Dawn’s Thoughts

I had a very good night out last night. I went to see Josh Blue perform comedy. I haven’t been to a comedy show (and in most cases, I don’t care for a lot of the comedians I see on TV) but my friend told me about Josh Blue when he was on Last Comic Standing. “You have to see this guy,” she said, “He tells your kind of jokes.”

Well, I did a video search, and she’s right.

Good timed comedy for one thing, and disabled comedy after that! Need more disabled comedy.

So I went last night. Very nice theatre…from the marquee out front and the balcony stairs off to the sides, curtains and ceiling, I’d say it was an older theatre than I expected.

Before the show started, I explained to Courtney the things I liked about disabled films…by which I mean, the ones that actually have disabled people in the roles. I have problems with the film “The Keys to the House,” but it is also the only film where I could tell on sight that the actor in it had CP. His motions, eyes and head were familiar…and CP speech apparently sounds the same in Italian, too. Aside from Chris Burke or Christopher Burke, I’m not sure of many obviously disabled actors on television. It’s so good seeing people like people you know and like yourself on TV.

I have a copy of Look Who’s Laughing…a documentary of comedians with disabilities telling disabled comedy. It’s great, need more of it. My Thesaurus of Comedy does have a disabled section, but only about 3 jokes in it…one of these not even by a disabled person. Now I’m sure if you went around to the disabled folks I know and asked each one for funny stories, they’d have them.

In fact, I know so. People used to tell them to me. I used to tell them.

There wasn’t a very long line to get in, and a number of comedians before Josh Blue. One of the jokes I thought was good before this was the beginning of a joke with a kid in a pirate costume. The comedian complained that he was now too old to run around in a pirate costume.

I laughed a lot at the jokes Josh Blue told…but I think I came at them from a different perspective from some others in the audience. When he started talking to his bad arm, looking at it oddly as it crept about with a mind of its own, making jokes about benefits, how to make being taken for retarded work in your favor, and frustration at “helpful” disabled service (read “absolute panic at a disabled person in the room,” I cracked up.

Done that.

I guessed the joke about baby-proofing the house before he gave it. I just pictured the number of things my arm or leg has ran into of its own free will, and I could see where it was going.:)
The night wasn’t all disabled jokes though…plenty about marriage, raising children etc…and from the amount people laughed, they weren’t having a problem understanding his timing. He had very good delivery and pauses. I couldn’t clap often because I had the monocular, but half the time when people were laughing and I didn’t know why, I asked Courtney and she said, “Well, he has his arms crossed like this.”

I enjoyed the joke about Blue’s son…well, he said, when people asked if the child had CP, we’ve just discovered it’s not contagious.

:)

Waiting in the lobby later for CDs and DVDs, I told Josh Blue I liked the joke about benefits. He looked surprised and commented on that, I’m sure because the bit about benefits was a throwaway line. I was surprised too because the people in line were funny.

“He’s signing autographs.”

“How?”

Well, with a pretty well established method, seems to me. He had one hand to hold down the CD and the other to sign it. Makes perfect sense to me. The minor CP that he appears to have, it never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to sign.

It did, however, occur to me as I was signing my receipt atop CDs, that if I didn’t get my signature fitting better, that I’d be autographing something.

That, and the required 2 item minimum required with seeing the show. Damn it, drinking should improve my writing. It improves everything else.

Walking out, Courtney said people she had overheard thought Blue’s motor skills etc. were a gimmick at first. I thought that was funny. I talked about the jokes I really enjoyed, among them the one about the contagious CP.

“These jokes came about because somebody had to say that,” I said. “Maybe not in that setting, but they said it.”

Yes, well, Courtney said, it’s not contagious, but isn’t it genetic?

No. I explained what causes CP, that it was kind of a luck of the draw; that people I know have worse CP based on smaller hemmorages, or with the same gestational periods. I’ve joked about many of these things with Courtney and others, and explained to a few people. I hadn’t thought to explain further, because I assumed everyone knew by now.
But this makes me wonder. I enjoyed the jokes that dealt with ordinary life, but I enjoyed the disabled jokes because they sounded similar to things I’ve said or that people have told me about their disabilities. Funny stories. I enjoyed them because I identified with them…just as a comedian talking about tools would work well with construction workers. Misunderstandings, benefits, discrimination, being taken for retarded etc. all make sense.

Based just on the small sample overheard in the lobby, people clearly enjoyed the show, but how many understood it? Comedy, I suppose, could bridge a gap in demonstrating that people with disabilities can actually exist in society as complete people. But there’s an anthropology project.

In short, it was a great show. I would definitely go to a Josh Blue show again or any other disabled comedians provided I run across any, and I will have to try another show at that theatre…food, tickets were reasonable, and some shows are much cheaper than that one.

