Dressed to Drill

Home improvements are cranking at our house. The finished basement has to be ready for football season or so we hear. As a result, we have increased our supply of bandages. They are going like hotcakes.

Down on the Farm

Claudia did not need to touch the goat yesterday, but she did seem interested in milking a cow today. We will see how it goes. She is looking forward to the hayride and playing in the creek later this week. They are also making dream catchers, which we hope Claudia will in turn show the family how to do.

Tonight: We are determined to go to the pool. Last night was yet another weeknight we were turned away for thunder they allegedly heard. We are showing up again tonight. Life guards and storm clouds, beware.

Goat Milking?

Claudia is down on the farm this week. Today: Goat milking. She made a slight face when she heard what today's festivities included, but she cheered up when she heard they would be making their own ice cream to eat this afternoon (not with the goat's milk). We will see how our chic daughter fares on the farm.

Toothless on Meath Drive

That old tooth fairy is back. Garrett has jumped into the tooth-losing game and received a dollar for his efforts. It took him three days to be willing to give the tooth up for potential profit. The fairy left a dollar--on time this time, but alas she was still a little sloppy on the delivery. Garrett insists he heard something and saw her wings. Hopefully she will improve as Mr. G has another loose tooth and Claudia has two loose front teeth. It is getting costly.

Cute as a Bug's Ear

This is Claudia and two of her classmates before their big musical presentation on Friday. What you see here are two butterflies and a ladybug. Garrett also graduated on Friday, but we have no photos of that as Colleen messed up the digital camera.

The Devil's Day

Garrett turned six on 06-06-06 and it went ok. I did get one e-mail warning suggesting that I avoid balconies that day, but his birthday went off with a hitch. We got some GREAT presents. From his Aunt Amy and Uncle Ashley, he got a pop up dinosaur book and this foam rocket launcher. They spent a good part of last night launching rockets in the yard...which of course kept getting caught in the many trees...so that kept the Dad busy too.

Garrett also got a Lego Batmobile that we have already assembled. That was the Mom's job. She is going to add Lego assembly to her resume.

Summer Reading

In spite of the fact that I did not teach this spring, my reading list has not grown. Perhaps it was those four dissertations I edited. Hmmm. Regardless, here it is...

2006 Reading List
1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close By Jonathan Safran Foer
2. The Final Solution By Michael Chabon
3. Dear Zoe By Philip Beard
4. Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve
5. She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel
February
6. Parched by Heather King
7. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
8. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
9. A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
March
10. The Tender Bar
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. The Beans of Egypt, Maine
April
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
14. Stink and the Incredible Supergalatic Jawbreaker
May
15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
16. The Reader by Bernard Schlink
17. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
18. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
19. The Miraclous Journey of Edward Tulane
20.

As you can see I'm all caught up on my Harry Potter. The last book is supposed to be out July 7, 2007. A whole year to go.

Also, the list does not reflect the HUGE number of Magic Treehouse books I've read with Garrett this year. We also read the whole Mr. Putter and Tabby series.

44

Andrew has been playing lacrosse for Virginia Tech this year. They are having a very successful season so far.

March Madness, April Gladness

You may have heard about the George Mason University Patriots and their NCAA run. Sports were big in the month of March at the Rich household. In fact, the children are still playing basketball just about every day.

Claudia celebrated her 7th birthday last night with a game of Sorry. She is expecting a rematch tonight.

Why I Won't Be Nominated for an Oscar This Year

When I was in college, I made a film. It wasn’t the kind of film you might be thinking of, but it is equally embarrassing. Called "Beginnings," it was a mercifully short "relationship" film. I have a video copy of it, presented to me by the director/producer/screenwriter. It sits on a shelf with my other videos, including one of my own short films. All are collecting dust.

I really don't remember how I came to meet filmmaker David ______. I think he may have placed an ad looking for actors. I don't know that you could honestly call him a filmmaker then; he was a guy with big dreams, a couple lights, some rented equipment, and a really awful script.

I didn't have to audition. A quick summary of my acting credits over the phone seemed to suffice. The first time that I met David on campus at Virginia Commonwealth University, he gave me a copy of the script. At our second meeting I told him it was awful. After that, we began meeting regularly in a lounge area on the second floor of the library, where I would give him my “notes.” I had scribbled all over the manuscript and rewritten many of the lines. One whole scene, I told him, simply had to go.

