My mother. Her name was Kathleen, which she shortened to Kathi, Spell it with a Y or, God forbid, a C, and she’d lacerate your face with her scowl. She was a hair taller than five feet and I once saw her turn over a refrigerator during a fight with one of her boyfriends. (,,,) Kathi was a screamer. Sometime she opened her mouth and the screech that came out sustained for minutes without breaking or getting hoarse. She used to bend down to scream directly into my face, and i would get lost staring at the black fillings in her molar, the heat of her breath touching my skin like a finger. That voice, those big dangling earrings, the long red nails and skintight jeans and shirts slit open a few inches below the cleavage of her enormous breasts. I was forever climbing onto my mother’s lap, trying to button her shirt higher. “No honey,” she’d say, pulling my hands off her chest. “Mummy wants to show off her boobies right now.” With or Without You, by Domenica Ruta

Obviously, Domenica Ruta’s mother will not win any mother-of-the year awards.  Ruta’s truthful, searing memoir about growing up as the only child of a woman who “believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good one” expresses the chronicle of her own formative years in a darkly humorous manner that engages the reader in horrified and rapt attention.

I’ve never met a character quite like Kathi Ruta – she’s straight out of the pages of science fiction in my mind, this woman who can be using and dealing drugs one year and creating a successful business the next. Obviously brilliant, but deeply flawed – psychotic, really –  the life she provides her young daughter is void of even the most rudimentary sense of a normal childhood. Ruta’s growing up years were marked by periods of sexual and emotional abuse, as well as physical and intellectual neglect. So it’s not surprising that she became riddled with demons of her own and turned to alcohol to eradicate them.

It is surprising that somewhere in the midst of all this chaos, Domenica Ruta fell in love with reading. She lost herself in stories –  stories that convinced her she could overcome the life she and her mother were living and create something different for herself. Her mother did encourage her education, finding the means to send Domenica to an exclusive prep school. Eventually, she graduated from Oberlin College and then earned an MFA from the Michner Center for Writers at the University of Texas, all while, she admits, she “did nothing but drink and work, drink and read, drink and fight and love and drink.”   Her life really began to change when she cut off all contact with her mother, got sober, and was hired as a companion for a mentally handicapped adult. She shepherds him through the simple routines of his day and finds a peace she has never before known.

Watching Jimmy walk intrepidly through the woods feels like a gift that I’ve worked hard to earn. I’m broke and I’m single, a shameful state of being for an educated American woman of my age, but I have enough money to live simply. I have my sobriety and my health, and every single day I get a little saner.

“Life is good, huh, buddy?” I ask Jimmy.

“Yes,” he says, as he stares at the molting branches above us.

Ruta, who has been sober for four years, hasn’t spoken to her mother in almost seven years. Cutting off contact with her mother was both “liberating and terrifying,” Ruta said in an interview with NPR.  Her mother bombarded her with weeping, histrionic voice mails until she changed her phone number.  ”And the night after I had my phone number changed, I had this dream,” she says. “It was a very Faulknerlike dream, where my mother was dead, and she was wrapped in this brown wool blanket, and I wouldn’t touch her … but I was directing the EMTs to be very careful with her body, loading her into an ambulance, and then I drove this great Mack truck, with this — you know, it was sort of As I Lay Dying, with my mother’s dead body behind me, and I felt like I was flying.”

There’s not a trace of self-pity in Ruta’s memoir. It’s sometimes horrifying, defiantly cathartic, but mostly a poignant and even bitingly funny portrait of a toxic mother-daughter relationship. The title refers to a song by U2, one that Ruta and her mother often sang together, and hints at the possibility of renewed communication between them.

“I would like to (speak to her) one day,” Ruta acknowledges.

“I’m working toward that.”

Hooray! It’s time for my annual night to complain that straight plays Don’t Get No Respect! Take a shot every time I bitch and piss and moan about how they are the red-headed step-child of the Tonys and you’ll be snockered by the end, I guarantee it.

They open as though it’s a scene from Once, but the raggedy guitarist introduced to the mic is our own Neil Patrick Harris! “He’s only been on this stage four times, so cut him some slack!” Then he sings and dances with all of the various casts from the nominated musicals, Kinky Boots, Motown: The Musical, Pippin (including a dive through a paper hoop), Bring it On: The Musical, then, weirdly, Mike Tyson, who is no song and dance man by any stretch of the imagination. Apparently he had a one-man show on Broadway this season. I’m trying to figure out who would go to see this, but cannot actually imagine what kind of thing would climb out from under a rock and hand over $100 or so to listen to the witty musings of a convicted rapist, but who knows? Perhaps he is quite the raconteur.

Anyway, back to the opening number, which continued with Matilda The Musical, A Christmas Story, The Musical and Annie, Neil got into the disappearing box from Pippin that I got to disappear in when I did Pippin, (which I might mention again once or four times, you can also drink whenever I try to make the Tonys about me!) suddenly appearing in the back of the house with the cast of Newsies, “You’ll get a Newsie in your gift bag when you go!” Then he asks for his Tom Hooper Les Mis close-up, then does a super-fast patter song because Broadway actors sing live eight times a week, close-ups be damned! It ends with every single actor in New York on that stage, except for the ones in the audience. I’m only not there because I moved to LA. “Well, that’s our budget, goodnight!”

Audra “I Already Have All the Tonys” McDonald and Zachery Quinto present Best Featured Actor in a Play. Billy Magnussen from something called Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (I miss knowing what’s going on on Broadway!) was clearly the audience favourite, a big cheer went up for him, and Richard Kind was eating both of his hands whole in the “Who is going to win?” four-shot, but Courtney B. Vance wins for The Lucky Guy, gives a great, classy speech, then loudly says, “Which way do I go?” which was kind of adorable.

This year’s “Remember the shows from last year? Some of them are still running! Please come to NY and watch them!” trick is to have cast members, in costume and introduced as their characters, present the various musical numbers. The cast of Newsies, in idiotic character, introduce Matilda The Musical, which starts with a solo by the title child, then breaks into a marvelous number, “Revolting Children.” Then they sing “When I Grow Up.” These are some really good songs; I love Tim Minchin, who wrote the score. I know it swept every conceivable award in London last year, though this year the word on the street, even here on the west coast, is that Kinky Boots is going to be tough to beat. Then several Matildas finish. I assume this is because, like with Billy Elliot, they have a rotating cast of children. No Andrea McArdle stardom for you, kids! You are Menudo, infinitely replaceable, might as well know it from the start! As a former child actor, I am horrified at the idea of sharing the lead in a Broadway musical. As a current adult, I think it’s probably good that millions of dollars of pressure aren’t buckling the shoulders of an eight-year-old who might want to grow up without a nervous condition and a heroin addiction at fourteen. Which did not, let me make perfectly clear, happen to Andrea McArdle, whom I totally wanted to be when I was twelve and still think is awesome.

