Back from Beyond

About four months ago, my life as I knew it stopped. On Aug. 28, my husband and I drove into Boston, thanks to some fine labor pains, and before the clock struck 9 p.m., we had our son. Joey was large, considering he was six weeks premature, weighing in at 5 lbs., 6 oz., and 17 inches long. But he wasn't just a preemie and we knew we were in for far more.

For the next two-plus months, our family were officially residents of Boston Children's Hospital. While there, Joey underwent three intensive surgeries, fought off a major blood infection, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, and dealt with a slew of other minor, but not inconsequential, issues. He bounced from ICU to ICU, hospital room to hospital room, while we transitioned from parent sleep space to parent sleep space, pull-out cot to pull-out cot.

It was the best and worst time of my life. Best, because we had our beautiful son, whose packs more strength in his tiny toes than anyone else I know does in their entire body. Worst, because I've never spent more time worried or stressed or afraid. We finally came home on Nov. 5, 69 days after we left, and I'm still finding references to life before Joey. The latest being when I logged into this blog and saw my last post was published the day before he was born. You know, when life was somewhat normal.

I'm going to try to return to my writing, and that includes reviewing random movies and books that everyone in the world has already read before, but I'm sure there will be plenty of Joey thrown in. I don't plan on becoming a Mommy Blogger, but his story is just a little bit different.

To start, I'd like to share the things I've learned about our experiences, both in the hospital and at home, over the past few months.

1. I have no beef with the human race. You hear so often about how society is going to crap, and with the first anniversary of the Newtown shootings passing by this weekend, sometimes that's hard to argue. But while our family was facing the biggest challenge of any of our lives, my husband and I were constantly struck by the generosity and heart of people. Some of it was people we knew - our parents and siblings and distant aunts, uncles and cousins were fantastic. They watched our dog; they did our laundry; they treated us to dinner even when they weren't physically there to take us. Our closest friends were great, too. But what got me was the generosity of people we haven't seen in the longest time, and of strangers. My closest friends from college appealed to old friends, roommates, professors and more, and they inundated us with gift cards for food and gas. Parents of my husband's high school friends sent us gifts. I was constantly receiving Facebook messages from people of all walks of life, wishing us luck and sharing their own stories. A church in our town that we had never heard us took up a collection and sent us an obscene amount of money. And the strangers - the quilting group from Cape Cod whose quilt was given to Joey before his first surgery. The donated Halloween clothes and toys to the ICU. I cannot get over the generosity and kindness of people and as Christmas approaches, it's something I think about a lot.

2. Boston Children's Hospital is an amazing place. I knew it was one of the best in the country, and when Joey was diagnosed with a couple of his problems prenatally, we knew we'd give birth in Boston to take advantage of Children's reputation. But I still can't get over it. The skill of the surgeons, the expertise of the doctors, the talent and kindness of the nurses. We were there for over two months and met hundreds of employees and I could probably count the bad ones on one hand. Joey's doctors would visit him every day just to see how he was doing, even if he was completely healed from whatever they had treated him for. Nurses that had had him days before would make excuses to check up on him, even if he wasn't their patient that day.

One of the scariest days in the hospital came in the cardiac ICU after he had undergone a minor procedure to diagnose a heart condition. He was only supposed to be in there a day, long enough to get his breathing tube removed, before returning to a regular hospital room. His tube was removed in the afternoon, he seemed fine, and we went to celebrate this minor victory over dinner. We returned to find his room filled with doctors and nurses reviving him and performing an emergency intubation (putting the breathing tube back in). It was horrifying. His numbers were plummeting, his body was pale and not moving, and it was obvious how serious the situation was by the amount of people in the room. We watched helplessly from the doorway. And while it was going on, Joey's nurse for the day - a hilarious woman named Karen, who we had spent most of the day joking around with - tried to make us as comfortable as possible while she worked on Joey. She explained what was happening, sent over another nurse to answer questions. When things had calmed a bit, she brought us water and juice because we "looked pale." She made sure our night nurse was someone we were comfortable with. The doctors on staff were equally comforting, and the mix of professionalism and humanity was exactly what made our experience so great.

3. Be thankful for what you have. I'm the worst person for getting caught up in my own rut and forgetting how much worse things could be. I still do it. Joey went through so much, and I still have rough nights where I get frustrated because he's crying or won't eat. I just have to scroll through the pictures on my phone. There he is with tubes coming out his face and chest in the NICU. There he is after one of his heart surgeries, with his chest cavity still open. There he is, dropping weight down to 4 and a half pounds, with little stick fingers. There he is passed out from the pain meds. There I am, holding him for the first time in weeks after he had a breathing tube for an extended period of time. I guess a little fussiness isn't so bad.

4. Kids are resilient. I can't believe the stuff this five-pound tough guy went through and I complain ad nauseum when I hit my head on the low pipes in the basement (in my defense, those pipes are the devil). But he'd undergo some major surgery, and then three days later, have half his tubes removed and look awesome. We saw it with other kids in the hospital, too. Youth is most certainly not wasted on these guys.

That's it for now. I'm sure I'll come up with some other brilliant observation, but for now, my writing muscles are still getting their groove back.

Movie Review: The Usual Suspects

No, this movie isn't one of the Greatest of All Time, but it's a classic (in a way) that I've never seen and it was on TV - Sundance, no less, which means F-words and all - and when you're on modified bed rest, you'll watch anything. Like seriously, anything. Do you want to know who my favorite Family Feud host of the past 10 years is? Because thanks to the Game Show Network, I actually have one.

Anyway, yes, this was the first time I had ever seen this movie.

For those in a similar predicament, here's the set-up (pay attention because there will be a test). An explosion on a boat that looks to be a drug deal gone bad leaves just two survivors - a Hungarian gangster with burns on most of his body blubbering about a mysterious criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze and a small-time thief with cerebral palsy (Kevin Spacey). While the Hungarian gives whatever hospital bed testimony he can, including working with a sketch artist, the thief, Verbal Kint, gives testimony to a couple of cops. Most of the movie is a flashback to his tale.

It begins six weeks earlier, when Kint and four other lifetime criminals are put in a lineup for a weapons charge. While in holding, they devise a plan themselves, targeting a ring of crooked cops who transport smugglers throughout New York City. After that goes swimmingly, they attempt to launder the loot with a "fence," who tells them about another job stealing jewels and/or money from a jeweler. Instead they wind up stealing drugs, and they learn that the job came from a lawyer named Kobayashi. The whole thing was a setup by Kobayashi and his client, Keyser Soze, and he (Kobayashi) blackmails each criminal into attacking the aforementioned ship to break up a drug deal between Hungarians and Argentinian gangsters.

Some of the guys take some convincing; one winds up dead before the attack. The real question is what happened on the ship and who is Keyser Soze? Kint gives a brief back history: Soze was a Turkish criminal mastermind. When his Hungarian rivals tried to pressure him by breaking into his house, raping his wife and threatening his family's lives, he responded by killing his family himself, along with all but one of the Hungarians. After that, he became more of a myth than a reality, a legend that some criminals and cops questioned even existed.

