Today is National Book Lovers Day so I thought I’d share a few books that impacted me as a person and a writer. Of course, my main book would be the Bible, but I will focus on my fictional impact for this post.
Little House on the Prairie and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe would be at the top of the lists for my formative years as these are two of the first books I read on my own. I then, of course, read the entire series of both. I’ve now read the Little House series to my daughter and have read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to her as well.
My mom didn’t read a lot to me growing up. What she did do was read herself. All the time. I mean all the time. It fueled my love for reading and while I took a break for several years for some reason, I am back to reading full-time again.
To get me into To Kill A Mockingbird, Mom read the beginning to me in her Southern (North Carolina) accent. She brought the story alive for me and I took off from there. She gave me Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry and I sobbed like a baby. Both books made me aware of racism in our world, shattering some of my innocence, but in a needed way.
Later I would find The Cat Who books by Lillian Jackson Braun at the library and these and Nancy Drew ignited my love of mysteries. Later there was At Home in Mitford and the whole Mitford series by Jan Karon, which I still read today because each time I open the books it feels like coming home. There was also Francine River’s books, of course, which showed me that Christian Fiction doesn’t have to be boring.
Of course, I can’t forget the first book I ever took out of a library – the school library – King of the Wind by Marquerite Henry. It was hardcover, solid, and the horse on the cover was gorgeous. I was so proud to carry it home and read it. I read this with my daughter a couple of years ago, though, and am shocked at how depressing that book was. I must have forgotten that over the years.
I later also read Misty of Chincoteague and still can’t spell the name of the place without looking it up.
My daughter and I have worked our way through several of Henry’s other horse books over the last two years.
Anne of Green Gables has been another important book in my adulthood. I loved the Kevin Sullivan movie as a kid and finally read the whole book and not just parts of it about two years ago. I then read it to my daughter, eliminating some of the more flowery language so she wouldn’t get too bored.
Three years ago my son and I read Silas Marner by George Elliot and I don’t know that it impacted me much other than to open my eyes to the classics, which I have woefully neglected over the years.
I’m sure I’m forgetting some very important books in this list but I can always write a follow-up post to share some more. It is my blog and I can blog more if I want to!
How about you? What are some books that have impacted you over the years? Fiction or non-fiction. Fun or serious? I’d love to know. Really!
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
This week I haven’t been able to read anything other than The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz because I just have to know what happened. This is a book where the author has made himself part of the story and it’s brilliantly done.
I’ve mentioned before that Horowitz has created or written for several well-known television shows including Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Injustice, New Blood and Collision.
He also is the only author approved by the Arthur Conon Doyle Estate to write Sherlock books and he has written two — Moriarty and House of Silk.
His other books include the Alex Rider series (for teens), The Magpie Murders, the Power of Five, Diamond of Five.
At one point I thought the book might be wandering into territory I didn’t want to read about and I considered dropping it but then Horowitz, writing as himself since he is the main character/narrator of the book, said he was only continuing to talk to the rude consultant to the police because he had to know what happened to the victim. It was how I felt too. I can’t stop reading until I know what happens so more than once I’ve been up late reading the book, desperate for a resolution.
The book starts with a woman walking into a funeral parlor and arranging her own funeral. Odd enough but then later that day she’s murdered – strangled in her home by a cord on her curtains. A man named Hawthorne is called in as a consultant and Horowitz decides to write a book about Hawthorne and the investigation. Hawthorne is rude and blunt and Horowitz starts to second guess the decision but he’s already invested and needs to know what happened to the victim so he pushes forward – much like the reader.
Horowitz does such a wonderful job crafting the story and weaving in humor that you can’t help but want to push forward, though.
This is the first of four books in the series. I started reading book four when I saw my husband’s library book on the kitchen table, opened it to see what it was about, and couldn’t put it down. That’s when he told me it was book four and he had the other books in his Kindle. Our accounts are connected so I downloaded the first book immediately.
I’m also listening to Death by the Seaside by T.E. Kinsey when I drive somewhere or wash the dishes and I hope to finish When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr this week as well.
Little Miss and I will be finishing up the second book in the Boxcar Children series this week – Surprise Island.
