My newest guilty pleasure

"I am not in denial!"--Six Feet Under

"Make sure he marries you--first!"--North and South

On this long Easter weekend some people binge-watch on TV. Through the miracle of Youtube, I've just been watching North and South, the 1985 miniseries about a South Carolina plantation heir (Patrick Swayze, who went on to Dirty Dancing and Ghost) and a Pennsylvania foundry heir (James Read, who went on to, uh, the sequels) who become friends at West Point, as well as their families, in the years before the Civil War.  I watched the whole nine hours over two days, and I guess it's a guilty pleasure.

Produced by David Wolper, who did the overrated Roots, it's definitely on the cheesy side. (Tom Shales' review in The Washington Post: "North and South is incredibly stupid television, for people who move their lips as they watch TV.") The acting isn't so great:  David Carradine is an especially hilarious villain.  Georg Stanford Brown, as an escaped slave, seems to be on a different show (something slower and more serious). There are also cameos by doddering legends like Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor.  It's the kind of show that has a pair of southern sisters, where one is the blond nice girl and the other is the brunette bad girl.  I kept guessing what was about to happen, of course.

Yet I like this sort of story. I wonder how I'd deal with a friend who owned slaves. (Would my principles trump friendship?) Read has an abolitionist sister (Kirstie Alley) who starts out as a pain in the neck and ends up an unhinged fanatic, but at least she tried to do something about the slavery problem.  Martin Luther King wrote about "the fierce urgency of now," yet it must have been twice as urgent back when millions of people were living and dying as slaves.  There's a nice musical theme by Bill Conti, along the lines of his Dynasty theme.  And I'd forgotten how pretty Lesley-Anne Down was! I'll probably watch the sequels too.

Wednesday night I went to a Vintage Meetup at the Tot Cat Cafe, a cafe for cat-owners!  Last night I went on an Art Walk Meetup, the first in months.  I've also put aside Lapham's Quarterly and started reading Gulliver's Travels.