I love a good twist, not to mention a good caper, so this movie was right up my alley. Plus, the cast was fantastic - Spacey's crew of criminals include Gabriel Byrne, Benicio del Toro, Kevin Pollack and Stephen Baldwin, while the investigating cops include Chazz Palminteri, Dan Hedaya and Giancarlo Esposito. But I think what gave me the most enjoyment came after the movie ended, when I checked out its trivia section on IMDB. (Note: If you've never seen this movie before and don't want the end ruined for you, you might not want to click on that link.) Apparently, the director worked very hard to make every single actor think that HE was Keyser Soze, to the point that at least one actor got into a screaming match with the director at the premier because he was so sure it was him. That's just impressive.

Other notables: Kevin Spacey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (strange, since I thought of him as the main actor, but what do I know?). Either way, not a bad way to spend an afternoon on bed rest.

Diaries from Modified Bed Rest

About a week and a half ago, my doctor put me on modified bed rest. I won't get into the nitty gritty of pregnancy fun, but suffice it to say that there's a good possibility the baby will make an early appearance and keeping me as sedentary as possible is one way to try to stop that.

Before now, I hadn't really heard of "modified" bed rest. Apparently, it's like a slightly better form of traditional bed rest. Instead of being strapped to a bed or couch, with standing-up privileges reserved solely for using the bathroom, I can at least move around the house. I can shower, do "light" meal preparation (my own brain has translated this to "microwaves good, ovens bad"), and go up and down the stairs a limited amount of times a day. The list of things I can't do is far more impressive:

• Work outside of home (thank goodness for the Internet)
• Take the dog out, even to the backyard
• Do laundry
• Lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk
• Clean the house
• Cook real meals that don't consist of cereal, popcorn and/or ice cream bars
• Eat in a restaurant/go to the movies/go to a store/really see the light of day

It's a strange existence. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've left our property in the last 11 days and have enough fingers left over to make a peace sign: once for a doctor's appointment, once for this weekend's baby shower (we were able to pull the car up to the back door of the room where the shower was, so I literally walked about 15 steps), and once to accompany Matt to the grocery store. I stayed in the car in my pajamas while he bought ice cream. It was the highlight of my day.

Still, it's been kind of amusing. If you said this was how I'd have to live forever, I'd probably lose my mind. But we're all having fun coming up with ways to keep it interesting. Because of my intense fear of getting bored, I've become even more OCD, making daily to-do lists for myself that contain the limited amount of productive things I can do (Write thank you notes! Fold laundry! Upload photos to the computer!) and stupid things to make sure I don't look up at 8 p.m. and realize I spent the whole day watching reruns of American Horror Story. So thinks like "read" and "work on embroidery" somehow get the same billing as "pay cell phone bill." Whatever. Don't be jealous of my sweet to-do list.

My other unasked-for advice for anyone on modified bed rest is to get dressed in real, honest-to-goodness clothes every day. Being home and not seeing other people is a big motivation to wear pajamas 24/7, a reflex I fully understand. Normally, I'm in pjs within 10 minutes of getting home from work, and the only reason it takes me that long is because I have to take the dog out. But there's something about putting on real clothes that still allows me to feel like a functioning adult, even if my day's big event was scoring a 89-point word on Words with Friends. 

Be prepared for more messages from the homefront. I mean, "write blog" was No. 10 on today's list.

Movie Review: Baby Mama

Clearly, I'm keeping with my "highest-quality movies of all time" theme going here by watching and reviewing Baby Mama. I often get this confused with Casablanca myself.

In all honesty, sometimes, you need brain candy. Especially when you've been couped up for a week on modified bed rest, watching people do such fascinating things like laundry and emptying the dishwasher and walking their dog with a level of jealousy previously reserved only for taste-testers in the Cadbury chocolate factory (all of my talent is going to WASTE!). And so rather than move on to the No. 3 Greatest Movie of All Time, On the Waterfront, I watched Baby Mama. Do not judge me.

In case you couldn't guess from the cover or the title or your previous knowledge of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Baby Mama is about a career-driven woman who waits too long to have children, discovers she's infertile, and hires a white trash surrogate to help her out. Fey's Kate is an executive with a Whole Foods/Trader Joe-style organic food store (with her hippie boss hilariously played by a ponytailed Steve Martin) and while her professional life is going splendidly, she never got around to marrying or trying to have kids. Now 37, she tries in vitro fertilization only to find that her T-shaped uterus is not the ideal gestational home for a baby.

That leads her to hiring a surrogate from a company run by the most fertile should-be-post-menopausal woman in Sigourney Weaver. The company presents her with Poehler's Angie, who moves in with Kate after she becomes pregnant and breaks up with her common law husband (played by Dax Shepard). The two have the typical bitter battles you would expect between an upper-class yuppie and her white trash baby mama. Kate needs to come out of her perfectly constructed shell. Angie needs to grow up and come clean about a lie she lives with for most of the movie. How could things possibly work out in the end?!?! Don't worry; they do.

The movie was exactly what I thought it would be and that's good. Oscar-bait movies are all fine and good but they take a level of mental effort that I just don't have on a late Sunday afternoon. This. This is what I wanted and needed.

And no, just because this and Juno are both in my DVR at the moment does NOT mean that I am some baby-movie-obsessed junkie. If my DVR is an indication of my life, I'm also a meth cooking Mexican serial killer while also reigning as one of the top home-chefs in America.

Movie Review: Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is kind of like Casablanca with me. I know it's considered one of the biggest classic movies in the history of movies, but other than the fact that it has something to do with the Civil War and includes the line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," I really knew nothing about it. Unlike Casablanca, I was less than thrilled.

For other modern-day movie morons, I'll give you as brief a rundown as possible with a 4-hour-plus movie. (Seriously. Four hours. Plus. Especially if you actually sit through the 75 musical interludes.) When we first meet Scarlett O'Hara, she's the prettiest and most sought-after young thing in her Georgia town. The oldest daughter in her rich, plantation-owning family, she has pretty much every guy she meets wrapped around her finger. Well, every guy except the guy she loves: Ashley Wilkes, the son of another rich plantation owner in town. She dolls herself up for a party at the Wilkes' place, hoping to lure Ashley  into her clutches, until she realizes that the whole point of the party is to announce Ashley's engagement to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. (Apparently, marrying cousins is big in the Wilkes family. Ashley's sister wants to marry Melanie's brother, too. It's possible this whole thing takes place in Shelbyville.)

Scarlett declares her love to Ashley but he really does love Melanie. So she does the next best thing: marries Melanie's brother Charles out of spite, to make Ashley jealous while also keeping the whole Wilkes family close by. About five seconds later, the Civil War begins, Melanie & Ashley and Scarlett & Charles marry within a couple days and a couple days after THAT, the boys are off to fight.

It doesn't take long for Charles to become a non-violent war casualty, dying of pneumonia and leaving Scarlett a very young and not very mournful widow. She decides to move to Atlanta to stay with Melanie to "help with the war efforts," which really means "know as soon as possible what's going on with Ashley and then try to steal him from her." The two women devote their time to helping care for injured soldiers, etc. When Ashley gets a few days' leave around Christmas to visit, he spends his time doting on Melanie, trying to ignore Scarlett and also getting Melanie pregnant. Before he leaves, he asks Scarlett to take care of Melanie.

