Good Morning, Baltimore

I have an interview with a junior high on the other side of town on Wednesday. I'm still a bit reticent about taking a teaching position after the school year has already started, but, as they say, beggars can't be choosers. We'll see how it goes.

In an effort to get my mind off my own pitiful drama, I went to go see "Hairspray" tonight. It's actually the first time that I have been to a movie since the beginning of summer. Unfortunately, may Divine forgive me, I actually enjoyed it. Once you get over the fact that John Travolta sucks in the role -- he wasn't convincing as a woman, as a Baltimorian, or even, oddly, as being fat -- it actually works really well. The songs were, by and large, enjoyable, and the entire thing came was cinematic enough to justify the remake. It started particularly strong, with the songs gining it momentum; eventually the plot starts to slow down, and the songs became a bit less enjoyable and irreverent. Other than Travolta, I found myself quite pleased with the rest of the cast, and I have a crush on Elijah Kelley, the young man who played Penny Pingleton's beau Seaweed. He was frankly beautiful, and just lit up the screen with his enthusiasm. Some bits of the movie had me thinking to myself, "That's not how it happened!" But by the end, I just accepted it for what it was, as something independent of its source material. After the disappointment of the recent cinematic adaptations of "The Producers" and "Dreamgirls", it was nice to see a confident, well-crafted musical that I genuinely enjoyed.

Unfortunately, before the year is out we're going to be faced with Tim Burton's re-imagining of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," something which I find myself less than enthusiastic about.

"We Collaborated With The Cleaning Of The Baths To Loosen To The Toilet Each Sees Is Used."

This is about the only Spanish (aside from very simple statements, like "Me llamo Bill") that I can recite from memory (and I apologize if any grammar or spelling has been slaughtered in the remembering):

Colaboramos con la limpieza de los baños soltar el sanitario cada ve se use.

This used to be posted in the lavatory at De Porres P.L.A.C.E., and I managed to memorize it, before I even knew what it meant. I mean, I had an idea, since the signs were posted above the urinals, but I certainly didn't recognize many words. I actually created a little song with it, which I proceeded to sing for everyone I saw -- which more or less meant Brianna. The song lingered for a while after I left, but eventually seemed to evaporate, just another detail lost in the march into the future.

Then yesterday, I was teaching my students about "clean" and "dirty" -- "limpio" and "sucio" in Spanish -- and when I saw the word "limpio" in the bilingual dictionary, the entire song came back to me. So I thought I would share, because I can't get the damn thing out of my head. Some day, I will record it, and then you'll all be sorry! YOU'LL ALL PAY!! MWUH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

Of course, I'm also posting it here so I won't forget it again, too.



On an unrelated note: as I'm looking for a job, I've been paying more attention to the goings-on in my (hopefully) future profession. Hence I was very pleased to find that John Waters addressed ACRL. I find the reactions amusing: the positive reaction isn't really sure that it is positive in any sense except the theoretical, and the negative reaction has trouble putting the offense into words. How old was she that she was referencing "vaudeville"? Really, I have sat through a few of these speeches, and they are ALL relentlessly self-serving, including Barak Obama's spewage at the ALA Conference in Chicago. His single-minded, relentless idolatry of children's librarians left me breathless with boredom for the duration of the speech. (Yeah, OK, children's librarians are great, we get that, but there are whole species of librarians who will never, ever have to participate in anything called "storytime".) I would have paid an extra hundred dollars if John Waters had bum-rushed the stage and started to recite the professional biography of the man with the singing sphincter from Pink Flamingos, complete with a slide show and Odorama.