25 April 2024: Just clicked "submit" on the practicum students' final grades, so that's that for Spring 2024 grading. A strange and hard semester, but as always, the students--even when some of them were driving me crazy--were the best part.
Trying to get Pandora to play some chair-dancing music, but it is resisting. [Decided to sort of live-blog this for some random reason?] So far, it's offered "Right Here Waiting" and "Take My Breath Away," neither of which is the vibe! "Manic Monday" got us a bit closer. "Hold Me Now"--while a great song--seems like a step backward. Now it's playing "All Through the Night," which I adore, but still isn't right.
Okay: we'll take this last offering--from one of my all-time favorite movies. I can picture every frame in my mind. Mellow, but good enough...
10 August 2022: With the completion of the Dickinson entry, I have crossed the 42K word mark for the book, just a bit shy of 1/3 done, I think. Feels good, but "miles to go" and all that.
Since "She's Like the Wind" was playing on Pandora when I added the Dickinson entry to the larger document and ran the numbers (as I sang along, loudly--no one else in the office suite today), and since this song/movie/singer means so much to me, I am including the video. Ha.
Encore is showing all of North and South today (it got started at 10:00 this morning and runs until 7:30). When I saw that, you know I set the DVR (because, yeah, I can't watch 8.5 hours of TV straight). But I have been watching since 10:00, pressing "pause" every 30 minutes or so to get some work or chores done. And it's as awesome as I remember. (And I've blogged a bit about it before.) Take a look at the imdb page and check out that cast (besides Patrick Swayze, of course). Elizabeth Taylor as a madam? Johnny Cash as John Brown? And that's just scratching the surface.
Plus, since I haven't seen the whole thing since I was much younger, I can feel even smarter than I did back then. For instance, when Orry and George are at West Point, I remember young me feeling all clever for recognizing what it meant that an older cadet was named "Ulysses Grant," whose friends called him "Sam." But now I knew what it meant that two of their fellow cadets are Georges--Pickett and McClellan and another is Tom Jackson, later known as Stonewall.
So far, it's also offered up some terrific, 80s mini-series lines,
including the villain yelling at a horse, "Faster, Satan, faster!" and
one friend saying to another, "We're supposed to be fighting Mexicans,
not each other." Good stuff.
This one hits hard as Patrick Swayze was one of my first celebrity crushes. I think my first memory of him was from a movie that still has (in my opinion) one of the greatest collections of male eye-candy ever...
But my big old crush on him really got going when he was in North and South. This mini-series was a huge hit in the Hanrahan household. Erin and I would re-watch the VHS copies we had of it (taped from the original broadcast). Heck, it's how I first learned so much about nineteenth-century America because let's face it, that mini-series covered everything--from the Mexican War to John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry to all the big battles of the Civil War. It was even my first introduction to the tragic mulatta trope, the subject of my first published article many years later. Sometimes when I am teaching the nineteenth century to my 204 students, I almost want to tell them, "Go watch North and South!" It's totally racy, too, and must have been a bit scandalous back in 1985. Check out this trailer from the third night of the first part of the mini-series. Good stuff.
For the record, I haven't seen the whole thing in years and years, although I did discover not too long ago that it's all on youtube and soon wasted about an hour watching the beginning. Yeah--it's not Ken Burn's style accurate, but it still rocks. And at the center of this epic (yup, that's right, I called it epic!) mini-series was the young, gorgeous, and charming Patrick Swayze as Orry Main. Hmmmm...maybe Patrick Swayze, therefore, is part of the reason I became a nineteenth-century Americanist.
And then...Dirty Dancing. Again, I was obsessed. When the movie first came to theatres, my parents insisted I was too young to see it. That was probably a good choice (although they did always let us watch the most gory horror films...) since I was just ten years old. But when it came out on VHS about a year later, all of the sudden, they decided I was old enough. I remember watching it at one of my first slumber parties, too. I had two posters from the movie, the soundtrack(s), and yes, a VHS copy. And I watched and rewatched it. I can still probably quote most of the script.
One of my favorite moments from this movie (and there are so many): the look Johnny Castle gives Baby at about 1:42 into this clip (youtube won't let me embed it) followed by that bitchin' jump off of the stage. It still gives the pre-teen girl in me flutters in the stomach.
And then...Ghost. Cried like a baby in that one, even enduring the awkwardness of seeing it in the theatre with my dad. (I was 13 by that point...not the right age to watch that pottery scene with your dad right next to you. Although, is there a right age to watch that scene with your dad next to you?)
Anyway, I've got lots of other Swayze stories to tell (like the time my brothers thought it would be funny to tease me by pausing Roadhouse at the point where Patrick's bare butt is on screen), but it's enough now to say that it's very sad to hear of his death. He was such a decent man who fought so hard against his disease. Rest in peace, Patrick.
