Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Poem for Wednesday, Cinderella, Brookside Animals

In Search Of Cinderella
By Shel Silverstein

From dusk to dawn,
From town to town,
Without a single clue,
I seek the tender, slender foot
To fit this crystal shoe.
From dusk to dawn,
I try it on
Each damsel that I meet.
And I still love her so, but oh,
I've started hating feet.

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Tuesday was a chore day, though not particularly a bad one -- my most crucial ones got done, and so did Daniel's, though he is refusing to make a dent in sorting things in his room and I am resorting to threatening to toss or give away his entire childhood if he doesn't at least tell me which of his high school papers can be discarded. I would say that we took a break to get bagels, except I think lunchtime was when he first got out of bed! He did take care of some moving-related things and I got laundry sorted and folded (and I got to watch Body of Lies while doing it). The weather was atrocious pretty much all day -- nearly 100 degrees before the storms arrived in the late afternoon, then thunder, pouring rain, flood warnings, and we weren't even in the area with the hail and tornadoes. We were going to get our free Domino's Pizza for dinner -- we got one of the post-no-hitter coupons -- but didn't want to venture out in that weather, so we had hot dogs and macaroni instead.

By then the skies had calmed down and we saw the live-action Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branagh, with a cast of great actors, of whom the most interesting was probably Cate Blanchett in the thankless role of the stepmother whom we're supposed to hate not in this version because she's physically abusive, but because she dresses fashionably, throws parties with gambling and drinking, and resents the fact that the man she had to marry to avoid destitution is obsessed with his dead first wife. We're supposed to think she is evil for not being able to afford to pay the servants, and because her cat, being a cat, chases mice. I get pissed off when people snark on Cinderella for not being a feminist heroine (for similar reasons that I've always defended Bella Swan, also a survivor of a miserable childhood), but the stepmother deserves forgiveness; watching this version, I was struck by how much her bitchiness towards other women reminds me of beloved Jane Austen characters. Brookside animals:


















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