The Silliness of Youth

Today spousal unit Don and I went to see a French film. To understand the meaning of this, I have to explain my love/hate relationship with the French cinema. All I can say, is I must be a sado-masochist - I seem to get exrtreme pleasure out of my own misery that results from the depressing effects of 'le cinema francais'.

The film we partook of today was a biography of Edith Piaf -" La Vie en Rose". How can a movie that has a title like "The Rosy Life" be depressing one might ask. One might ask, but if one does , one certainly isn't French. Can you say "l' ironie"? (Of course the irony is that the Americans retitle a film called La Mome (The Kid) - La Vie en Rose - I don't know if they thought this would make the ending seem any happier, but she still died in misery and despair and it was in the middle of the night with no rosy fingered Dawn or lightness to be seen. It is clear to me that Judy Garland, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf were all the same person living out their manipulated, miserable, lives concurrently, controlled by insecurity, drugs, booze and abusive svengalis.

The upshot of watching a woman self destruct over and over in flashback, flash forward and flash frozen for two and a half hours is an uncontrollable impulse for the viewer to revisit every mistake ever made in his or her own life and to correct it immediately! I am now officially going to lose 30 pounds, write my novel, recover my belly dancing physique and clean my over-cluttered home all in the next week! So of course I set to work on the latter immediatement and lugged the first box of stored mementoes upstairs from the basement for weeding and disposal.

What a teasure trove of sentimental detritus! I found things such as - A play bill from my High School production of "My Fair Lady" (last person credited on sets - my personal cross being the love-seat I was responsible for lugging on and off stage for every Higgins library scene!)

(Not our set but a similar one with a love seat)

- Organic chemistry tests, - my German grammar exercises, - flashcards on the Greek alphabet lovingly made for me by my father and "The Daily Farkle" the underground newspaper that I helped write and copy in the olden days of high school yore and mimeograph machines.

I also found a stack of my creative writing, including this gem of classical poetry, labelled "Thing dim and Young (Endymion)". I can ascertain very little relationship to the stunning Keats poem except for the fact that both my and his opuses rhyme, it is sometimes hard to figure out where the sentences end there are actually some syllables in common. Here for your reading pleasure and moral edification is the poetic drivel of a junior highschooler smitten with the epic skill of the romantic poets. (Disclaimer - The author of this website takes no responsibility for injured sensibilities or injuries caused by excessive poetic license.)



Thing Dim and Young

Judy, a mother antelope born wild,
Gave everything he wanted to her child.
Her son, who was not really ment'lly sound,
Wanted his anat'my mov'd changed around,
So after surgery, it came to be,
That then he wasn't he, he was a she,
But soon he missed the easy life of men
And wanted to be back himself again,
So after operations full of hope,
Entirely male emerged the antelope,
But being male, his lack of valor stung
And like a yellow streak around him hung.
Again this antelope badly deranged
Received still yet another full sex change,
And in the woods those not remembering
If he were she, or she he, called him "Thing".
Tired of being she, it was arranged
That "Thing's" sex once again would soon be changed.
The doctor, who had never made mistake,
Pronounced it the last change that "Thing" could make.

The moral of this story is that 'cause
"Thing" was never glad of what he was,
He changed too much and now it must be ever,
That the "Thing" of Judy is a boy forever.

(copyright 2007 - One might ask why!)

As far as all that self-improvement malarchy - maybe there is something to be learned from my younger self about what is really important in life.