"But our fish said, "No! No!
Make that cat go away!
Tell that Cat in the Hat
You do NOT want to play." ~ The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss

So I have some issues.
By now we've all seen the advertising for the monstrosity that is "The Cat in the Hat" movie. The New York Times panned it, as did the Dallas Morning News.

Beware gentle friends, there is a book that has come out to promote the film, and it is titled something like, "Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat, the Movie." This is not in fact the well known children's book, but a mockery of all things Seussian. Missing are the colorful, witty rhymes of the good doctor, and in their place is the rather drippy plot of the movie.

Personally, I find the image of Mike Myers in a furry cat costume rather frightening. But maybe that's just me.

My Mom is leading a full fledged boycott of all things related to the movie, which she terms a "sacrilege to children's literature" and I quite agree.

Further sacrilege
Did anyone else ever read Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth?

It is a true story of the Gilbreth family. Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth were motion study experts, well known in their field, who also happened to have 12 children.

It is a classic, and one of my favorite books. Every time I read it, it makes me laugh so hard I cry.

My school had parents who volunteered to come in and read to the elementary school classes. For the first half of sixth grade, my entire class eagerly waited for Thursday afternoons when Mrs. Sheetz would come and read to us. She read us Cheaper by the Dozen, and we were thoroughly caught up with the Gilbreth family. Our teacher even started using phrases from the book, saying "That is Eskimo," when one of us stepped out of line. The ultimate threat to us was, "If you don't behave, Mrs. Sheetz won't come." Oh, that really got us. When she said that, we all went ape, going so far as to kick classmates under desks if they looked cross-eyed.

This Christmas, there is a movie coming out with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt entitled "Cheaper by the Dozen". But is not the classic tale set in the 1920's. No, it is simply borrowing the title and none of the story. While I really like both Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, the public would be better served if the movie were not named after the book. They have no similarity past the title. It would be nicer if it were called "Funny movie in which Steve and Bonnie play the parents of 12 children set in modern day America."

I just find it disappointing. Why would you use the title of a perfectly nice story?

Can Hollywood please stop trampling on good books? Please? Anyone?

Sweet Stuff
My Dad asked my Mom to look for a picture of my brother taken on their vacation to South Dakota.

And so my Mom has been digging through picture envelopes and picture albums, which is usually a task that no one but me enjoys.

So I sat down with her and we looked at pictures.

Pictures of her and her chums in Johnston Hall goofing around and being generally college. Shots of the Hefflinger clan turned out in their Easter Sunday best.

Pictures of my Dad as a little kid with a bucket on his head and pictures of him catching a fish. Pictures of him playing twister. And oddly enough, a picture of him wearing a woman's robe -- yeah, I didn't ask questions.

Anyway, I realized a couple of things while my Mom and I were looking at pictures:
~ I come from a family a good-looking people, both sides. Everyone is just attractive, and considering that both of my parents have several siblings, that's fairly impressive.

~ My brother looks like a girl in most of his toddler pictures because our parents didn't want to cut off his red curls. Shoulder length red curls, folks. My brother was a pretty, pretty princess in purple striped pants.

I realized tonight as I saw pictures of me and various family members that from the time I was born I have been surrounded by people who have loved me greatly. Grandparents that were unbelivably patient and caring, and who took time to read to me, or take me to the zoo, or let me drive the truck. A brother that has always loved me, sitting through dance recitals and soccer games, and who drove across Houston from a New Year's Eve Party so that he could be with me at midnight to beat the pie pans.

Parents who did their best to see that I didn't want for anything. Who have taught me how to be generous and gracious. Who have taught me the meaning of a promise and the art of telling a story. Two people that laugh about better than anyone I know.

It's all in the pictures. I'm quite fortunate really. And I am thankful.

If it ain't baroque, it must be...
Bach's a jazzer. Yeah. Curly wig aside, he's a jazzer. (Not to mention the fact that Bach delivered the equal temperment tuning of music that we still use today)
I'm at my piano today just reading through a Bach prelude and there's this beautiful chord progression, D7, pedal D, leading to G7, still over pedal D, GMaj7, back to G7, and it's amazing.
Here's Bach, coming shortly after the church (yep, the Catholic one) stopped telling composers what they could or couldn't write. And he's just playing with harmonies willy-nilly.
When you take in the fact that quite a lot of Baroque music was originally improvisatory...well it blows your mind.
A bunch of white guys, composing primarily for the church or wealthy patrons, soloing over chord progressions that don't really get used all that much until you hit the brothels of late 19th Century New Orleans.
Yeah. Curly wig aside, Bach's a jazzer.