The Husband is reading. I can’t tell you what because he was attending a car show for work (he is a newspaper reporter/editor) so he’s not here for me to ask.
What’s Been Occurring
I wrote about what’s been occurring in my post yesterday and the only new thing that has happened since then is that Little Miss and I went swimming yesterday afternoon at my parents. We will be doing the same this afternoon.
I’m still hoping for a fairly relaxed week coming up. I have to take our van to a local scrapyard to see if they will buy it off us and take Little Miss to gymnastics and then that’s about it. I’d like to spend a good part of the week putting my grandfather’s poems in scrapbooks before my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary party in September.
I’m really looking forward to fall this year, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently. Summer just feels so busy and I really want some days where I can stay inside and accomplish some of the things I need to do for my books and journals and stock photography since those are my own sources of side income right now. Plus they are fun.
What We watched/are Watching
This past week we watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (we actually still have to finish it), The Super Mario Brothers movie, Newhart, Designing Women, and I finished Monkey Business with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe because I kept getting interrupted while watching it. This upcoming week I am watching All About Eve with Marilyn.
I also watched a video with Darling Desi on Youtube where she talked about how she is ready for fall. I’m right there with her.
What I’m Writing
This past week I worked on Gladwynn Grant Takes Center Stage and am going to work on it through August and hope to finish it by the beginning of September so I can continue on Cassie for the Apron Strings book series. My book for that series comes out in August of 2024.
Little Miss and I have been listening to a playlist that includes a lot of Christian musical artists while we swim. Those artists include: Matthew West, Elevation Worship, Crowder, Keith Green, MercyMe, and a few others.
Blog Posts I Enjoyed This Past Week
I am severely behind on blog posts but did read a few. I’ll leave a link to some of my favorites next week.
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Welcome to the Saturday Afternoon Chat where I . . . um . . . . chat. Ha!
Anyhow, I can’t offer you tea today because I am out of tea! I can offer you some lemonade, water, coffee, chocolate milk or plain, whole, lactose-free milk.
(I do have one tea that my blogging friend Bettie sent me but the cinnamon is a bit overpowering, just to give you a heads up. I’ll still make you some if you want it, though. *wink*)
We had fall temperatures this week and I loved it!
I just wanted to share that with all of you.
On Tuesday it was so nice and cool that I made ham and bean soup and it was seriously so comforting. On Monday Little Miss had some sort of allergy attack or brief illness, but I am guessing it was simply sinus issues because she gets these off and on and allergies have been high in our area. By Wednesday I had the same thing but no fever at all. I’m pretty certain we were all dealing with issues from the weather change, which was from very hot to nice and cool.
On Friday the humidity came back and we have some of that today but the temperature is still in the high 70s, which I am fine with.
Our little allergy attack or whatever, threw our week off a bit but that’s okay because we didn’t have a ton scheduled anyhow. Sadly we didn’t get to go swimming but we hope to later today and also tomorrow.
On Thursday we went to my parents to have lunch with my mom for her birthday. It had to be a quick lunch because I had to take my son back to the town we live in (seven minutes away) for him to get to work and Little Miss back for gymnastics.
Yesterday, The Husband, me, and the kids had lunch out together and then The Husband went grocery shopping while the kids and I sat in the new truck like a bunch of slugs. We didn’t help because The Husband moves fast and we can’t keep up. He’s very efficient and we tend to distract him.
Right now I am sitting on my daughter’s bed writing this blog post because it is one of the coolest rooms upstairs once the air conditioning and fan are on. I really wish the humidity would go away again.
Our cat, Scout, is sitting next to me which is very unusual because she’s normally outside exploring. This is the second day she’s chosen to stay inside and nap so I hope she is okay. She’s a hunter and loves to take down mice, moles, birds, and snakes. Her not doing that has me a little worried, but maybe she’s just catching up on some sleep.
Little Miss says maybe she just wants to hang out with me and I suppose that is a possibility.
This week was a lot slower than other weeks and we needed that.
I was supposed to start a new job next week but found out some very disturbing things about the owners of the magazine I was going to work for so I backed out.
