Martha’s best 45th birthday ever winds down as I pick a half-slab of Hickory River Texas barbecued baby back rib pig meat from betwixt my hind molars and listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary singing a live-wire spiritual “You Can Tell The World” from one of her gifts as I quaff a New Belgium Saison Harvest Ale, good with shards of fried okra, zestacious baked beans, sweet corny cornbread, Frenchy sauced fries, and a pint of draft Shiner bock. “Cactus In A Coffee Can,” a splendidly sad song about a thorny plant that flowers every spring and a woman flying home to Colorado to spread her mother’s ashes, plays. On the way to the movie, we listened to lecture from the “Heroes & Legends” series #14 by Tom Shippey, Tolkien guru & former St. Louis University professor and a friend of ours since 1992, on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Riding home, we listened as he spoke on “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn,” which I taught since 1974 and gets my vote for the Great American Novel. In a half an hour, he got the heart and soul of it and showed us virtues unperceived before. But I digress. How unlike me. The Penguins Of Madagascar, Martha’s birthday Disney Pixar movie pick, got six big thumbs up from the Fosters. ‘Twas funny on both child and “grown-up,” which Jo Foster and I maybe aren’t, levels. Jo sussed correctly that the villain was voiced by John Malkovich, as I guessed that the most gallant hero was Benedict Cumberbatch speaking. The four musketeer penguins are calved from their Antarctical home and wander to Venice (the most well-realized), Shanghai, Madagascar, and New York City. Love, revenge, and more love abound. Groaner puns (“Bake on, Kevin”) and though my voice had gone from a croak to a creak, we could comment freely because we were the only three in the the theater. We saw the 3-D version but it’d be as fine flat-screened. Mary Travers, RIP, sings “Semper Fi,” a song about a US Marine and Eleanor Roosevelt meeting in a military hospital after the war was over and FDR had died. Then barbecue and back home under the light of a nigh-full moon. At Chez Campbell, the blue-light reindeer gleamed in their stone circle turnaround, blue light candles glowed from the upstairs windows, and the Christmas tree lit up the east window. “For in this darkness love can show the way,” PP&M sing in their penultimate song. “Let the midnight special shine its ever-loving light on me.” The disc is over. So is this note.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 02:51:49 +0000
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