Jimmy Stewart seems to be following me around these days.

I’m not complaining.

Well, I am complaining about the recent rumors of an “It’s a Wonderful Life” sequel, as this is just straight up cinematic blasphemy (more on that in a minute).  What I’m not complaining about is being able to have reasons to discuss Jimmy Stewart with people several times over the past two weeks.  As someone who vastly prefers the old to the new when it comes to movies, this is a problem I run into a lot.  While my peers reference Lloyd Dobler and his boombox or the cue card scene in Love Actually as some of the best love declaration scenes movies have to offer, I am in my corner with no one to discuss the wonder of the “hearthfires and holocausts” speech from The Philadelphia Story except myself.

Now, I love Say Anything and Lloyd Dobler. I am, after all, a female born in the 80s subject to the same Cusack problem as everyone else. And Andrew Lincoln’s storyline in Love Actually is certainly my favorite.  But there is nothing that compares to the earnest delivery of a Jimmy Stewart monologue.

If anything, it is because I love Jimmy Stewart so much that I enjoy these other flicks as much as I do.  When given the opportunity to try and convert a friend who is not interested in watching black and white movies to the wonders of classic Hollywood cinema, I almost always try to win them over with Jimmy, because I think so many of the things they like in modern cinema are so Stewart-esque.

For those not in the know, before there was Tom Hanks, there was James Stewart. The entire Hanks trajectory from affable and funny comic lead to respected, well-rounded actor and everyman, pretty much matches Stewart beat for beat.  One of the things that helps calm me down when I think about scary situations like an It’s a Wonderful Life sequel is that there is only one guy who could be George Bailey and it is Tom Hanks.  And Tom Hanks would never, ever agree to do something as stupid as star in the sequel to It’s a Wonderful Life.

If you liked Tom Hanks in Philadelphia or enjoy a good courtroom drama or The West Wing, you should check out Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Not only will you have a textbook example of what people are talking about when they say “Capra-esque”, you’ll be treated to a Stewart monologue that can get you hopeful about politics even in this time when no one can seem to get along.

If you’re looking for something a little more lighthearted or you could use a break from watching Elf for the umpteenth time over Thanksgiving weekend, consider Harvey.  Like Buddy, Stewart’s Elwood P. Dowd lives in a blissfully different world than the rest of us, convinced he has a partner in crime that is a six-foot tall bunny.  While this isn’t my favorite Stewart performance and I would probably say Will Ferrell gives us a better jubilant man child than Stewart does, let’s review this logline one more time: This is a movie about a guy who thinks there is a giant bunny following him wherever he goes. That, my friends, is a concept.

Rom com fan? Hard to narrow down all the lovely Stewart performances in the screwball comedy genre.  You Can’t Take it with You is becoming a quickly-forgotten classic , but I think the best entrée into screwball comedies of the 1930s is The Philadelphia Story. Not only do you get Jimmy, you’ve got Cary Grant being his dapper and endearing self as well as Katherine Hepburn in a role that might help you understand why many people think she is the superior Hepburn.  Plus, there is the speech. The hearthfires and holocausts speech. If you like a good speech like Ben Affleck’s in Chasing Amy or the orations from Grey’s Anatomy or The Notebook, you’re gonna want to watch this movie just for the speech.

Perhaps thrillers are your thing. Alfred Hitchcock movies tend to have a broader appeal than a lot of old movies, and Stewart has been in a ton of them.  The Man Who Knew Too Much is a fun case of mistaken identity that has Stewart traipsing across Morocco and Europe a la Tom Hanks in the Robert Langdon films.  If you’d rather something a little more suspenseful, Rear Window is a story you’re probably familiar with—the man who is spying on his neighbors and then thinks he has witnessed a murder. Many movies have done this story since Hitch and Jimmy did—none have done them nearly as well.

My favorite of the Hitchcock movies is a strange one though. Most people remember Rope purely because of the gimmick that it is filmed in one time with what appears to be one continuous take.  This is also an incredibly campy movie with a massive amount of homosexual subtext.  So much so that my best friend and I developed a Rope drinking game that basically amounts to drinking to every time one of the characters says something suggestive.  There is a point where Farley Granger (yes, that is his real name) gives a speech about choking chickens. You chug during that speech. We have never played this game and not gotten absolutely hammered.

And then there is It’s a Wonderful Life.

It defies genres, the Frank Capra classic.  I may have just spent 800 words trying to win you to the ways of Jimmy Stewart by comparing his flicks to stuff you may have seen, but I am going to get cliché when it comes to this film and say this: they just don’t make them like this anymore.

It is a small drama about a small town and an everyman living a small life.  Rather than see our hero save the world, stop a plague, suffer from a disease, or uncover a mass conspiracy, George Bailey just tries to live his life right. Along the way, he falls in love, he buys a house, he helps his family, and he makes the small sacrifices and compromises we all make because we couldn’t afford it or things just couldn’t work out.