What’s odd is that when I searched up the name of the potential employers at first all I saw were their own sites and anything positive but when I did the same on my phone (to see if there were any former employees who commented on sites about the fairness of their compensation offer) the name of the company with the word scandal came up. It was almost like God wanted me to see the posts and information about the scandal that happened about 9 years ago.
That sent me off down rabbit holes I did not want to go down and eventually led me to someone who had been involved in a very sick situation involving the owners and their family. Once I confirmed the stories were true, I sent an email and withdrew my acceptance of the offer.
It is very sad and sick how people in leadership roles take advantage of others and then act like dark things that happened never happened simply because the individuals don’t want to give up their power and money.
It was disappointing that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to make some extra money as our family really needs it right now, but I could not, in good conscience, work for people who covered up very serious crimes and in some cases perpetrated those crimes.
I’m not really sure I would have made money in the job anyhow with the way the payment structure was set up. Plus, the company was very legalistic in their Christian views and that’s a bit scary for me considering some of my background.
This upcoming week we don’t have anything scheduled but I have planning to do for homeschool and my parents’ 60th anniversary party in September.
How was your week last week? Anything exciting coming up this week? Let me know in the comments!
I’m hoping August will be less so and at least this week it should be less crazy.
In July we had a lot of activities – summer reading, camps, swimming, appointments, new trucks to pick up, and friends of Little Miss and The Boy coming over. It was all a bit crazy at times.
We tried to go swimming at my parents at least once a week in July to take advantage of the pool my dad had worked so hard on throughout May and part of June.
I wrote a little bit about Little Miss and me and how we play in the pool in a post last week. She, of course, is very creative and likes me to rate her jumps from the ladder into the pool in the voices of the characters from the books we’ve read together over the last couple of years.
Most of the events we had weren’t the entire day but they were in the middle of the day so it would make traveling or attending other events a challenge. It was okay, though, because it gave us something fun to do without draining a ton of our time and energy – or at least it shouldn’t have drained our energy but there were some weeks where we felt a bit drained from all the running around.
There were a couple 45-minute trips, up and back, to either drop cars off places and pick them up or pick up the new truck (last week).
Being so busy didn’t give me a lot of time to blog or read blogs. I did have some time to read and work on book two of my cozy mystery series, however. I’m really enjoying writing this series. It’s a ton of fun.
This week I need to shift into homeschool planning mode, even though it doesn’t start for another couple of weeks.
Usually, we start school after Labor Day, but this year The Boy will be attending a career center near us and school starts August 24th for him so I decided Little Miss and I will start the same day, but with a reduced schedule. We will probably read a few books, or watch some educational videos each day to ease our way back into the school year. Math, which neither of my children enjoys, even though they are both good at it, will wait until sometime in September.
I won’t give The Boy any assignments after school those first days when he starts at the career center and instead will start adding his homeschool lessons in very slowly as we get closer to September. The career center classes are from 8:30 to 11:30 each day and then he will have homeschool lessons in the afternoon throughout the school year.
This should probably be in a separate homeschool post and most likely will be put in a separate one too, but I am truly looking forward to our homeschool year this year. By the end of last year, I had found a groove for homeschooling that works much better for us as a family. A more laid-back groove that will allow us to learn in a more relaxed and free way. There will be more emphasis on reading, exploring, hands-on activities, music and art and less focus on strictly following a curriculum, worksheets, busy work, and anything else that public schools focus on and call a real education. I don’t want my kids to have to prove they know something by filling out worksheets, taking tests, writing essays or regurgitating to me what they’ve learned.
We will, of course, have to do some of those things to help me know what areas we might need more work on and because those are the kinds of things I need to show a little bit of at the end of the school year to our evaluator, but it will not be our main focus this year and I’m so excited.
We have a few more summer activities for August – including a local firemen’s carnival, trips to local state parks, and a vacation Bible school at the local Catholic Church, which is held by all the churches in town – Catholic and Protestant.
We also are planning at least one or two more trips to a local state park and maybe to an amusement park a couple hours away. It’s hard to get too far away because of The Husband’s schedule. A lot of the events he covers during the summer are on the weekends.
How about you? How was your July and what’s on your schedule for August?
Here are a few photos from the month of July. With all the activities we took part in, I am surprised I didn’t take more photographs. This isn’t all of the photographs I took. I have some on my phone as well but in August I hope to take even more on the Nikon.
