I want a bean feast.

Veruca Salt really wanted a bean feast, whatever that is. I imagine what many presumably would: a huge, Last Supper style table adorned with every type of bean found in the United Kingdom, Asia, Africa, and the Americas mounded onto expensive white china. With two dozen twelve year-old girls in velvet party dresses and white stockings rushing the table, scratching their way to the garbanzos, ripping the oversized bows out of each others' hair to get to the adzuki beans first, and pushing the unpopular girl's face into a mountain of kidney beans while chorusing, "JEANIE CANNELLINI! JEANIE CANNELLINI!" 

Though I'm not especially interested in bean-feasting, what I do want, in an undeniably vain and Veruca Saltish way, is Fiestaware. Fiestaware, for those who do not regularly read the kitchenware section of the Macy's catalogue, is an irresistibly colorful outfit of platery. Platery is not a word but I like the way it sounds, so I'll keep using it. I suspect that Fiestaware has a sort of cult following. And I suspect that I am part of this cult. Well, in any case I really hope that there's a cult so that I haven't been fertilizing an irrational platery fixation by making my girlfriend drive me to the mall, out of her way, to compare prices of the "Shamrock" 10 1/2 inch dinner plates to the ones priced on Amazon.com.

I think that Fiestaware might induce in me some sort of chemical brain reaction. It's the novelty of its bold uni-coloring. It's sleek and unassumingly sexy like that boy in high school who the entire student populace giddied over; the guy who performed better-than-decently in a non-quite-fabulous sport like pole-vaulting. Or golf. No, probably not golf, but maybe lacrosse. But not in Canada because lacrosse is too, you know, en vogue there. I think they have lacrosse players printed on their money, actually.

If you haven't yet checked out Fiestaware, 'tis almost the season to watch A Christmas Story on TNT- repetitively. Ralphie's family dines on some Fiestaware dinner plates! Clearly this is not the most memorable part of the movie for most fans, but it makes me seriously happy.

Ta for now,

Marie

Wedding Ring Into The Hole.

I often think about the time I watched a wedding ring get flushed down a toilet. It was in the middle of seeing The Reader several months ago at Kabuki Cinema in San Francisco. I ran to the bathroom, not wanting to miss any more shots of the German countryside and female prisons, and found a group of women huddled around a toilet stall chanting, "DO IT... DO IT... DO IT" in regards to a consumed and ardent lady who was knees-down in front of the seat, who, as it happens, had recently discovered her husband was cheating on her with Calista Flockhart's older sister, apparently an old family friend. Practically a cousin, in fact! Which was essentially incest! Which was disgusting! She held a blank and serious gaze, the kind of blank and serious gaze you see in poorly directed movies when women characters find out they're being cheated on and are deciding what to do next. She pulled her ring off of her finger, for reals because I'm not talking about movies anymore, then dropped it into the toilet and flushed it alongside the raging cheers and victorious fist-raising of the women gathered around the toilet in support like some crazy, backwards bachelorette party.

...

This did not happen. Actually, I flushed it. I flushed a wedding ring down the toilet, but it wasn't mine. Maybe it was a woman disavowing her marriage, but I think it was probably just someone who didn't realize that their wedding ring had somehow fallen off their finger and into a toilet at Kabuki Cinema. How it went was- I ran to the bathroom, made pee-pee, and just after I pulled to flush I looked down and spotted a gold wedding band sitting at the bottom of the bowl. It was sort like when you see trees toppling onto people in movies and you yell, "WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST GET OUT OF THE WAY?!" I could not move, and I watched, petrified, as the ring shot up the little dark toilet hole. I immediately mourned the chance I'd had to be the anonymous heroine who stoutly gave up eight minutes of her oscar-nominated film to not only stick her hand in a toilet that is used every two minutes and currently had pee in it but potentially get it back to its rightful place by way of the lost and found. 

"Yeah, she found it in the toilet near theater 6. Fished it out with her bare arms and everything," the theater employee, official keeper of the lost and found, would say to the grateful and alleviated ring owner. "This is one of the most impressive finds I've seen, and I've been here since 2005!"

And just thinking about this potential interaction would suffice. But, I lost my chance. And a wedding ring, which is sitting in sewage twenty something miles outside of the city.

In other news, my mother is coming into town next week. I am not sure what to do with her other than the usual drinking of froo-froo cocktails. And I have not yet told her that the guest room often rumbles due to whatever it is the downstairs neighbors are doing. 

Anyway, take care for now,

Marie