"It just doesn't make sense," I said. "I've reread it a couple times and I can't make heads or tails out of their gibberish."

"They have their own code, their own shorthand, their own language," he replied somewhat shyly.

"Their own language?" I asked.

"It is something an old girlfriend and I used to do," he said. "We would talk in code so no one else could follow our conversation."

"Hmmm. Well, the audience isn't going to be able to follow it either," I said. "If I can't pick up the code when reading it, how is an audience going to catch it in a scene that runs a minute and a half?"

See, I was already becoming a prima donna. There is just something about the whole genre that makes people act strangely. But David willingly made the changes, including adding some scenes that I suggested to replace the ones I found unworkable. One thing that remained was the stuffed animal that is prominent in several scenes. If the animal was meant to be some kind of metaphor for the relationship, its message was lost on me. David was never able to clearly explain to me the significance of the brown bear.

Even then, years before my MFA in fiction, I understood that if you were going to place something before the viewer--and call attention to it--it should contribute to the story. These subtleties were lost on David. We went through several more revisions before the script was something I was willing to say aloud and give up my weekends to shoot.

In my pre-production meetings with David, I found out a great deal about him, definitely more than I needed, or wanted, to know. At least 10 years my senior, he had studied engineering at UVA before graduating and discovering that he wasn't an engineer. Deep down inside, he was actually…well, Francis Ford Coppola. Or so he hoped. He had black hair and a full beard that was only starting to become salted. He always wore a navy Greek fisherman's cap and a jean jacket.

I believe that I met him relatively early in his cinematic journey. His lack of knowledge about certain films in particular and the genre in general startled and often annoyed me.

"The film will have piano music in the background," he told me at one of our meetings. "Something soft and random. Like the music in Ordinary People."

"That's a classical piece," I said.

"What is?"

"The music in Ordinary People. It is a classical piece called Canon in D."

"Oh. Well, this is going to be original," he said. "My brother is going to write it. He plays the keyboards."

We had many conversations that went just this way. I found a number of them exasperating. Although I was only a college sophomore, I had already spent years watching and analyzing plays and movies. I had written major college papers on Elia Kazan and Paul Schrader. I could even tell you who won Best Picture in 1965.

I always wanted to go to film school, but didn't have the guts or the resources. Filmmaking costs a lot of money. The one 8mm film that sits on my shelf collecting dust cost more than $75 to produce and is only about 10 minutes long.

To be a journalism major, you just needed a typewriter and some paper. So journalism is what I majored in. But I was careful when choosing a college to find one that also had an art school offering filmmaking so that I could take classes.

David wasn't technically in film school either. He was "dabbling," taking the classes he thought he needed--a film class here, a directing class there. He was getting credit for the movie we were making as an independent study.

My leading man in "Beginnings" was a guy named Wade who was pursuing graduate studies in theater. Like David he was also already experiencing a "career" change. Having majored in something else as an undergraduate, he was, at the time I knew him, giving acting his very best shot. He had an agent and would do just about anything to add line to his resume, including print advertising and dancing the polka in the beer garden at Busch Gardens. I am fairly certain he was never embarrassed by "Beginnings."

We shot most of the film in Wade's apartment, and I was shocked by how much time it took to accomplish so little. I had learned in high school that I really wasn't cut out for stage work. After weeks of rehearsals, I was pretty much sick of the play I was in by the time we made it through opening night. I thought acting in a film would be more creative. It actually requires an enormous amount of patience. There is lighting to contend with, problems with setting the camera's depth of field, and actors who can't seem to remember their lines.

This is why Hollywood uses stand-ins. These stand-ins are the people who are tortured for minutes, sometimes hours, on end while the million dollar stars relax their trailers. Walk here. Now stop, mark the floor. Go back, and walk it again. It is mind-numbingly tedious.

Because of David's inexperience--and the fact that we were the cast and the crew--it probably took longer than it normally should have. As for Wade's inability to learn his lines, let's just say that graduate acting classes at VCU must've been pretty time consuming. There are places in the film where I have far more camera time than I should have simply because Wade is reading from his script off camera. By the fourth or fifth take, he would've mastered some of the lines simply out of repetition and David was able to finally reset the lights to get him on camera "acting" the lines.

