grey gardens and newsroom nuggets

Let me first just say that I'm home in K-town for the weekend, I'm snuggled up in bed with my laptop in my pitch-black dark bedroom...and our cat (also black, like the night and this bedroom right now) is as nocturnal as I am and he is on the prowl. I keep hearing him stalking around, but I can't see him. Creepy...

OK, so anyway, I just thought I'd catch up and I apologize in advance because this is gonna be a long blog.

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First, thoughts from the newsroom...
This morning was busy! When winter weather hits the Midwest, it really becomes the meteorologist's show, and today was a perfect example. I knocked out pretty much all of the news stories just for live shots and stories about road conditions, and I gave a TON of time to the meteorologist. Plus, schools were delaying and then cancelling, so that kept things hopping around the station as well. In case you didn't tune in last year, I am the person the superintendants call to say that school is canceled, and I am the one who puts it on the air in the little bar at the bottom of the screen. A friend of mine said yesterday, "Do you realize how much power you have? I mean, you could make a LOT of money off of that." That's assuming high school kids would be willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money to have me "accidentally" cancel school. It would have to be a ridiculous amount of money because I would get fired.

Anyway, this is just a small joy, but I noticed yesterday that two of my stories made it all the way through the day to the 11:00 news. Now let me explain why this is significant to me -- The only time I write anything is if it's new for the morning or if we have breaking news. The other day we had two breaking news stories: a train crash and an armed robbery. Now, usually these stories run again at noon, but by five or six, they don't make the news because there is a lot more new stuff twelve hours after my show. If the story does make the evening news, it's usually rewritten as a VOB or as a package. But when a story that I actually wrote makes it through the whole day, I always feel a small sense of pride. And yesterday it wasn't just one, but TWO!

Oh, lord, the cat is in here...somewhere...I wish I could explain how creepy this is! Haha!

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OK, topic two -- Grey Gardens. Grey Gardens is a documentary made in 1973 about a house of the same name, and the two ladies who lived there -- Edith Bouvier Beale and her adult daughter Edie Beale (or, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie.") Big Edie was Jackie Kennedy's aunt, making Little Edie Jackie's cousin, and like the rest of that well-connected family, they used to be very wealthy socialites. Then for a reason unknown to me (I'm going to have to find a biography), the glamour, wealth, and men in their lives faded away to leave a mother and daughter in a dysfunctional, codependent relationship. The two women became very eccentric and their once-fashionable home in East Hampton became a run-down house full of cats and raccoons. The Beales never left the house and lived in such squalor that apparently their home was finally inspected with a threat of eviction. After they passed the inspection, a pair of brothers came out to the house to film a documentary of the two women in their current lifestyles. The result is Grey Gardens, a charming yet disturbing chronicle of these two women and how they chose to live.

It's equally heartwarming and heartbreaking to watch the mom and daughter's eccentric mannerisms, conversations, and choices of clothing -- Big Edie is exposing herself half the time ("I'm about to get naked, so you better watch out!") while reliving her days as a singer by warbling to old records from the 1930s and talking about how she had a wonderfully fulfilling life..."I had my cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it and had everything I wanted." Meanwhile, Little Edie fashions clothes out of everything in the house, always covering her hair with a dark scarf, dancing around the room, and talking about how her days at Grey Gardens are numbered and how much happier she'd be in "the city" (meaning New York City, where she once lived before her mother persuaded her to come back and take care of her). The soundbytes from the two ladies are so priceless and perfect that you'd think someone had written the lines ahead of time, and yet they are so delusionally and earnestly spoken that you know no one could ever come up with this dialogue.

Now, a few years ago, someone had the idea to make Grey Gardens into a musical, and it started off-broadway. It then came to Broadway in (I believe) 2007, where it didn't run for long, but definitely made an impact, winning several awards. Now that I've seen the documentary, I'm exploring YouTube for snippets from the show, and it looks like it too would have been fascinating to see. The first act is a sort of historical fiction of what the Beales' life would have been like when Little Edie was a young woman hoping to be married, showing how Big Edie's selfish desire to keep her daughter from leaving drove the two apart; Little Edie leaves with a suitcase at the end of the first act. Act two opens on the delapidated 1970s version of Grey Gardens, and (from what I've seen) weaves the wonderful lines from the film into song and dialogue between the now eccentric mother and daughter. Christine Ebersole played the role of Big Edie in Act One, and Little Edie in Act Two, and she is sensational. In all my research of the show so far, all I see is people pointing to her and saying, "Now that is how you sing a song on Broadway. Now that is talent!"

If by any chance I've sparked your curiosity, look up "Grey Gardens" on YouTube...the entire documentary is there in sections, as are several songs from the Broadway show. Especially check out "Revolutionary Costume for Today" and "Around the World." I would watch the documentary first because it gives you much greater appreciation for the songs, their lyrics, and Ebersole's ability to capture the essence of the women in the documentary.

OK, that is it for me! Sorry, I told ya it was going to be a long one! But hopefully I've given you an interesting read.

And I think the cat just farted. Is that possible? Do cats fart?

Until later!