown, hooded getup in the back row who looked strangely like Jack.
Sure ’nuf, twas he, just days before Christmas, that little creature was stirring with a song from his mouth.
As the echoes of the children’s voices faded into the corners of the school cafeteria, the action-adventure play began, with groups of children saying they were going to catch a gingerbread man and Jack periodically taunting, “Run, RUN, as fast as you can, but you can’t catch ME because I’m the Gingerbread Man!”
In groups of four, and five, and six, they chased him around the stage, and he eluded them each time. Two impressions I had:
1. He’s a REALLY cute little guy.
2. GOSH, he’s got a big class. I didn’t think the play was EVER going to end. But I guess it just seemed that way. I guess the teacher had to let everybody have a moment on stage; they can't all be stars like Jack.
But it did, and Jack posed for the paparazzi, in this case, with his little brother Patrick. Two cute little buns, out of Melissa’s oven.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, “When first we practise to deceive!”
Sir Walter Scott couldn’t have imagined how true those words penned more than two centuries ago would ring today, when filmmakers practice to deceive our eyes with their 3-dimensional endeavors. And I’m not talking only about “Tangled,” Disney’s tangled rendition of the Rapunzel saga.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I rebel against the rush to 3-D taking over movies for a couple of reasons:
No. 1: The old 2-D films weren’t broken, so why fix ’em? No. 2: I lament the fact that, when all movies are in 3-D, which I suspect they will be, kids will never know the magic of the old 2-D’s, just like they can’t appreciate the old days of black and white. No. 3: When you get right down to it, in my opinion, most of the 3-D flicks are pretty lame, with few moments of brilliance. No. 4: And this is most important of all, the theater prices for 3-D are making the films just too damn high for middle-class families to afford.
OK, so that was more than a couple of reasons. Call it a four-dimensional diss.
The 3-D devolvement knocks movies out of a tradition dating to the Great Depression, when the admission of a nickel gave folks just about the only diversion they could afford. Now, amidst the Great Recession, 3-D movies are knocking us for a loop.
Even if the 3-D technology made every flick into a WOW, the prices are inflated too exponentially to make the venture worthwhile.
For example, time was, I could take three grandsons to a matinee for an admission of $21 bucks, courtesy of the old-fart rate for me. Now, the theaters don’t give us old duffers a break so that, when Kate and I took four lads to “Tangled” a week ago, admission was 56 bucks, at 13 smackers apiece for Kate and me, and 10 apiece for the boys.
Fortunately, Patrick got in for free, as a 2-year-old. That was doubly fortunate, as he slept through the entire flick (I envied him the nap, because it just wasn’t worth the time, IMHO).
How sacked out was he? Enough so that, when I transferred him from my lap to Kate’s so I could go buy another freezie drink at an inflated price because the boys needed a refill (we bring cups and split up the drink), the tyke didn‘t even wake up.
I used to feel a tad guilty when we’d stop at the drugstore to buy contraband candy to sneak past the ticket sentinels, but no more, not now that the ticket sellers might as well be wearing masks, as bandits for the theater moguls charging outrageous prices for technology that doesn’t add a scintilla of enjoyment to the experience, in my opinion. They're just churning out 3-D flicks to jack the prices, pure and simple.
To the moviemakers and theater owners I say, to tangle a line from Rapunzel: "Highway Robbers, Highway Robbers, take down your prices!"
Oh, I know they think the math adds up, but here’s my math: I used to be able to take the lads to a flick for $30 or $35, tops. Now, with the total tally approaching 80 greenbacks, we just won’t be going to as many movies.
With apologies to Johnny Paycheck, from back in the ’80s, long before YouTube and the glut of 3-D movies, they can take 3-D and shove it, I ain’t payin’ that no more.