And one holiday season, things just get too tough for poor George Bailey. He hits his breaking point and wonders if maybe not being in the world would make things better.  If you haven’t been there, I congratulate you on your happy life.  Most of the rest of us have hit these spells of self-pity from time to time and we need It’s a Wonderful Life to snap us back into order, give us the motivation and inspiration to put our head down, push through the crap, and keep going.

I can’t tell you the last contemporary movie I’ve seen with the basic message that life doesn’t work out as planned most of the time, but that is okay. You’ll be okay.

Movies are bigger now. The stakes are higher, the escapism more outlandish, and movies with feel good messages like Life of Pi are done in 3-D.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just doesn’t happen to be my thing.   On TV, I can find things more my speed. This is where the small scale lives now, which makes sense given the differences in medium between film and TV.  In fact, some of the best shows on TV during what many call a golden age are character studies about relationships, small decisions, and events that don’t threaten people’s lives.  If you like Parenthood, Gilmore Girls, Sorkin, early Grey’s Anatomy, The Sopranos or The Good Wife, you probably understand this desire to not have so much peril in your mass media consumption.

There were a lot of jokes on Twitter about what on Earth an It’s a Wonderful Life sequel would even be about. The article indicated Zuzu, the precocious daughter of George Bailey, would play a role.  Maybe the old Building and Loan got embroiled in the fiscal crisis.  Maybe Zuzu uncovers that the descendants of Old Man Potter are secretly dumping chemical waste into the town’s water supply. Hell, maybe Zuzu finds more magic petals and travels to outer space on a magic carpet with Clarence.

No matter the scenario, there is no way a sequel doesn’t undercut the resonance of the story of little old George Bailey.  At some point, the movie would have to acknowledge what happened to George; how his wonderful life ended.  You’d realize the hope he has on New Year’s Eve in the film faded again. That he ended up having to sell the Building and Loan after all, or that he had a heart attack three years later. Rather than suggest that life is wonderful, this movie would inadvertently be about how life goes on without you.  Charming, right?

My life isn’t going on without Jimmy Stewart though.  Yours shouldn’t either. If you haven’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life, find time to watch it.  Every time I convert a person to the wonder of Jimmy, I’d like to think an angel gets its wings.

 

In my lifetime, the instances I have been mistaken for a cosmopolitan person are few and far between.  It happens on occasion, usually with my family. Last Christmas, I made mac and cheese for the big family dinner. It was a Giada di Laurentis recipe from Food Network with bread crumbs on top. No one would touch it, opting instead for the large bowl of cooked noodles tossed in Velveeta next to it. “Fancypants mac and cheese”, they called it.

Recently my friend Danielle referred to me as sophisticated because I knew what a snifter was. 

Those rare instances aside though, I am typically viewed as what I pretty much am: a pop-culture obsessed redneck with the taste level that comes with such a designation.

I thought when I arrived in Bossier City, Louisiana for work yesterday that I would take to this place like a moth to a flame. Biloxi is my favorite stop on the Circuit, with New Orleans a close second.  This seemed right in the wheelhouse.

That is, until I figured out the coffee situation. Namely, that there isn’t one. The nearest Starbucks is 2.4 miles away and the only place serving coffee near the hotel appear to be the Auntie Anne’s pretzel place with its java coolatas.

Much to my relief, there is a tiny coffee shop inside the casino which serves a smattering of lattes and, surprisingly, has kona coffee, which is one of my favorite blends.

Considering our tournament is being played on the roof of the riverboat under the cover of the tent, I knew from about 30 minutes in that this coffee shop and I were going to become fast, necessary friends.

In my first trip to the shop, I learned quickly they don’t bother carrying skim milk.  So, the second time down there, I came more prepared.

“A medium kona blend with two percent please,” I requested.

The server stared back at me, utterly baffled. She opened her mouth, paused, then shut it again, briefly looking around her area trying to figure out if she could wing such a request. She gave up a few seconds later.

“I don’t think I understand what you mean. You want milk in your coffee?”

“Yeah, or you could just leave room in the cup and I can add it.”

“So…like a latte?”

“No, I don’t need that much milk,” I responded. I realized she was still lost, but, to be fair, so was I. This didn’t seem that far-fetched to me and even in Australia, where coffee with milk just isn’t a thing, they kind of got the gist of what I was getting at when I would ask.

“You know coffee with cream and sugar?”

She did.

“I want that…but instead of creamer, just a little bit of milk.”

“Ohhhh, okay,” she said with a smile. She turned around to prep my coffee.

I stood a couple of seconds and realized the couple next to me was staring at me. It was probably justifiable. I was dressed for a snowstorm in boots and black pants, a peacoat, a large scarf, and fingerless gloves:

//instagram.com/p/gv-WS1if11/embed/

Hey, stop your judging. I get cold, mmkay?