Well, I’ve been wanting to watch these for awhile…there’s more in the series too, including a political set that includes the film Red Menace (which I have somewhere in VHS). Communists take over the U.S. while a man sleeps…the acting is so bad it’s funny.

In these, the acting is still bad, as I expected…I had to watch in small doses, but the films from the 1940’s where actually easier to watch…slightly better acting, score, a plot, and scenery that often changed. the 1960’s special effects (regardless of the drug featured in the story) appeared to consist of classroom paint, oil and food coloring, along with some vanishing and distortion that may have been done with two cameras.

I became more interested as an anthropologist when I began to see the social customs mentioned in passing throughout some films. Much of the tone of the films from the 1960’s had actors posing common questions kids may have been thinking at the time — one with a rather stupid line at the end that they were all actors. Many times the current young adult society was ridiculed to make a point…because we all know that will convince kids not to use drugs and have sex.

Only children have dares, so of course a group of children are shown. In a hilarious example, a long-haired young man is shown talking quietly to a girl on a park bench — but the ever-present narrator informs us that this isn’t a real boy because you can barely tell him from a girl — and then goes on to demonstrate that real boys go out and do things like have rumbles in the park and drag race.

Hmmm…gee, talking to a girl, or engaging in fights and dangerous activity. This would really not be shown as an example today.

In another funny example from the 1940’s or 1950’s, social customs and gender roles are explored again. It has a woman playing baseball! This has a better narrator and, of all things, somewhat of a plot. The boy in this example has a single parent — a mother — and yet, heavens above, he can still go out and play with boys and girls and has no problem liking girls.

Never would have guessed. Having a single parent didn’t turn him into a sissy.

The girl, we are told, lives in a perfectly normal household — with two parents — though from the way the actors interact, like the Stepford Wives, it leads you to believe that the household isn’t normal at all.

In one 1960’s film, Sonny Bono, in an awful gold suit, tells students not to use drugs…because drugs are bad. Instead, they should smoke a cigarette…because, you know, cigarettes are what every adult influenced by advertising in the 1960’s was doing, so why shouldn’t you?

I half expected an advertisement for which type of cigarette, complete with brand name, like the film that was solely an ad for a pad company. Sadly, no luck.

The 1940’s film about syphillis, thankfully edited, attempted to tell people about getting treatment by repeatedly showing the type of injection they will get if they do. Oh, and although they show a younger American man coming in for treatment, their first example is an actor with an awful Italian accent.

Because, you know, all nations blamed syphillis on other nations…the French Disease, the Spanish Disease…Maybe they couldn’t resist putting a stereotype in.

Half the 1960’s films are so unbalanced as to appear to advocate for drug use. In another fabulous example of things that would never been shown to a classroom today, taking drugs is compared to playing Russian roulette — demonstrated no less.

Because you just can’t be a real man or woman until you’ve done things like, well, fought in a large group, drag raced in a group, or played with a loaded gun in a group…just so long as you don’t do drugs or sex in a group.

Oh, and you can’t be a hippie either.
Some very interesting unintentional demonstrations exist in these films.

Also included is a film about how to teach “trainables” — a term I understood only through reading a previous 1970’s book about mental retardation, but which the film’s little title card explains. This film is interesting only for being a special ed film, and is the only film aimed at teaching teachers. In order to teach teachers, they must first make them comfortable saying slang words for body parts…which are written on a blackboard.

I think I might recall this from my own class, but I shudder to think about what may have occurred the next day or next week after this kind of thing was used in a special ed classroom.

The film was done in the 1970’s, possibly when institutions were closing, and as such, all the developmentally disabled students are adults…even when they’re supposed to be young adults. Coming from, I assume, little instruction, sex education would have been necessary, but it’s rather funny to watch someone who is, if not an adult, than a prematurely-old child, talking to a teacher about puberty.

These films were fun to look at socially. I don’t need to rent them again however.

First of all, let me say I wish I had something to write other than reviews in this blog for awhile, but otherwise it would just be what I had for dinner and looking for jobs, and that gets a little boring to write about. So here we go:

I got my Warner Brothers Archive DVD’s March 1st. They’re very good…though the ads are right that there’s no extras and no cleaning up of films for the DVDs. They’re manufactured on demand, but I’m happy to report that case artwork exists, and also on the DVD. It’s plain, but it works. The thing that was not advertised is that these disks only work if you have a DVD “play only” player — something that had me cursing until I realized I could use them in the back room. It just doesn’t work on DVD recorders or on PCs. This is stated on the box, but I didn’t hear about it in any of the reviews I read beforehand.