Neil suggests combining plays and musicals into playsicles. “They’re called mashups, I do them every year! They’re rarely funny!” “Children of a Lesser Godspell, Cats on a Hot Tin Roof, A Midsummer Night’s Dreamgirls, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein: The Musical. Too soon? Justin Bieber would love that musical. And my favourite, Bring it On Golden Pond. It’s for you! I do it for the community.”

Tom Hanks, in a somewhat dreadful haircut and moustache that I assume are required in The Lucky Guy because nobody would look like that on purpose, presents Best Featured Actress in a Play. Chalita Grant from Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike got a huge hand like her co-star did, which leads me to believe it’s this year’s Peter and the Starcatcher, the little show that could. Judith Light wins for The Assembled Party, for the second year in a row. Though last year she won for a different show, of course, as this isn’t the Emmys. She mentions Jessica Hecht, apparently in the play with her, with whom I went to NYU, though for some reason, that wasn’t part of her speech. I guess she must have run out of time. We did Talking With together, she was excellent. I think, “I did a show in college in 1984 with someone who is in a play on Broadway with the actress who just won a Tony,” might be the world’s biggest stretch in making the Tonys all about me. You might have to drain the bottle on that one.

Velma Kelly from Chicago and two chorus boys introduce Bring it On: The Musical. I have no idea who is playing Velma Kelly these days, she may be wildly famous and I just don’t recognize her, but the show has gone on long enough that there probably aren’t any famous people left to be in the show. The cast of Bring it On: The Musical sing energetically about getting together for the big cheerleading competition. I think. It’s very good, but kind of hard to figure out plot-wise out of context.

Some haircut in a tux is backstage is talking about Royal Caribbean Cruises while being prodded by the fairy godmother from Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella, next to him is Alan Cumming playing patty cake stone-facedly with Scarlett Johansson. It’s like a dream I had once after eating too much cheesecake right before bed. It would make an excellent performance art piece. Perhaps it is a revival of Einstein On the Beach without the music?

Mufasa from The Lion King tells us that their costumes won the Tony in 1998, then pauses for a really long time before the audience realizes that they are required to applaud, or the show is not going forward. Do not defy The Lion King! He is king of the lions, dammit! He says that Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella and The Nance won Best Costume for a Musical and Play earlier in the evening. We will not speak of the fact that there are untelevised awards, which tend to fill me with the righteous fury of the theatre fan who wants to see the speech of the Best Lighting Designer live.

Neil runs on and says that backstage, “Mike Tyson gave three of the four Matildas face tattoos! That last one can run fast…”

Alan Cumming and Scarlett Johansson, having wrapped up their patty cake, present Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Alan says, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the part of the evening where two actors who were not nominated for their performances graciously present Tonys to actors who were.” Love you, Alan! Gabriel Ebert wins for Matilda the Musical. Is there any show anymore not titled Something: The Musical? Can’t we just assume it’s a musical because they are singing and the poster is in a cheerful font? He gives a slightly hysterical, adorable speech.

Ronnie and Dennis from Rock of Ages present…could they not get celebrities this year? Or did they just want to save money on gift baskets? If you are introduced by your character name, no swag for you, they will slap the Nexxus products right out of your hands as they kick you out into the street, giant lion head still perched on your sad, unfamous melon. Anyway, it’s the number from Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Poor Fairy Godmother had an awkward magical change into her costume, I looked down for one second and missed what was clearly a much smoother quick change for Cinderella. An unusual casting choice for Prince Charming. I rarely imagine fairy tale princes having such assertive schnozzolas, but perhaps they cast for talent and not paper doll good looks.

Once won Best Sound Design for a musical, so Guy and Girl announce that Kinky Boots and The Nance won Sound Design this year. I spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking that an actor I knew personally was playing The Guy on Broadway and wasn’t that nice for him and why didn’t anybody tell me before I realized that it was Rory from Doctor Who with blonde hair.

Neil says, “You haven’t lived since you’ve seen Mike Tyson in a pair of kinky boots. No, seriously, two people have seen it and neither of them lived.” It’s like that year that Jack Palance did the one-armed push-ups at the Oscars and Billy Crystal kept coming out all night saying more and more crazy things about what he was up to. There is a great deal of frantic writing going on backstage with people coming up with Mike Tyson jokes, you can practically hear the pencils scribbling. I’m sure Mike Tyson has a grand sense of humour about himself.

Oliver Platt and Liam Neeson come out wearing wreaths as the joyous spirit of comedy and the spirit of tragedy, “Screw you.” They talk about the theatre cheerfully, on Oliver’s part, and sullenly, on Liam’s, until the end, when the spirit of tragedy gets happy too, because theatre is great and everyone should come to NY and see it! It’s like some sort of a party turn, and entirely adorbs. Either Liam Neeson is shrinking or Oliver Platt is much taller than I thought he was.

John Cryer and Martha Plympton present Best Direction of a Musical and then Play. Martha says that “It’s an honour to be nominated and nominated and nominated,” and Jon says, “And I believe it’s an honour just to be miscast.” Diane Paulus wins for Pippin. Nobody gets played off on this show, everyone just says their speech in a reasonable amount of time, then leaves. Either there is a sniper just off-camera making sure they aren’t too lugubrious about it, or they have been spoken to very strongly, “Do you know how America will react if we have to cut one of Neil’s numbers because you had to thank everyone you’ve ever met in your life? Poorly!” Best Direction of a Play is Pam MacKinnon for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Is this the first year that two women have won the directing awards? I think it would have to be! Right on, sistahs!

The cast of Jersey Boys presents the number from Motown: The Musical, which seems to be a jukebox musical containing some of the best music ever written, so that’s okay. It starts with a guy singing “Get Ready” to a thrilled and giggling Audra McDonald in the front row, then goes onto a quick trip through the ’60s sung by some pretty spectacular voices. The tiny child playing early, pre-tragic Michael Jackson is kind of unbelievable great.

