Letters

Dear Body,

Now is so not the time to be getting sick. Not at all. You can't wait a week?

Also, if this is swine flu, or any other kind of flu and not just a cold, someone's head is going to roll.

Uckily yours,
Me

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Dear Millay paper,

I revised you. Can't you just conclude yourself?

Frustratedly yours,
Me

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Dear Thesis,

Thank you for being you, even if we are having some trouble with that section on "Quarantine." I have faith we will manage, though. We must manage, for this chapter has to be done before I leave town next week.

Soppily yours,
Me

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In less annoying news, my teaching evaluation went pretty well. It was weird seeing myself on video, but I got over it eventually, and the director of the composition program liked what I was doing and even wanted copies of my paper assignments to put in the sample assignment bank for other 101 teachers. Perhaps I should go into curriculum planning or the like.

"You're looking for a noodle in a haystack. Oooh, cookies!"

Watched Flying Down to Rio tonight. More accurately, I watched the subplot with Ginger and Fred and gave the main plot (some kind of love triangle between people I didn't care about) a miss.

I have to say, there must have been some good crack being done in Hollywood in 1933. Nothing else can explain that last production number, with all the women on planes. No, really, through the magic of special effects, there were chorus girls dancing while harnessed to the wings of old-style prop planes. The people in the movie viewing it had to look through binoculars to see the show. One memorable sequence had a line of girls lauch some parachutes which ripped all their clothes off, leaving them to dance about in their underwear 10,000 feet above Brazil. No, really.

Yeah, this was obviously made before the Hays Code came into being. If it weren't for that sequence, the see-through dresses most of the women were in would've given it away, as would some of the dialogue. ("What have those South American girls got below the equator that we don't?" comes to mind.) Even the Carioca itself might not have passed muster the next year, given the scandalous way everyone pressed their foreheads together while dancing.

For what it was, it was fairly entertaining, even if Fred and Ginger only danced together for about two minutes. (Two pretty good minutes, though. In addition to the nifty stuff, I laughed quite a bit when they bumped their heads together and staggered around all dazed after trying to do the forehead-touching thing.) Ginger in particular got to pull off some snappy dialogue, and Fred got in a few amusing lines as well. Here's a conversation I found funny:

Ginger/"Honey Hale": What's this business about the foreheads?
Fred/"Fred Ayres": Mental telepathy.
Ginger: I can tell what they're thinking about from here!

Them drunkenly watching the denoument of the main plot together through a pair of binoculars was also pretty funny. Not to mention that the placement of it right before the fadeout seemed as if RKO was saying very loudly, "LOOK, HERE ARE FRED AND GINGER. THEY ARE OUR NEW MONEY-MAKING PAIRING. YOU WILL BE SEEING MORE OF THEM."

Now I...kind of want fic. Hmm.