Friday, July 19, 2013

Nine for IX - An Inspiration

Summer Olympics 1996 I was sitting in my preferred spot on our living room floor in front of my family's TV watching in awe. My heroes at the time, The Magnificent Seven (who I'll be calling the M7), had just won their gold medals. The following school year suddenly we all wanted to be gymnasts again. My friends and I had always done cartwheels at recess, but now we were inspired. These girls were our idols. I can remember wanting to be Shannon miller (that hair!) as well as wanting her poster for my wall. (I never did get one - I'm thinking b/c my mother and I had a mutual, unspoken agreement that such a poster would clash with my ballerina decor. Also, it was made very clear that we didn't poke holes in Mom's wall.)

As time went on other figures covered those walls (i.e. NSYNC) and the inspiration I got from Miller, Strug, Dawes, Moceanu and the like was replaced with, well, let's face it, hormones.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Cross-Post: How Admission Breaks Many Molds

Admission isn't your typical book or movie.  It's not just a maudlin love story.  It's so much more.  Tina Fey's character Portia, now in her 40s, is just getting her coming-of-age story where she finally learns to live and to stand up for what's right.  It's about her ability to love and accept love, to connect with her estranged hardcore feminist mother, to balance work and her increasingly unstable personal life, and most of all it's about establishing and maintaining roots.  It's a complex story that aptly divvies out proportions of multiple people's lives in a mere two hours.  We feel like we know the entire characters' histories in this film (I can count five characters that adhere to this, despite Portia being the main character).  The movie's writing by Karen Croner is beautifully stellar, carefully crafted, and knowingly faithful, in essence, to its source by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

(Story originally from Anything You Can Do)