this woman’s work

It’s to learn phpList, a free html newsletter publisher. It’s giving me fits. Argh. Plus I have to hit up the good folks at siteground to install it because the installs from Fantastico (automatic installer) don’t take. And I can’t figure out why. One reason I want to learn it is that I’m thinking about hosting small biz clients and I want to be able to help them manage their email lists if I do. Plus I want to send my own.

So that’s what I’m doing today and I don’t have time to blog plus my eyes are spinning in my head from too much computer so I’m about to go upstairs and lie down somewhere and squinch my eyes shut for a long time.

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Tonight after everyone left and Madison went to get her jammies on, she came back and climbed up on the arm of the couch.

“I don’t want to be Madison,” she said. “I want to be someone else.”

“Like who?” I was thinking she’s going to say Laura or Wanda, which is her recently added alter ego.

“Like … Emmalina,” she said then slid down the arm of the couch to land face down on the cushions next to me. “Or Pennie,” she finished, her voice muffled in the couch.

I pulled her into my lap.

“So why don’t you want to be Madison?”

“I don’t know. Because I don’t want to be pregnant.”

See, now she wants to be Pennie, she doesn’t want to be Madison, she rounds out with pregnant. I think she’s saying, “I don’t really want to be adopted right now at this minute — too complicated.” So I say, “Sometimes it’s really hard to have a birth mommy AND a mommy mommy.”

“I wish Pennie could STAY,” she answers.

“It would be fun if she could just LIVE here,” I agree.

We sit with that for awhile. She’s cuddling and looking gloomy. I’m wishing I could make it all easier. Then Noah interrupts with, “Hey, do you think Jon understands Garfield?” And that breaks the spell.

I think open adoption makes things better but it’s not a cure-all; it’s still adoption.

My girly. She is so sweet.

The muffled “Pennie” was no accident — this is hard for her to talk about. She stumbled over “pregnant” because she knew it wasn’t quite what she wanted to say. She is sometimes shy about telling me these things and I wonder if she already has this idea that I’ll be somehow hurt by her switching allegiance. I guess I thought that openness would stop her from feeling like she has divided loyalties but I’m not sure if it does. Or maybe she muffles it because it is such a painful thing to say; I’m not sure.

It’s why I am so explicit about how much I enjoy Pennie and how happy it makes me to see Madison having fun with her. When I was a kid I worried that my grandmothers were jealous of each other. I was afraid of bringing one up in the presence of the other because I didn’t want to make either one feel bad. If one of them had said, “I love to hear about the fun you have over at your other Grandmother’s!” It would’ve gone a long way. That’s why I say it now.

Maybe it’s working because muffled or not, she does talk to me about it.

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I don’t know why that is. But come to think of it, I was never actually in my office today — I checked email upstairs on Brett’s laptop.

Pennie and Nate just left. They sang Bohemian Rhapsody on our karaoke machine. A good time was had by all. Pennie made Madison a trunk (well, she didn’t make the trunk but she lined it in pink and added ruffled ribbon all around the insides) and her dad (Pennie’s dad) filled it with dress-up clothes — hats and purses and things. Pennie and Nate added some costumes. And then Pennie’s brother sent Madison a whole little chef’s outfit! Hat and apron and oven mitt, etc. Very cute. Madison was thrilled with the whole shebang and tried on all of the clothes.

Because Pennie didn’t want Noah to feel left out, she gave him four enormous bags of candy. My teeth hurt just looking at it! (And yes, she checked with me first because she is thoughtful like that.)

That was our very late Christmas celebration.

Afterwards Madison was a little pouty and gloomy, missing Pennie. Now Brett is in her room reading her a bedtime story and Noah is in his room reading to himself.

It was a very nice way to spend an evening.

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Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger and Paul Giametti were fabulous, as you’d expect. There were some nice shots, too. And Brett and I both cried pretty much through the whole first hour.

BUT there’s this Bad Guy in it and he was so darn bad that I went and looked him up on the web afterwards to find out if he was really as rotten as Ron Howard directed him to be.

In the movie Max Baer has killed two men with his boxing prowess and is hell bent on killing Jim Braddock, too. He gleefully taunts Braddock at a restaurant, offering to comfort his wife once she’s a widow and he’s an animal in the ring. Basically he’s a typical Hollywood villain out to thwart the good guy.

