Friday Night Lights
Truth be told, I'm not a big one for sports related shows, most of them being movies. I had a brief thing with movies about basketball back when I actually played it on a team. I was ALL for the drama of and centering around basketball, but that passed after I quit. I hate "Rudy." Wasn't a big one for "Remember the Titans" (though, it always made me laugh when other teams would start chanting "We are the [insert team name]. The mighty mighty [insert team name]" because in high school, we WERE the Titans and any other mascot inserted in there seemed absurd to me. I was immature. I'm not denying it). I mean, I enjoy watching specific sports on the television, but all that "we are a team" shit and everything that comes with it - never really bought into all that, I guess
But, there's something about Friday Night Lights. Might be the music. Might be the way it's filmed. Might be the characters and their little dramas. My love for it could be a lot of things, but all I know is that not enough people watch it. I got the soundtrack from Michaela (consisting mostly of songs by Explosions in the Sky) and then, years later, started watching the show. Thankfully, I got the wife into watching it because I NEEDED to talk to someone about it. I know some people write it off because it appears to be a show about a high school football team, and that's all fine and dandy. Some just don't get how high school student dramas could be interesting. Again, fine and dandy. I just wish more people would give it a chance and watch it and see what I see in it, whatever that may be.
Granted, this last season was painful to get through. My poor Coach Taylor was having a rough time of it and I hate to see him like that.
That's probably it. That's probably why I love this show. Coach Taylor and his wife. I could do without the football, though that tends to round out the show, but Coach Taylor is really what does it for me
I love Kyle Chandler
***
I know it's early into the day, but I had to distract myself somehow.
The wife brought back some books with her from home. Most of them are David Sedaris books. Since Sean let me borrow his Dress Your Family is Corduroy and Denim, I've taken a liking to his dry humor and outlooks. They're just fantastical to me
But, she also brought back Alice Sebold's autobiography. If you don't know, she wrote The Lovely Bones, a book that I never finished. The one thing I do recall is the rape scene, which pretty much opens the book.
Well, guess what opens her autobiography?
And it was horrifying.
I probably shouldn't have read it right before I planned to go to sleep. If you know me, you know how damn paranoid I am about getting raped (or having anything bad happen to me). But the feeling it left me with wasn't fear or paranoia - it's this odd feeling of restlessness and a need to do ANYTHING to get those images out of my head...to get this nasty feeling of shock out of my system.
It's not an entirely graphic account, but it's truthful, and I'm left with the question of how does one shake something like that off. The answer: you just don't. It probably follows you forever, one way or another. Sure, like the death of a family member or friend, time dulls the initial shock and pain of it, but it never truly leaves you. For Alice Sebold, it took place at the very end of her freshman year of college, right before move-out day. It was more than easy to picture MSU's tunnel under the bridge instead of Syracuse's. I could see the walk home from the Aud to Abbot - could see the dorm halls and the night recepts letting me in without my ID because the guy had stolen it. Knocking on Sasha's door...Katie and Chri's door, trying to find someone to help.
I could never put myself in her shoes completely because I've never been in a situation where all of my power was taken from me. And I've never seen myself as a very strong person, so I'm not at all sure how I would handle something like that. Alice Sebold seemed uncommonly calm, as most victims of rape strangely seem. I don't know what part of your brain takes over to deal with something like that. I hope I never have to find out
I know this all seems a little trite coming from safe, ol' me and I'm sure you've all heard someone talk about this before. It's not like I haven't thought about this before either, it's just that something about her account struck a chord. Maybe because it was a college campus and that's just a little too close to home. You know?
And now that I've depressed all of you (if you've even made it this far), I would like to talk to you about my goal:
I want to own movie versions of most of our past ROIAL Players' shows. I don't mean our actual performances of them, but the movie adaptions (or in some cases, the movie the play stemmed from). There are a few that wouldn't be possible, but here's a list that I'm looking at
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Clue
Brick
The Breakfast Club
Arsenic and Old Lace
Dangerous Liaisons
I know there's a movie version of Delicate Balance, but I've seen the trailer for it and I, in no way, want to own any part of that. I remember watching it with a cast member and we both looked at each other as if to say "What the fuck is this?"
And if movie versions are not possible, maybe have an audio version. I know The Reduced Shakespeare Company puts of CDs of their plays, as I have The Complete Word of God Abridged in my iTunes library. I already have a strange audio version of The History of the Devil that the SciFi channel put out as a kind of radio play. It's seriously almost four hours long and the actors are atrocious, but there it is.
I haven't written a post this long in a while, so I'll leave you here
take it easy. don't die. don't get raped
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