The first time I read La cage aux folles, I thought I would fall off my miserable little chair in my miserable little library carrel, laughing. The first time I saw Edouard Molinaro’s Franco-Italic rendition, I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. The first time I saw Mike Nichols’s adaptation, heaven help us in English, I thought I was gonna die from laugh-induced asphyxiation.
But as we know it’s not the hilarity but the humanity that makes greatness. And I think this is one of the great plays of the 20th century.
Netflix has placed the Nichols rendition, The Birdcage, front and center, by way of tribute to Robin Williams’s demise. Williams plays Armand. Despite the updates (Kevin: “The ones who funded the Mapplethorpe exhibit?”), it’s good, very, very good.
{grump!} This morning when I headed out for the not-daily-enough two-mile walk, along about 6 ayem, I picked up a branch that had snapped off the neighbor’s silk oak and went to carry it to the giant trash bin in the alley.
Shee-ut! Someone (or possibly last night’s microburst) had tipped over that gigantic thing and rolled it into the middle of the alley. And they’d had themselves a little party, so it seemed, right outside my back wall: a pile of empty Negro Modelo bottles, a Guinness can, an empty Smirnoff bottle, and several stacks of the iconic red Solo cups had been dumped behind the yard.
And as I strolled out of the alley, who should I spot coming out of the empty for-sale house on the corner but the three high-school bud’s who seem to be associated with the real owner of that place. Apparently it was a rental — which explains why the damn thing was allowed to run down despite having been expensively renovated by the previous owners — and now their dad, a gray-haired fellow of the lawyerly class (these young gents look like Brophy Prep or Phoenix Country Day students…they do have a “look” that you can’t miss). The old boy must have decided to get out of the landlord business, so now it’s on the market. And what do you bet Dad has no clue the little darlings spent the night there? He’s probably out of town and “trusting” his straight-arrow-looking sons to behave themselves back at the manse, no doubt located in Northeast Scottsdale or some such.
Presumably they were not actually partying on the far side of my backyard pool — Cassie and Ruby would have gone batshit had any such goings-on been going on — but rather had spent Saturday night in the for-sale house and then, by way of hiding the evidence, carried the clean-up debris over to our alley instead of depositing it in the trash bin behind Dad’s soon-to-be-former rental.
How do I know this? Well, certain Brophy Prep Men of my acquaintance also were given, once upon a time, to perching on rooftops and partying hearty. Actually, in their high-school days we might say they “partied silly,” but…
LOL! The thing about baby boys is that they do grow up to be men!
The lads climbed into their car and drove, ever so carefully, away. (Did you know that one way cops can spot a drunk driver is that when you know you’re plotzed you tend to drive much slower than the speed limit?)
One of Sally’s male relatives was puttering around her garage. We recruited him to right the giant trash bin and drag it back to its assigned place.
The beading adventure has entered a new phase: I’m making rosaries (and therein lies a tale, below…) to help raise funds for the choir. Take a look!
The cross on the left — the triangular piece — is handcrafted glass made by choir member Doug Thomas. Among his many accomplishments, Doug is an artist in glass. He makes spectacular art bowls and plates that sell for startling amounts of monnaie. And the cross on the right is by Navajo artist Kee Nataani. I found that at the Heard Museum, also at a somewhat…surprising price.
The decade beads on the one with the glass cross are faceted red agate and the larger prayer beads are brecciated jasper. For the one with the silver cross, the decades are red agate and the larger beads are Swarovski pearls; the blue decorative accents are Swarovski crystal. The three-way connectors are TierraCast silver, the best-quality silver findings available, IMHO — they have an image of Mary on one side and of the spotless rose on the other.
Both of these are sold. But I have one more Nataani cross. Doug is on vacation and does not know about these antics, but we believe he can be prevailed upon to make more of his glass crosses. They really are very striking — much more so than is obvious in the image. So if you would like a unique, truly one-of-a-kind handmade rosary, e-mail me at vicky [at] thecopyeditorsdesk [dot] com, entering the usual symbol in place of the bracketed terms. Price is $50 each; if you would like to make it a tax-deductible donation in return for a FREE GIFT of a rosary, let me know and I’ll tell you how to make out the check. Either way, all proceeds go to the All Saints Episcopal Church Music Program.
Just now we have two others in hand: one made with greenish African jasper decades and red agate prayer beads, with Swarovski pearl accents and a different type of cross by Nataani, and another made with fairly large, highly polished nuggets (stone is unknown, but they have a pale reddish cast) and red agate.
The African jasper number is my favorite, and I’m surprised it didn’t sell on Sunday, when we put the things on display. It actually could be used as a necklace, if one chose. My photography is not as good as Nanette’s, but here’s a vague idea of how it looks:
And a close-up of the Nataani cross:
As usual, click on the images for larger, higher-resolution versions.