The girl in the couple couldn’t have been much older than 21. She inquisitively asked, “Do you always order your coffee that way?”

I smiled and shrugged, embarrassed to be questioned about my coffee choices a second time. “Well, yeah, most of the time.”

“Have you ever had a latte? I like those, the syrups are really good.”

“Yeah,” I responded. “Lattes are delicious, but I drink a lot of coffee, so I try not to get them every time.”

She smiled and nodded, then appeared to go back to waiting for her order. She wasn’t done though. I could feel her eyes on me and turned to meet her gaze.

“Are you from New York?”

Now it was my turn not to understand the question.

“You just look like you’re from New York.”

“Oh…no, I am from Kentucky. Not quite the same, huh?”

Judging by the look on her face, my hometown of Lexington may as well have been Lexington Avenue.

I couldn’t decide whether I was flattered or concerned. With a single sentence, I managed to convince an entire coffee shop (albeit with three people in it) that I was a strange, high-falutin’ sort. Where I come from, that isn’t a good thing. No one wants to be the person at the party with the fancy mac and cheese. Yet, here I was getting mistaken as a big-city maven with fancy coffee, fancy milk requests, and way too many winter accessories.  I can only hope these nice, nice people (seriously, Louisianans are just universally the nicest human beings out there) admired my style and knowledge…I can hope really, really hard that is the case, but I am guessing it isn’t.

I paid for my coffee, dumped in a couple of Splenda, and headed out the door before taking a sip. Before I got back to the tournament area, I realized this beverage was about 60% milk and 40% coffee. I was freezing and under-caffeinated, but I simply threw the drink out. There is no use crying over spilled 2%, after all.

I think it all started when my mom took me shopping as a child.  Our trips to the mall were less about fashion and more an exercise in being pragmatic. If I found something I liked, my mother’s response would almost always be, “Let’s get two.”

Most of the time it would be multiple shirts in different colors, but on occasion we would buy two of the exact same article of clothing. She would tell me if I really liked something we should buy it in the size that fit me and one size up so I wouldn’t outgrow it as quickly.  Even when I got into high school and didn’t have these concerns, she would go back to the store and buy a second one of the exact same shirt in case I spilled something on it or got it incurably dirty..

This might have been her subtle way of trying to prepare me for the real world beyond just my fashion choices.  According to my mom, I was not to be trusted with pretty much anything a parent would describe as dangerous. I was told by my parents I couldn’t play soccer because I would hurt myself (why my parents decided gymnastics, the only sport with a severe injury rate on par with the NFL, was an acceptable activity for me is still a mystery).  I think I was 12 before she trusted me with a steak knife at the dinner table.  She didn’t keep me out of these pursuits to be cruel, nor did she do so because I was an irresponsible child.  She kept me out of them because she saw just how often I inadvertently found myself in a pickle be it because of freak accidents or because I lost something important.

For example, one time while shopping for clothes, I got locked in a dressing room for a good three hours.  The store, which was originally something else before it was a clothing store, had what appeared to be a large closet repurposed as a dressing room. As a result, the door stretched not only all the way to the ground, but also a good eight feet into the sky, not quite touching the ceiling, but making it impossible for me to either crawl under or climb over the door, which had a faulty lock.  The employees were in the process of making the “Out of Order” sign when I went in to try things on.  So, seven-year-old me had to sit patiently in the dressing room while the mall staff hunted down a tall ladder and a locksmith to climb into the room and free me.

We still don’t quite know how I contracted the human version of hoof and mouth disease in middle school, a condition that WedMD can attest typically only occurs in people who work closely with livestock.  Amazingly, this was not the only time in my very suburban childhood I was diagnosed with a condition typically only found in farming populations.

I refrain from offering too many details of how this He-Man suction cup toy ended up stuck on forehead the day of freshman year Homecoming because it probably deserves its own post, but yeah, that happened. So did the massive forehead hickey.

“You’re the absent-minded professor,” my mom would tell me.  "You get so caught up thinking about school and other bigger things, so you just forget about what is going on right in front of your face.“

She still says this to this day. In fact, it came up again this week when we were discussing my latest wave of misfortune, which includes two sets of lost car keys, a flat tire, three calls to AAA and, most recently, the ominous appearance of the “Maintenance Required” light on my car.

“Honestly,” she said with a sigh, “I always said you weren’t allowed to do things because something weird would always happen to you or you would lose something important.” She even confessed to me that when I was in eighth grade, she resorted to storing a copy of my writing portfolio, an elaborate project Kentucky middle schoolers were required to complete in order to graduate, in her safe deposit box, for she just knew I would find a way to misplace it and then where would we be?

While most people (especially my friends in the poker world) would cringe at the suggestion I am an inherently unlucky person, nearly everyone I know will at least agree that I am remarkably forgetful.  While I can keep my work and school stuff organized and fine-tuned like a well-oiled machine, my life stuff is almost always a mess.

