Some Enchanted Evening in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

                                                                           In 1862 Victor Hugo wrote a story about an ordinary guy with a cool name who is sent to prison for a minor crime but turns into a bad guy while serving his sentence.  When he is released from prison a couple of decades later, he remains a bad guy until he discovers religion and then becomes a really good guy. Surprisingly, it took Hugo 365 chapters to tell the same tale that some rappers belt out in three minutes.  Unsurprisingly, after writing all those words he came to the conclusion that less is more and scrawled The Miserable Ones on the title page. In the late 1970s the Tunisian lyricist Alain Boublil read Hugo’s book, and somewhere between Chapter 178 ( Pestilence and Pox ) and Chapter 301 ( Fresh Bl...

When I was young, the cool chicks in movies...wait, there were no cool chicks. My niece has a poster of Disney's Belle on her bedroom wall. Now, I know Belle is classified as a princess but really, she's a regular girl whose favorite pastime is reading. I recall having a poster of Garfield and one from Raiders of the Lost Ark in my childhood room. Mary Ellen Walton wore overalls and lived on a mountain, Laverne and Shirley seemed to live a fun life, Wonder Woman kicked ass in her leotard, and Jo from The Facts of Life  drove a motorcycle.  But movies?  I really can't remember any girls at all. Can you? And don't give me Brooke Shields or young Jodie Foster.  I know Diane Keaton in Annie Hall was pretty cool, but I didn't see that movie until I was well into college.  The female leads from the 1970s that I remember most are Nurse Ratchet lobotomizing the sane and Linda Blair vomiting on a priest. Even with a few gender ...

By now we Americans know exactly how to behave in the wake of violent and incomprehensible tragedy. It was much easier in years past.   “You’ll never catch me in a spaceship hurtling toward the stars at 75,000 miles per para-second. No way.”   Or, “Those poor people. One second they’re simply enjoying a bowl of rice and the next a 1,000 foot wave has destroyed their entire village.  I’ve never been happier to live in Nebraska.”   And we would settle in on our couches and davenports and Chesterfields in our lounge wear, snacking on potato chips, or nachos, or brie on baguette slices, flipping the T.V. station back and forth between that night’s preferred disaster network and preferred entertainment network. But now, as certain cynics might call it, the tables have turned, and as the tragedies pile up here in the United States we have developed a more intricate and familiar routine to handle them. At the school where I teach we have a fire drill at the end of every mon...