Sunday, October 31, 2010

A better class of ghost story

Yup, it's that time of year again.  I will buy buckets of candy & we will get nary a trick-or-treater.  Because we live on an unpaved(1), unlit(2) country road with no neighborhood children (3) except M*** & those little boys across the street from the Rock family (4).  So besides our house being spooky-ooky, most of the local kids (the very few local kids) are unlikely to observe All Hallows Eve in any form & most especially not on a Sunday.  Even if I have to give half the candy to M***, that still means more for me.  I hope he likes Butterfingers!

This year, I will be spending my day wrapping up a regularly scheduled quilt block swap, cleaning up the tail end of a swap gone-too-long,  while A scrambles to complete his monthly reports, etc. before the new month ends & he has to get started on those.  That's right, in this scenario October is the "new" month.  That's how things have been around here for a while now.  Still, I would not want the day to go unobserved (except for the bit about my getting to keep all the Hallowe'en candy) & so I am thinking of revisiting one of my favorite ghost-movies:  Blithe Spirit.

First let me say that as a girl I had a huge crush on Rex Harrison.  Are you scared yet?  I think it started with Henry Higgins & all that Gregory House drama but about grammar instead of medical diagnostics.  C'mon, a little chill just ran up your spine, right?
 
From My Fair Lady, I graduated to The Honey Pot, (how often do you hear a straight man say"piffle",  outside of Bertie Wooster, that is), then took a giant step backwards to Doctor Dolittle.  My brother K & I recently had a nostalgic moment about how as children we loved this very bad film. I still get chills when the doctor throws Sophie the Seal off the cliff.  By the time I got the The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (another excellent choice for the day) it was all over for me & american boys.

Still not scary enough?  Hmmm, well, lets push on.  The play Blithe Spirit on which the movie Blithe Spirit is based (& by based I mean they used more-or-less the same script) is about a marriage.  Actually, it's about three people & two marriages.  In one of them, one of the spouses is dead.  & then... but I wouldn't want to give it all away.  Keep in mind, the playwright was a technically in-the-closet homosexual who still managed to flesh out female characters, even the dead one.  The man that wrote Blithe Spirit also wrote so much other stuff, including but not limited to propaganda.  No really, he wrote propaganda for the british government during WWII.  Some where in there he wrote several "fight" songs, including one of my favorites:  Don't Lets be Beastly to the Germans.  For the record, the Nazis hated Coward; he was high up on the list of people to be shot once they invaded (along with Virginia Wolf.  Imagine al-Qeada targeting the editors of the New Yorker, see even the villains were classier).  What else..oh there always  Mad Dogs & Englishmen.  & who could forget We All Wear a Green Carnation

Where was I?  Oh right, trick-or-treaters.  So, do yourself a favor, turn the outside lights off, get on your Netflix -Watch Instantly page & find Blithe Spirit.  If you would rather spend the evening a decade or so closer to this century, you could try Bell, Book & Candle but it isn't as good (although I concede the music might be better).

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