Damn, that Bank of America family photographed throughout the years backwards commercial gets me every time.

Jane Krakowski and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (dear Lord, sir, grow your beard back immediately) tell us that other people got to see Kinky Boots win Best Orchestrations, then they present Best Score. Cyndi Lauper wins, and Jesse crows, “Girl you’re gonna have fun tonight!” She starts crying when her nomination is announced, they show Harvey in the audience when she thanks him and he’s crying. We all love you, Cyndi! Stay gold!

Spider-man presents the number from Annie. Many Spider-men, actually, but one takes off his mask to speak, presumably the one who plays the main actor in the show, but then all of the Spider-men take off their masks, too! It’s like they are saying, “See, Mom? I told you I was on Broadway!” The Annie moppets sing an overly mic’d “Hard Knock Life.” Wait, why are they singing “It’s a haad knock life”? Is the show taking place in Boston? Then Jane Lynch sings “Little Girls.” What is this peculiar choreography that the children are doing along with the song? That they don’t do in the show because they are not in this scene? You can’t fool me with Annie, people, did I mention that I was twelve when the original musical came out? I was part of the first generation of American girls who were sure that they could play Annie just like Andrea could. It’s as though Martha Graham came back from the dead to have a bunch of ten-year-olds do something very symbolic and spiky in the middle of this traditional Broadway musical.

The Newsies are presenting another one? Have they run out of shows? They say, straight-facedly, “Headlines don’t sell papes. Newsies sell papes.” Somebody thought of those words, wrote them down, and now these poor saps not only have to say them eight times a week, but now on TV in front of at least tens of viewers. One less, because Mom has fallen asleep. I don’t even know what they were doing there I was so flummoxed by the whole “papes” situation. I think it may have been Best Choreography, won by Kinky Boots and certainly not whatever lunatic came up with that Annie nonsense, apparently in a fever dream.

Andrew Rannells from The Book of Mormon and Neil do a really funny number about being on TV vs. being in the theatre, especially since Andrew’s show was canceled. They are joined by Megan Hilty and Laura Benanti (“Canceled twice!”) “I wanna be on a TV show!” “You gotta have a series!” “Television sucks!” “Suck it, Will Chase!” “Kiss LA goodbye, it’s back to four show weekends!” Man, that was hard to attempt to summarize with no DVR. Look, just watch it, it’s much easier.

Anna Kendrick and Cuba Gooding, Jr. present Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Cuba stopping to put on his glasses. Andrea Martin wins for Pippin, hooray! Her last Tony was twenty years ago! She frantically admits that she only has 75 seconds, and I can hear that sniper sliding that bullet into the chamber, and then, for the first time tonight, somebody is getting played off.

Steven Van Zant has something to do with Broadway? Then, for some reason that I may have missed because I got a text about work, The Rascals sing “Good Lovin’ ” while clips from various shows of people hugging each other play on a big screen. I am at an absolute loss. If this is this year’s bone thrown to the plays I will be highly annoyed, especially since they are including musicals and it’s a very small bone indeed while the musicals already get a whole damn Thanksgiving turkey to themselves, can’t they leave just the tiniest corner of the show only to the plays? And not a band singing a song from 1966 that has nothing to do with anything? No? Okay, just checking.

For the second time they are showing the Depends commercial where Cheryl Burke, one of the pros on Dancing With the Stars, dances in Depends for charity. They never show her face, just big close-ups of her cha-cha-ing Depends area. I guess you’ve got the demographic for the Tonys pretty clear in your minds, huh CBS?

Jesse Eisenberg, whom they clearly got to do this because he can talk faster than any other actor alive since the sad passing of Richard Briers, talking as quickly as I think it is possible to speak without having to attempt to breathe through his eyes, gives a quick plot description of each play nominee as empty sets slide into place behind him, then they play a 15 second clip from each play. Because the Tonys hates plays. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike looks terrific in the clip, wins, and the whole room loses their collective minds. Ah, it’s Durang, no wonder. The producer takes her own sweet time in thanking everyone, indicates that Chris will speak more, and nobody plays off Chris Durang. If one wins Best Play, one should get a couple of extra damn seconds.

Wait a minute, there is more than an hour left of this show, and they are giving Best Play, one of the two biggest awards of the night, now? Bite me, American Theatre Wing. Could you have a leetle more contempt for the straight plays? I’m sure you could if you really put your back into it! Why not just throw their Tonys out into the back alley and whatever hobo picks them up first gets to have Best Play for the year, I’m certain that that would be slightly more respectful than how you treat the legitimate theatre on a yearly basis. Drunk yet?

Neil and Sandy from Annie, who is one of those sad-looking dogs, kisses Neil a whole bunch while he introduces A Christmas Story: The Musical. We will draw a veil over the moment that Neil Patrick Harris, one of the most beloved people in America, French-kisses the dog star of Annie, though I’m certain it will appear in my nightmares for years to come. They all sing and dance energetically to “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out,” and I had to look up the cast to realize that the actress playing the teacher is someone called Caroline O’Connor and not Bebe Neuwirth. Maybe it’s the hairstyle, but I was positive. Again, this is what I get for leaving NY.

Neil pretends to be tweeting, then somebody, who I am assuming is David Hyde Pierce, though it rather looks like David Hyde Pierce’s grandfather, grabs his phone and jumps up and down on it. I’m guessing David Hyde Pierce pulled a Brian Dennehy on a phone in the audience of his show? So out of the loop. First Bebe Neuwirth and now this, I don’t know anything anymore!

Simba from The Lion King introduces the number from Pippin. Pippin sings “Corner of the Sky”, goes a little flat on his final note if I haven’t gone stone deaf, then they segue into “Magic to Do”, with much acrobatics and a female Leading Player. Somehow, it all looks slightly better than the version I was in at Los Angeles City College in 1982 at the age of seventeen, playing the Andrea Martin role. But we had a female Leading Player, too, so they really didn’t need to pat themselves quite so strenuously on the back over their wild casting shake-up. Not that the actress isn’t great, of course. I still remember all my harmonies in this show. Mom still somehow sleeping, my singing along robustly or no.