This is my grandmother, the namesake of the main character in Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing.
My grandmother’s middle name was actually Gladwyn or Gladwin, we aren’t exactly sure of the spelling because it is spelled different ways on different documents. I like how Gladwynn looked when I wrote it, though, so that’s what I named my character.
Also, after she got married, Grandma was a Robinson, not a Grant, but I liked the name Gladwynn Grant more. Alliteration and all that.
Why did I base the main character of my cozy mystery series on my grandmother?
One, I love the name. Two, my grandmother had spunk.
My grandmother didn’t often show her emotions outwardly.
She wasn’t super affectionate.
She wasn’t necessarily sentimental.
She wasn’t a jokester and I don’t know that I’d call her vivacious.
These are all things I could use to describe my Gladwynn.
I could use other words to describe Gladwynn that I have also used to describe Grandma: determined, bold, and resilient.
My grandmother was born in 1909. She lived through the Great Depression, two world wars, and many other wars and tragedies. Her only sister, her only sibling, ended up in a mental hospital late in life after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. She lost her husband thirty-four years before she passed away.
She developed macular degeneration in her 80s and almost completely lost her eyesight, but didn’t let that stop her. She found ways to help her see better, and found a machine to enlarge the print for her so she could read the newspaper or write checks. She went out to dinner with family and she loved her family in her own special way.
She was quiet, reserved, and subtle, but also never backed down, never gave up, and never stopped living life to the fullest.
She passed away two weeks before her 94th birthday from a heart condition that doctors were amazed she’d lived with for so long.
That condition didn’t show up until her 90s, despite years of battling high blood pressure. She was tiny and spry and right up until a few weeks (maybe a few days?) before she passed away she was able to squat down to look at her TV and bounce right back up again like she had the legs and knees of a 20-year-old.
When I took this photo she was out in her backyard, cleaning out a ditch with some kind of gardening tool. She was wearing a pair of gardening gloves and sitting on her bottom, a position she’d gotten into all by herself. I can’t remember her age here. Maybe 88?
All I know is that this is the version of Ula Gladwynn Grant Robinson that I love to remember. Even though she wasn’t always open with her feelings, she did enjoy laughing, she smiled and she, on occasion, even told me she loved me.
I miss her, and my maternal grandmother, terribly, but I will do my best to keep them alive in my memories, my heart, and my stories.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
I will be finishing up Elementary She Read by Vicki Delany tonight and I have to be honest that I did not enjoy the second half as much as the first half. The second hash seemed like a rehashing of the first half. I don’t know how to explain that other than the author repeating themselves a lot about the characters and points of the story like she herself forgot some of those points and wanted to be sure the reader didn’t as well. I will probably try another Delany book but maybe not in this series. The main character of this series sort of grates on my nerves but maybe she will grow on me if I try book two.
The only reason I kept reading the book was because it was due back on Libby yesterday. As soon as it was returned for me, however, before I finished it mind you, I asked to have it put on hold again. At first it said there were two people ahead of me. Then it said that I could have the book back again. So I took it back to finish it.
This week I plan to focus on The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz.
I also plan to read a chapter or two of Anne of Ingleside, which I believe is the last book in the series that focuses on Anne, Gilbert, and her family exclusively.
Next week I hope to finish Nicole Deese’s book All That Really Matters which I started at the beginning of the summer and got distracted from. It was a pretty good book, even though I can tell it’s going to be a typical romance of he doesn’t like her but he’s going to fall for her, blah, blah. Oh, wait. I write that stuff too sometimes. Ha.
The Husband is reading a Joe Pickett novel.
Little Miss and I read a stack of picture books yesterday and she started a book called Saving Winslow that she picked out on the last day of summer reading.
The Boy isn’t really reading right now as he tries to enjoy the last bits of summer before school starts the 24th.
What’s Been Occurring
I talked about what has been occurring in yesterday’s post. After our crazy busy week, Little Miss had some sort of allergy attack or brief illness (which would be the second in two weeks) and had a runny nose and dry cough all day yesterday. She slept hard last night and into this afternoon and now she’s a little bit better. Because of her not feeling good yesterday we are staying home today instead of visiting my parents but will probably see my parents later in the week. We will definitely see them on Thursday, which is my mom’s birthday. Also, she’s going to be 79, not 80. I aged her a year (again) in a post last week.