I lose keys, credit cards, phones, wallets, purses, IDs. If it is smaller than a candy bar, there is an almost non-existent chance I will be able to hold onto it for more than a year.  I often say that, should I ever get married, I don’t want a diamond ring. Cubic zirconia is fine by me, husband to me. I just want two. 

That’s right, I want a spare wedding ring so I don’t feel like the worst wife on Earth when I inevitably lose the first one.

At work today, my colleague told me she believed this attitude might be the cause of some of my woes.  "If you assume you are going to lose it, you’re just asking to lose it,” she explained.  "Rather than have a spare, why not just modify your behavior to try to become less forgetful?“

The thing is, I’ve tried.  I take hours to pack, meticulously checking things off lists. When I leave hotel rooms, I crawl around on the floor doing a full sweep before I leave to ensure nothing gets left behind.  I chant things to myself as I walk out the door in the morning like "phone, phone, wallet, keys” as a mental checklist of what I need to leave the house with.

Nonetheless though, I still lose things all the time.  When I was in France for WSOPE last month, I managed to lose my keys, despite them never leaving my backpack.  Knowing that I shouldn’t leave it to chance that all my receipts for my expense reports survive living in my wallet, I devised a system for long trips where I tuck them in an envelope in my hotel room at the end of every day. Then I left that envelope in the hotel room.

So where does that leave me?

I have become the everyday version of a doomsday prepper. I’m a doomsday-to-day prepper.  When it comes to technology, I have two laptops, two phones, several USB cords, at least a dozen SD cards and thumb drives, and at least two batteries for everything that comes with a battery.

When it comes to keys, I have four or five spares for my house and car floating around at any given time. I give copies to neighbors and co-workers, I leave a spare set at home, and I leave a spare set in my car.  In my old apartment, I even managed to acquire a second garage door opener.

People look at me and my backpack that effectively serves as a portable Best Buy and shake their head. Their eyes widen when they realize I basically have a tiny Walgreens worth of over the counter medicine whenever I travel.

“You just never know,” I try and explain.

It is that uncertainty I just can’t handle, I think. So, I develop contingency plan after contingency plan.  It is a concept discussed in Julie Norem’s tome on defensive pessimism, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. People who tend to get anxious can calm their anxieties by thinking their way through worst case scenarios.  It relaxes them doing knowing they have a plan of attack should things go badly.

The more I just accept that this kind of bad shit will always happen, the better I seem to handle the situations.  They used to derail me. I would often cry. Now I shrug, maybe call my mom and vent, but by and large, it is just another day.  If the He-Man monster can’t take me down, a lost car key sure won’t.

I only wish the rest of life was this simple. Owning two of everything may solve a lot of life’s problems, but there are some things an endless amount of duplicates just can’t fix.

I know there has been some rumblings the past day or two about how to do live reporting.  There are different schools and different approaches, that is for sure.  And I am being sincere when I say that they all have merit.  There are multiple perfectly valid approaches to the task, which is not an enviable one. It is an expensive endeavor. Each event you not only need to pay the day rates of people familiar with poker and the players on the Circuit, you also have to get them to the tournament and put them in a bed while they are there.  Most sites don’t include food per diem for their writers and many reporters are asked to do more than just report. They are asked to take photos, find Tweets, send Tweets, conduct interviews on breaks, and write recaps.

I admit that, as someone who employs live reporters for our Circuit events, I ask a lot of them.  I would like to think they are reasonably compensated, but there are nonetheless long days that can take their toll on people.  I value the work they do more than I can ever put into words.

I thought I would put up a part of the content guide I passed along to our live reporting team just to add to the conversation and share my point of view about the way I like to go about live reporting. There is a lot more beyond this, but this is what I call “Jess’s Three Commandments of Live Reporting”: 

Trying to cover an entire poker tournament from start to finish is no easy task. Much like the game of poker, the game of tournament reporting is one of incomplete information. Unlike poker, our job is not to hazard guesses about the pieces of info we don’t have. Our job is to do the best to tell the story of the tournament using only the information we have. We don’t prognosticate, we don’t editorialize, and we never assume to know anything.

Before we get into the specific stylistic approach of WSOP Live Reporting, here are three key points about our larger approach to covering a poker tournament:

1. ABC: Always Be Counting Consider this my version of the Glengarry Glenross speech. When you are covering a poker tournament, you should always be counting chips.  The entire tournament is about acquiring and holding onto chips, so being aware of how many chips people have is top priority. Don’t go out to the tables searching for hands. Instead, go searching for chip counts. Pick up where you left off the last time on the floor and just keep counting until you inevitably come across a hand worth watching. There is no division of labor on this team. We all chip in (heh, no pun intended) to do updates and counts. No one is above counting chips. Not even Ty Stewart.

