It's Sunday morning, and Dan's away at church. I'm home because I seem to have contracted Influenza, the perfect finale for the Great Homework Crisis of '10. Yeah. So. Not exactly how I wanted to spend the break I envisioned for myself, but here we are. It's day 5 now, and even though I'm getting better I still can't get out of bed without feeling unsteady on my feet. I really should get some homework done today, but instead you find me here, posting. And I warn you now, this will likely be one of those rambley self-indulgent posts where the author talks about anything that comes to mind presuming that everyone will be as interested as she is.
Sometimes people are wonderful. It was horridly cold and windy at school Tuesday, and as I was walking from the parking lot to class I saw a couple (both wearing plaid hoodies) walking the other way holding hands. When they got to the parking lot they suddenly looked at each other, grinned, and took off running for their car, still holding hands. It made my day. I love catching people enjoying each other and being sweet.
Dan always laughs fondly at my love for all things picture-book-ish. But sometimes I really do think I'd like most of all to live in that world instead. It's been one of those months. I want to go live in a cabin in the woods with green shutters and a crooked chimney, wearing a kerchief and brightly colored aprons, sweeping with a homeade broom while cheerful little birds bring me the mail. I want inanimate objects to have feelings and faces. I want to save scraps for friendly mice who curtsy politely and leave me seeds for my flower bed in return. I want the woods to have a smooth carpet of grass and little flowers instead of a prickly bramble like real ones do.
While we're at it, let's make this like an old-time Disney movie and an MGM musical too, with very bright colors and swirly clothes, where everybody knows the same choreography and the orchestra swells out of nowhere just when you need it to. Something with Brigadoon's color palette, perhaps, and I'll take Fiona's dress too, pleaseandthankyoueversomuch. Oh, and all of Liesel's clothes from Sound of Music, plus the mixture of sweetness and high spirits and gravity in that movie. And then give me Cinderella's voice, and we have just the right kind of world.
You know what I love about musicals? Yes, ridiculous question I know-- what do I not love about musicals? But I was thinking about it, and I realized that what keeps me returning to them constantly, besides the beautiful colors and the fantastic clothes and the happy endings, is the joy and expansiveness and abandon of the characters when they're singing and dancing-- that moment when you completely forget that the person onscreen is a paid actor who probably has a troubled life and instead they become someone completely human, only better, because for just a few minutes they can express fully and perfectly whatever they feel. You know that incandescent look on Katherine Grayson's face in Anchors Aweigh when she's swirling around the cantina singing? Or Audrey Hepburn/Marni Nixon singing and dancing around the bedroom with the maid in My Fair Lady? That's what I mean. You know right then what it's like to be completely buoyant, you know that Aunt Susie is more real than Kathryn Grayson and that in that world where Aunt Susie is real, people have this amazing thing they can do that captures the feeling you get sometimes, like you're on top of something and at the edge of it all at the same time, but you never understand what. Maybe you could if you lived in that world.
It was Beauty and the Beast that taught me all this first. There are so many moments in that movie where I remember as a child feeling such longing, without any clue for what or why or even knowing what longing was. Maybe that's why I loved it so much.
Alright. I'll go hit the books now.