The films themselves look great. I got I Know My First is Steven (1989) and The Flight of Dragons (1983). The first has very good picture, with occasional dust or scratches on the film visible. Sometimes there appears to be a slight jump motion from one charactor or another, but this doesn’t happen when I run the film back and play again. The Flight of Dragons is a cartoon — one of the animes I remember enjoying before anime was a popular word. I never owned this one or saw it on television…my friends owned a copy. Now of course I understand that Rankin Bass did the cartoon, as they did The Last Unicorn, and the two films are very similar — drawing styles, music, credits, backgrounds, still pictures, etc. Rankin Bass is better known for their stop-motion work on Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Like the Last Unicorn, they have an excellent script, great characters, animation that’s detailed etc. I haven’t finished the film yet, but it’s good. Some years I found one of the books the film was based on, The Dragon and the Geiorge by            , which I recognized only by the character names. I read it and then got rid of it — the basic plot of the movie was there, but the storyline with the main character’s wife, Angie, was thankfully left out of the film entirely. The film was also based on the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, an attempt to explain how dragons might have flown scientifically. I think I have seen this book but I haven’t bothered with it. The film combines the two ideas of the books and does very well. Actually, that’s a very interesting idea, combining two books with similar themes. In the film, Peter is transported a magical land, where he must help the wizard Carolinus defeat his evil brother — something the scientific Peter must do while trapped inside the body of a dragon. (Actually, a plot very similar to The Last Unicorn in a way). This is a good film, and I’m enjoying it.

I know My First Name is Steven shows the true Steven Stayner kidnapping case. I’ve been wanting this film, and convinently saw it mentioned on the WB website the day it was released, which intrigued me into looking through the rest of their inventory. I can say having watched a lot of contemporary movies and TV series for this time period lately (Growing Pains, A Son’s Promise) that this film has aged very well. Considering that at the time this film was made, the writers could have beat you over the head with the plot alone, with a Very Special Miniseries about strangers, complete with foreshadowing music and much wailing going on, it’s a relief to say that whoever put this together did any extremely good job.

Because it’s a miniseries, a lot of standard camera shots are used — a few closeups, a few establishing shots. Not fancy camera work, no special effects — and not that that’s a criticism. They have good locations in this movie, and it’s more of a character study — of Steven’s family, but particularly of Steven and how he changed.

There’s also some chilling throwaway lines in this script, that the scriptwriters had no way of knowing about when they wrote this. Funny. One of them is pointed out by the actor who plays the older Steven Stayner, in The Yosemite Murders by Dennis McDougal: the screenplay has Steven’s older brother make him a list of available girls at school — something I guess that was done in real life, and seems perfectly normal. The other is something I noticed. The grandfather in the story comments to Del, Steven’s dad, that if he didn’t have so many kids, he could afford a car that runs, and that if the kids were animals, they could pick the best and drown the rest.

The statement is obviously meant to show the grandfather’s relationship with the family — and one of the reasons he’s suspect later on — but wow, what a statement, considering more recent events.

The film comes on two discs, no extras, and it is quite good all by itself — in fact, it looks better visually than the last time I saw it on TV — but this is one film that really needs extras. A few documentaries, a TV promo trailer, other things, would really be wonderful.

The actors all do a good job in this film — and you get to know the characters pretty well. Steven’s brother Cary isn’t given much to say in the script — rightly so, considering when it was written — but as Steven’s big brother, the script does show him than the younger sisters. “Mom and Dad never come in here,” says Cary in the movie, when Steven compliments him on his drawing ability.

Huh.

But the focus of the movie is about Steven, of course, and the film actually has an arch to it that works — things get worse for Steven after he tries to go back home. This was in the book, too, but it’s great the movie explored it (as it could very well have ended happily like A Son’s Promise, regardless of the outcome). The little title card epilogue at the end of the film has been updated to 2004 — something I haven’t seen before– with one notable, but perhaps appropriate omission.

Great movie. Highly recommended. The people who made it took the time to allow it to be a miniseries and didn’t squash it down to a hour.

Howard Zinn: You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:

Maybe it was just not my morning for Howard Zinn. It wasn’t, either, the last time I tried to watch this documentary on television. Don’t get me wrong, I like Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — the fact that he uses enough block quotations to give a good picture of events and focusing on people history usually neglects. And I’d be interested in how he came to develop these ideas.

Maybe this film tries to show it — Zinn as an activist here, there, and everywhere else — but I quickly lost interest. By the time the film showed Zinn at a book signing with students being interviewed as to why they enjoyed his books, I’d lost interest all together.

the film has some good music and the credits, with little side videos, are well worth watching for some comments.

Growing Pains Season One:

Well, this is another disk of Growing Pains the series, and I have to conclude after watching several that they haven’t aged well. I remember when the show went off the air. I watched it then. I like watching many things that I enjoyed at the same thing as this show — even those shows which stress morals — like some episodes of After School Specials.