Oftentimes, you’ll find a story much more interesting than a hand by focusing on chip stacks. You’ll notice someone doubled up and can inquire where their chips came from, which is much more interesting than a 12 beeb pot that involves two players you recognize.

2.     No One, and I Mean No One, Cares How You Think a Hand Was Played

This may seem harsh. It is intended to be. It is true though. The players don’t care how we think they play, they just care we get the action right. The readers at home don’t care how you think a hand was played either. While there are plenty of updates sites that use an (oftentimes very entertaining) editorializing approach to recounting hands, this is not something we do. As the official live updates of the WSOP itself, it is of the utmost importance that we remain completely impartial in how we report on hands.  We do not comment on whether a play was good or bad. We do not comment on how we would play it. If a hand is terrible, those reading it can conclude it is terrible without us telling them as much.

That is not to say we don’t encourage color. If one player at the table berates another player at the table, type it on up. While we do not comment on people’s play, we can report when someone has an opinion about a hand.  The color of live updates is in these exchanges. Calling the flop anything else but the flop isn’t going to make the hand more interesting. Capturing the dialogue, a player’s nonverbal actions, and the action of the hand will though.

3.     Live Updating is Bigger Than One Hand at a Time

Live updating a poker tournament isn’t just about finding a hand and then another hand and then another hand. These micro pieces of content add up to a bigger picture, and each day of the tournament that picture is going to look a little different. On Day 1, the big picture is the story of who is there, how many players there are, the history of the event, and the fun stories of prop bets and table talk that we don’t often get on the later days.  On Day 2, the focus shifts to prize pool, the money bubble, and the quest to make the final table. By Day 3, it is all about the action, which is why we will do everything in our power to capture every play at the final table.

In order to convey those big pictures on their respective days, the small pieces of the puzzle need to change accordingly. On Day 1, tracking bustouts takes precedent over hand histories of small pots. We would rather see photos of friends sitting together than a blind vs. blind battle when they check it down. On Day 2, the hands become easy to find, but that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of things like POY or Casino Champion races.

Moral of the story: Every time you write a post, be it a hand update, a bustout, or an embedded Tweet, ask yourself how it is helping to tell the larger story of the tournament. Don’t ever feel like you need to post something just to post something.  Your micro post should help tell the macro story.

A lot has been written about the splintering of music.  While social media and technological advancements have arguably made movie-going and television a more social experience, the opposite seems to be happening with music.  Streaming services like Spotify and the instant gratification of looking up videos on YouTube means people can find exactly what they want when they want it.  They don’t have to settle for Top 40 if they don’t want to anymore.  As a result, very few of my friends and I are listening to the same stuff at any given time.

I have been a Spotify addict for a couple of years now. Let’s set aside the arguments about whether or not artists are fairly compensated on such a service and focus on the bright side: in exchange for $8 a month, I have access to a massive library of music and, with a refined search functionality and some interesting recommendations, I have steadily increased my musical repertoire.

Most of the time, I find one song from an artist on a soundtrack or an old mixed CD from a friend. Upon repeat listenings, I realize I might like more from the musical act.  Sometimes, like with Relient K, I discover the one song is the only one I enjoy.  Other times though, I unearth a heap of great music, like I have with The Avett Brothers, The Civil Wars, The Weepies, and yet another band that starts with “The”, The Format.

I first learned of The Format a few years ago when I searched for several notable songs from one of my favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars. Their tune “On Your Porch” plays a big role in the Duncan/Veronica relationship and, as I am a fan of emo sounding acoustic tunes, I was hooked:

Since then, while I wouldn’t skip past this song on Spotify when it came up, I hadn’t thought much about it.  For whatever reason though, it came on in the car a few weeks ago and I made a mental note to look for more from this band.

As I looked up The Format, I discovered that this is one of their only slower songs.  The rest were rather catchy pop rock tunes, several of which I added to my “Let’s Give It a Shot” playlist.  The more I listened to these peppy beats, the more I liked them.  Their lyrics tend towards the whimsical, making their songs perfect belt-in-the-car fare.  And if there is anything I enjoy more musically than the emo and acoustic, it is songs of the belt-in-your-car ilk, as I am a musical theater nerd through and through.

I eagerly added song after song to my Spotify playlists. As I dove deep down into The Format catalog, I started to notice something surprising–the lead singer’s voice sounded incredibly familiar.  At first I wrote it off, assuming my familiarity with On Your Porch explained the situation.  Then, I heard a Fun. song shortly after listening to The Format and put two and two together.  The lead vocal on all these The Format tracks was Fun. frontman Nate Ruess.

A little Googling later, I discovered Mr. Ruess had a band before Fun. and that band was The Format.  They released two albums, gained some traction, but nothing on the scale of the global popularity of Fun., then disbanded in 2008.  I had fallen in love with a band that had fallen out of love with each other five years ago.