Sigourney Weaver and Michael Bloomberg, who must be wearing lifts, because he looks only a foot shorter than Sigourney rather than the three feet that he really is. Possibly she is standing in a trench. Apparently he got a special Tony for supporting Broadway Theatre for the past eleven years of his reign. They are presenting Best Revival of a Play. Which is more important than Best Play so that’s why it’s on twenty minutes later than Best Play, though still an hour before the end of the show? And then they don’t even bother to turn on the producer’s mic for ten seconds because the Tonys hates plays? No, I’m not going to let it go, why do you ask? Wow, they don’t gently play her off, they bring the music up super loud, cut to an extreme long-shot of the stage, cut her mic in the middle of a word, practically and, presumably, punch her in the throat as soon as the camera goes off of her. We certainly didn’t want to miss another minute of Royal Caribbean guy standing backstage next to Cyndi Lauper and Jake Gyllenhall, looking like a tool. Poor guy, I’ll bet he was glad to get the gig, too, and here I am, being mean. Sorry, Royal Caribbean guy! I know it’s not your fault.

Having run out of characters from long-running musicals to talk about things that happened before the television cameras bothered to show up, Annie and Daddy Warbucks wander onto the stage and mention that Matilda The Musical won Best Book. Annie says “Leapin’ lizards!” when Daddy says that their show premiered in 1977. Because it is so very long ago. Pardon me while I fall down into a heap of dust and bone fragments.

Hal Prince presents numbers from Phantom of the Opera, because it just had its 25th anniversary. And because there might be one person in America who hasn’t seen it yet, so come to New York and see an old musical! Don’t bother with a new play! Okay, I’ll admit it, I never saw Phantom, though I was in New York for twenty-three of its twenty-five years on Broadway. Heavens. This guy they have playing the Phantom these days is…expressive.

Neil says that Mike Tyson was pulling the boat through the fog with his teeth. I think they have officially run out of Mike Tyson jokes. Mike Tyson, he’s no Jack Palance.

Sally Fields and Matthew Broderick present Best Actor in a Musical to Billy Porter for Kinky Boots. Even I, who has no idea what is going on on Broadway these days, knew that was going to happen. He is practically having hysterics. It is very winning. Looking forward to seeing him in the number!

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play. Tracy Letts, Virginia Woolf. He gives a much more stentorian speech.

Matthew Morrison introduces the Parade of the Dead. Cyndi Lauper sings “True Colors” and plays lap steel while the pictures of the honoured are on a screen behind her and the camera swings wildly back and forth. The pictures are never full-screen, we always see Cyndi in front of them, and sometimes they are hard to read when the camera is all the way of one side of the stage of the other. It is less In Memorium and more “Look! It’s Cyndi Lauper, you like her, right? Don’t change the channel just because you don’t know who all these dead people are!” Look, Tony Awards, the only people who watch this show are people who know exactly who Celeste Holm and Richard Griffiths were, stop trying to appeal to the theatre-haters.

Velma Kelly is back, but her words aren’t there, and whomever this actress is, she is sort of marvelous about not having anything on the PromTer and stating so completely in character. Once they come up, they are on the wrong box and she does a Fosse quarter-turn and reads her stuff like a champ. Which I have no idea what it was due to taking notes about all this. The continuing story of My Life With No DVR by The Mighty Kymm, available soon at your leading independent booksellers. It’ll tear your heartstrings. Neil teases the “O, they’re over here,” quarter-turn moment afterwards.

Jake Gyllenhall presents Actress in a Play, which, to the surprise of absolutely no-one, goes to Cicely Tyson in A Trip to Bountiful. I am pretty certain that nobody else in her category bothered writing a speech, I certainly wouldn’t. She has never won before, and also is Cicely Tyson. She spends about thirty seconds getting out of her seat and getting up to the stage, then give the s-l-o-w-e-s-t acceptance speech in captivity while wearing some sort of fantastic purple sea anemone and bangs. I’m pretty certain that the director is smashing his face into the glass in the booth until the blood runs, because they are GOING TO RUN OVERTIME AND IT’S ALL CICELY TYSON’S FAULT. Whom they will not have the temerity to play off. Even the sniper is standing down, teary-eyed. “Please wrap it up, it says. Well, that’s what you did with me, you wrapped me up in your arms and I’m going home with a Tony. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Well played, Miss Tyson.

Jake G (I’m not spelling that name for the third time) presents Best Actress in a Musical to Patina Miller for Pippin, the female Leading Player. She is in one hell of a gown. Strapless, big bell skirt, fabulous colour, just what everyone would ever want to wear while winning yourself a Tony.

People. I know you are happy you are winning this Tony, and it’s awesome to win a Tony, and hey! Tony! But stop thanking your agents and managers. This show would come down on time and the director wouldn’t be gibbering in the corner right now if you would stop thanking your agents and managers.

The chicks from Mamma Mia present the number from Kinky Boots. Lots of OK Go choreography on the treadmills. Not nearly as impressive a number as from Matilda The Musical, I’ve got to say. It may not have been the best choice. You know, I saw that movie when it first came out and really loved it a lot, but I didn’t think, “You know what this needs? Songs!” This is why I am not Harvey or Cyndi. No vision.

They announce in clips the special award winners from earlier in the evening, and they don’t even get random characters from musicals wandering onto the stage to introduce the clips, they only get Voice-Over Lady. Not so special. Looks like Larry Kramer gave another laff-a-minute speech. A sentence never said by anyone ever: “That Larry Kramer, he’s hilarious!”

Guy and Girl are back to mention that Matilda and The Nance won Best Lighting.

Patti Lupone announces Best Revival of a Musical, first stating that the fourth nominee was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which they show a few quick clips from, because it was a limited run and is closed already. Of course they couldn’t have a live performance because the cast is all dispersed, probably performing on those Royal Caribbean Cruises they keep shilling, but they could have shown a filmed number, couldn’t they? Of course not. This isn’t about honouring the nominees for their excellence, it is about promoting tourism in New York, which is why Phantom of the Opera got about 1000% more time than all of the play nominees, both original and revival, and Edwin Drood put together. Patti announces the winner as Pippin, then grandly stalks off the stage, the camera chasing her desperately before they finally remember to change shots and go to the winners trotting out of the audience. I think the director is probably lying on the bathroom floor, trying to cool his fevered brow, is why that shot didn’t change in a timely manner.