By the time we finally “wrapped” filming, David was already talking about another collaboration. This time he wanted me to write the script, which was to be based on some of my fiction. I can still remember a disagreement we had about the content.

"It is a little bit Saturday Night Fever, a little bit Diner," I told him.

"What?" he said. "Saturday Night Fever is a movie about disco music."

"No, it's not. Have you ever seen it?" I'm sure my facial expression conveyed my disgust.

Despite our creative differences, David had big plans for the film--he was working on a budget and looking for a full-time job so that he could pull together the funds to shoot the film. He expected me to spend the summer hashing out a script. We would have monthly critiques, but this time it would be me making the revisions.

It was spring, the end of the semester, and I was feeling a lot of pressure to plan the rest of my year around this yet unnamed, unwritten project. I was also very eager to see Beginnings. So I attended the screening that David set up for his instructor. I even took along my boyfriend, figuring he deserved to see how I'd spent all those Saturdays.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. I know that I wasn't expecting it to be brilliant. The script was weak at best. I guess I was hoping to see that David did indeed have a gift--maybe a way with lighting, a unique visual perspective.

The instructor, who I had also taken a film class with, gave a running commentary in the dark, which didn't help matters. "Oh, that's a nice shot…. I like the angle of that…. Oh, now that shot, that was really awful."

When it was over, his instructor was confused. She turned to David. "I don't understand who the other woman was. How does she tie in?"

"There's only one woman in the film," said David.

She pondered this for a second. "Just one woman," she repeated.

I needed to get out of there and fast. "Beginnings" was truly the right name for it. It was a beginner film, a practice film. Have people walk and talk, set up lights, pan left, zoom in--there you go, a movie. It was probably good practice for all of us. But I knew that I couldn't do another film with him. I couldn't invest myself and devote more time to a project than I had with this one, and risk a similar outcome.

David sensed my disappointment. He tried to assure me that the next one would be different, but even he didn't seem convinced. Ultimately it was fairly easy to extricate myself from the new project.

I ran into him on campus that fall and he told me he had just received great news: "Beginnings" had been accepted into a film festival in Ann Arbor. That's great, I told him, and wished him well. Then I went to the pay phone across the street and called my mother long distance with my calling card.

"There are people laughing at me in Ann Arbor," I cried.

"They're not laughing at you," she said, but that's her job.

I guess I had hoped the film would disappear. And it did, just not as quickly as I had hoped. In the last 20 years, I have only watched "Beginnings" a handful of times. The last time was because my husband wanted to see it. I told him he could, if he could handle the rules:

Rule #1--No sound. I can't bear to hear it, especially not my own voice.

Rule #2--I hold the remote and get to forward through any scenes that are unbearable to me (about three).

Rule #3--Viewers must endure my running commentary: "Look at how thin I was, and blonde…. I still have that coat…and that stuffed animal."

In 1993 David won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival for a film called Lillian. In 1999, Roger Ebert was so taken by his film Thirteen at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville that he devoted an entire column to David. This attention led to David winning the fifth annual Movado Someone to Watch Award, which comes with a $20,000 prize, also in 1999. He is known for using non-actors.

When I began writing this piece, I got online to find the last name of the film teacher I only remembered as Joan. I found it and she is still teaching at VCU. Much to my surprise, so is David who after years of dabbling earned his M.F.A. in film at VCU.

In the intervening years, I've been a newspaper reporter, an advertising manager, a magazine editor, and a fiction writer. David is still making films, one at a time, doing the best he can. For the film that so dazzled Ebert, David is listed as director, writer, and cinematographer. Oh, yeah, and his brother is still writing his musical scores.

Big Weekend at the Rich Ranch

It was a big weekend at our house. Garrett has started taking karate and earned his white belt over the weekend. He is very excited and took it to school with him today.

Also, Andrew played in his first Virginia Tech lacrosse game this weekend. It was at Clemson and we are still waiting to hear the results. This weekend he heads out to La Jolla, California, for three games.

Can you hear me now?

Well, I guess not. At the Rich ranch, we are still dealing with the flu blues. Art had a major relapse over the weekend and now has two perforated ear drums. The house is in disarray. Garrett is on a major Max and Ruby bender. But Claudia did really well with her first book report. I am hoping we will be able to a light at the end of the tunnel this weekend.