There will be no more Format tunes to add. I’ve exhausted the catalog a mere month after stumbling upon it.  That is the problem with this new hunt and gather approach to my music collection.  I will stumble upon gems, get excited to hear new music from these artists, then discover nothing else is in the pipeline.

Disheartening as it may be though, I think about my high school days and realize option B would be the old days of never being able to stumble into The Format to begin with.  I’d have to settle for Fun., whose music I do enjoy, don’t get me wrong, but is still my second-favorite Nate Ruess-fronted band.  As I type this, I realize these are some #firstworldproblems for sure. I’m not crying myself to sleep at night at the lack of new The Format music, just still adjusting to the new world order of how we find new music to listen to in 2013.

So these days, music hunting feels more like antiquing to me.  Sifting through the piles and piles of old catalogs looking for the rare find, relishing the discovery, knowing that is where the adventure ends.  Sometimes I may find a band like The Avett Brothers that continues to produce new songs, but more instances like The Format are certainly on the horizon too.  There is always hope though. I mean, The Civil Wars got back together? Could Something Corporate be next?

I can hold out hope, but until then, I will take a page from The Format’s lyrics in what might be my favorite song of theirs, “Janet”–It’s time to forget the past and just learn to love what I have.  Because I have fallen in love with The Format, balloons or no balloons.

I haven’t been to the movies in a while, so I was more than happy to get back to the theater with my friends Mary and Cory this weekend. These gals are lovely movie buddies, and they tend to be the people I see the most movies with here in Vegas. Problem is, I tend to hate just about everything we have seen together.

While they oohed and aahed at “The Great Gatsby”, I rolled my eyes.  When they sang along with joy to “Les Mis”, I heaved and sighed. It has become a bit of a running joke that I only accompany them to the movies to mock the flicks they enjoy.

So, it was quite the surprise to all of us when, of all movies, I found myself enjoying “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” more than one would expect. I, for one, came into the film with low hopes. As much as I enjoy the work of screenwriter Danny Strong (Buffy Troika forever!), the reviews on this film seemed tepid at best. Moreover, I was not sure how I felt about the contrived, Forrest Gump-esque notion of telling the story of civil rights in America through a White House butler, even if it was based on a true story.

Here is where I am going to be perfectly honest: I got almost nothing out of the seemingly sincere history lesson this movie offers up. What I did get out of it was the joy I get out of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, rife with pure camp and a flare for the overdramatic.

Wesley Morris over at Grantland confirmed I wasn’t the only one who conflated The Butler and Leave Her to Heaven.  What Morris doesn’t address though is how much the director, the titular Lee Daniels, is invoking this sense of camp intentionally. When Douglas Sirk first hit the scene in the 50s, his movies were generally panned as fluff, but years later, people now consider his work rather subversive.  Scholars believe Sirk is an auteur, purposefully invoking this sense of camp to make points about gender roles and societal expectations.

There is a whole lot of earnestness to “The Butler” that, the more I mull over it, the more I tend to believe Daniels believes he is making high art, not a low cult classic.  Things like the dramatic juxtaposition between the lunch counter and the inaugural dinner aim high on the “arty” scale, that I think the director might just believe he is making one of the most important race movies in history.

But there are still these moments in the movie that have me wondering if he is in on the joke. The introduction of each hilariously-cast President seem designed to elicit a reaction, if not laughter. Then there are moments like when the butlet’s son returns home and is the most stereotypical Black Panther you can imagine. Cut to his girlfriend (who, btw, is Yaya from S3 of ANTM. Yes, that Yaya who got all snotty with Tyra about the cheap kente cloth then lost the Cover Girl challenge basically because she had bad skin) who has the most INSANE Afro the cinematic world has ever seen and I can’t help but believe this stuff is meant to be intentional.

To be honest, I hope Daniels is aiming for this sense of Sirkian camp on purpose.  As the character Dr Martin Luther King (oh you know he made an appearance in this movie) points out, the Black servant in American culture is a subversive character.  They defy expectations and challenge the status quo in a way that is more subtle and often more effective than more direct efforts for equality.

“The Butler”, much like the butlers, achieves the same sort of thing.  Camp is a subversive style, and the campiness of this films challenges some of the expectations that tend to come with “important dramas” designed as awards bait.  In actuality, this movie is a bit of a bait and switch. You come expecting a history lesson and a sanitized race movie like “The Help.”  Instead, you get a melodrama that never ceases to surprise you, prompting you to question your expectations.

Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was Daniels’ intent all along. I certainly hope it is, because otherwise it becomes a movie I am laughing at, not a movie I am learning from.

I can only hope other people occasionally have those weeks where you feel like even the smallest, simplest task feels like it is ten times more difficult than it needs to be. I have these weeks roughly four times a year. It is a seasonal thing, I guess. Summer is ending, so let’s see how you deal with apartment issues, bank issues, life issues, work issues, and a prescription snafu that will make your head spin.