And now they come back from a commercial with a number from Once playing, presumably because they are running so behind (that tic in the director’s face? It will be known as Cicely Tyson forevermore) that they started it during the commercial! Would it have been faster not to have included a number from the best musical of last year? That’s crazy talk! It is 11.01p, and they are rushing like crazy to get to the Best Musical. Bernadette Peters is presenting it, and she. Will. Not. Be. Rushed.

Kinky Boots wins Best Musical, and two different producers speak without getting played off. Neil threatens not to sing the closing song because they are long on time, but who is he kidding? He does his “written during the show” song to the tune of “Empire State of Mind” with Audra McDonald (in a dress that I would swear is made of out the same material as The Leading Player’s was) singing the Alicia Keys bit super-awesomely. Because she is Audra McDonald and she can do nothing else.

So there you have it! Come to NY, see a Broadway show, the Tonys hate plays, Neil Patrick Harris made out with a dog, drive safely!

But it does. Mexico’s Sonoran Desert (home of dramatic Saguaro cactus and tasty Sonoran beef) actually exists on both sides of the Gulf of California (the body of water gringos often refer to as the Sea of Cortez), and almost the entire length of the Baja Peninsula is host to its stark beauty.

The thing about the desert is, it’s anything but deserted. This desert, in particular, is home to quail that move about in order of size, much like their animated cousins in the opening of The Partridge Family, woodpeckers and vultures that perch on the cactus arms, several species of hawks, actual roadrunners (which, contrary to the folks at Looney Toons, are actually about the size of chickens), geckos that chitter like squirrels, coyotes (that really are pretty wily, living, as they do, so close to humans), both bobcats and larger mountain lions, and any number of formerly domesticated dogs, cats, and horses.

Sometimes in the night, I’m awakened by one of the cats screaming – it used to scare me, but now I just confirm there are no strays in my room and go back to sleep until the gecko wakes me up.

Everywhere we go we see street dogs. These are all mixed breeds, some friendlier than others, but none truly mean. There are rescue groups here but without funding, and with a culture that doesn’t believe in neutering, the dog population keeps increasing. I, of course, want to take them all home.

Yesterday we drove an hour or so to Todos Santos, where we did NOT make a stop at the Hotel California (been there, done that), but did visit my favorite vendor of Talavera ceramics. I bought four hand-painted espresso mugs and a milk pitcher, as well as bottle each of vainilla tecul, vanilla extract made with tequila, and another kind of vanilla designed for putting in coffee or drinking straight.

We also met friends in nearby Pescadero, where we went to a restaurant that seemed sort of casually disreputable from outside but makes truly amazing food – I had a fish fillet stuffed with shrimp and scallops, wrapped in bacon, and drizzled with a poblano chili sauce and it’s a meal I’ll never forget.

On days we don’t leave town, my mother and I hang around on her deck until the sun gets too hot. Then we swim in her saltwater pool, or walk down to the water and collect shells. Her beach runs into a mangrove forest, and when there aren’t people doing drug deals (no, not kidding, but also not really common) or teenagers seeking alone-time, the mangrove is a magical place, with a tidal creek running through it, and it’s own subset of local wildlife.

This morning is an at-home morning, and I’m pausing in my typing to watch the water every few minutes. As the song says, fish are jumping…but the dolphins are leaping as well. Later today we’ll go into town to walk along the Malecon (the boardwalk, basically), with limon crema (key lime ice cream) from “the place with the polka-dot trees” or we might just go as far as Chametla, to have a coffee and a povlerone cookie.

Next week, we’ll be trekking to El Triunfo to see the piano museum, and to the Artisania, the local artists’ collective. I might spend a lot of money, or I might just buy one special thing.

For now, though, it’s enough to sit here with the salt breeze dancing in my hair and the water lapping at the sand, and a mug of coffee to sip.

When I was asked to title this column, I chose Deep Cuts because I planned on reviewing both current and older films, but because summer is a’comin’ in, there have been new films up the wazoo, and why review older ones when there are all these brand new movies filled with the promise of perfection and joy all over the place? Well, this week I am making up for it by going for a Very Deep Cut Indeed™.

Recently it was Mary Pickford’s 121′st birthday, so of course I celebrated by going to see Little Annie Rooney and eating strawberry shortcake. What did you do?

My name is The Mighty Kymm and I am a silent film nerd (“Hi, Mighty!”). I have no-one to blame but my parents: take a child at an impressionable age to a week of Chaplin comedies on the big screen, end up watching her take time off work years later to drive to Oakland to see Abel Gance’s six hour verson of Napoleon with a live orchestra. The first taste is always free, then you go for the big stuff.

For the uninitiated, Mary Pickford was one of the biggest silent film stars that there were was, she started United Artists studio with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, and she played twelve-year-old girls until she was well into her thirties. Including in Little Annie Rooney.

Little Annie Rooney started life as a music hall song, referenced in this film, and continued after the movie as a comic strip. The film takes place on the Lower East Side of New York, where all the first generation immigrant kids run in gangs and throw bricks at each other. It’s not exactly the Bloods and the Crips, though there ends up being guns and shooting and death in addition to adorable moppet brick heaving, so neither is it entirely the innocence of The Little Rascals, either.

Annie (Mary Pickford, natch) is the leader of one of the kids gangs; Mickey Kelly (Joe Butterworth) is the other.

As the movie puts it, they are both Irish, so neither of them will quit fighting first, and it starts with a massive melee that somehow causes no heads to cave in, though Lord knows they all try hard enough. Annie’s brother, Tim (Gordon Griffith), and Mickey’s, Joe (William Haines), are in an older, more gang-like gang, though Tim is mistrusted by Spider, a real bad guy, because he’s a cop’s son. Joe finds Annie and Mickey brawling and stops them, causing Annie to get a giant crush on Joe. It’s hard to have a romantic male lead in a movie where your romantic female lead is supposed to be twelve-years-old, but the movie does make it work. Go with me on that.

Officer Rooney (Walter James), Annie and Tim’s dad, is beloved in the neighbourhood, though not by the crooks, and all of the immigrant parents of the gangs of kids bring their problems to him. He tries to advise Joe to stop with the gang business and get a good, honest job like his old man did, but Joe brushes him off.

Then, bad things happen (extremely bad things considering this is a comedy, it gets pretty dramatic in the middle), and Spider and Tony, another bad guy, try to blame them on Joe, but the kids find out the truth and save the day, though not before another tragedy happens. Everything is all right at the end, though, in case you were worried.