And speaking of brothels
Jazz, one of the few art forms that American's may claim as truly their own, is now played in the finest concert halls in the nation. The music is supported by national endowments, and is taught in several school music programs.
Over the summer I heard the Count Basie Big Band play in the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. The band was dressed in tuxedo's and the audience was full of blue-haired ladies dressed to the nines.
And to think that 80 years ago Count Basie was playing in a seedy bar on 18th street in Kansas City.
Louis Armstrong learned to play in the red-light district of New Orleans, was addicted to laxatives and marijuana.
Miles Davis was from East St. Louis, oh yeah, he had a couple of nasty addictions to, but he kicked them eventually.
Basie's predecessor, Benny Moten, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The term "jazz" itself has numerous connotations, overtones, and innuendos.
This music whose history is littered with prostitutes, drugs, bad blood, street fights, poverty, and discrimination is played in the most gorgeous music halls in all the world.
And it makes me chuckle. That this music, with so many skeltons in the closet, is held up as the art form that it's creators always intended for it to be. That little blue-haired old ladies, with carefully coiffed bouffants, and finely manicured fingernails, sit quietly in plushly upholstered seats attending to the voices of those artists on stage who owe their craft to all night jam sessions in greasy joints on the wrong side of the tracks.

The Best Quiz Ever
So my friend, Melissa, is amazing -- click here to take the quiz she came up with -- It's the post from Monday, November 17.
It's an interesting insight into who I hang out with -- crazy, yes, but definitely adorable.
"Walkie Talkie Girls"-- you gals make me happy in about five million different ways.

"I want to know, do I stay or do I go,
and maybe try another time
And do I really have a hand
in my forgetting?" ~ The Fairest of the Seasons, Nico

"I never seen you looking so bad my funky one.
You tell me that your superfine mind has come undone
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend,
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won't be there no more." ~ Any Major Dude, Steely Dan

Just some songs that I've been listening to lately.

A Foggy Day and Steely Dan
The group of friends I had in high-school was close. We were all in band, all of us were pretty serious musicians, and we all listened to mostly the same music. We went through phases in our musical tastes, and we hit Steely Dan as juniors and seniors at FBA.

That was the year that the Lady Saints basketball team lost the semi-final game in the last minutes after a missed free throw, which should have been re-shot. The entire gym was silent, and just as our girl went up for the shot an opposing fan blew an air-horn which was specifically prohibited by the rules.

The clock ran out, and the FBA fans just stood there.

In a school that small, everyone feels quite keenly connected to the ups and downs of the teams. For the seniors, it had been the last chance at that sweetly fleeting glory that is high-school competition. But everyone had wanted that banner proclaiming FBA as the reigning state champions. It was a tangible outcome of effort, and something that would proclaim your success long after you had left the school's hallways.

The band had, of course, traveled to the game. As the situation became more desperate the usual chatter and laughter that went on in the stands was suspended as we focused all of our attention on the battle taking place below. We willed the ball to slip cleanly into the baskets, we cheered and yelled for the girls that we had watched over the course of the season and whom we had known since childhood.

The band loaded up the instruments and left the gym. No one talked, and we glared at everyone from hooded eyes.
As we got outside, one of the trumpet players, an eighth grader who played in the band, lost it and unleashed on a sophomore trumpet player. Slugged him hard enough to make him cry.

The upperclassmen, myself included, separated the two of them while chastising both. "What were you thinking, you don't just lose your temper like that."

But secretly we cheered the eigth grader on. We'd all been wanting to pop this other kid for quite sometime, and we're pleased that someone had done the job. Middle schoolers could get away with that stuff much more easily than juniors or seniors who were supposed to know better.

My mom drove Heather and I back to Dallas after the game. This I remember clearly: it was a damp and grainy sky, and we sat in the back of the car listening to Steely Dan, and looking at each other, thinking about being a game away from state and losing to a team from Houston, and feeling that Waco was a pit of a town, even if it did have Baylor and Dr. Pepper.

Any Major Dude, was definitely one of my favorite songs on the CD. I deemed it deep in the way only a 16 year old can. I played the song for Heather, explaining that the lyrics, were "just, really good, you know." She agreed. We were juniors and thought we knew just about everything there was to know. We were smarter than all our teachers, and most adults. Not being passionate at your life or beliefs was the most contemptible offense we could imagine. We gave no quarter to those who had shown no zeal for what they did in their careers, or in what they believed of the world.

