Retired Middle School Teacher liked Barbie

Expectations weren't high for this one, and Greta Gerwig's Barbie was, for awhile, only what I expected. It starts as an elaborate comedy sketch as Barbie and Ken leave their perfect Barbie world for a visit to our real one. My own 8th grade drama class wrote the same sketch with fairy tale characters around ten years ago.

But then we realize that the core of the story is the estrangement of tween-age girl Sasha and her mother. Sasha now will have nothing to do with her old Barbie doll or her mom. The anxiety of middle school, the mother's sense of loss, and Barbie's shock and pain turned this comedy sketch into something I recognized as real. Barbie, embodied by Margot Robbie, sheds tears, a new experience for her, as Sasha attacks her for ruining girls' lives.

Ken has been only Barbie's accessory in Barbie Land where every night is Girls' Night, but, in the real world, Ryan Gosling shows the awareness dawning that a man is empowered simply by being male.

Gosling provides a lot of the comedy in this movie. Simu Liu as his rival Ken looks like he's having a lot of fun, and the two of them lead a cast of great dancers in a parody of an 80s power ballad. I'm also delighted to see Michael Cera back on screen as Ken's "buddy" Allen, a doll introduced then ignored in 1966. Cera was a comedy genius in the raunchy but touching Superbad ten or so years ago.

America Ferrera as the mother of Sasha delivers a soliloquy worthy of Shakespeare, cataloguing the ironies and paradoxes of what's expected of women in our society.

The movie has political resonances without even trying. Since the 1970s, one of our political parties has successfully branded itself as the party of hard men with the women who adore them, and has branded the other one as the party of effeminate men and shrill angry women. The schema is intellectually shallow, but emotionally deeply effective, hitting us in our sense of self. In the movie, the conflict of boys v. girls plays out in a cartoonish way and reaches reconciliation. If only it can be so.

One very simple line probably should be recited regularly by every young couple: Ken cries that "it's always 'Barbie and Ken.'" Barbie, on her way to enlightenment, teaches him, "No, it's Barbie, and it's Ken."

There's an odd moment when Barbie, dejected, sits at a bus stop next to an old lady. Barbie brightens and says, "You're beautiful!" The old lady says she knows. It made me think of how Barbie's story parallels that of the Buddha, who was raised a prince in a walled garden, shielded from illness, poverty, old age, and death.

This silly-seeming entertainment resonates.

Derek Walcott's Bounty: Quick Dispatch from the Front Lines

Since I read the selected poems of Derek Walcott, I've wanted more. Poet/critic Christian Wiman called the 1998 book The Bounty "a great book," enough for me to order it online with 1-click.

[See my appreciation, Never Get used to Derek Walcott's Poetry (01/2023).]

I'm only a few pages into it. As usual with Walcott, I've had to re-read portions and google some references to get oriented. He's worth the trouble. Besides, there are incidental pleasures that keep me going.

Here's a pair of lines that made me laugh out loud, they're so apt and so connected to what I see on my bike rides through wooded Georgia every day: Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air,// squirrels spring up like questions,...

Those are lines from stanza vii of the opening eponymous poem, which may be about a visit to his mother's grave, which may be located near a beach on the island of St. Lucia, but somehow is related to a seaside English town where Victorian nature poet John Clare is buried. I'll have to get back to the book on that one.

Bike in the USSR

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 Scott Smoot in Moscow, virtually

I visited Moscow in June 1977 on tour with the Westminster Ensemble, directed by Frank Boggs. My Kodak pocket camera took the photo of Red Square then. My Android took the selfie this morning. I thought I'd boldly declare my support for Ukraine with my new bike jersey, though I also thought to keep my sunglasses on so Putin won't be able to recognize me. Don't want Novichok in my Gatorade.

The distance to Moscow from Minsk is 444 miles, the distance I've traveled on bike trails around Atlanta since May 2. I post a photo from each place I virtually visit along with the story of my connection to that place. (To see stops from the whole world tour, use the arrows under the headline.)

I look back with regret on how we snickered at the Russians for accepting Communism's mindless bureacracy and petty tyranny. In private, we ridiculed a winter fashion show in midsummer; plumbing fixtures unconnected to any source of water; signatures required from three functionaries in different corners of a store to check out with one item; a museum of science and atheism squatting in a beautiful church; a sediment of boiled grey rhubarb in a drink that every restaurant served us; teens mobbing us after our show who dispersed at the approach of men in suits who corraled us upstairs for "open dialogue" with "young people" in their 30s. Finding fault was our teenage version of patriotism; but these people were our hosts.

I cringe thinking about a lot of the stuff I thought and did back then. At seventeen, I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about the things that mattered to me, and I had hardly an inkling of things that didn't -- such as American civics, other cultures, history after World War I, and current events.

About one thing, I was prescient. After rehearsals, our director Frank Boggs sometimes joined his teenaged cohort in a circle for sharing thoughts and feelings. One time I said how deeply grateful I was for the friendships I had developed with classmates and especially everyone in the Ensemble, but I wondered if adults experience friendships like that. Frank said, "You'll still have friends, but the intensity won't be the same."

When we returned to Atlanta from our tour, I burst into tears. This, I told Mom, was the end of something. "It'll never be the same again." I was right.

Miles YTD 1707 miles || 2nd World Tour Total 15,242 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Kiev

[Our Ensemble also toured Poland. See my virtual bike trip to Warsaw with a link to more about Frank Boggs.]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.