The racial politics in the film can make 21st century audiences a little squirmy, as everyone acts to the fullest extent of their stereotypes (the fact that the joke “Black people sure do name their kids funny names” goes back as far as 1925 is surprising), but beyond the broadness therein, all of the ethnicities get treated completely equally.

Annie’s gang includes the black kid, the Chinese kid, the Jewish kid. Mickey’s gang includes the Greek kid and the Italian kid. Everyone is all mixed together in the Lower East Side, and the two kids who are actual enemies are both Irish. Also, Annie’s best friend is the Jewish kid, and the Chinese and Greek kids are the ones who make the truth come out at the end of who really did that extremely bad thing, and all the kids come together at the end, no more bricks.

Mary Pickford being thirty-two is definitely the thing that one needs to get used to in the film, especially as she is surrounded by actual children, and the older boy that she crushes on was, in real life, seven years younger than she was. When in shots by herself, she is surrounded by huge doors and chairs, like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann character, and all of the adults are played by the tallest actors that they could cast. It is all extremely peculiar, but then, as you are watching it, you think, “O yeah, this is a movie!” and just accept it, like space travel and talking animals.

It’s very funny and entertaining, and legitimately tear-jerking in the middle, and it’s available in its entirety on YouTube, if a little fuzzily and without soundtrack, certainly without the wonderful live piano accompaniment that I was lucky enough to get.

If you have never seen a silent film before, and you live someplace that has a movie house that has silent film evenings, give it a try! But don’t blame me if you end up driving for miles to get another hit (there were two people from Australia in the audience with me, and yes, they came just for Mary’s birthday!), that silent film monkey is pretty hard to get off your back, believe you me!

Did that catch your attention?!? Ladies, I hate to be the one to spill the beans, but we aren’t alone in our love for antiques and vintage finds. Our guys: boyfriends, husbands, dads and, perhaps even sons, have a love for antiques. My little 3-year-old has been helping me find treasures since before he could talk!

Mantiques in particular are antiques that have a more masculine bent, like leather-bound books, Mad Men style whisky glasses, hunting paraphernalia, vintage tin Guinness posters (we have a few of these) or other advertising and anything to do with tools. I also find that men love all things nautical and anything to do with man’s best friend.

To my complete and utter surprise my husband enjoys going to estate sales and antique markets. He loved this shower we found at the Brimfield Antique Fair in Brimfield, Massachusetts. Isn’t it neat? He thought it would be a great outdoor shower. I mean, check out those body misters! Unfortunately, we didn’t have room for it, let alone the money to purchase it… I would class this as a mantique.

I also find that men love industrial items repurposed – old typewriters, industrial shelving for their man caves, nautical charts. At Brimfield we found amazing tables that had been made out of old bowling alleys and fantastic lights created from old chimney caps. My hubby swooned over restored outboard motors and took some pics for friends (which I found out he still has saved on his phone).

As Father’s Day approaches, I thought it might be nice to get your guy or dad a mantique in celebration of him!

One year I gave my husband a nautical tide clock with the map of our new home. Massachusetts Bay Trading Company can customize these tide clocks for any location.

If you aren’t by the sea, you can recreate this look with old maps (maybe special to where you live or where your special guy was born) and get a DIY clock from a craft store. Simply mod podge the map onto the clock and voila an affordable and thoughtful gift.

I am a huge fan of vintage keys and men love them too. At antique fairs these can be a pretty penny, but I’m sure at a yard sale or an auction you can pick up a whole jar full for a song and dance. These keys belonged to my grandfather and I made this key art in his memory. For a full tutorial click here.

Finally, we gave this to my father when I was just little and this is still one of his favorite possessions. My dad loves saving his spare change and rolling it. We found this at a craft fair, it is an old post office box turned bank.

Due to the 30+ years of use, the slot on the top has become scratched, but it still sits in pride of place on my dad’s desk filled with coins. The desk is also a mantique.

These are just a few ideas for Father’s Day. If you aren’t into DIY, I have a few other gift ideas for you. Clocks are timeless in appeal, whether it be a gold pocket watch with an inscription from a previous owner, a vintage wrist watch with a worn leather strap or a gorgeous 1950s alarm clock.

Still stumped on the perfect gift for Dad? Antique liquor glasses, decanters, model boats, vintage trains, globes (one can never have enough of these!), oars, vintage croquet mallets or boardgames all are lovely gifts too!

]]> http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/06/habitation-cest-manifique-les-mantiques/feed/ 4 http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/06/habitation-cest-manifique-les-mantiques/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/allthingsgirl/feed/~3/xjJpiHMIo5Q/ http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/06/his-majestys-hope-a-maggie-hope-mystery/#comments Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:56:32 +0000 Becca Rowan http://allthingsgirl.com/?p=15415 Maggie Hope is quickly becoming my favorite historical mystery heroine. His Majesty’s Hope, the third volume in Susan Elia MacNeal’s series about an intrepid young woman working behind the scenes for the British government during WWII, is the best one yet. I was completely engaged from the first chapter, and couldn’t put it down.

Maggie has quickly moved through the ranks from typist to codebreaker to outright spy, a member of the Prime Ministers’s Special Operations Unit. In this book she’s catapulted (quite literally!)  into Berlin to infiltrate the ranks of an esteemed female member of the Nazi intelligensia, someone who has a close connection with Maggie that has only recently been revealed. Maggie is given a new identity with a thoroughly developed  backstory to go along with her mission, and a cyanide pill to swallow should she fail at her task.

No pressure, right?

The suspense mounts masterfully, and I was biting my fingernails a few times as Maggie found herself dancing a little too closely with danger. If you ever had any doubts about the evil goings on during the Nazi regime, this book will certainly dispel them. A major subplot in this novel is Operation Compassionate Death, a “program” of secretly euthanizing children who were handicapped or chronically ill. Maggie’s friend Elise, a nurse at a Berlin hospital participating in this atrocity, discovers what’s going on and enlists Maggie’s help in bringing it to light. And Germany’s social ills aren’t the only ones on display in His Majesty’s Hope. Back home in England, Maggie’s dear friend David is coming to terms with his homosexuality, which was illegal in British society during that time period.