Throw in the fact I am currently on a rather long cross country airplane ride alongside the most openly affectionate couple I have ever seen, and you can probably understand why I was in one of those moods where even the slightest provocation was probably going to lead to one of those mental breakdowns that get people in trouble with the FAA.

There are few places better designed for you to fester in your own negative thoughts than an airplane, so I splurged for wifi in an attempt to take my mind off things. While surfing the web did not exactly turn my mood around, an email from Klout did get me hopeful.

I have been a Klout fan for a while, as it is the closest I have seen to an organization that accurately assesses the worth of someone’s social networking presence. It isn’t perfect, but nothing ever will be when it comes to social media.

The Klout algorithm is great, but what is even better is that the site comes with presents. Klout perks are like my adult version of Christmas. I geek out over the smallest things, like a $5 gift card to McDonalds or a small order of business cards. Problem is, the more popular the site becomes, the faster these perks get snapped right up.

Today’s perk seemed too good to be true, that I thought for sure it would be gone by the time I opened a new window to log in and check it out. I had mentally prepared for another disappointment to add to this already frustrating day.

The perk was $25 in coffee from The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Most of you familiar with me know I have a rather pathetic chemical reliance on caffeine. My reputation as coffee addict is so profound, I hear about the proximity of Starbucks of locations I am visiting days before I arrive. Thing is, while Starbucks is great, my first coffee love has and always will be Coffee Bean. When I was working a somewhat hellish Hollywod job, I would trek to the Bean and seek solace in a caramel blended. When I moved back East, I lamented leaving Coffee Bean behind.

Now that I am in Vegas, I am back in Bean territory, but now that I have learned the caloric impact of these frozen blended coffee treats, I try to drink them sparingly. My Caramel Blended days, much like my Klout Perks, are rare treats I don’t indulge in often, but when I do, I suck every last morsel of sugary coffee goodness through that signature purple straw, relishing every drop.

I know this sounds like sad advertorial, but I had to jot a few notes of thanks down that this Klout perk was indeed not a joke. I have picked out two delicious bags of ground coffee that should be getting to me shortly after I return home from my trip. And it may be marketing and big business and a ploy to get me to buy more, but I don’t care.

Today I desperately needed something, anything to come through and go my way. And The Coffee Bean was there, almost as if on cue. So, the least I can do is just write a quick note and acknowledge that I am grateful. This post isn’t just for the Bean. It is for me too–a reminder that good things do happen and you need to appreciate them. If you are going to let the small stuff get you down, you better let the small stuff perk you back up again too.

I’ve always been a big fan of musicals, so it is often surprising to people when they hear some of the shows I’ve never seen live.  Over the years, I’ve crossed a lot off the list, especially since the Broadway tours started coming through the Smith Center.

The third season of Smith Center musicals got underway this week and kicked off with one I have longed to see: Les Miserables.  So, I was excited when my friend Morgan and I made a day of seeing the matinee yesterday.  She had never seen the show either, but I did have the upper hand being somewhat familiar with the music and having seen the (terrible) movie version last year.

I’ve always had the ability to be relatively familiar with something even though I haven’t seen it.  Friends have marveled at my ability to identify movies I haven’t seen based on just a few seconds of footage and knowledge of the cast and story (ask AlCantHang about My Blue Heaven if you don’t believe me).  Les Mis is one of those musicals I’ve been adjacent to for so many years, I had a pretty decent knowledge of the plot before I even saw the movie. And I, of course, knew “On My Own.”

I’m gonna be straightforward here: you’re hard-pressed to present me with a silently suffering woman who perhaps also has an unrequited love that I am not going to be fully enamored with. This is why I’ve seen “Mildred Pierce” a dozen times. Some of my female friends are not as fond of this particular female archetype, as they often come across as doormats. 

Eponine from Les Miserables is a doormat, let’s be honest. This girl is a glutton for punishment who pines away for her friend Marius, who seems to reciprocate a little, but not enough. Then, when this girl he saw for literally two seconds strolls by in her fancy high class clothes, he decides he is smitten with her. So what does Eponine do? She helps him get the damn girl, no questions asked.

Eponine’s nadir of doormat-dom comes at the top of Act II. In the middle of a brewing revolution, Eponine volunteers to wade her way through the streets filled with violent uprisers and angry soldiers to deliver a letter to Marius’ dream girl, Cosette. On the way back, she sings a ballad embraced by 12 year old girls worldwide for the past two decades: On My Own.

The song is basically about a girl fantasizing what it would be like to be with the boy she pines for.  The lyrics include things like, “On my own, pretending he’s beside me” and “I know it’s only in my mind, that I’m talking to myself and not to him.” Yeah, it is pretty literal, hence the appeal to the younger set. Again, I can’t lie, I love it. Been one of my favorite Broadway ballads for years.

