Favorite book becomes a movie!

Can't remember if I've blogged about one of my favorite books, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. So nice to see that its film version, The Hedgehog, opened this weekend. 3rd daughter encouraged me to read the book after she found it by accident at her library and loved it. Me, too!

The Adam's Apple Jump

Check out The Nonverbal Dictionary. Scroll down the home page to get to the A-Z list.

Now I know why I feel so embarrassed when I gulp answering a question from the co-worker I fear. I'm embarrassed to show that I'm embarrassed! Look at Flashbulb Eyes and Zygomatic Smile. Read 'em and weep.

Darwin Would Love It!

The Museum of Science in Boston has put up this great site to show an illustrated time line for Life's Evolution. Just drag the button across billions of years to see the various stages of living beings. Humans are an.... afterthought? transitory stage? culmination of evolutionary process? Stick around for another billion years to find out.

The Slap

Among the many stories my mother-in-law told me about her life as the oldest daughter of Slovak immigrants homesteading in a sod house in North Dakota in the early 1900s, was the one about how she found blood on her underwear one day when she was about thirteen. Mary was terrified that she was deathly ill and spent some time in great anxiety before deciding to tell her mother. Instead of reassuring her daughter that this was entirely normal and was the start of her menstrual periods, her mother slapped her! Apparently this was some sort of custom for Slovak women with their daughters, who usually arrived at this major event with no idea of what was happening.

Her next younger sister found out ahead of time what to expect from Mary or school friends. When it was her turn, she didn't say anything to her mother. When her mother found a bucket of rags soaking in her bedroom one day and asked what it was for, the younger sister said, "You know what it is." Period (pun intended!).

Kids weren't told anything about where babies came from, either. Mary said that being around farm animals let farm kids see how things were done with them, but often didn't make the connection with their parents or other people. She was 11 years old when she realized that her mother was showing signs of pregnancy, but it was never spoken of. On the night the youngest sister was born that year, she heard her parents talking in their bedroom (the only bedroom) while their 3 daughters slept on mattresses on the floor of the main room. Her mother asked the father, "What is it?" and her father answered, "Another girl." Then they talked about the small tear in the kitchen screen door - that the tear should be made bigger so that the girls could be told that the stork brought the baby. Mary listened to all this and said nothing to her parents about it the next day when the baby was produced for all to see.

Now I'm reading Miriam's Kitchen which has recipes and stories of Jewish life in America and in Eastern Europe. Imagine my surprise when I came to this page (205):

Puberty

In my grandmother's house in Brooklyn, in the bedroom in which I slept, there was a painted dresser. One drawer of the dresser held pale blue sanitary napkins, year after year.

These came in handy one year. Visiting, I got my first period - far from my mother, who had remained in Detroit to study for college exams.

I confided in my grandmother. She smacked my face.

I looked to her for a reason. I saw an ironic, apologetic little smile, heard a caught breath that might have been a decimal place's worth of secret amusement or inner regret.

She said: "Now you'll always have rosy cheeks," then went looking for a contraption, elastic and clips.

I knew this slap came out of the past, and she was just doing her duty. I sensed that her investment was less than complete. The smack was not painful, yet burned on my cheek like guilt, like innocence - something she felt was fitting, and I knew was unjust.

Later I stumbled on written words parsing that shtetl gesture. Thus mother warned daughter, time out of mind, not to compete for the father's attentions; thus mother taught daughter the shame of Eve. I may have been the last in my line to be punished in advance for sexual sins, mine and those of every mortal woman.

-----------------------------------------------

Mary was not Jewish, but Poland and Lithuania, where Miriam's people came from, were not far from Slovakia. I doubt her mother gave it any more thought than that it was what you did for your daughter, as it had been done to you. And Mary was the last in her line to be slapped.

and now for something completely different......

Came across this link to Savage Beauty, a surreal fashion/art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here's the description:

This website from the Metropolitan Museum accompanies their retrospective exhibition of the work of couturier Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide at age 40 in 2010. McQueen was known for his lavishly staged runway shows, for example his spring 2003 collection, Irere, featured a recreation of a shipwreck complete with pirates and amazons, and models falling overboard.It's only a game in 2005, was a human chess game, with models dressed as chess pieces, such a knight in a horsehairs skirt. On the exhibition‚s website, visitors can view selected objects including McQueen's extremely low-slung trousers, "bumsters" or the Spine Corset, a silver exoskeleton, worn over a dress. Narration is provided by Andrew Bolton, the British curator of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, Michelle Olly, who wore one of the dresses, and McQueen himself. There is also a section of online videos available here, where visitors can watch a model in a chiffon dress drop into the ocean, and see the chess pieces move.

Click on the Video link to see a selection of short video clips of McQueen's shows. I really like the one called, "It's Only a Game," as described above. Wonder how this guy ever made any money? It's not like anyone can really wear these things. Can't think that he only sold to collectors and museums.

Crime and Punishment

Starting a week ago, I was assigned to a jury for a case at 26th & Cal, that ominous address for the Criminal Courts building on the south side of town right next to Cook County Jail. A convicted felon, who looked fairly ordinary to me, was accused of owning two guns kept in the bedroom closet of the apartment of his former girlfriend and their two grade school age children. Illinois law says that convicted felons can not have guns. The girlfriend was the only defense witness. She said they were no longer a couple and he only visited occasionally to see his children. She had assorted men's clothing hanging prominently in her closet and said that they were donations from friends and family for a garage sale - even though they had been there for a year since she moved there. He did go into the bedroom and lock the door for an hour or more once in awhile, which she thought was "odd."

I thought the girlfriend presented herself very well - dressed nicely, spoke intelligently, etc. Another woman on the jury, a suburban nurse, also totally bought the girlfriend's story, but several black women on the jury said they almost laughed out loud when they heard about the "garage sale." They said no woman would give up "prime real estate" in her bedroom closet to garage sale clothes - for a year! That stuff goes in plastic bags in the garage or basement! The more I listened to them, the more I realized I had been taken in. The last straw was the information that the felon's current address was with the "former" girlfriend's parents - hunh. Things just didn't add up.

So, at the same time that I felt foolish for having believed the girlfriend's story at first, I felt sad at having to find the felon guilty of two more felonies (after two days of the trial, the jury voted unanimously for a guilty verdict in less than 2 hours). Three felonies puts a person in the "habitual offender'' class in many states, although I don't know if this case falls under that law. I keep thinking about that guy and what it must be like to realize you will be in prison for a very very long time. One guy said as we were leaving the jury room to go home at the end that maybe we saved a life. One of the guns in the closet was loaded - probably to be used at a moment's notice - and sitting in a hatbox on the closet shelf. How many kids live in places like that?

I won't be able to stop thinking about all of this.

Blackened Zucchini a la Calabrese

Today I had 3 very nice organic zucchini in my fridge. I decided to make Blackened Zucchini the way my sister tells me her family likes them. Using Grandma's heirloom cast iron skillet, I let the zucchini and some chopped onion sizzle without disturbance while I made some spaghetti sauce out of my last two pints of canned tomatoes from last summer's garden (wiping knuckles on lapel of t-shirt and blowing on them). I figured this was blackened enough, but I'll have to hear from the source to know for sure. They were good! Not mushy like zucchini can get if cooked too long at low temp.