While it sounds like a lot to handle in one novel, I felt that MacNeal juggled all the plots twists and turns with great aplomb. In fact, one of the reasons I enjoy this series so much are the layers of complexity involved – the historical and sociological dimensions always dovetail so nicely with Maggie’s ongoing personal story. His Majesty’s Hope definitely left me eager to find out what our Maggie will find herself involved in next. When  All Things Girl  spoke with Susan last  November,  she was busily at work on Book Number Four which she told us would be set in Edinburgh, London, and Washington, D.C.. “I’m excited to introduce President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to readers,” she said.

And I’m eager to see how Maggie, FDR, and Eleanor get along!

Buy the books from the Maggie Hope series on Amazon!

Mr. Churchill’s Secretary

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy

His Majesty’s Hope

Connect with Susan Elia MacNeal on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and her website.

It’s the perfect time to share the mid-issue update of “Fear & Courage”.  Throughout the ‘zine you’ll find a few tidbits here and a few tidbits there as we wrap things up and begin preparing for our 3rd Issue (due in early July).

The warmer days are the perfect time to celebrate with a bowl of ice cream and the delicious Part Two of our interview with Jeni Britton Bauer, founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream.  Our new Man of the Moment is the very sexy John  Barrowman.   You’ll also find new pieces in Everything Girl, Writings, and Art.

Summer is the time of year when things slow down here at All Things Girl.  Folks take vacations or are in the midst of traveling for work.  And, to be honest, we begin to think about what 2014 is all about and finding some fresh voices.

When it comes to fresh voices, we are always open to regular contributors and columnists.  We’ll also be looking for a new Writings Editor and would love to add a Social Media person. (Email Me at Deb.Smouse AT allthingsgirl.com if you’re interested).

And 2014 is going to be all about Shakespeare.

• 1st Quarter – 2014 (Jan-Mar) – “Taming of the Shrew”
• 2nd Quarter -2014 (Apr-Jun) – Love’s Labor’s Lost
• 3rd Quarter – 2014 (Jul-Sep) – As You Like It
• 4th Quarter – 2014 (Oct-Dec) – Much Ado About Nothing

As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts and anxiously await your submissions.

May you be willing to take the plunge and do something that scares you.  I know no other way than that to grow your courage.  Happy June!

Now it’s time for me to concentrate on my own writing but I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about my time being The Writings Editor for All Things Girl.

The next writings editor may have different views, so it will be important to keep an eye on what gets published, but these are the sorts of decisions I made about accepting submissions. There are some things I considered which are so obvious it would be easy to dismiss them, but submissions do fail on these basics.

First of all I considered whether the piece of writing fit the theme for the months (now quarter). At ATG we’ve always looked for a broad interpretation, but there needs to be some link to the theme, otherwise there’s no point in having themes.

It may seem strange, but then I looked at whether the writing had been submitted by a woman, after all we are a showcase for women’s writings. It also had to be poetry or fictional. Other parts of ATG cover other types of writing.

I’ve read some interesting submissions but they need to fit in with the ATG style, which is why it’s always good to read a magazine before you submit. We celebrate good writing, preferable that lifts the reader. Writing that promoted suicide as a solution to the problem in a story tended to be rejected.

Some submissions posed a problem about morality. Could I possibly publish stories that promoted drug abuse or sexual abuse or were littered with obscene language? For every submission I asked the question, ‘Would I be happy if my grandchild read this (when she was older)?’ I never wanted to be in a position where I was ashamed of choosing a piece of writing. I was aware that although the majority of our readers are adults, we also have young readers and writers.

Very occasionally I rejected work that was peppered with spelling and grammatical errors. Sometimes one or two of these get through however hard we try, but we need to make some effort to get these things right. This is interesting on an e-zine as writers come from all over the world. I’ve tried to not change US spelling to UK or vice versa.

When writing passed all the above criteria I would upload the poetry or prose onto the ATG site and email the writer. It would be easy to dismiss those writings not published, but I recognise that most were well written, just not quite right for ATG. I read every single submission and I’ve learned so much from all the writers who’ve sent their work to us. I’ve enjoyed all the submissions and some have been inspirational.

So what now?

I hope everyone will continue to send their work in to ATG and perhaps this blog post will help you analyse the style and content of our e-zine. Thank you for all the contributions so far. It’s our contributors that make ATG so good.

For myself I hope to continue to send my own efforts to ATG and to contribute to the blog now and again. I’m at the editing stage of my first novel, which is taking a lot of time (far longer than I expected). I’m also looking for reviewers of my first poetry book and first children’s book, so do get in touch if you’d like to do that. They are available on Amazon but I’d be happy to give a copy to the first three people willing to write a review. If anyone wants to read more of my work please come and visit my blogs. www.pennyluker.wordpress.com or www.penspoems.wordpress.com
But the most important thing is to Keep Writing!

I hate “Taps.”

There aren’t a lot of pieces of music I can say that about, but of them all, “Taps” is at the top of the list of “Songs I Hate.” The irony is that, in and of itself, it’s a beautiful piece of music. This haunting bugle call was originally meant as the signal for “lights out” in Army camps and on bases, as well as at West Point. True, it was adopted as such after a particularly bloody battle, but it wasn’t originally associated directly with death.

Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh — Falls the night.

Like many people, however, especially those of us with family, friends, or loved ones serving in the military, “Taps” has a more emotional context. It’s the bugle call you hear at funerals, and once you’ve heard it in that setting you never lose that connection, or the emotional response. For me, the tears come, mostly for my grandfather, but for a string of others as well, from the very first note.

This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, “Taps” is playing on an infinite loop in my head.

Why? Because I found out recently that a dear friend, a military veteran who survived a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, then a year in Kabul with the National Guard, lost his last battle, one with that insidious enemy we call “cancer,” in February.

His name was Mike Greene, but I knew him best by the handle he used on OpenDiary (an early blogging platform that existed before LiveJournal or Blogger): WarriorPoet.

There was no more appropriate identifier he could have picked, for this was a man who, in one breath, would talk about the daily business of life in a Forward Operations Base, and in the next would share his hopes and dreams for his young sons, or muse about a favorite piece of literature.

He was unfailingly kind, and when there was a writer whose work he liked, he was also unflaggingly encouraging.

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

When I stopped using OpenDiary as my primary blogging platform, WarriorPoet followed me to my own site to read and comment on my stuff. When I created a meme project (CafeWriting), he participated, even sending me pictures from Kabul to use for some of the prompts. More than once he called me his literary muse, and suggested I should “…just change your name to Calliope.”

