TRUMBO

"Mac, have you ever been in love?" "No, I've been a bartender all me life"--My Darling Clementine

Thursday night the choir did a concert for the old folk at Villa Colombo.  An old lady got up and started dancing so I danced with her! (We were singing an Italian song that I didn't know anyway.) The following night we did a concert at the Ashbury United Church.  I baked gingerbread for them to sell.

Saturday night we saw John Ford's My Darling Clementine, which Moira got from the library. (Can't remember how often I've seen it.) The O.K. Corrall story has been filmed many times, but never better than here.  Henry Fonda had a great square dancing scene!

Yesterday was the Reading Out Loud Meetup.  Our topic was children's writing, as usual for December.  I read a passage from L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon where she met her relatives after her father's death, then another where she sent her poem to a newspaper, not realizing you mustn't write on both sides of the page.  I also read the poem "Harp Song of the Dane Women" from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and A.A. Milne's poem "King John's Christmas," which begins: "King John was not a good man.  He had his little ways..." That's a great British expression, "He had his little ways"! Bill and Hillary Clinton have their little ways too!

Last night I saw the biopic Trumbo at the Varsity.  It was pretty good:  Bryan Cranston is one of my favourite actors.  And Louis C.K. had a good role as fellow screenwriter Hurd Hatfield.  But I disagree with Trumbo's final message that McCarthyism had no heroes or villains, just victims.  The Titanic was something with just victims.  In this case, it seems to me that Dashiell Hammett was definitely a hero and Ronald Reagan definitely a villain (both as Screen Actors Guild president and later as president).

It's unusually warm today.  I'll get one last chance to wear my autumn jacket before it gets cold!