This next week we do not have a ton to do, luckily. I might ride with my dad to his physical therapy 45 minutes south on Tuesday and Thursday, but otherwise, it should be a relaxed week. You know how it goes when I say that in my posts, though. The week usually doesn’t end up being relaxed at all.
I will start my job as a sales representative for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine as an independent contractor around August 7.
Photos from Last Week
What We watched/are Watching
Last week The Husband and I watched a lot of Newhart and it was nice and relaxing.
I watched half of Monkey Business with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe and will watch the rest today. I also hope to watch some All Creatures Great and Small, even though I’ve seen all the episodes.
I also have had to watch a ton of Snake Discovery, which is a YouTube channel about snakes that Little Miss loves.
What I’m Writing
I worked on Gladwynn Grant Takes Center Stage this week and I am having a lot of fun writing it. I also wrote at least one blog post I’ll be sharing tomorrow and started a couple more. On the blog, I shared:
This week I will be listening to Elevation Worship. When I drive anywhere I will be listening to Death Beside the Seaside by T.E. Kinsey as an audiobook.
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Good afternoon! Oh, right. By the time I got this done, it was evening.
Sit! Let me make you a cup of something – well, probably not warm for most of us because it has been ridiculously hot out there for most of us.
Yuck!
So let me pour you a glass of lemonade instead. Or iced tea. Or a cold soda. Anything to cool you off.
After another long week, I am very excited to announce that next week we do not have any activities scheduled. I am so excited I can’t stand it!
Summer finally hit us for a few days this past week and it can go away for all I care. I am not a summer fan at all. The heat and humidity make me feel zoned out and sick.
I would have preferred to sit inside all day long in front of the air conditioner, but there were a few activities we had to attend and a few errands to run this week.
On Monday we were supposed to go to a day camp but ran out of energy from our busy week and pool visits the week before. We went to the day camp the next day instead. It was being held every day last week but it was a half an hour from our house and during the hottest week of the summer and we had other responsibilities or plans on the other days so we only attended the camp one day.
It was a Christian camp and Little Miss loved it. It was a camp for her age group so The Boy stayed home and then worked the next day with my dad at his house.
Wednesday sent us to the last day of the summer reading program where Little Miss picked out a book of her own but didn’t realize until that night that it was her book to keep.
“This is my first novel!” she cried. “And it’s mine! Now I can read it and shove it under my pillow and not feel guilty if I bend a page.”
Poor child. She’s inherited my fear of damaging a library book, which is a fear I’ve mentioned on here before.
After summer reading we took The Boy to work with his grandfather and then I headed to the local high school to fill out paperwork for The Boy to attend a career center this school year. He will attend the career center in the mornings and have homeschool lessons in the afternoon. It starts in two weeks and he is not really ready for it at all. I’m not sure I am either. He’s growing up so fast and I really need a brake lever to pull and slow it all down.
A couple of weeks ago we had to buy him a new phone because his was dying. We bought a refurbished one, actually. For the last five or six years his phone has been connected to my AppleID and my phone. His photos and memes, music, etc., all showed up in my phone and vice versa.
We both decided it would be easier on both of us if he got his own AppleID with this new phone. That way he doesn’t have to swipe past all my memes and ads for my books and I don’t have to swipe by his Gen Z humor-based memes and weird photographs. I also don’t have to weed through his heavy metal to get to my Christian music and jazz.
Once we made that move, though, we both agreed it felt weird for us to have our own phones.
In fact, he said it felt “lonely.”
He was right. It felt lonely not to see the photographs he takes of frogs he finds when weed whacking at the pond at my parents or the weird photos he takes of his one friend crossing his eyes at the camera or the random photos of what he’s cooking in the middle of the night. He also takes some really nice photographs of storms or scenery, such as these two last week when a nasty storm was headed our way:
Speaking of him cooking in the middle of the night, last night he was cooking garlic to add to his pasta and the smell upstairs was overwhelming. I texted him to tell him the smell was so overwhelming that it woke me up. He insisted the smell wasn’t that strong. I’m very sensitive to smells, sometimes to the point it triggers anxiety for me if I can’t get the smell out of my nose. After I complained to him I could smell an air freshener that The Husband picked up about a month ago and that bothered me too.
