Monday Morning Musings

Good Monday morning. I hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was busy with auditions for our fall production at the Winnsboro Center for the Arts. We are doing an original play, "Bonnie & Clyde in Winnsboro" written by a local actor, Randy Lindsey, who has given me the freedom to adapt the play and direct it. Anyone who has any connection to theatre and playwriting knows what a generous gesture that was on his part.  The story is based on historical fact. The infamous couple stopped in Winnsboro often as they made their way east from Dallas to Louisiana, and the play puts those facts into dramatic form.


WHAT I'M READING:  Prayer by Phillip Kerr. I'm not sure I would finish this one except for the fact that I am leading a discussion of the book for an online mystery book club to which I belong. The central charater, Gil Martins, is an FBI agent, but except for the fact that he drops the F-bomb quite frequently, he doesn't come across as a law enforcement professional. And even some of them don't feel the need to bomb every line of dialogue.

WHAT IS MAKING ME LAUGH: Two squirrels chasing each other up and down the big pine tree just outside my office window. In fact, it is so distracting, it's taken twice as long to write this blog post.

  
WHAT I'M DISMAYED ABOUT: That we're once again interfering in Iraq, and it looks like that interference is going to go on for a lot longer than first anticipated. No doubt we needed to give the humanitarian aid to the refugees, but that should be the extent of our involvement.

AND NOW JUST FOR FUN I thought I'd share an excerpt from my humorous memoir, A Dead Tomato Plant and a Paycheck. It's been a while since I posted an excerpt, and I forgot to get the Sunday paper with the good comic strips.

This excerpt seems appropriate since school will be starting soon in many parts of the country. Gee, I remember when school started in September. What about you?

The beginning of each new school year is always met with varying degrees of eagerness and excitement. There are some kids, like Jason in the comic strip Fox Trot, who live for each school year so they can amaze a whole new set of teachers. Others go begrudgingly because in some respects it is better to have something to do every day than be home with Mom who might find some unsavory job to do, like clean the toilets.
 
Mother’s are generally thrilled to have the kids gone most of the day, but first there is the mad rush to get them all outfitted with a few new clothes and the 10-page list of school supplies.
 

One year, a couple of days before school was going to start, I went up to our local grocery-drugs-everything-under-the-sun store to get those school supplies. When I arrived, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who'd waited until the last minute to perform this little task.
 
The aisles were crammed with shopping carts, harried mothers and a multitude of kids, which created more confusion than in the pits at the Indianapolis Speedway. The mothers wore a grim look of. determination which clearly said, "I can only suffer through this indignity because it is all for a greater good," as they jiggled crying babies, fought their way up and down the aisles, and did their best to ignore the earnest pleas of their kids.
 
"Oh, Mommy, please! Can't I have this organizer? See it has Star Wars stuff on the front and this neat thing for paper. And I won't ask you for another thing extra, I promise."
 
"I know it's not on the list, but I really need these felt-tip markers, and the big box of crayons and some of these notebooks."
 
For the first time in my life I actually had the presence of mind to think ahead and only brought one kid with me on this shopping trip, and he had masking tape over his mouth. So I was in a position to see a little humor in the human drama occurring around me. Although I did have to hurry to cosmetics if I felt a laugh coming on to avoid the risk of being attacked by a horde of irate mothers armed with wooden rulers.