
A random memory just flew by.
Years ago I knew a woman selling fabric goods at a hip store named Poppies in Berkeley. She told her roommate at home one night that...
“Geee it was busy, we sold so many notions today!”
“You sell Notions?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Notions.”
“Yea.”
“Wow... you... sell....Notions...’
Obviously he was thinking on the lines of
Sometimes a Great...
Yes, It
is a burden to carry other people memories.
Okay, so here's what I wanted to say.
Am I the only one who saw the movie
Where the Wild Things Are, and turned it into an Ingmar Bergman film? It really was not that big of a jump.
So, I read into things. It’s one of my faults.
It’s not as though I shoot smack.
I introduced the kids to
Limelight. Synopsis: A young ballerina is a mess because she can’t get her career started. Cavalero, an aging vaudevillian, is a train wreck because he is at the end of his. Every line seems to have weight to it, reading as Chaplin’s essay on how to live without regrets. It is an autobiographical bittersweet movie spoken in such a lyrical voice.
The kids had seen it three years ago but understood more this time around, and so, got more out of it.
The coming of age as the blooming of metaphoric understanding. The year you realized that the scarecrow, tin man and lion ARE the farm hands. (Sorry if I just blew that for some of you.) It happens to every child and there is a proverbial line drawn at that time.
At the end, and as an aside: Chaplin was awarded an Academy Award for composing the theme from Limelight twenty years later in 1972. The boycott against Chaplin in the US by his right-wing political enemies was so successful that his film never played the required two weeks in a Los Angeles theater to be eligible for consideration at the time of its original release in 1952. But while he was banished, his theme song was not. Even today people who never knew who Chaplin was still recognize its haunting melody.