It's a bigger promise than Scarlett realizes when Melanie has a difficult pregnancy and gives birth right around the same time as Sherman's invasion of Atlanta. Scarlett and her simple-minded servant (slave?) are stuck delivering the baby and then trying to get to the O'Hara plantation - named Tara - in order to keep them safe and also to check on Scarlett's own sick mother. She calls the only person she can think of: Rhett Butler.

Until this point, Rhett has been kind of like that annoying fly that keeps showing up. We meet him at the Wilkes' party, where he annoys everyone by saying the North would win any war with the South. He overhears Scarlett's declarations of love to Ashley and then teases her about it. But he's an able-bodied man with lots of connections and he gets her a horse and carriage to take Melanie and her baby away. Along the trip, both Scarlett and Rhett grow up a little bit when they see their wounded soldiers march by, and Rhett is motivated to jump out of the carriage right then and sign up to fight. Why? I have no earthly idea. Scarlett continues the journey, learning along the way that the Wilkes plantation has been burned to the ground by those evil Yankees.

Tara is still standing, but barely. The barn is gone, the livestock is gone, all but two of the "servants" are gone, her mother is dead of typhoid, her two sisters are both sick with the same disease (although recovering) and the stress has driven her father to mental instability (something the actor - Thomas Mitchell - is pretty adept at, since he also played Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life). Scarlett becomes the de facto head of the household, trying to keep everyone fed and afloat.

Then the war ends and the South lost. And the government puts a heavy tax on Tara that Scarlett can't afford. Her father is so overcome with rage that he starts chasing after a prospective buyer and dies falling off his horse. Scarlett finds Rhett in Atlanta and tries to flirt the money out of him, but he sees through her and refuses. She runs into Frank Kennedy, her sister's fiance, who is trying to run an antiques store and lumber mill in order to raise enough money for the wedding. Seeing how high his prospects are, Scarlett tells him her sister is marrying someone else and goads him into marrying her instead.

Scarlett's business acumen (she and Frank join forces with Ashley Wilkes) leads to a thriving lumber mill, but that doesn't stop her from almost being raped in the middle of the woods. Frank, Ashley and a gang of vigilantes goes out to get revenge - Rhett tries to save them but is too late as Frank dies and Ashley gets shot in the arm. So now Scarlett's a widow twice removed.

Rhett takes the opportunity of her husband dying, oh, 12 minutes before, to propose and convince her to marry him. She agrees and they travel around in the lap of luxury. But when they return home, Scarlett goes back into her Ashley-obsessed ways. She gives birth to her and Rhett's daughter, who Rhett adores, but the couple is distant and aiming for divorce. Also, there's a lot of drinking and marital rape, so that's fun.

I'm almost to the end so I'll stop there. I've spared you about 12 more character deaths. Moral of the story? Stay away from Scarlett O'Hara. Nothing good can come from this.

I had a problem getting into and enjoying this movie, which probably makes me a bad movie fan, but oh well. First of all, with the exception of the good-hearted Melanie, every character was despicable. Scarlett and Rhett were both selfish and conniving and manipulative and cold-blooded. Ashley (and Scarlett's parade of dead husbands) were clueless. I wasn't rooting for Scarlett to get Ashley or Rhett to get Scarlett; I wanted Melanie to win and Mamie to raise up the other servants and say, "Hey, you guys enslaved us for years and you can't buy me back with a red petticoat. I'm going north, suckas!" I had a hard time sympathizing with these Southern rich slave owners during the Civil War, too, their English acting accents be damned. Yes, it's sad that people died and their lives were difficult, but then...they were slave owners. They'd been making their slaves' lives pretty difficult for a few decades.

Anyway, Gone with the Wind was ranked No. 2 on my arguable Greatest Movie of All Time List. Here's why:

• Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1939 (also won for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and a slew of cinematography awards that I didn't count but are worth mentioning).
• No. 4 ranking in the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Greatest Movies list in 1998.
• Held on for a No. 6 ranking 10 years later.
• No. 43 in AFI's 100 Years, 100 Cheers.
• Had three of AFI's most memorable quotes, including No. 1:
• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (1)
• "After all, tomorrow is another day!" (31)
• "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" (59)
• Oscar win for Best Actress for Vivian Leigh. (Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win Best Supporting Actress for playing Mamie, while Clark Gable (Rhett) and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie) were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.)

Book Review: Danny the Champion of the World

After reading a slew of Stephen King DEATH TO EVERYONE books, with Serious Literature like The Cellist of Sarajevo and Serious Nonfiction like The Other Wes Moore, I was due for some brain candy. For some, that means Danielle Steele or a Twilight book or Fifty Shades of Horny Middle-Aged Ladies, but like my actual candy, I prefer something of a little higher quality. Like Cadbury. And what could be more of a literary version of Cadbury chocolate than Roald Dahl.

A background: I was totally a Roald Dahl kid growing up. Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Witches were always my favorites. I devoured them like so many creme eggs. But somehow, I missed Danny the Champion of the World. I'm not sure how that happened; maybe the children's library I went to didn't have it. But I always notice it as THE Roald Dahl book on "best children's books" lists and figured it deserved a belated shot.

Danny's mother died when he was a baby, leaving him and his father with each other. They didn't have much money or many possessions; they lived in an electricity-free gypsy caravan behind the gas station/auto repair shop his father ran. But they were not wanting for things, thanks to his father's adventurous attitude. His father taught him how to build a car engine from scratch, how to fly a kite, how to make a fire balloon. He regaled him with fantastic stories before bedtime. What else could you possibly need?

One day, Danny learns of his father's secret hobby: pheasant poaching. Because this is England and people in England are weird, rich people had a habit of raising certain types of game and when they're ripe, inviting all their weird, rich friends to "hunt" the more or less domesticated animals. You know, kind of like "The Most Dangerous Game," but instead of hunting men, they hunt pheasants. Poaching pheasants from these rich people's property was kind of a family and town tradition; not only was Danny's father into it, but so had been Danny's grandfather and mother, the town doctor, the town policeman and even the town vicar. It was a way to catch delicious pheasant while also sticking it to Victor Hazell, the town's designated Mean Rich Guy.

One night, Danny's father goes off a-poaching, but when he doesn't return, Danny goes looking for him. He finds him in a deep pit, a trap set by one of Hazell's pheasant guards, with a broken ankle. Danny gets him out before the guard finds him and their doctor friend, Doc Spencer, gives him a walking cast. Still, Danny's father is kind of irked. I mean, a guy protecting his property from pheasant thieves? The nerve! So he and Danny decide the perfect revenge would be to somehow poach all of Hazell's pheasants the day before his annual big pheasant hunt, where all the local dukes and barons and important people would come to hunt.

The strangest thing about this story was the idea of pheasant poaching as heroic. Admittedly, I was born 10 years and a country away from where this story takes place and so raising game for hunting purposes isn't something I'm familiar with. And Hazell is kind of a jerk. But it's still a weird thing that poaching pheasants is this wonderful activity that unites the whole town.