Most of the time when I have seen it performed, the girl sings it in a manner that is sometimes sad and pensive, but ultimately hopeful and happy. Like Joey Potter. Come on kids, we all remember Joey singing this on Dawson’s Creek:

Some, like Samantha Barks, who played Eponine in the movie version, opts for a more melancholy “On My Own”, a girl sad she is stuck in this spot she can’t get herself out of—she feels the way she feels. Bookened with Act I’s even more downtrodden Fantine belting “I Dreamed a Dream” and you have the most depressing pair of long-suffering gals in musical history.

The Eponine in this show took a different tact with On My Own. She belted the crap out o the song and you could tell she was pissed. And it was awesome.

I love a long-suffering girl, but the trope typically features a female who doesn’t speak of her anger. You hear about her sadness, like Fantine, her disappointment, like Joey Potter, but you rarely see them get all that mad.

Eponine would be mad though. This is a chick that gets by on her own, as the song says. She continually puts herself out there, sacrifices for this dude, and the thanks she gets is that this guy honest to God asks her to go deliver a love letter in the middle of the war, risking life and limb in the process. It makes sense she would be angry that this kid has not had the epiphanous moment where he recognizes her sacrifice and realizes what he is missing out on.  

Perhaps the movies and the musicals don’t let these long-suffering girls get too angry because it breaks the illusion that there is hope this moment is coming. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t in Les Mis and it doesn’t most of the time in real life either. The long-suffering woman usually just ends up still suffering. Or they die, as is the case in this play. These are fun options to choose from, right?

So I loved angry Eponine. You get angry, girl. You’re hungry, your dude doesn’t realize you’re alive, and your parents seem to have no regard whatsoever for you once you age past six years old. I’d be angry too. Sure, there is some solace in dreaming about what might be or could have been. The other interpretations of this song certainly have merit, but this one was a surprising, refreshing change.

After the show, I was talking with Morgan, who seemed to be a little more invested in the Cosette and Marius relationship than I ever was.  I started to mull over it and grew a little concerned. Am I so jaded and obsessed with the long-suffering girl that I have been rooting for the wrong person this whole time?

It wouldn’t be the first time.

In college, I was driving with my friend Jamie and somehow we got to talking about The Godfather movies. Over the course of the conversation, I said, “Oh come on, everybody loves Fredo.”

Jamie’s jaw fell to the floor. “No, she loudly asserted. “Nobody loves Fredo.”

Our friends later sided with Jamie. Apparently I was the only one who saw The Godfather movies and took away from them the message “Poor Fredo.”  He may not be a long-suffering woman, but for those unfamiliar with the movie, it chronicles the Corleone family and their organized crime activities. Fredo is the second oldest of four brothers, but has the least responsibility because, you see, Fredo is kind of an idiot.  He means well, he just isn’t very bright.  So, while he doesn’t exactly suffer, he does have to sit back and watch as his brothers get responsibilities and rewards while he gets nothing.  To add insult to injury, they give Fredo meaningless tasks to pass the time, kind of like when you let your small child break the egg and put it in the bowl so they can say they “helped make dinner.”

(I hate to even deign to spoiler alert freaks, but um, spoiler alerts on the 40 year old movie dead ahead)

Fredo decides he needs to make a stand. He does so by betraying the family. For that, Fredo has to die. 

Now I get it, family is family, especially in The Godfather, but I watched Godfather II and cried when poor Fredo had to go. Sonny Corleone, the oldest brother who gets gunned down in the first film? Couldn’t care less that he died. Good riddance. You were violent and yelled a lot, I never liked you Sonny. Fredo though…I understood Fredo. I don’t condone the betrayal, but Fredo is the Corleone I get behind.  Even Tom Hagen, an adopted son that is second in my Corleone Power Rankings, can’t beat John Cazale.

But apparently I am the only one.  Even though I believe Jamie, I still don’t understand why people hate Fredo. I know they do, but come on kids, give him a chance.

After the show, I worried Les Mis was the latest text where I massively misinterpreted the message because I sided with the wrong character. I tweeted to see where I stood.

Just got out of Les Mis at Smith Center. Quick poll: anyone actually root for Cosette and Marius over Eponine and Marius?

— Jessica Welman (@jesswelman) August 10, 2013

Well, it turns out Eponine is no Fredo. If anyone is the Fredo, it Is Cosette.  Turns out there are a lot of people who hate long-suffering men, but when it comes to long suffering women, I am far from on my own:

@jesswelman Seen it five times live. On My Own still my favorite number. So, no, I always want Cosette to end up in the sewer.

— Rick Fisher (@RDFish66) August 10, 2013

.@jesswelman Oh, gosh no. She’s not even interesting in the book! #teameponine

— YosemiteForest (@YosemiteForest) August 10, 2013

@jesswelman Cosette is the most unlikeable character ever!

— Max Steinberg (@MaxJSteinberg) August 10, 2013

@jesswelman nobody, ever.

— Astin (@AstinTO) August 10, 2013