Mother’s Day’s this coming Sunday! Here’s the wrap-up of some movie ideas that might bring a smile!
Youngsters’ Mom-Flicks
The Parent Trap (Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara, Hayley Mills, 1961; Lindsay Lohan, Dennis Quaid, 1998)
Old favorite about sisters being reared apart by their divorced parents—sisters who are now plotting feverishly to haul the grown-ups back before the preacher-man!
Mother’s Day is Sunday May 11, 2008!
The movies have been making a big deal of Mom for ages, since well before James Cagney’s psychopathic Cody Jarrett went stark-raving bonkers in the prison mess hall on learning his beloved, but homicidal, mother had bought it in the back (White Heat, 1949)…
In the run-up to Mother’s Day weekend, I’ve put together a list of noteworthy films from yesteryear that all have one thing in common: At least one compelling mother(ing) character, or a strong motherhood theme.
I was not one of the 1008 Americans to receive a call from CNN Opinion Research Corporation Poll, asking whether I’m in a sour mood over the state of the country, so I did not get to weigh in on the subject.
I wish I had been called, because I would have greatly differed with the whopping 70% of my grumpy countrymen. And, should the unsuspecting pollster have stayed on the line long enough, I would have had this to say:
Who lets their mood be determined by such a thing? If I based my mood on something as ambiguous as the state of the country, I might never rise from my covers in the morning. What kind of emotional measuring stick is that?
Here’s the deal: Life has problems. If I focus on problems, I am anxious, which the dictionary defines as full of mental distress or uneasiness because of fear of danger or misfortune; greatly worried and afraid. Spending any time whatsoever being greatly worried and afraid is a colossal waste of precious time and it produces nothing good. It does produce, I suppose, a very sour mood. A sour mood isn’t going to change gas prices or the situation in Iraq.
Next week, from Tuesday through Saturday—which is Mother’s Day eve!—The Scent Shop will be holding a special Mother’s Day
“Color Her World with Fragrance”
promotion: Purchase 1 bottle of fragrance, and get a second of your choice for half price!
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What is it about scent that stirs the heart, the imagination, the deepest memory of man and woman?
Well, since Mother’s Day is right around the corner, let’s save that one for the mind-body experts at Johns Hopkins, while we get right down to all you need to know about Geriann Fowler’s friendly neighborhood fragrance haven, The Scent Shop!
…one man had even lifted his shirt so that all could get a close-up of his most recent surgical scar. Everyone seemed duly impressed at the shiny gross-out spectacle near this stranger’s exposed navel…
Moom and I had a screamingly funny time on the trail, sailing along the untried road in utter darkness during an unexpected thunderstorm. “You do have your cell phone, don’t you?” she asked, in seriousness. “Yes,” I answered. “But do we even know where we are, I mean, exactly? Will the phone even get a signal out here? And how would we tell anyone where we are, when we can’t see anything but some sort of crops all over the place?”
We both burst out laughing, and pressed on, windshield wipers on “high”. Better to find Malden than curse the dark.
…Four boys she’d had, and she never gave a thought to what happened when they got behind the wheel; ah, but the girl…what can I say?
This is a story about how mothers stay mothers forever, no matter how old their children get, how far those children have traveled, or how capable those children might have proven to be in taking care of themselves over the years.
It’s a brief story of my dear sainted mother, Lillian E. Thompson (1926-2002), who managed the Poplar Bluff city bus company for years until her retirement in 1996. It’s a tale that illustrates how that “lioness instinct” never dies—at least if you have a child you consider something of an egghead with little in the way of practical, real-world savvy. You want to protect that child with all you have—even if she’s been around the world and experienced earthquakes and terrorist bomb threats…Even if you’re 74 and on oxygen!
Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 11th, and that leaves sons, daughters, and grandchildren plenty of time to plan a loving salute to moms everywhere!
The really swell thing is that when you give yourself a little time to plan, you don’t have to rush to the smell-good section of the nearest five-and-dime before church that Sunday, in the hope of seizing onto whatever little cheesy French knock-off doesn’t scream, “TOTAL ABSENCE OF CLASS OVER HERE!!!” Because when you couple that kind of “inspiration” with a supermarket corsage, and a hasty blue-plate special at the only roadside greasy-spoon with any seating left in the county, you’re setting yourself up for tragedy of ancient Greek proportions.
I’ve been tooling about the Internet and coming across some really neat websites for Mother’s day ideas. Here’s a sampling of what I found…
“You can’t engage anybody in battle who doesn’t do the same things you do…It’s like a boxing match, where your opponent gets to kick. It’s impossible to survive, let alone win.”
—David Kelley
In addition to life-threatening blood loss, Kelley had sustained an ugly hodge-podge of injuries of the sort consistent with a bomb attack: permanent nerve and tendon damage (in both legs); an injured internal organ (his liver); and significant shrapnel to the head, arms, and chest.
The incident, however, did not end with the bombing of Kelley’s truck. “We were [then] engaged by small-arms fire,” recalls Kelley. “Our gunners were shooting back.”
“The thing is, we’d been out on patrol, and we were actually going back to refit,” says Kelley, regarding his platoon leader’s fateful decision to order “one last sweep” of the major supply route they’d been inspecting that day. “We were going back to get more fuel, more water…We were actually going to make it back in time for a hot meal—something that was only possible maybe three times a month!”
Part I
“…I was in the third vehicle, the one that took the hit. When the thing blew up on us, it pushed me down into the floorboard. I didn’t think I had any legs anymore, from the pain I was feeling…I remember telling our driver to stop, but he wasn’t even there anymore.”
—David Kelley
The main reason a very restless David Kelley entered the military at 17 was that he was tired of school. “I called every branch,” he remembers. “I left messages with all of them; The Navy was the first to call me back.” And so Kelley began his military service as a Navy man in 1994.