All this and we barely knew each other’s real names.

Three years ago, Mike wrote a piece for a CafeWriting prompt about heroes and villains (and gave me permission to share it). Even though it’s a little off-kilter for Memorial Day, I’d like to share it with you, because I think it’s appropriate, in its way, and also because I agree that we bandy about words like “hero” without stopping to think what they really mean.

Ordinary heroes. Becoming a hero by mistake. Poetic heroes. Short-lived heroes. Personal heroes. Heroic wisdom. And I got nothing. After spending pretty much the entire month pondering and wondering, I’ve come to the conclusion I no longer believe in heroes.

Sure, there are people who do amazing things which I’m not sure I could ever do, even in the same circumstances. Sure, they’re worthy of respect and admiration. But to be called a hero? Maybe according to Webster (to whom I give little respect – I’m an OED kind of guy myself), but that’s just words. What about the gut meaning – what it REALLY MEANS to you on an intensely personal level? I’m not sure I even know what a hero is. If it’s got to be epic, like the firefighter who carries out an entire family from a burning building, how can one consider a teacher a hero? And if it can be non-epic, like a father showing the value of hard work, does that make everyone who works hard a hero? How can we all be heroes? But if it’s something intensely personal, without any reference to anyone else, doesn’t voicing it into the wider world make it null and void?

Maybe heroes are a kind of cultural karma. When life is bad, do people blindly flail about for something, anything to give them an anchor of hope? God can’t exist without the Devil. Yin and Yang. Heads and tails. Heroes and Villains.

Are heroes nothing more than another form of nostalgia? The Greatest Generation. The Roaring Nineties. The Age of Aquarius. The Reformation. Pax Romana. My heroes have always been cowboys. I’m holding out for a hero. I’m only a man in a silly red sheet/Digging for Kryptonite on this one way street. Maybe heroes are only an excuse for our own failings. Greed, pollution, war, hate, crime, economic troubles, illegal immigration, drugs – Hell, someone’s got to be out there to make things all better, even if it’s just Grandpa who cut the crusts off your peanut butter sandwiches.

Let’s put heroes where they belong. With the Holy Grail and Eternal Truth and Perpetual Motion. I guess we’ll believe them when we see them.
~WarriorPoet (M.J. Greene), 28 July 2010

A mutual friend of the WarriorPoet’s and mine, another OpenDiarist who goes by the name RebelBelle, recently quoted something she’d heard in a movie, about death and remembrance. The actual quote, from Banksy is this: “I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”

WarriorPoet’s – Mike’s – first death may have come in February, but I find comfort in the fact that his words are still around for people to read, that his family will continue to remember him and speak his name, and that even though we never met in person, knowing him made me both a better person and a better writer.

I read online that the governor of Mike’s home state ordered the flags to be flown at half-mast on the first business day after his funeral. This weekend, as emotions and patriotism (for whatever country you’re in – Memorial/Remembrance Day isn’t a solely American holiday) run high, there are likely to be lots of flags at half-mast, and hearing “Taps” will likely be unavoidable. I suspect the hot dogs I plan to grill tomorrow afternoon will be flavored by tears as well as mustard.

But that’s as it should be.

Because Memorial Day is about remembering the military officers we’ve lost, yes, but it’s also about treasuring the days the rest of us still have.

Then good night, peaceful night,
Till the light of the dawn shineth bright;
God is near, do not fear — Friend, good night.

Note:The lyrics to “Taps,” are both unofficial, and anonymously written.

Before Midnight was coming out, and I had never seen Before Sunrise (1995) or Before Sunset (2004), not that I hadn’t had plenty of time.

I quickly got Before Sunrise from Netflix and watched it right away. A completely charming, lovely movie about nice and interesting Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), meeting on a train in Vienna, then walking and talking and falling in love all night long. At the end they vow to meet in six months, but since I am from the future, I knew that they hadn’t, so it was a more bittersweet ending than it was before Before Sunset was made.

I returned the disc, but couldn’t get Sunset in time, and therefor I crashed straight from that beautiful night of hope in Vienna to Before Midnight ‘s eighteen-years-older Celine and Jesse in Greece without the cushion of nine years later in Paris in between. It was a bit of a culture shock.

Nine years after they re-met in Sunset , Celine and Jesse have seven-year-old twins, and have just dropped off Jesse’s son from his former marriage at the airport after spending the summer with them in Greece in the guest house of a famous author. Jesse has written four books, only the first two being about him and Celine, she works in an environmental group, but is about to take a job in the government in order to effect change from the inside.

They have a big fat Greek meal with their host and other friends, then go off for a night alone together in a hotel, which is where we get our talk talk talk talk talk, which is what Celine and Jesse are all about and the tradition of these movies, but when do long-term couples with children ever get to be alone?

Much more of this movie takes place with other people than the first two installments did, and I’d say that the best part of Midnight is the long dinner scene, where interesting, charming people talk about relationships and have fun together. It’s when we get to the hotel and the two leads alone is where the film starts getting into a bumpy area.

The hotel scene is, to put it baldly, pretty much a half an hour of fighting. I don’t want to fight with anyone for half an hour, I don’t want to watch people in real life fighting for half an hour, and, frankly, I don’t want to go to the movies to see it, either.

I admit that, having just seen Sunrise , I may have been in too raw a state of young love to watch this, but frankly, I didn’t want to know that Celine and Jesse grew up to be jackasses. They are nasty and horrid to such an extent that I stopped caring about whether they would stay together or not. It also all appears to come so much out of nowhere that I wondered whether the nice, friendly people they were earlier in the film was all a ruse to get us into this hotel room.

The whole final quarter of the film felt like a writing exercise, “Have the character be at odds with one another, and then make them go as far as possible without actually murdering each other.” In the rational cold light of morning, I completely understand why that scene is there. A., without it there is no conflict and this is just a movie about happy people chugging through their lives. B., there are two other long scenes of nice conversation between the couple, why sit through a third? And C., most importantly, director Richard Linklater is showing what a long-time couple can be like without anyone else around. This still doesn’t mean that I particularly want to sit through it.

I am still interested to see the fourth film, nine years from now, Before 3.30 In the Afternoon , but I sure hope that Celine and Jesse in their fifties will be less of a chore to sit through than Celine and Jesse in their forties.