Still, I was a big fan of the book and here's why. Dahl dedicates this book to his entire family: his wife and four children. And this book is really a love letter to the family bond, particularly that of a father and son. In most of Dahl's books, the protagonist is a precocious child who outsmarts some evil adult - Matilda and her parents/the Trenchbull; Charlie and Willie Wonka; James and his evil aunts. And while Victor Hazell is an adult villain, nearly every other adult in the book is a friend to young Danny, especially his father. It's a nice, sweet message that's less about revenge and more about love.

And adventure.

Book Review: The Other Wes Moore

Wes Moore was born in the late 1970s in one of the more poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Baltimore. After his loving father died of a rare and sudden illness when Wes was three, his mother Joy raised him and his two sisters herself. Joy was an immigrant from Jamaica, having arrived in the U.S. as a child so her father could get a college education. The importance of schooling was passed down as Joy also got her degree. But the struggle of raising three children alone wore on Joy and she moved them to the Bronx to get help from her parents.

Living in a tough neighborhood had its effects on Wes, who befriended people from all walks of life playing street basketball. Fearing of the dangers of the public schools she had attended herself, Joy sent Wes to a private school, but that only added to his troubles. At school, he stood out for being poor and black. At home, he stood out for going to a rich school for white kids. He started skipping classes and got caught up in minor street crime.

Seeing where Wes was headed, Joy and her parents scraped together the money to send him to Valley Forge military school in Georgia. Isolated from the streets, taken in by older cadets and supportive commanding officers, he rose through the ranks. He eventually went to Johns Hopkins University on scholarship, studied abroad in South Africa, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, worked on Wall Street, served in Afghanistan, and acted as a fellow at the White House.

Wes Moore was born in the late 1970s in one of the more poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Baltimore. After his father abandoned him before he was born, his mother Mary raised him and his older half-brother Tony by herself. Mary was one of nine children and had Tony as a teenager; she didn't have much support from her family and while she tried to go to college, she eventually had to drop out when government cuts took away her Pell Grant.

Living in a tough neighborhood had its effects on Wes, who befriended people thanks to his skills as a football player. Fearing the streets that turned her older son into a drug lord by the time he was in his early teens, Mary moved Wes around to different neighborhoods. Tony also wanted a different life for Wes, too, but the example he set was different than the lessons he tried to teach and Wes' criminal record began when he was just eight, after he brandished a knife at another boy in a street fight. Wes continued down Tony's path when he began working for drug dealers. He rose through the ranks, making money, friends, and enemies. He dropped out of high school, got his girlfriend pregnant and by the time he was in his early 20s, had four children by two women (one of whom was a drug addict) and several convictions for drugs and violence on his record.

 Seeing where he was headed, Wes tried to change his own path by participating in the Job Corps program, earning his GED and training as a carpenter. But a year of the legitimate life made he realize how much money it takes to support his mother, two former/current girlfriends and four children and he quickly regressed. One day, he, Tony and two other men wielding guns and mallets broke into a jewelry store and took almost $500,000 worth of merchandise. They also fatally shot an off-duty police officer.

Around the same time that one Wes Moore learned of his Rhodes Scholarship, the other Wes Moore learned that he'd spend the rest of his life in prison.

How could two men with the exact same name and such similar backgrounds have seen their paths diverge so drastically? There's no way to answer that and Wes Moore (the author) doesn't try to. The closest thing I can really see is the difference in support system. Yes, both men didn't have a father. But Joy had supportive family who cared about things like education and keeping Wes off the streets. When they recognized the warning signs that he might be headed down the wrong path, they did everything they could to stop it - first at the private school and then with military school. Mary didn't have those resources. She knew education was key but with no one to help her out, she could only do so much to support her sons. The other other "parent" that Wes Moore knew was his older brother, who became a player in the drug game at the ripe age of 14. When no one shows you another path, you take the one you recognize.

Still, it's a fascinating look at how our society works. The opportunities afforded to certain privileged people, whether it's because of race or class or geography, make things so much easier for some than for others. Wes Moore struggled to become the man he did, but he was given a leg up thanks to such a supportive family and, later, because of the connections he made at Valley Forge. The other Wes Moore, while he could have taken a different path, didn't really have the opportunity to do nearly as much as his namesake. This isn't to make excuses for the crime he committed - he definitely should spend his life in jail for killing an innocent man - but it's sad that that path was the easiest one for a boy to take.

The One Thing No One Tells You Before You Write a Terrible Column

A lot of people have been up in arms the last couple of days about this article from Slate. In it, the author describes how, once her children were born, the dog that she had previously doted on like a furry baby quickly went from adored to ignored to downright hated. Why? Because he's a dog.

A friend of mine once told me that before he had a kid, he would have run into a burning building to save his cats. Now that he has a kid, he would happily drown the cats in the bathtub if it would help his son take a longer nap. Here is how I feel about that statement: Velvel, avoid the bathroom.

It’s not that I don’t love my dog. It’s just that I don’t love my dog. And I am not alone. A very nonscientific survey of almost everyone I know who had a dog and then had kids now wishes they had never got the dog. This is a near universal truth, even for parents with just one child, though I have more.

This is two paragraphs after she talks about making the dog homemade food and sitting in the backseat so he could ride shotgun on trips, all before she had kids.

As someone who reads articles about pregnancy, oh, every nine seconds, constantly scoffing at the ridiculousness of some of the things I see (If you vaccinate your baby against whooping cough, he will grow a third arm and only sleep in the closet!), I'm almost unfazed by the obvious crazymommies. That's why God invented STFU, Parents, after all. But this hit me close to home and I've been thinking about it off and on since I read it yesterday.

Like the author, we, too, have a dog that we dote on. Charlie was our wedding gift to each other and we often count that as one of the smartest things we've ever done. We thoughtfully chose the breed; at the time, we lived in an apartment, so we avoided any dogs that were large or had a ton of energy or both, no matter how much everyone loves a lab. We fake-fought for awhile between a bulldog (Matt's choice) and a corgi (mine), but after some research on the care and attitudes of both breeds, and learning just how much bulldogs are prone to gassing you out of house and home with their extreme flatulence, Matt presented me with a stuffed corgi to represent our new dog-to-be.

We first met Charlie when he was five weeks old. The breeder - a pleasant chainsmoking older woman who also served as her town's animal control officer - put the only two unclaimed puppies from the litter in a used playpen to let us choose. We weren't allowed to touch them since they hadn't been vaccinated at all (and after they were, they didn't grow extra extremities...although Charlie does like to sleep under the bed), so we put our fingers to the mesh siding. One of the roley-poley balls of fur and fat and cuteness waddled over, sniffed our hands and licked at them. That's how we met Charlie.

The first day we met Charlie.

Since then, Charlie has been as much a part of our family as either of us. He sleeps under our bed, we wake up at ungodly hours to take him on "family walks" before I have to go to work. When we go on vacation, we find ourselves drawn to random dogs we see on the street out of Charlie withdrawal. In Chicago, we came across a guy playing fetch with his well-trained cavalier spaniel puppy and recognizing my squealish reaction to the little guy, let me throw the ball for awhile. We might have scared another guy while he walked his two bulldogs. It happens.