He texted that there was no way I could smell the air freshener as he had barely sprayed it by the stove downstairs.
I texted back a realization.
I could smell the garlic and it smelled like garlic. For almost two years I have not been able to smell garlic correctly. My smell has been distorted since I had a severe case of Covid in late November 2021. Garlic, onions, peppers, and several other things had a very distinct smell that I could only describe as “the Covid smell.” It was like a cross between burnt rubber and sweaty feet. I don’t know how to describe it at all.
Garlic, onions, and peppers also tasted horrid and for the most part still do.
My smell has also been reduced since even before Covid so the fact that I could smell that garlic so distinctly was actually a good thing in some ways. Smelling that much at one time wasn’t really fun, however.
Thursday was a lighter day last week. At least for me. The Husband had a lot going on and then he took Little Miss to gymnastics so he could sit in the parent area and read a book.
On Friday, Little Miss had two friends over for swimming at my parents’ pool.
She and her one friend proceeded to argue almost the entire time and I was ready to ground them both before their time together was over. They both have very strong, determined personalities and neither likes to back down when they want their way. They argue constantly yet still call each other their best friends. It’s a bit strange.
In some ways it was good that we didn’t have a ton of time for swimming because of the arguing. Little Miss and I had a talk about her behavior specifically later in the day. She is learning how to communicate with others and, like adults, she sometimes slips up. I hope her bullheadedness and tendency to be rude when she doesn’t get her way is something we can continue to work on and improve as she grows.
We didn’t have a lot of time for swimming because I had to ride with The Husband 45 minutes South to pick up our – okay, his – new-to-him truck. The truck is a 2004 Chevy Avalanche and is much bigger than any other vehicle we’ve owned before. It will be nice for The Husband to have this winter when he has to come home on very slippery, narrow roads to get home from work.
The whole family took a ride in the truck earlier today and it is nice, even though it is louder than our other cars, other than the van when the exhaust system needed to be replaced.
I truly hope this next week is a bit less crazy. We don’t have any events scheduled.
I have taken a job with a company that I will talk about in a later post, but it is a work-from-home job for 15 or so hours a week and doesn’t being until August 7 or later.
As I mentioned above, school starts August 24 and we will be home a lot more after that.
How about you?
Have you been having busy summer days or nice and relaxed ones?
So here I am, behind yet again on my Marilyn movie-watching.
That’s okay, though. Summer is meant to be easy going and relaxed so I will take my time on these and if summer busyness gets in the way, I’ll just have to push my posts off.
If you are new here, I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies this summer and I have called the The Summer of Marilyn.
This week I watched The Seven Year Itch, which was nothing like I expected it to be.
I thought this movie was a drama until I started it and realized it was definitely not a movie to be taken seriously. This is the movie with the famous scene of Marilyn’s dress being blown upward by her standing over the subway grate.
This is a movie made in 1955 that jokingly explores the idea that middle-aged men who have been married seven years feel like they need to break out of the mundane and sow some more wild oats. I, personally, did not find it that funny that the movie makers thought it was funny to make fun of men in New York City sending their wives and children to the country for the summer so they can go meet other women and have parties, therefore feeling free and easy again.
We start the movie with Richard Sherman, a man working in book design, who sends his wife and son off to the country for the summer. Richard is determined he won’t be like other men who drink, smoke, and chase after women while their wives are gone.
Not long after he decides this, though, he heads home to a house that’s been made into apartments and starts complaining as he unlocks the door about how his wife wants to live in a house and not an apartment. Their apartment is nice, he decides, especially with nice neighbors upstairs and – he turns around and someone needs help being buzzed in through the main door.
That someone is Marilyn Monroe who is looking, of course, drop-dead gorgeous.
Richard has to renew his resolve not to forget himself and go crazy while his wife and son are gone with Marilyn acting all clueless and walking around upstairs either naked or half naked. When she almost drops a tomato pot on his head his resolve cracks and he invites her down for a drink.