And there are times lately where I want to watch unambigious shows — now it’s getting harder to tell who at any given moment is the bad person or good guy in a series. Something to do with filming. And it’s not just this show — others like the Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons are preachy by today’s viewpoint.

But every episode in the series so far seems to be about a Very Special Episode — sex, drugs, AIDS, stealing — and here, I’m not only speaking of this show but of Mr. Belevedere too, which I watched reasonably recently. If today’s shows could be said to cater to a common person, these shows spoon fed the masses their daily moral lesson. This is something I don’t remember continuing into the 1980’s-early 1990’s, but apparently it did.
That’s all right, so long as there are enough episodes without that to stand on their own. And there don’t seem to be. And that’s too bad. It’s not that this is a bad show, it’s easy to see that the characters in it are a happy family, but still…just in this one disk, the father threatens to hit his son twice…and there’s a moral right there, for the audience. In a show like Home Improvement some years later, a Very Special Episode came alone once a year, not once a night.

I’m sad to say that maybe I’ve outgrown these. It’s nice to see shows where people are nice to one another, but the morals on top are sometimes a bit much.

This book is printed by Thorndike Books, and I picked up for two reasons: It had a cover that didn’t draw me in, but tag lines that did, and it is a large-print that is not a 1950’s mystery for adults…very unusual.

Hav’sing finished it, I can say it has a good idea — Varina, a 15 year old girl, meets a boy, Chase, who proceeds to inform her that she is really a clone, and that they must round up the other clone children. The story starts with an interesting flashback of Chase as a little kid, on a boat with 3 scientists, two of whom treat like a son, and a startling event that occurs.

Did I mention this book has cliffhangers all over? Not that that’s a bad thing, but some of them seem far-fetched. At times I could ignore the writing style, which I found had abrupt spots, with exclamation points here and there, or sentences that just didn’t read right to me. I was hoping for another The House of the Scorpion, which like this book, dealt with power struggles and human cloning, with a child narrator, and even though this is the first book in a series, I have no need to look at the others.

The main character, Varina, may be confused and disoriented with the news that she is a clone and scientists are out to get her, but she swings wildly between trusting whoever she meets completely one moment, and being suspicious of their intentions the next. While this makes sense under the conditions the book sets — for instance, that she’s just met this boy Chase when he starts telling her stories — it ends up tiresome and doesn’t serve any purpose.

I was interested with the initial trouble on the boat in the beginning, and I maintained my interest during Varina’s introduction to her life with her uncle Jim, despite some reading problems I had with the story, but as the story goes on, it lose momentum quickly. Each clone is revealed to have a particular kind of superpower (which, if they actually had them in real life would probably more a lot less controllable — like the kids who can hear people through walls but wear headphones to school).

And as each clone is selected into the group, the story of each character is repeated, so that by you get two or three characters introduced, this one story seems to take up most of the short book. That’s rather annoying.

In the meantime, guardians pop up out of the woodwork with regualarity to take care of Varina and the others — commonly people she has never seen before. Meanwhile, cliffhangers on all sides, Varina’s Uncle Jim lays in the hospital, and while Varina mentions every so often, that she wants to be at his side, that she trusts him absolutely, she goes on shopping trips with an aunt she has never met before, spents one day with the woman and concludes that with all the time spent with her aunt, she’d never learnt of her family.

Well, in a day, that might not always be something mentioned on the first day. Somehow I don’t consider a day much time.

Varina and the others manage to get cars and planes with ease and always escape just ahead of the scientists — which makes sense, as all good serials do. However, even if this is for younger readers, its cliffhangers and wording jarred me out of the story on several occasions.

It’s excellent that I found it in large print…something that should happen more with books. It’s also excellent to see a large family of adopted handicapped children in the story at one point.

It is however hilarious when Varina comments that her mouth dropped open when a child in a wheelchair stood and walked.

I laughed.

This is kind of a joke in the disabled community, you understand.

While it makes perfect sense that Varina would think that, it’s really old. To the author’s credit, the family does explain why the child walks — and it’s a reason I can believe. But here’s the thing, you can be in a wheelchair and still walk, or at least some people can. You may only be in the wheelchair for long distance walking, etc.

The story ends with a cliff hanging that’s been hinted at. But most of the book, unfortunately, instead of minor world building or charactors, is spent collecting children, running from scientists, and repeating, just so the reader doesn’t forget, that they are all clones, most with special powers and tattoos. when they’ve nearly escaped at the end, it makes me wish the characters had been developed, or had done something other than the very beginning of a story. It’s the first of a series, but there’s nothing for me to hang on to in it, nothing I can’t wait to read.

Maybe they have an adventure in the next book. But this one, I’m very sorry to say, can be summed up in a sentence: “There was once a story about clone children and they had to run from evil scientists.”

That’s the start of the story. It’s a great idea. But I needed more story here.