So. The real Max Baer was, I read, a pretty nice guy and gracious when he lost the fight to Braddock. Says Wikipedia, “The author of the book on which the movie was based has asserted that Baer was kind, charismatic, loved and respected, and pointed out the emotional pain that Baer endured the rest of his life following Campbell’s death [the boxer he killed in the ring], and the fact that he gave purses from his bouts to Campbell’s family to help give Campbell’s children an education.”

Not that the guy was perfect, especially compared to good guy Braddock. From a Slate article about the film:

That studiously determined upstart turned out to be gritty Jimmy Braddock from the Jersey docks, known by the more fitting “Plain Jim” before Damon Runyon tagged him “Cinderella Man.” Braddock’s tale is indeed inspiring: He had a family to feed while Baer’s expenses ran mostly to his wardrobe and his mistresses. Baer Jr. cheerfully admits that his father was woefully unprepared. “He didn’t take Braddock seriously, he didn’t train, and he got a b.j. before the fight,” he says, apparently listing the offenses in ascending order of gravity.

So Baer gets tagged as a villain for a whole generation (and then some what with DVDs and cable television) despite being a nice fellow but Ron Howard was making a film and he decided the film needed a villain so that’s ok, right? All in the name of art. Well.

I was thinking about this for two reasons: One, because as a writer of personal narrative I’m interested in fictionalized accounts of actual events. Ron Howard doesn’t pretend to be making a documentary but the whole “true story” schtick is a selling point so you gotta take it into consideration. I’m just wondering to myself, how much responsibility does he have to at least play it close to the truth? This isn’t the stuff of legends; it’s the stuff of newspaper accounts. There are verifiable facts. But then — and I think this is interesting — one of the accounts I read says that Baer’s portrayal in the movie is very close to his portrayal in the press at the time. So you could argue that Howard filmed an actual fictionalized narrative sold as truth by journalists; a sort of alternative reality of an historic event.

I find that kind of an interesting idea although I don’t think it justifies smearing a dead man’s reputation further. That leads me to the second reason I was thinking about it.

I think it would have been a more interesting movie if he had shown the real Max — the one getting blow jobs before the fight and who said after his loss to Baer (Wikipedia adds that he said it “cheerfully”), “Jim fought a good fight and I hope he’s more appreciative of the title than I was.”

Ron Howard said through a spokesperson, “The script was written from the point of view of the Braddock family. To them, Max Baer Sr. was a real threat.” Ok, fine. But then focus on them feeling that threat — the press conference where a journalist asks Renee’s character how she feels about her husband perhaps dying in the ring, that was pretty good. I got a feeling of “threat” there. I don’t need to be further hammered over the head with the idea that Max was scary. As a movie goer, I didn’t need the defamation of this guy’s character to get the idea that going into the ring with him was frightening. The whole good guy/bad guy scenario was so overblown that it drove me to Wikipedia, right? It made me doubt the film; it made me more aware that it was a film. It was too pat and too convenient to be convincing. I think Howard could have just gone with filiming Max’s showboating and womanizing, his casual devil-may-care attitude and let that contrast with Braddock returning his relief money (once he’d made good on a fight even though his kids were still wearing rags). To my writerly mind, that’s a good enough story.

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Jessica said I can use the name we actually use with her on the blog. Oh my god, people, this will be a relief. So we call Jessica Pennie. (Her legal name is Jessica but her friends call her Pennie.) Those of you who have friended me on myspace already know this because Pennie is my TOP FRIEND. As she should be. Anyway, what Pennie said about Juno was:

• That she loved it and like all of you thought the writing was terrific;
• That she identified an awful lot with Juno and felt that her snarkiness was effectively used to show her need to emotionally distance herself from the pregnancy (in other words, she didn’t think it was just the writer being smart and felt it was purposefully placed to convey Juno’s defense mechanism).

I will likely wait ’til it comes on DVD and then watch it. From all I’ve read and heard I think I’m not going to like it as much as Pennie did. But see? We are allowed to disagree on things including how adoption is conveyed in the media.

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