It’s then he realizes she’s gorgeous but not too bright and that is totally fine with him.
He’s already been daydreaming a lot and Marilyn kicks his daydreams into high gear.
He enjoys daydreaming about how Marilyn will fall for him but, truly, Marilyn is just absolutely clueless to his advances and his more interested in getting into his apartment to take advantage of his air conditioning, which she does not have in her apartment.
Marilyn, incidentally, does not have a name in this movie. Her name is just The Girl.
This is another Billy Wilder film with Marilyn – like Some Like It Hot.
The movie is based on a play written by George Axelrod.
In addition to Marilyn it stars Tom Ewell who played Richard Sherman in the play as well.
Many lines from the play had to be cut because they were deemed indecent by the Hayes office, which determined what was and wasn’t allowed in movies at that time.
There has long been rumors that during the filming of the famous scene with Marilyn, there was too much noise to use the final footage and it had to be shot again on a sound stage. While it is true that the scene was shot twice, footage was used from both shoots, according to an article on Wikipedia. Marilyn really did stand over a grate outside the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theater, then located at 586 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. She also did get a lot of attention from the press and onlookers when this happened because Wilder invited them to drum up attention for the film.
This left Marilyn’s then-husband Joe DiMaggio pretty ticked off, but, alas, the scene became one of the most iconic ever in a movie.
Overall I enjoyed this movie, even if I didn’t like some of the messages underlying the plot. In the end, the craziness was drawn to a close before it got too crazy but the in-between stuff that seemed to suggest that men running around on their wives was okay wasn’t a great message for me. I do know that most of it was being said as a joke and that part of the message really was that it wasn’t actually okay to be done. And, yes, I really liked Marilyn in this movie. She was so free and joyful. Yes, she was sexualized, just like in her other movies, but she also held her own as an actress, playing the comedic parts with ease and pure entertainment.
Next up for me for Marilyn Movies is Monkey Business.
After that, I only have two more movies:
All About Eve and The Misfits.
Both are dramas.
If all goes to plan, I’ll be writing about Monkey Business next week, on August 3, All About Eve on August 10 and The Misfits on August 17th.
(Monkey Business is available for free on YouTube, for those who might like to watch along.)
Swimming is supposed to be a relaxing activity for some, but it is not relaxing for the parents of creative children.It is not relaxing for me, in other words.
Little Miss and I have been trying to go to the pool at my parents’ at least twice a week.
The rest of the family isn’t as into swimming as we are.
My dad did a lot to make the pool look nice and also feel nice so we want to make sure that we are using it as much as we can.
The last few times we’ve gone, Little Miss has made up a game where she jumps from the ladder and then I have to rate her jump. I don’t rate her jump as myself. Oh no. I have to rate it as a character from one of the books we’ve read and I have to speak in the voice of said character.
Little Miss just started to be able to reach the bottom of the pool this year and isn’t super confident with swimming so she wears an inflatable tube for her higher jumps. When she jumps, she expects me to give her a rating and a critique from a character from either the Paddington books, the Chronicles of Narnia, or Anne of Green Gables.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I read to Little Miss I do all the accents and voices for the characters. I had no idea that she was going to urge me to carry on this tradition when not reading as well, but, alas, she first started asking me to use the accents or mannerisms of the characters while jumping on our neighbor’s trampoline.
I have to rate her not only in their voices, but also their personalities, so Edmund from the Chronicles of Narnia might say, “That was horrid. Now give me some Turkish Delight!”
Paddington might say, “Oh, that was lovely. Would you like a marmalade sandwich?”
Marilla from Anne of Green Gables says things like, “Jumping in pools is not ladylike. You should pray to ask God to forgive you.”
We go on like that for a while and then Little Miss decides we should do swim competitions across the pool, which is how I ended up in agony Saturday night into Sunday. I attempted moves that I should not have been attempting without a bit more stretching and preparation.
There isn’t a lot of downtime for me to simply float or move around gingerly when I’m in the pool with Little Miss, but I still have a lot of fun with her. It reminds me of the days I did the same with The Boy and I know one day I will miss those fun times in the pool with her, the same way I miss those times with The Boy.
