The Reader Travels

I’m registered to vote, so I might as well. But honestly, any time I tune in and listen to what the politicians are saying, every sentence, every sound bite, just sounds dumb. I guess that’s why I haven’t voted in 15 years. Go ahead, be appalled, I don’t mind.

I think I’ll go and vote to allow convenience stores to sell beer and wine in my neighborhood. And I guess I’ll vote for President while I’m at it. It’s not that the wine store is extremely far, it’s just that I don’t like those big red NO signs in my neighbors’ yards and all over town. It’s just so negative.

Besides, today I started to cook my spaghetti sauce and I realized I didn’t have any red wine, and I didn’t feel like driving to the over-priced wine store at the edge of town, so I faked it by combining white wine with vermouth and dark rum. It tasted good, but it just wasn’t the same. And if I could have gone to the Texaco on the corner, I would have done it.

For the sake of my spaghetti sauce, I will make it to the polls this year. Cheers!

The Taming of the Shrew
is a fun play to remake into movies. You’ve got a spunky girl causing a bunch of trouble, an overbearing father and a lot of sexual tension with this new man in her life.  It’s a great formula for a Hollywood comedy.

I faked my way through an honors paper that asked the question of whether Shakespeare was a feminist or not. Instead of actually answering the question, I went into this whole BS answer about how Shakespeare was part of a baby boom generation, so yeah, he might’ve been a feminist maybe.

On the surface the story might look a little sexist, right? You have this shrew of a woman who needs to be put in her place, tamed as it were. But what we really see is a man who learns to appreciate the fire in this woman and to see what really motivates her as a person.

And yadda yadda yadda, I’m not sure why I like The Cutting Edge
so much, but I will watch this movie every time I catch it on cable. And you can hear the words echo in the house, as me and my man sing in unison: “Toe pick!!!”

High school seems like an apt setting for the type of jealousy and back-stabbery of Othello. And though I’m not sure  I’d ever be prompted to watch O (probably because of Julia Stiles, and despite Mekhi Phifer), I did let Quentin Tarantino talk me into watching Switchblade Sisters, a loosely based rendition in pure cult cheese.

I really related to this film.  Even though I wasn’t in a girl gang, I was in the flute section in marching band, and that’s really close. And even though I didn’t have girlfriends lying to me about my other girlfriends to win my affections, I did have a really jealous boyfriend who was his own Iago, whispering lies to himself.

He was jealous of everything. First, my sister, then my best friends. Then there was the gay trumpet player, who had a huge crush on me, but only in the boyfriend’s disturbed mind. There was the guy at the beach, which I almost understood, but not really. But the one that really got me, was the dog.

He was jealous of his own dog, the same dog he would take to the beach to pick up girls before we started dating. That cute, furry little maltese was a chick magnet. He was a wing man, a partner in crime, an accomplice. Until that furry little traitor started taking my side in arguments and snuggling up to me instead of his master.

It was hard to escape alive in such a tragedy, but I did it. And when it was all done, I think he was right to be jealous of the dog. I didn’t look back. I never even missed the man. But the dog, that’s another story.

If you didn’t know this about me already, I happen to be a white girl. But the year that Ella Fitzgerald died, I wanted to be her for Halloween, so I went out and got some dark brown theatrical make-up and slapped it on. I made a few mistakes that year:

1. I wore a sleeveless, backless dress, so I had to make up a lot more than just my face and hands.
2. I went to a party and drank enough trashcan punch to make me bump into my host’s freshly painted walls, throw up on the drive home and pass out in my bathtub.
3. I wore a dress I had planned to wear again.

Now, there have been more than one white actor who played Othello in the movies, but let us compare the two big ones — Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.  Olivier got all dressed up in dark brown paint like me and my Ella Fitzgerald fiasco, but Welles did it right.

If you’ve never seen this movie, it’s pretty cool from a cinematic perspective.  Orson Welles both starred in it and directed it, and while his acting was always phenomenal, it’s the way he directed the movie that’s so amazing. He had himself filmed in shadow, so he looks darker than he really is. Every scene is set up perfectly, so the white man turns black.

So, this got me thinking about the board game, which I used to play when I was kid, before I even knew what Othello was. The white disks turn black and the black disks turn white, and in the end, you’re just deadlocked. Play now.