But that being said, when I read about how the author thought of her dog before she had children, I could see the problem already. Charlie is part of our family. We love him dearly and would be heartbroken if anything happened to him. But he's a dog. We didn't make his food from scratch (we don't even feed him people food unless we're too lazy to pick up that potato chip we dropped on the kitchen floor). His spot in the car is the backseat. We brush him and clean his ears and walk him, but if we skip a day because we're too busy or something came up, we're not too worried about it. He's a dog.

The problem with the author is that, for her, her dog wasn't a dog; he was a child. And when real children came along, she didn't know how to treat him like the dog he was. Spoiling him rotten and completely ignoring him aren't your only two options for interacting with him. There's got to be something between extreme love and extreme hate.

Admittedly, we don't have children yet. Our son is due in early October. And I have no illusions that we'll be able to maintain the same level of attention we shower on Charlie that we do now. But there's a difference between only walking him a couple times a week instead of every day or not having him show off his ability to dance for treats as often and wishing he weren't part of our family anymore. When I daydream about what we'll do once we bring our son home from the hospital, Charlie is a big part of that. Will he lick milk and food off the baby's face? Sleep next to the baby's bouncer? In a few years, will he wait with us at the school bus, eagerly anticipating the arrival of his best buddy? I dream of our family walks, except now one of us is holding Charlie's leash while the other is pushing a stroller.

My first purchase for the baby. It reads "My brother is a corgi."

This pregnancy has been a difficult one. Our baby is in for a tough few months of his life, and to prepare, we've spent much of the past few months at doctors' appointments throughout the state of Massachusetts. Countless times, we've returned from these appointments mentally and emotionally drained from what we learned. Always, there are serious conversations about the future. Sometimes, there are tears. And every time, Charlie will emerge from whatever corner of the house he's hunkered down in (usually behind the toilet) and crawl into one of our laps. He's always loved affection and will sit as close to you as possible on the couch, but he rarely chooses to sit in your lap. Unless he knows you need it.

High fives will always cure what ails you.

As I read this article, all I could think about was Charlie and the amount of joy he brings to my life. How many times a day do I smile because of him, whether it's because he's done something sweet or silly or simply because he looks cute sleeping in that little corner of the couch he likes? There are six photos on my desk right now and Charlie is in three of them. I know in the months and years to come, those photos will be added to, with pictures of our smiling son. But they certainly won't be replaced.

Chocolate Trifle

Do you like chocolate? No? Then go away. Your kind isn't welcome here in the land of cake and pudding and candy bars and slobber-slobber-slobber. Chocolate trifle is for Serious Chocolate Fans Only.

This is a recipe from my mom and while it's not exactly a holiday tradition, she did make it probably once a year or so. It's great for hosted functions or even to bring to parties (although be careful transporting it) because it's easy to make and looks nice and no one who's ever eaten it doesn't salivate at the thought of it. I made this two weekends ago when a group of friends visited and my goodness, I wish I was eating it again RIGHT NOW. Chocolate trifle, you'll be the death of me.

Chocolate Trifle

1 chocolate cake 
2 boxes of instant chocolate pudding
1 tub of Cool Whip
2 Skor bars (frozen)
Kahlua (optional)

How fancy you want to get depends on your preference. I make the cake from scratch because I'm  physically incapable of NOT making a chocolate cake from scratch; my grandmother's recipe is too deliciously moist and chocolatey that stuff from a box, even when smothered with other ingredients, just isn't the same. But I won't judge you (too harshly).

Bake cake in a 13x9 pan and let cool, then cut into 1x1 squares and divide in half. Make pudding as instructed on the box. Break Skor bars into pieces. When everything is prepared, layer ingredients in a trifle bowl in this order: cake, Kahlua (drizzled), pudding, Cool Whip, Skor bars. Usually two layers of each will fill the bowl. Refrigerate and serve.

Easy, right? The hardest part is trying to break up the frozen Skor bars. And it leaves you open to get creative. You can add other types of liquor, other types of candy bars, sprinkles to make it festive. I was wondering how it would taste with butterscotch pudding instead of chocolate and with caramel sauce drizzled on it, as well. Kind of a turtle trifle. Go wild.

But seriously. Don't forget the chocolate.

Book Review: Roadwork

Roadwork is the third of Stephen King's "Bachman books," the collection he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It's not just that the name on the cover is different, however; the two men that wrote, say Rage and The Stand are two very different men, even if they live in the same head.

Bart Dawes, the main character in Roadwork, would understand that concept. Ever since the death of his young son Charlie of a brain tumor, Dawes own brain has been the home of two different personalities: George, a darker version of himself, and Freddy, a representative of Charlie that passes for his conscience. As the story goes on and Dawes falls deeper into a pit of depression and desperation, Freddy grows quieter, as though he's slowly killing what's left of Charlie and what's left of his own goodness.

While Dawes' decline started with Charlie's death, it is exacerbated by the impending installation of a new highway system that will be running right through his home and workplace, forcing him to relocate both. Except he does nothing to do that. He lies to his wife, Mary, and to his boss about finding a new home and a new factory in which to house the Blue Ribbon industrial laundry company. Instead he cashes in his life insurance policy, buys a couple of heavy-duty guns and squirrels away the evidence. His inaction is discovered, and he soon loses his wife and the only job he has ever known, sending him into a spiral of booze and television and darkness. Soon, the only people he can really open up to is a local crime boss named Sal and Olivia, a young co-ed hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas.

The more people tell him he has to move, to officially give up everything now that he's lost his son, wife, job, and house, the more he digs in and becomes desperate. He attacks the construction site with a carload of Molotov cocktails. He takes the city's settlement for his house and divides it between Mary and Olivia. And then he calls Sal for explosives. Lots of them.

I don't want to paint all the Bachman books with the same gray brush - after all, I really liked The Long Walk - but Roadwork is of the same ilk as Rage. There is nothing supernatural in this book; the Big Baddie is the city, or cancer, or fate, or the changing nature of middle age. Instead, like in Rage, we spend the book in the mind of someone deeply disturbed, driven to this point of violent desperation. In some ways, it's sad and you feel for Bart Dawes; if his son had lived, if the city had left him alone, how fulfilling or happy might his life had been? But I just found myself feeling bad for the innocent people he hurt with his actions. Mary also lost her son and house and marriage, but she's almost viewed as a villain because she mourned and then moved on in time. His inaction at the laundry cost a factory's worth of people their jobs. Even with Charlie/Freddy's voice begging him not to, he hurt people.

All of which made Dawes not entirely sympathetic and took away from my enjoyment of the book. Dawes isn't nearly as bad as Charlie Decker from Rage (hey, between these two books and Firestarter, we've got three Charlies. Quality name), whose reason for wanting to shoot up his school is because he has nothing better to do, but it's still a pretty extreme reaction. Stephen King wrote this book right after losing his mother to cancer and so was full of darkness and questions about the unfairness of it all himself; you can see where he's coming from. But it's almost as though his mother, through Charlie/Freddy, was telling him not to be so dark, as well. I have to say I agree.