So, you might reasonably ask, how did the Prods come to be practicing their devotions on prayer beads that looks suspiciously like, oh…say, a Dominican rosary? Well, I personally have no idea. Presumably when Henry VIII decided to go his separate way and take the English with him, some of us were reluctant to part with old customs. Also, quite a few escaped RCs come to rest in the Anglican (Episcopal, in the US) church, and they also are comforted by their traditional ways.
A smaller, more Protestantly ascetic Anglican rosary does exist, but as it develops, the prayer group in our particular church prefers to use the Dominican rosary, and so that’s why we decided to try this more traditional style.
From what I’m told, a five-decade rosary for use by Episcopalians is more likely to have a plain cross (as above), rather than a crucifix.
These things make perfect confirmation, baptism, and first communion gifts, and also as Christmas or birthday gifts to the faithful and to rosary collectors. No two are alike.
My next effort, after filling a few orders for new ones with Doug’s glass cross, will use a lapis cross and lapis rondelles for the decades, with pearl prayer beads, pater beads, and accents. Here’s the cross I have in mind:
Is that gorgeous or is that not gorgeous? They make one in malachite, too, which may be even more arresting. Malachite and lapis are both pretty expensive, and so I don’t know whether to hold the price at $50 or not. As it is, $50 is about what it has cost to make the rosaries shown above, so we’re actually selling them at cost.
The accents on each of these are sterling silver. So the effect should be pleasing, whether one uses them for prayer and meditation or as jewelry.
At any rate, if you’re interested in buying one for a worthy cause, get in touch: funnyaboutmoney [at] gmail [dot] com or leave an inquiry in the comments section below.
And please Pin this, Tweet it, Facebook it, and pass it along in any other way you can think of. If you would like to run a small display ad for these on your website, Funny about Money will offer $25/year for PR 3+ sites and $10/year for those with a page rank below 3. Get in touch at the same email.
And give a listen to the group you’ll be supporting:
Less than 15 minutes before my 6:45 ride shows up to head across the city for the Thursday a.m. networking group, of which I’m the prez. Gerardo was supposed to have been here at 6 with a palm-tree trimming crew, but as usual he’s late.
He was supposed to have shown up over the weekend, but as usual…yeah. Naturally, he picks THE single most hectic day of the week to announce he’s bringing his underlings at the crack of dawn.
Can’t complain. Palm tree trimming is horrible, hard, dangerous work. Every few years another guy gets killed when a frond or two falls on him and suffocates him — and not just idiot happy handymen who think they can trim their own damn trees. More often it’s a professional tree dude.
After the meeting, fly back here to let the dog out — she still has a urinary tract infection and can’t be left locked up from 6:45 to 12:30, which would suit me a lot better. Then fly north up the freeway, meet the designer almost at freaking ANTHEM for godsake, halfway to Prescott. Bring along new maps, edits on old maps.
Work in to this: physical therapy exercises. Back is flaring up again, so now I need to do that routine twice a day.
Fly back here. Put the jury-rigged dog fence up. CALL THE FENCING GUY and try to talk him into installing an out-of-code puppy fence (I’m dead sure he’s gonna tell me anything near a pool has to be six feet high, in which case we’ll be using jury-rigged fencing for the next 14 years, more about which later.
Clean the pool, which will be left a godawful stone mess by the palm tree guys, who will drop the fronds and the damned seed pod wand things into the pool. First will have to suck up as much as possible with the water hose vacuum thing; then run the skimmer without Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, then clean up that unholy mess out of the skimmer and out of the pump pot and then re-hose the bottom of the pool and then put Harvey back in, hoping nothing is left in there that will break him.
Then back to work on the project that kept me awake until midnight: Singapore client sent a 50-page magnum opus — trying to short me by setting it in 10 point type and single space the 5 1/2 pages of references and claiming it was actually only 40 pages. He wants it back by June 6, four days into the four-week course I have to teach without benefit of sidekick. Got one of my former grad students to agree to do the references but then realized the goddamn things are in a fucking field — automatically generated by some piece of software. Meaning I can’t cut them out, send them to her to work on separately while I read the body copy, and then paste t hem and her edits back in. Oh no. I have to finish the ENTIRE 50 PAGES of Chinglish arcana before she can even get it, and she has to be done and ready to ship the thing off by the 6th. Good luck with that! I see the references are full of GIGO: if you don’t enter the data correctly, the program spews it out incorrectly.
Haven’t had time to read my own page proofs for Slave Labor. Haven’t had time to ride herd on the e-book version of that thing. Rebulding t he backyard and rescuing the pool is going to absorb the whole freaking afternoon.
I suppose I’m going to have to call the homeowner’s insurance guy and arrange to have someone clean up the smoke damage, huh? Won’t that have a colorful effect on my premiums.
