Old fashioned sexism set to music
Last night I watched the movie Carousel which is a musical with this sterling line, “It’s possible for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.” This is uttered by the heroine as she movingly remembers her dead loser husband who used to hit her and has just — in ghost form no less — hit their daughter. The daughter says something about being hit hard and it feeling like a kiss. Eegads.
Yesterday I rearranged some of the furniture. What an exhausting job. I emptied all these bookcases and switched stuff around and then switched some stuff back, periodically laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling while I tried to figure out what to do next. I was playing South Pacific over and over again, too. Noah would come upstairs and laugh then bounce on the couch and demand goldfish crackers before going back down to the playroom. Now everything is in a place but whether or not it’s the right place remains to be seen. We have so many books that every time I do this (I rearranged the bedrooms a couple of weeks ago) it’s a huge, dusty project reshelving.
Speaking of books, I’m reading LovingKindess by Anne Roiphe which is about a feminist mother whose daughter is joining an orthodox yeshiva in Isreal. It’s intriguing. Someone had underlined certain passages in it which makes it a mystery story, too. There’s the actual plot written by Roiphe and I’m waiting to see what happens and then there’s this subplot where I’m trying to figure out why this sentence and not the one below compelled the previous reader to make note of it.
