RIP, Dixie Carter

Sad news tonight with the announcement of Dixie Carter's death at the age of 70. While Carter had a very distinguished career in both television and the theatre, for many (including myself) she will be best known as Julia Sugarbaker, the smart, sexy and damned opinionated lead character in TV's Designing Women. For a number of seasons, Carter, along with Delta Burke, Annie Potts, Jean Smart and Meshach Taylor, kept us laughing at the foibles of a group of friends running an interior design firm in Atlanta. (I've blocked from my memories any of the subsequent seasons with Jan Hooks, Julia Duffy and Judith Ivey. Show killers.)

While Carter, as the mouthpiece of creators Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason, had any number of memorable moments, none captures the essence of Julia Sugarbaker as much as this:



Rest in piece, Dixie Carter. Your talent and grace will be missed, but your performances will live on. And thank God for that.

Book Review: "The Irresistible Henry House" by Lisa Grunwald

In the heyday of college home economics programs (in the 1940s through early 1960s), some schools featured "practice houses," in which students could learn all the basics of how to be a good housewife—cooking, sewing and cleaning, to name just a few. Some practice houses also had "practice babies," babies obtained from local orphanages that were used as teaching tools to help women understand how to care for infants and young children. These babies usually lived at the school for the first two years of life before being put up for adoption at the orphanage.

Lisa Grunwald's fantastic book, The Irresistible Henry House, tells the story of such a program, through the eyes of Henry, one of the practice babies, and Martha Gaines, director of the program. Henry, as he is passed from one practice "mother" to another, learns early on how to charm women and make each one feel important and loved. Except his adoptive mother, Martha, whose need to love Henry and need for his love in return causes her to lie to him, a lie that has ramifications through the rest of their lives.

I thought this was a terrific story. Grunwald's characters are tremendously vivid—Henry is a cipher because he wasn't able to make any permanent human connections at an early age, and instead spends a good portion of his life trying to please everyone but himself, only to find his affections not returned when he first truly falls for someone. I found Martha's plight somewhat heartbreaking, but you can definitely see how smothering her love is to Henry. And Henry's journey as an artist and animator is as fascinating as the rest of the story. A really great book that will make an interesting movie.

Book Review: "Everything is Wrong with Me" by Jason Mulgrew

When you look back on your childhood as an adult, things are often much funnier than they were when you were growing up. And if you have the type of childhood that Jason Mulgrew had, a) you have the makings of one hell of a memoir, and b) you're probably lucky you survived.

In his funny and immensely self-deprecating memoir, Everything is Wrong with Me, humorist Jason Mulgrew recounts his childhood growing up in working class Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. From the auspicious beginning of how his parents met (his mother saw his costumed father marching in a Mummers parade while he was bleeding from a stab wound) to his experiences as a non-athletic child playing Little League baseball or being used as a decoy by his numbers-running grandfather, Mulgrew finds humor both in the ordinary situations he lived through as well as the hard-to-believe ones. And from his anecdotes about his adult life, it sounds as if he didn't learn much from his childhood!

There were a number of times I laughed out loud during this book, but at the same time, I felt as if Mulgrew tried a little too hard at times. And while his constant self-deprecation was funny at the start, by the end of the book you wondered whether his self esteem was really that low or if he thought it would make his story more appealing to readers. But those foibles notwithstanding, this book certainly stands alongside David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs in chronicling dysfunctional family life, although this book is a bit cruder (and, much like the pre-teen and teenage boy it follows, a little more sex-obsessed). Good fun.

Book Review: "The Solitude of Prime Numbers" by Paolo Giordano

Alice and Mattia are misfits. Both scarred (one literally, one figuratively) in their childhood, they meet as teenagers in Italy. Alice is the typical teenage girl, trying to fit in despite her low self-esteem, while Mattia wants nothing more than to disappear into the world of numbers that soothe him and bring order to his internal chaos. The strange relationship they forge together is at the core of The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

The story follows Alice and Mattia from their difficult childhoods to somewhat uncertain adulthood. They have jobs—Alice is a photographer and Mattia is pursuing a career as a mathematician and college instructor. They struggle with life, drawn to one another while at the same time wishing for solitude. They muddle through relationships with others—family, friends, coworkers—and you can't help but wonder whether they are at all fulfilled by their lives.

This is a beautifully written book, but ultimately it is hard to love. Mattia and Alice do such a good job pushing everyone away in their lives, and these characters did the same for me. While I know that there are people in this world who struggle with how to connect with others, as a story, it was very frustrating to invest so much time on characters I didn't feel advanced in any way.

A Little Bit of History (and don't forget the shopping)...

Spent some time yesterday in St. Augustine, FL, the oldest city in the nation. As I walked around Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, I glimpsed at where the larger crowds were—the hundreds of shops lining the side streets of St. Augustine, which dominated the historical buildings.

Now these weren't the "traditional" type shops you might find in Colonial Williamsburg or other historic sites. These shops sold chocolate, crafts, clothes (including that historic brand, Harley-Davidson), chili pepper products and outdoor banners featuring your favorite sports teams. And yet the crowds poured in and out of these stores like they sold rarities they had never seen.

I'm not a snob. I understand that retail sales is often one of the only ways to keep sites like these alive and accessible to the public. But when I think about St. Augustine, and places like Gettysburg, where the approach to the battlefield is loaded with fast food restaurants, tchotchke shops and convenience stores, I wonder if this is really the only way we can get people to spend some time exploring our nation's history. Is a visit to Gettysburg only palatable with the spoonful of sugar of a lunch at McDonald's or Hardee's?

Again, I know I should be happy that families are still traveling to these sites instead of heading straight to the beach or the outlet malls. But at the same time, I can't help but imagine that all of those who died during the Battle of Gettysburg did so for freedoms far beyond three t-shirts for $12.

Or maybe that is precisely what they fought for...

Maybe It's Just Me...

...but can someone tell me why Southwest decided its new ad campaign featuring a bunch of shirtless, middle-aged, overweight guys with the letters spelling out "BAGS FLY FREE" on their chests would make you want to fly Southwest??

Book Review: "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins

It is the future, and the nation of Panem has arisen out of what was once North America. Panem is represented by a glorious Capitol, and the world Panem rules is divided into 12 Districts, each focused on a particular industry, like agriculture or coal mining. Those in power remind the citizens of Panem just how insignificant they are once a year, by forcing each District to choose one boy and one girl to represent it in the Hunger Games, a battle of survival televised to all citizens. The contestant who wins the Hunger Games spends the rest of their life as a celebrity to their District and all of Panem, while the other contestants meet their fate at the hands of one another.

Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old resident of District 12. She steps forward to take her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games, and although she expects it to be a quick death sentence, she realizes she actually wants to survive, and win. But what she faces in the Games—both physically and emotionally—is far beyond anything she could imagine, because much like our own reality shows, the Capitol manipulates the circumstances of the Games.

This book hooked me from the very start. While the creation of a new world out of the one we know isn't new, Collins' depiction of Katniss' life and the description of the circumstances around the Hunger Games is tremendously compelling. Having watched more than my share of reality shows and knowing how "real" they are, I still was captivated by the Games themselves. And while I had suspicions of how the story would unfold, I still was excited to finish the book, and plan to read the next two books in the series. If I had any criticism of the book, it's that its main character was a 16-year-old girl, so some of the rationale behind Katniss' actions, and her reactions to situations, were a little childish, but this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book. But I am drawing the line at this YA series...