Book Review: Firestarter

Firestarter, like The Dead Zone, is another book that I know I read in the past, remembered liking, but not being blown away by. Reading it a second time gave me another appreciation, brought on by my age or more life experience or who knows what else.

For many, Firestarter is about a girl who starts fires, which is technically accurate. Charlie McGee, the 7- (and then 8-) year-old title character, can indeed start fires with her mind. But the book is really about the dangers of the government, based on its well-known history of experimenting on unsuspecting, innocent people with some scary drugs and other things and then covering up their effects. The whole thing is more about Charlie's escape from this agency, a fictional arm of the U.S. government known as the Shop, than it is about OMG SHE LIGHTS FIRES WITH HER MIND WAY COOL (a la Carrie).

The first half of the book documents Charlie and her father Andy's flight from Shop agents trying to capture them. As they move from New York City to Albany to a farm run by a kindly older couple, the Manders, to an abandoned Vermont cabin once owned by Andy's grandfather, we learn their backstory. When Andy was a poor college student, he signed up to participate in some medical tests. The good news? It introduced him to Vicky, another volunteer who would become his wife. The bad news? The "hallucinogenic drug" they were supposedly injected with was actually a mysterious substance known as Lot 6. Vicky and Andy are two of the only participants who don't kill themselves or go insane, although they are left with some side effects - Vicky's ability to close doors from across the room and Andy's talent for dominating people's thoughts with mental pushes. Oh and the fact that when you combine their talents, you get a daughter who can start fires with her mind without problem (like the migraines Andy gets when he uses his mental domination abilities too often or too strong).

When agents from the Shop fear the McGees are going to escape (they aren't), they kill Vicky and send Andy and Charlie on the run. The second half of the book takes place after Shop agents have caught up with the father and daughter in Vermont and taken them into separate custody at their headquarters in Virginia. The two respond differently - Andy quickly gets hooked on the sedatives they give him and loses his power while Charlie refuses to participate in any of their tests. Until Andy's brain uses mental dominance on himself, gets him to quit the drugs and plot his and Charlie's escape and Charlie gets seduced by a kind orderly named John who is actually John Rainbird, the trained killer who captured them in the first place.

Stephen King uses a lot of his favorite plot devices and characterizations in this book - an innocent youth with supernatural powers (Carrie White, Danny Torrence), the danger of a too-powerful government (The Stand), substance abuse (Jack Torrence, Larry Underwood), the destructive nature of fire (every book he's ever written). What makes this one unique is that the Big Baddie is not Charlie's evil-seeming ability - yes, being able to light fires with the mind is straight of a witch's handbook - but the people who are chasing her. Rainbird, who has no supernatural abilities, is far more terrifying for his intelligence and lack of conscience, as is the swift, absolute power of the Shop as a whole. In the book's afterword, King states that while the book is fiction, there are plenty of documented instances of the government testing dangerous materials on unsuspecting people and putting those with perceived mental abilities through grueling experiments. That is far more frightening than a little girl helping an old man light a wood stove.

Chicago State of Mind

A few weeks ago, we spent quite a bit of time in Chicago. A portion of that time was dedicated to my work - the whole impetus for the trip was for me to attend the American Library Association's annual conference. The conference was fabulous, if overwhelming. Tens of thousands of representatives from public libraries, college libraries, school libraries, business libraries, etc., descended on the city like a swarm of conservatively dressed bees who only want to sting you with knowledge. But I certainly got a ton out of it work-wise, as well as interest-wise (highlights include seeing Temple Grandin and Octavia Spencer speak).

I also spent a portion of this trip sick. Like, really sick. On the second day of the conference, I could have sworn I had strep throat and I'm not entirely convinced I didn't. I couldn't swallow for a few days. Then I couldn't breathe through my nose. Then I couldn't go 30 seconds without delving into a coughing fit. Add to that the fact that I was also 6 and a half months pregnant (and found out a week after returning that I shouldn't be walking long distances or standing for long periods of time...my bad) and we weren't QUITE able to keep to the itinerary we had originally planned. Luckily, we also stayed for 10 days so we had the luxury of turning in at 6 p.m. without feeling like we were missing anything.

Here are some of the things we did, in the order in which we did them because I have OCD and that's how I roll. Some I'd recommend wholeheartedly (Field Museum, Lincoln Park Zoo); others, I'd say you could skip if constrained by time or money (Adler Planetarium). But all were fun in their own way.

Field Museum

The day after we arrived in Chicago was the victory parade for the Chicago Blackhawks' recent Stanley Cup win. You know, the one they beat the Bruins for. We had no ill will toward the Blackhawks, were happy that the Bruins lost to a likeable team (unlike, say, the Canucks), but still. Did I mention that the parade was RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM OUR HOTEL? Because it was.

We opted to walk a few blocks and hide in the Field Museum of Natural History. It was a good choice, even if we were greeted by a gigantic taunt:

The Field Museum is famous for a few things. One is that it is the workplace of perhaps the most famous anthropologist of all time - Indiana Jones. Another is that it is home to the most complete and preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world.

Its dinosaur fossil collection in general is immense and impressive, as is its exhibit on Egypt. Frankly, the whole thing is pretty awesome and definitely worth an afternoon.

Adler Planetarium

I spent the next few days post-Field Museum at the conference and therefore, we didn't do much sightseeing. Well, I say we, but Matt did take a walk and photograph some of the city's famous drawbridges. But since I wasn't there, it doesn't count.

After the final day of the session, with tickets already purchased for a baseball game that night, we headed to the nearby Adler Planetarium. The planetarium was in the same area as the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, known as the Museum Campus. (We skipped the aquarium because of time and because you had to pay extra to see the exhibits that normal people would want to see, like penguins. I mean, really, what else is the point?) Adler is famous for a few things; namely, it's exquisite view of the Chicago skyline.

The actual planetarium was...OK. If the tickets had been cheaper, I would have probably liked it more. Like Shedd Aquarium, you had to pay more to see all the exhibits and we did upgrade so we could see at least one show. I'm glad we did; that was, by far, the best part.

The other interesting thing about the museum stems from the fact that astronaut Jim Lovell lives nearby so there is a ton of artifacts from his various trips. As a fan of that era of space travel (you know, the era where we actually traveled in space), I enjoyed it.

U.S. Cellular Field 

When we told people that we were going to Chicago, their first question always was, "Are you going to Wrigley Field?" Everyone seems to forget that there are, in fact, TWO professional baseball teams in Chi-town and we planned on hitting them both.

Obviously, U.S. Cellular Field doesn't have the same cache as the second-oldest ballpark in the country. It's named U.S. Cellular Field, for starters. And it's kind of in a shady part of town. The whole atmosphere had a kind of minor-league feel to it - the food was terrible but cheap, we bought tickets for $10 online and the promotions wouldn't have been out of place at a 9-year-old's birthday party.

That being said, it was still baseball. Professional baseball. And it had its moments. Before the game even started, we hung out in the bar located right behind right field. And by "right behind," I mean you are literally on field-level looking at the outfielder's back. We drank some sodas and watched batting practice just long enough for a practice ball by Baltimore's Chris Davis to land right next to our table. Instant souvenir!