All that talk of worlds falling apart and together -- we wallowed in it. Really profound. Far out. Oh yeah, we'd seen things fall apart, minds come undone, we knew what was out there. We were 16, living in the suburbs of Dallas, attending a private religious school, and planning for college. Yeah, we had a lot of worldly experience. But being a teenager is a science of extremes. You know or you don't, you can or you can't, you win or you lose. For us, the happy medium was to be avoided at all costs.

Despite our narrow perspective, we knew that things fell apart, but both us believed that they really did fall back eventually.

It's something that I think about on days that are misty gray and cold.

Columbia is five years and several thousand miles from that day when we lost, and Jacob hit William, and our band was suffering under a band director we called "The Flem," and our friend Jack had left us to move to Kansas City. Everything that happened seemed to affect us so greatly -- everything that happened seemed huge.

Since then I've seen minor worlds, and a couple of major ones implode in shimmering catastrophy. Not to imply that I'm any more experieced than I was at 16. I'm only slightly wiser than I was then, and I know a significantly lesser amount then I did in high-school.

The only difference is that now I truly question whether those worlds ever do fall together again in any coherent manner.

Fairy Tale, Schmairy Tale
As a child I was partial towards Snow White -- she was so good and kind, and so conscientious of good hygiene habits always making the dwarfs wash their hands. I enjoyed Cinderella as well, but lets face it, she wasn't nearly as pretty as Snow White. And Cinderella took a lot of crap from her human companions -- Snow White didn't take no guff from anyone.

Lately...
In the past couple of days, I've felt a strange kinship towards Cinderella. Just this morning I woke up and found that there were several small rodents gathered around my bed, and two bluejays had flown in to fix my hair. Three small rabbits were laying out my clothes for the day, and outside my door, residents could be heard moving around.
From out of no where an orchestra started to play, and we broke in to song,
"RCPA, RCPA, night and day, it's RCPA,
flip the breaker, check my homework,
by the way my roommate hates me"

"Oh, Sara" said the smallest mouse, "Will you go to the grand ball tonight?"
"Alas my furry friend" said I, "I must stay here, for if I go, I will surely face dire consequences. How I do love the idea though, to step out of these rags, do my nails and hair up, and be the belle of the ball. Drat to those watchful relatives, who keep me chained in my tower bedroom."
"Darling Sara" twittered a bluejay, "Were you to go, you would most certainly be the most beautiful and gracious lady in all the land. Perhaps some goodness will happen to you and you will be able to go afterall." The rest of the furry contingent nodded their heads in eager agreement.
"Dear friends, you are too kind" I said, blushingly "I do so appreciate your lovely words, but sometimes life is more like John Steinbeck than a Disney fairy tail. There will be no fairy godmother to pat my head and put me in a stunning dress. Most favored mice, you will not be turned into horses to draw my coach. Dear friends, it's past Halloween, there are no pumpkins to be found and glass slippers are, quite frankly, impractical."

My friendly animals hung their heads in sadness, and I offered a hankerchief to one of the rabbits.
"Never fear - I'm sure we will pass an enjoyable evening all the same, and well, we just won't think about how much fun all the people in the land will be having at the grand ball tonight. We'll not think of it at all. Or maybe we'll think of it tomorrow, after all tomorrow is another day."

One of those days...
Today was the best day that I've had in the past several, for a variety of reasons:
~ A great saxophone lesson with Moe.
~ Going to Russian club with Joanna -- I'm a sucker for languages. I love to learn, and the way that people communicate is fascinating to me. I learned a lot about Russian tonight, and had a lot of fun asking how to say different things! I'm quite glad that Jo let me tag along. Pravda!

~ But the absolute best moment of my entire day (and actually the best moment of the past 4 or 5 days) was seeing Scott. We had been trying to catch each other all day, so this evening when Sam told me that Scott was on the first floor, I ran downstairs. When I saw him at the end of the hall I ran pell-mell through a crowd of several people to get to him, and when I got there we threw our arms around each other. We just stood there as people moved around us, just holding each other and crying (well, I was doing most of the crying). There aren't enough words to describe how happy I was to see him, and just hold on to him and reassure myself that he was really there and okay. We smiled and cried and laughed, and stood there, in the center of the hallway, being thankful for each other.

