Greetings,
I
love foreign flicks, almost as much as the French love American
films. I really get into them, deriving a sense of bonhomie,
adventure and international intrigue. Most of all, they fulfill my
dreams of unlimited European travel without the hassle of
interminable flights over the pole.
Tonight, we treated ourselves to
Babette's Feast.
It ranks right up there with Like Water
for Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet, Life is
Beautiful, Il Postino, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Crying
Game, Shall We Dance? and The Red Violin.
Exquisitely lovely, this
film carries a poignant message, that I too will rhapsodize:
Oh, to have been Babette!
What fun she had making others happy.
What a beautiful spirit she portrays.
If you like meaningful,
relationships-rich movies about human kindness, pleasure and purpose
and you are a foodie, this is a must rental. The presentation of food onscreen is, in all senses of the word,
delectable. The cooking scenes are fantastic. And the eating
scenes, sheer torture. Do not watch this on an empty stomach.
It has left me hungry
for more. Alas, like Babette's feast of amazing and spiritually
satisfying food, this is may be it.
I think I'll watch it
again.
I received a beautiful
card with an Art Furtado painting of three hula dancers from Auntie
M, my dear friend with the huge Hawaiian heart, who lives in central
California. The painting is one of three hula dancers. Art
Furtado is a graduate of Chouinard
Art Institute (now Cal Arts, a school now funded by
Disney), and having just perused Herb
Ryman's work at Disneyland, I see a common influence in
style and compostion.
Don't get me started on
art...
There are people in the
world who actually read the Sunday paper and all its glorious
detail. People like Auntie M. As busy as she is with her
thriving online business, she took the time to clip an article, Web
Wandering, Hawaii Wikiwiki, out of the November 4th San Jose Mercury
News with a post-it that said, "Ho`omaika`i!
(Congratulations!)
In the card, she
wrote:
Aloha!
What a
joy to see your excellent site recommended in last Sunday's
paper!
Hope
you are doing well. Miss you both!
Hugs!
m
I felt those hugs coming
right through that card. Does she know how much I miss her and Uncle
B? This was a bright spot on a physically painful day that has
kept me "down the hill" this weekend. I'll be fine
tomorrow; these things come and go.
The article lists six
Hawai`i websites and has this to say about a site that I put
together as a thank you to hula:
http://www.oocities.org/~olelo/hula.html
Everything hula,
from steps to words to lyrics to dress. And it goes
deep: The gourd listing alone has three links to
supplemental information.
I had not visited the
site for quite awhile, and decided to check it out for myself.
I lingered on this site, and relived my hula days:
May
Day is Lei Day in Hawaii
DH is on the hunt for
a perfect
digital camera.
I don't like to complain
about pain. Especially when folks like Kalena T teach me that
the spirit can rise above it.
Kalena is crippled with
the severest case of arthritis I have ever seen. Her hands are
gnarled. She walks with great difficulty, able to leave her
home with the help of an aide.
This week, she came to
the office with her aide, who is actually a devoted, life-time
friend, and her remarkably youthful-appearing 83 year old
father. Kalena, her father and I are graduates of the same
high school in Hawai`i, and we lustily sang our alma mater
together.
We were full of high
spirits. What pain!?
She came with a brown
shopping bag filled with exotic, unique, and mouthwatering Hawaiian
goodies from Munchies:
wasabi iso peanuts, deep-fried squid chips, li hing mango, and mochi
crunch/arare. Heady stuff that keeps tantalizing me back into
the kitchen for a munchy break away from this 'puter.
My teachers come in all
shapes and forms.
"Life is a Gift."
Sincerely,
Author
Unknown
P.S. If you would
like to share a portion of yourself with words, in response to
this journal entry, you may do it here.
"The
only gift is a portion of thyself..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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