We also got great seats on the cheap, saw some fireworks every time a member of the White Sox hit a home run and watched as the home team defeated Red Sox division foe Baltimore.

Lincoln Park Zoo

It's been a couple of weeks since we got back and I still can't believe the Lincoln Park Zoo exists. It's not just because it's a nice zoo; I've been to nice zoos before (the Pittsburgh Zoo remains my gold standard). No, it's the fact that it's a nice zoo with a huge collection of different types of animals in non-depressing environments and it's COMPLETELY FREE. Not just free on Tuesday mornings or on the third Wednesday of each month or free for kids if you buy the parents' tickets. Just free. For everyone. Always. No kid in the Chicago area will grow up having not seen a lion or a gorilla or a flamingo in the flesh. That's just awesome.

And like I said, it's a nice zoo.

Second City

For those unaware, Second City is the comedy troupe that kickstarted a lot of careers. Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, John Belushi, Amy Poehler, the list goes on and is highlighted by handprints and signatures of people who have performed there (even just as visitors). It's also known for its improv and while I'm not usually a big stand-up comedy fan for people I don't know, I love me some improv. So that's the show we went to.

We made sure to keep the program and circle the troupe members we saw perform. You know, just in case we turn on Saturday Night Live in a couple of years and someone looks kind of familiar.

Untouchables Tour

Embarrassingly enough, when we started looking into things to do in Chicago, this is what excited me most. Not Wrigley Field or Navy Pier or the famous museums. Not deep-dish pizza or Chinatown. No, I wanted to learn about gangsters and I wanted to do so from a guy dressed like an extra in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Check and check.


The tour was equal parts interesting and corny because obviously. In short, it was everything I thought it would be (although somewhat overpriced). We saw the site of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where John Dillinger was shot, the brewery where Al Capone made his near-beer during prohibition (as well as the alcohol to add to said "near-beer"). Perhaps most interesting was the church where Capone put a hit on a rival; his body wound up at the entrance to the church and while they attempted to hide it over the years with installed concrete stairs, there is still one bullet hole that was too high and is still visible.


Navy Pier

Our original goal had been to time walk on Navy Pier with the Fourth of July fireworks because Navy Pier is known for its fireworks and it would be festive. Nothing beats festive. Well, nothing except pregnancy, a terrible cold (treated with nothing stronger than tissues and cough drops) and the fact that we got there seven hours before the fireworks would start. Then nothing beats a hotel room bed.

So we did spend the Fourth of July at Navy Pier; it just happened to be mid-day, sans fireworks. I'm OK with that. For those that don't know, Navy Pier does have some military origin but now it's more of a combination mini-amusement park, kitschy shopping plaza and waterfront boardwalk. It's a nice place to walk around, do some fine people-watching (within 20 minutes, we saw a Forrest Gump impersonator and a wedding where all of the bridesmaids were wearing leopard-print dresses) and check out the views of the city. It probably would have been even more fun if I had been able to go on any of the rides, or at least the famous ferris wheel, but oh well. I still had a fine time taking an obscene amount of pictures of it.

Architecture Boat Tour

Other than Wrigley Field, this was the thing everyone said to do. Home of Frank Lloyd Wright and a slew of other architects that people with more architecture knowledge than me (i.e. everyone), it seems like every building has some sort of unique design history. And even if you don't know much about architecture, it's a nice way to go on a relaxing boat ride through the city and see some impressive sites. 

John Hancock Observatory

At first, I figured we would go to the top of Willis (Sears) Tower. I mean, it is the most famous building in Chicago's skyline. But then I thought about it - if you're on top of Willis (Sears) Tower, then you can't take a picture of Willis (Sears) Tower. Also, the Hancock Observatory is cheaper and, from everything I've read, nicer.

The views were, as expected, great, particularly of the beach and coastline. Strangely, they seem to really like marketing their Skywalk, which is just this little walkway between the two sides of the building that has terrible views blocked by grates so you can't even take photos. Why use the worst part of your product to sell it? But anyway, yes. Pretty sweet.

Wrigley Field  

Of course we went to Wrigley Field! Duh! It was exactly what I thought/hoped it would be (other than the utterly confusing way they label sections and rows) - a nice combination of history and pure baseball love. As a Fenway Park regular, I felt as much at home as I have at any other ballpark. No free batting practice ball this time, but it did happen to be free t-shirt day, so there's that.

Around Chicago

Other than the big sites, we hit a few places walking and driving around. Millennium Park was a sight, particularly the famous Bean statue (above) and the weird Cloud Gate water fountains (below).

Grant Park was across the street from our hotel (and the location of the Blackhawks victory parade) and had some interesting installations.

This being a library-themed trip, we stopped by the Chicago Public Library's main branch (above), a huge place made slightly less impressive when I learned it was only built a couple decades ago and made to look old. Making up for it was the children's library dollhouse containing references (obvious and not) to dozens of different classic children's books. We also passed by the Chicago Cultural Center (below), which was the original public library ages ago, and hung out with a group of librarian friends at Branch 27, a former branch building of the public library system that has since been made into a restaurant and bar.

We also stopped for photo ops at Steppenwolf Theatre (where Gary Sinise and John Malkovich got their starts) and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios.

Eatin' (and Drinkin')

Unfortunately, I didn't much drinkin' done because, you know, fetus. But we ate a lot. Like, a lot. Some of my favorites included:

• Lou Malnati's - The best pizza we had in Deep Dish Country, we went more than once.
• Pizzeria Due - The Pizzeria Uno chain was started in Chicago, and the second franchise was known as Pizzeria Due (for some reason, the two franchises are located about 20 feet from each other despite using pretty much the same menu). The menus for both are limited to their specialty - deep dish pizza that takes 45 minutes to prepare - and we went to Due rather than Uno because it had a cool balcony to sit on. I love the Uno's chain and it was fun for historical purposes, although I do think Lou Malnati's pizza was better.
• Hackney's - This chain bar was located right down the road from our hotel, in a district known as Printer's Row because of its history of publishing companies. The food wasn't superb but it had a good drink menu, the people were nice, and it was just our kind of hangout. 
• Yolk - Also a Chicago chain, this breakfast and lunch eatery was awesome. Really awesome. So awesome that we ate three out of four straight meals there at one point. Gahhhh, so good.
• Eleven City Diner - A famed Jewish deli, even things like turkey burgers were made from scratch and extra seasoned. 
• Lou Mitchell's - So disappointing. I had read about this breakfast joint and got excited because I do love me some breakfast joints. While it did have some charms (like giving out donut holes and Milk Duds to people waiting for tables), the whole thing was so disorganized. The hostess was grouchy, the waitstaff completely forgot about us for awhile and the prices were not worth the food quality/quantity we got.
• Goose Island Brewery - This was located right near Wrigley Field and was the perfect type of brewpub. 
• Rock n' Roll McDonald's - OK, full disclosure: We didn't really eat here. I think I may have had a smoothie for my sore throat and Matt might have gotten some breakfast biscuits while we waited for the Untouchables Tour to depart from right outside. But we hung out in there a lot. It's like a McDonald's Museum, with old photos and artifacts from the history of McDonald's, as well as general pop culture stuff. There was a display building outside that was, strangely, locked, so you could only see so much, but that included Elvis' car and statues of the Beatles.

Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds

I never really thought of myself as a Quentin Tarantino fan and still don't, for the most part. I appreciated Pulp Fiction as a good movie but wasn't really my thing and stuff like Kill Bill et al. just never appealed to me. Things changed with Django Unchained, a really good story with awesome acting that, despite its gratuitous violence, didn't really turn into a "Tarantino movie" until the very end when (SPOILER ALERT) an entire plantation's worth of people get their innards splattered against the wall.

Because of how much I liked that movie, I thought I'd give Tarantino's other recently critically acclaimed movie a shot. Plus, Christoph Waltz. I mean, c'mon.

Inglorious Basterds is the historically fictitious story of two separate plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler and a slew of other Nazi leaders at the exact same time. One of the plots comes from Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a young French Jewish woman whose family is shot by the vicious Nazi officer Hans Landa (Waltz) while trying to hide in a neighbor's floorboards. That scene tells you a lot about Shoshanna's fighting spirit and tragic tale but even more about Landa, equal parts brilliant and pure evil.

A few years after her escape, Shoshanna is living as Emmanuelle Mimieux, a cinema owner in Paris. She inadvertently catches the eye of Fredrick Zoller, whose recent heroics (the Nazi sniper killed hundreds of enemy soldiers while holed up by himself for three days in a bird's nest) are being turned into a Nazi propaganda film by Hitler's second-in-command Joseph Goebbels. In order to impress his new ladyfriend, Zoller convinces Goebbels to hold the film's premiere in her theater, much to her chagrin. But after she realizes that her theater will be full of Nazis, including Landa, she plots a way to burn the whole building down with them inside.

Meanwhile, the Basterds, a group of Jewish-American soldiers (with a couple of anti-Nazi Germans thrown in) headed by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), also hear of the premiere. This group is dedicated to killing Nazis in the most Tarantino-esque ways possible. In one 10-minute stretch, we see scalpings, throat-cuttings, and a guy get bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Raine's plan for the premiere is similar to Shoshanna's - all of Germany's worst baddies in the same small space is too good to turn down.

I won't ruin the end, but suffice to say that my attempt to keep a tally of on-screen deaths was futile when I was no longer able to keep the numbers straight.

Like Django, the movie had a vigilante justice theme with the least sympathetic villains ever. (Seriously, Nazis? Slave owners? I'm curious who Tarantino has left in his Most Hated People Ever drawer.) But while we had our obvious heroes in Django and King Schultz, the heroes in Inglorious Basterds are a little different, if only because there were almost too many of them. The two different plots were hard to keep track of, and even more so considering more than half the movie was in subtitles. One scene that takes place in a German bar had such weird lighting that it was almost impossible to read the yellow words. I found myself so focused on not missing what they were saying that I completely forgot who was talking at all.

This makes me sound like a simple American and that's probably true. I don't love subtitles for this reason. I doubly don't love subtitles when watching at home (I'm sure it was easier to read this stuff on a big movie screen). Oh well.

In the end, Inglorious Basterds leaned more toward Pulp Fiction than Django Unchained in my Tarantino Spectrum. I could appreciate the quality of the film, the intricacies of the plot, and the fantastic acting of Christoph Waltz, who is seriously just awesome. But I wouldn't say I loved it and I can't say I'd want to see it again.

Greatest Movies of All Time? Inglorious Basterds ranked in at No. 267, spurred by its Best Picture nomination. (Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor, although that didn't come into consideration for the GMoAT list.)

Book Review: Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture

I'm going to lose people right off the bat, thanks to the title and cover. And while, yes, this book is a biography of a professional wrestler, you don't have to like professional wrestling to be intrigued by the story of Gorgeous George. More than just serve as a fake pugilist, George did exactly what the subtitle suggests - he affected American pop culture in a way that is still being felt today (even if those performers don't even realize it). And by pop culture, I'm not talking about professional wrestling - I'm talking sports in general, music, TV, and the grand idea of "celebrity."

For those unfamiliar, Gorgeous George was a professional wrestler whose heyday came in the 1940s and 1950s. He was the ultimate "heel," wrestlespeak for "bad guy." He talked about how much better he was than not just his opponent, but the people of the crowd. How they were all dirty and poor and unattractive and beneath him. His "performance" began not when the bell sounded the start of a match, but before he even began walking to the ring: he would be preceded by a valet who would "disinfect" the ring with Chanel No. 10 perfume and then lay down a clean carpet on which his master could tread. Then, with the dulcet tones of "Pomp and Circumstance" ringing through the arena, Gorgeous George would begin walking to the ring. He would wear long, ornate, effeminate robes in bright colors; his hair would be bleached blonde and styled using gold bobby pins (which he called "Georgie pins.") He would rankle the audience members as they showered him with boos. When he got to the ring, his valet would help him disrobe and prepare for the match. The whole process took about 15 minutes; all the while, his opponent would be hanging out watching the show from his corner.

For more information about him, check out this video. You won't be disappointed.

To understand why George became such a phenomena, you have to look at that period of history. George first arrived as "Gorgeous," flaunting the luxury and expensiveness of his clothes and lifestyle, at the end of the Depression and then during World War II, a time when most people's funds were limited. He also arrived right around the time of television. This new medium of entertainment made professional wrestling extremely popular, as it didn't have to worry about paying writers or actors (unlike scripted TV shows); they could get away with using only one camera (unlike field sports like baseball or football); and because wrestling matches were predetermined, they didn't have to worry about one ending too soon to be worthwhile (unlike boxing). So wrestling was big, and as the biggest wrestler in the business, Gorgeous George was a household name for decades.

A handful of well-known celebrities directly credit George with their own personas. James "Godfather of Soul" Brown remembers watching him and adopting his fancy robes and outgoing ways. A chance meeting with George, after which George spent some time tutoring the then-teenager, Muhammad Ali's "I am the prettiest! I am the greatest!" routine is something that could have been taking word-for-word by a Gorgeous George interview. Even Bob Dylan - not exactly known for his flashy style - points to a meeting with George as what helped him figure out how to change his name and create a stage personality. The author of the book, John Capouya, does a good job of following those lines, those trends, down to the celebrities of today. Gorgeous George's influence is still felt.

In his personal life, while George did adopt his Gorgeous persona to the point where he legally changed his name to "Gorgeous George," he was not really the guy he portrayed on TV. For much of his career, he was a loving family man to his wife and two adopted children. Then he struggled with alcoholism and gambling and adultery, which cost him two marriages, two families, and all of his money, and when he died in 1963 of a heart attack brought on (probably) by his alcohol usage, he was destitute.

While the story of a famous person brought down by personal demons is not a new one, the story of Gorgeous George is utterly original, fitting of this breaking-ground man. It's also an exceptionally researched and well-written work by Capouya that would be easy for anyone - even the non-wrestling fan - to read and enjoy.