A cup of Joe
I've had a lot of cups of coffee over the course of my life, and several of them are attached to my most favorite memories.
I must have been 10 or 11 when I had my first cup of coffee. My family was driving back to Dallas from Barnhart, Missouri, and my Grandma Alsup was with us (I think this must have been the same trip that we stopped at the Precious Moments headquarters in Carthage, Missouri -- but that's another story). Anyway, my Grandma and I shared a hotel room in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and when we got up in the morning Grandma made coffee. It was the coffee that is always in hotel rooms -- you know it's going to be bad, and it has some name like, "Company Best" or "Gourmet Goodness." Grandma made it, and just poured me a cup, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do -- doesn't every 10-year old drink coffee. She didn't offer me cream or sugar, and if she had, I wouldn't have taken it -- our family adage is, "If you're going to drink coffee, drink it black."
Then there was the first time that I went to Starbucks in eighth grade -- coffee was a very "high-school band" thing to do. Two of my friends and I played in the high school bands our eighth grade year. Of course we were quite pleased the first time we went to Starbucks with the jazz band. Coffee was something that the big cool kids, like Clint and Ruth drank. Going to Starbucks was the equivalent of being welcomed into the band with open arms.
There was the coffee in Alaska, when the set-up crew went out to dinner and we had espresso from demitasse cups. There was the Hawaiian coffee that Anna and I drank as we talked about our freshman year at college and how good it was to be back home in Texas. There have been many cups of coffee (usually with a piece of cheesecake) between Clint and I, accompanied by conversations. There was the cup of coffee I had in Springfield with Joe, which was most assuredly the best memory I have of that weekend. And of course, there are the many pots of coffee that my parents and I have shared while shooting the breeze around our kitchen table.
Tonight some of us went to the Broadway Diner and over several refills, talked about rural Missouri with Lou, the cook, who also coaches high school football and wrestling at a Military Academy in Boonville. And I guess that's what I like most about a cup of coffee -- you can just sit there and shoot the breeze, about nothing in particular, with people that you've never met before. It is a comfortable thing to talk with someone over a cup of coffee. A pleasant, and a simple thing.

Huzzah, Purple, Huzzah
For those of you who were worried, and I was...
FARC will have a magazine to publish this semester!!
And there was much rejoicing!! Much, much rejoicing!!

When we had to extend the deadline by two weeks, I was concerned.
When we went through the initial review process and a good deal of the submissions were filled with icky teenage angst and little literary value, I was worried.

But we got done with the review process tonight, and let me tell you, we are going to have a magazine! We got 34 submissions, and 19 of them scored a 7 or higher in the review process. We also got some of the best artwork and photography that I've seen submitted to Purple.
Sure there's some weepy teenage, first love type poetry -- but I think that we're going to have a magazine of which to be proud.

I am one happy girl right now.

In the gym...
When you were in middle school, did you you ever just sit in the bleachers of the gym and watch the basketball team practice? Boys trying desperately to impress the girls with their dashing athletic moves.
Today, I experienced the same thing in front of the Dance Dance Revolution machine in Brady Commons.
A certain boy who is trying to win Joanna's affection danced away while Joanna and I acted like we were in seventh grade.
Acting like we were in middle school went something like this:
"Ooo, he's trying to impress you, Jo" at which point Jo bashes me, I bash her back, and then we look at the boy and giggle.
Repeat this a number of times, and you end up with how Joanna and I spent our lunch hour.

It's my book, darn it!
I managed to spend an hour today in the bookstore, picking out cards and making an impulse buy.
I happened to walk by the paperback fiction section on my way to purchase the cards, when I saw The Brother's Karamozov and since I had just had a conversation about this book, I stopped. This was my first mistake.
I started to move away, telling myself, "Sara, you're already in the middle of a couple of books -- you don't need a thick Russian novel."
But then I picked up the Penguin Classic Edition. This was my second mistake.
When you pick the book up, you start to feel possesive of it. "Hello book, oh how nice and heavy you feel in my hand, what? you're looking for a loving home -- why of course, I can take you home."
After telling myself that I didn't need the book, I put it down and walked away. But I couldn't just leave my book there -- I had held it and looked at the introduction, it was mine.
And so I left the book store the proud owner of a rather thick Russian novel.
If anyone sees me in a bookstore, could they please escort me out of the store -- that would be great!

Just in case you were curious...
Here is a rather interesting study regarding what terms the different regions of the country use to refer to carbonated beverages

Of course we all know that just calling everything coke is the correct way to do things -- Please note where Texas stands in this debate.
Not that everything Texas does is right...wait a second... it's Texas, it must be right.