I started drinking at the crack of dawn last Friday. Against all better judgment and reason, I invited my girlfriends over to watch the royal wedding and drink champagne before work. Jess and Helen turned up right on time at 5am, only a little disoriented. Julia arrived in her bathrobe and a party hat. We had grits casserole, biscuits, berries, and at least Kate Middleton's weight in champagne.
We modified a variety of royal drinking game rules I found online to suit our purposes. We remembered Diana at every mention of her name with a MAY SHE REST (and a drink), and honored Her Majesty the Queen's presence on screen by drinking continuously.
The wedding party looked more perfect than dolls. But if you looked past the heirloom jewels and the endless rows of military medals, you could see that William and Kate really are two people in love. And that's pretty special, no matter what. I didn't expect myself to get so emotional when they exchanged vows.
We oohed, we ahhed.
We laughed, we cried.
And then, somehow, we went to work.
As for my favorite moment, well, it's between
"You look beautiful."
and
Discussion Question:
pssh you know what we're here to talk about. ROYAL WEDDING DISH you know you have a lot of feelings
Winter is ostensibly over here in Boston (although don't tell the winter coat I'm continuing to wear most days), so my homicidal winter madness has subsided temporarily. After a winter so insane that the snow had to be measured in Shaquille O'Neals, every bud, blossom, and shoot is an impossible miracle.
My skepticism about living in Boston is well documented. Very well documented. The 30 Rock episode where they go to Boston for a week in January ("Winter Madness" S04E11)--particularly the experience of native Southerner Kenneth--pretty much sums up my dominant feelings about this place.
And let's face it. I don't really fit in here. People have a hard time understanding my accent. Yesterday, when attempting to order a blueberry ale, the waiter helplessly asked me to repeat myself over and over again, asking, "Blueberry aioli?"
I never realized that my daily habits were so redneck until I moved to Cambridge. I live in an apartment complex with dozens of units, but we are the only residents who ever use the small common yard out front. I can often be found out front working on craft projects like Tanie's space shirts or assembling our many dozens of pieces of IKEA furniture in my overalls from the Fairview Tractor Supply Company. Nick and I also like to sit in our deluxe canopy camp chairs and read.
just LOOK at those rainbow glow-in-the-dark pony bead accents!! I guess it goes without saying that this picture was not taken in Boston.
The neighbors walk by and they're all
It seems like something happens every day that makes me feel like an alien. Facebook friends of mine know all about my considerable distress about the difference in Southern and New England traditions--in my world, a white elephant exchange is not called a yankee swap and people not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day get pinched.
Even the smallest things are different. I started noticing recently that every monetary transaction I experience up here ends with the cashier informing me that I'm "all set." This is not an unusual thing to say at all, until you realize that every cashier says it every single time without fail. A quick Googlin' informed me that this is, in fact, a Boston tic.
But despite the cultural differences and the winter (oh lord, the winter), I have to admit that I'm coming around to a few things about Boston. Since I hate being such a Negative Nancy about New England all the time, I thought I should fess up to the things I've started to like.
Glistening water and athletic rich people rowing crew--what's not to love?
LIVING NEAR THE OCEAN
Seagulls scream at you on your way to work. You can almost smell the salt air. You can drive up to New Hampshiah and eat lobsters that mere hours before had been minding their own business in the ocean.
I recently learned about The Bechdel Test and now I can't get it out of my head. The Bechdel Test, born of classic queer comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, is a laughably minimal three-part test for movies:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.
this image is from DTWOF author/illustrator Alison Bechdel's blog here
After watching two very enjoyable and ostensibly more or less feminist-friendly movies and realizing that they both just barely passed the test (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Forgetting Sarah Marshall), I decided I should do a little research.
Thank goodness for the Bechdel Test Movie List, a website that rates over 2100 movies according to the Bechdel test. They have a great icon system to indicate how a movie scores--a system I am going to borrow from shamelessly here for simplicity's sake:
= Fewer than two women = Two or more women, but they don't talk to each other = Two or more women, but they only talk to each other about a man = Two or more women and they actually manage to talk to each other about something other than a man = Passes but only just barely
Using the Bechdel Test Movie List, I have compiled the following highly academic study:
BECHDEL TEST RESULTS FOR MOVIES I AM SUPPOSED TO LIKE VERSUS MOVIES I ACTUALLY LIKE
Wow! That's...not very many smiley faces. According to this list, women in the top ten films of all time are limited to the following topics of discussion: how to fashion a dress from curtains, whether one is a good witch or a bad witch, and what might happen when they get to Auschwitz.
captioned for those who cannot read lips very well, such as my husband: 'are you KIDDING me?'
Real talk? The only movies I've seen on this list are the ones with smiley faces next to them. ...and The Godfather.
Well, surely the 2011 Best Picture nominees will be an unblemished field of smiley faces. Right?
Looking at this list only reaffirms my vehement belief that Winter's Bone should have won Best Picture this year. If you haven't seen it, see it immediately. It is breathtaking. The actual Best Picture winner, The King's Speech, only contains two short interactions between women that barely register as legit conversations: a brief introduction and a mother telling her daughters a story. Maybe that's part of why I thought it was such a total snooze compared to Winter's Bone.
The Bechdel Test is an embarrassingly low bar. It's not a test for determining whether a movie is feminist-friendly--it's merely a metric for determining if a movie treats women like human beings. Of course, not every movie has to pass the Bechdel Test--there's always a place for male- and female-centric movies. I'm pretty sure Steel Magnolias wouldn't pass the reverse Bechdel Test. But if only the occasional movie didn't pass the test, the test wouldn't exist in the first place. It is downright sickening how few popular movies from the past century pass the test.
What's so scary to me is not that many popular movies marginalize women. I didn't roll off the cabbage truck (or...whatever) yesterday. What's truly disturbing to me--what fills me with Smashing Pumpkins levels of rat-in-a-cage fury--is that the movies we hold up as the finest examples of the medium are guilty of the same sins as 1980s beer commercials. Strip away the grandiose cinematography and the heartfelt performances and you've got the same old bull we've been seeing since the beginning of time--women existing only in relation to men.
I'm ragin' like Achilles.
I know, Brit. I know.
As for MOVIES I ACTUALLY LIKE, here's a hastily assembled list of my perennial favorite movies to watch, in no particular order:
So I'm curious. How do your favorite movies of all time stack up to the Bechdel Test? Look them up here and report back. Have any of my female readers out there experienced a similar SHOULD LIKE/ACTUALLY LIKE dichotomy? Holler back and let's talk about ladies who have better things to talk about than men. And in doing so, we'll be passing the test ourselves.
Bonus discussion question: Creative types out there, I need some advice! How do other people with creative jobs keep their creative juices flowing in their off-hours for their own projects? I've missed blogging but I'm finding it so hard to find the motivation to write blog posts after long, draining days of editing. Tips??
= Fewer than two women
= Two or more women, but they don't talk to each other
= Two or more women, but they only talk to each other about a man
= Two or more women and they actually manage to talk to each other about something other than a man
= Passes but only just barely
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