La La Lacrosse

Andrew tried to come home this weekend to Flu House, but wasn't able to get a ride. That was probably our last chance to see him this semester and he has begun conditioning for lacrosse. Almost all the games are away games this spring, including spring break in California. We hope to catch Andrew in that VT uniform about the end of March.

I Heart Valentines, Not

Both kids missed their valentine parties at school. And we've concluded that no one really loves Andrew. His lame mother did not even send him a candy care package. Slacker!

Flu Blues

Boy, have we've been sick. In true Olympic fashion, we have categorized the symptoms. Claudia takes the gold in the fever category with a high of 104.1. No one chose to compete with Garrett is the vomiting category although we all have felt pretty nauseated. I myself had to walk out of a family room screening of Rugrats in Paris. Those kids are just gross. My stomach is rolling just thinking about it.

No one has had much of an appetite, but potato chips and bottled water are going like hot cakes.

Funny but Sad

I really enjoyed Haven Kimmel's sequel to A Girl Named Zippy. This family is hilarious, but I was left wondering about the neglect. There is one line in the memoir where she says that she doesn't blame her mom for not washing her clothes or doing other things because they didn't have any running water etc. (and of course that was her dad's fault), but I blame her mom. She should've gotten up off the couch before it was time to go to class.

Royal Person of the Week

Garrett is the royal person of the week in his class. It is kind of like King for the Day. He prepared a poster and put his brother Andrew in two categories: under Friends and Family. The cat also received prominent display.

Fa la la la Oh I'm Sorry That's All We Have Time For

Reasons to Take Down That Christmas Tree on Jan. 1

1. You already got your money's worth out of the $90 Blue Spruce
2. The pitter patter of needles dropping in the night is keeping you awake.
3. The kids look under the tree every morning just in case there was something they overlooked on The Day.
4. A gangle of squirrels has gathered on the porch eyeballing the tree as it is the only tree on the property they haven't built a nest in.
5. Everyone else already dragged their tree to the curb

or
6. You are just dying to crack open those boxes of Martin Luther King decorations.

$$$$$

I love gift cards--giving them and getting them. But I want to know what the person used the gift card for, especially if it is a Barnes and Noble or Borders gift card. It always makes me think.

Andrew used his Borders gift card to buy a book on physics and promptly plopped down to enjoy it. It is a book I wouldn't have thought to get him. Borders should have a gift registry like Penney's and Target does.

The Final List for 2005

I am still savoring Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley. Here are the books I have finished this year.

1. The Corrections (completed)
2. The Bad Beginning (completed)
3. Rules of Engagement
4. The Last Gift of Time (completed)
5. The Reptile Room
6. The Logic of Wings
February
7. Above the Thunder (completed)
8. Snap
9. Snow Angels
10. The Secret of Roan Inish
11. The Night Country
12. The Celery Stalks at Midnight
13. The Hours
March
14. The Rise of the Graphic Novel
15. We Have Always Lived in a Castle
16. A Prayer for the Dying
17. Reading Lolita in Tehran
18. Because of Winn-Dixie
19. The Speed Queen
April
20. The Tiger Rising
21. Atonement
22. In Fond Remembrance of Me
May
23. Mother of Sorrows
24. Wonder When You’ll Miss Me
25. Blankets
26. Middlesex
27. Confessions of a Teen Sleuth
June
28. The History of Love
29. Embroideries
30. Blackbird House
31. Don’t Kiss Them Goodbye
32. The Last Days of Summer
33. Prey
34. A Year and a Day
July
35. The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake
36. Second Glance
August
37. The Dream of Water
38. Freakonomics
39. Shadow Baby
40. About a Boy
41. My Sister’s Keeper
September
42. Kite Runner
43. A Stir of Echoes
44. The Ice Queen
October
45. I Am Legend
46. The Bright Forever
47. Sideways
48. Judy Moody Predicts the Future
49. Judy Moody Gets Famous
50. The Pilot’s Wife
51. Stink the Incredible Shrinking Kid
52. Judy Moody Saves the World
53. All Rivers Lead to the Sea
November
54. Judy Moody MD
55. Beet Queen
December
56. Judy Moody Declares Independence
57. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
58. Spook

This list does not feature all the children's books I read this year. That would be quite a list. Today alone we read Scaredy Cat and The Gardener, both which I would recommend. I am now working on Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which is the book club pick for January.

And yes, Andrew is write. If I devoted this much time to my novel, I would be done by now.