Greetings faithful Flap-Nation!
And I thank you for taking the time to put away your food journals, from sectioning grapefruit, pausing your Learn Spanish/Italian/Japanese language tapes, putting down The Iliad or Dante's Inferno--(or was this Paradise Lost's year?) You know, all the things that keep us middle-class/middle-brow folk occupied in the new year.
I trust your holidays went...?The flap household did the usual: hot chocolate for staying out in the snow for little more than seven minutes, obsessing over candy canes dangling off the tree like the goddamn forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, and of course, watching classic "Family Holiday" movies together.
This year we curled up around the computer and fired up Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie so plotless and benign it makes any Walt Disney movie look like The Deer Hunter. And still! The littlest Flapper found cause for fear.* I should have known. This is a child who felt frightened at a Pooh-n-pals Halloween video. All Christmas season, she shrieked and left the room every time I sang the stanza from my favorite XMAS radio song, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: "There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long agooooooo."
So anyway, here's the Flap-Family watching a movie about a family who lives in St. Louis, loves it, never wants to leave St. Louis. Not even when they get the chance to leave and move to New.York.City. God forbid, not with that huge fucking fair that's coming to town. After all, this family reasons, everyone else in the world who comes to the fair has to TRAVEL to St. Louis, and they ALREADY LIVE RIGHT THERE. Works for me, I guess. I hate long trolley rides, ya know?
And even though I've been watching this movie my entire life (I even had the sound track record when I was a kid) this year's viewing really fascinated me with just how over the top its whole Good Ol' Days of America message was. Seriously, if using the porn analogy, with Walt Disney movies being an issue of Playboy circa 1972, "Meet Me..."is a never-ending beaver shot from Hustler--any era. Countless adorable children licking giant lollipops in turn of the century sailor suits, mildly curmudgeonly grandfathers, heart of gold housekeepers, barking fathers who sputter over the top of their newspapers. It's all here, folks. The purest, most distilled example of Americana Pornigraphica. And it works, too. My kids are still singing the Trolley Song.
But wait! I implied, with my entry title, some classic bitching about my messy house! But I don't really feel like it anymore. I'm having one of those Sundays where I swear I'm going to put everything to rights. I'm going to trace my steps back to that pivotal moment when everything started going to shit (it's usually something like the night I didn't unload the dishwasher leaving no where to put the breakfast dishes except the sink and then I had to come home and make dinner with crap all over the counter and then I was too tired after making dinner under those conditions to clean up a double mess so I just started reading a goofy book instead...). Nope, today's not a day for the straight-up where-did-all-this-shit-come-from-and where/how/when-can-I-return it/burn it/abandon it? It's a day for believing in the power of my virtual Flapper-Keeper. That mental state where I persevere among the stacks of old magazines, possibly important papers, random playmobil pieces and finally figure out whether to shit or wind my watch.
In closing, I would like to offer my Erma Bombeck homage joke:
I read somewhere that women with fat asses have smarter kids--something about Omega-3 storage or some such. All I know is, if that's true, it's very possible one of my kids will be able to invert the space/time continuum.
*She got scared when Tootie went trick-or-treating
