Today I am going to share with you my one and only Christmas tradition. I hope you are worthy of it.
Like all good traditions, this one comes with rules. It is also a song,one that may be familiar to you: “O Holy Night.” But this is not just any version of the song. Dr. G found it somewhere on the internet several years ago and downloaded it. Once a year, we fish it up from the depths of the hard drives and listen to it again.
Rumor has it that this recording was sent by an aspiring vocalist as a demo to a Nashville record company, and some indiscreet staffer circulated it around. Others suggest that the achievements of this singer would be impossible for an amateur, and that every note is carefully planned. Either way, it’s a stunner.
As it played the other night, I found myself crumpled on the floor in a fetal position, laughing. Every time it seemed safe to uncurl, the singer would ramp it up a notch and I would seize up again.
It is truly The Worst Version of O Holy Night Ever Recorded. Here are the rules for participating in this tradition:
You must listen to the whole song.
You must listen to it at a sufficient volume.
If you don’t think it is funny, you must never tell me.
Mentally check here if you agree to these terms: ____
I woke in the dark pre-dawn hours on Saturday to the sound of a hard rain falling—in the room. We were in an inn in Bisbee, an old mining town in the southeast corner of the state that has been given a facelift in recent years by artists and community busybodies. In a corner of the room where the ceiling paneling had pulled away, the water was coming in. I pulled a washbasin under the leak, which worked for an hour or so, when the drip decided to split up and attack from different areas. Dr. G finally woke as well, and helped maneuver a plastic-lined basket under the worst of it. We snuck back under the covers and listened to that months-absent sound: rain. It was nice, like washing your face after a long day.
By the time we got breakfast and sorted out the room situation, the rain had turned to thick snow, fluttering down like goose feathers. Our plans to hike the hills behind the town and wander the narrow streets were kaput, but it was SNOWING! Woohoo! Last time I saw snow was in Fairbanks, Alaska, 18 months ago. We liked Bisbee in the snow. One of the charms of Bisbee is its unpretentiousness. You get a life story with every transaction, and the prices are low. It took two visits to BizzArt and manhandling every single handmade toy to decide on a few Bisbee Stitches to take home. We met their maker, who looked kind of like his creations, with big eyes and fluffy blue hair.
The snow stopped as we drove away from the mountains into the plains, on a search for Contention City. It’s a ghost town that made an appearance (in non-ghost form) in the movie 3:10 to Yuma. The name had captured our imaginations and we decided to find it, since we were in the area. Clambering over a fence, down old roads, across abandoned train tracks and a dry riverbed, we finally came upon the few remains of the town: broken bricks and rusting nails, thick bottles in blue, brown, and green glass, broken pottery and ceramics. The sky was just like it is in the movies: Blue clouds breaking up, dousing a distant wedge of yellow-leafed trees or purple hills in light. You’d think by the beauty that they were the only places worth going.
It was a business lunch. We were discussing marketing and branding, and it turned out I had a lot of opinions. My fork was stuck conveniently in a pool of black beans, ready for me to take a bite once I finished talking. “We have to keep focused on students,” I said, gesturing to emphasize “students.” I gestured right onto the handle of my fork, which flung sticky, glistening black beans high into the air above the table. They showered down in singles and clumps onto my hair, face, and shoulders. “So that settles it!” I said after a moment of stunned silence.
In these two videos, which I found in the archives of Killing the Buddha, Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham. Other commentators place the interview in 1969, the Summer of Love. I find it funny and delightful. The two men are so different, and yet seem to enjoy one another’s company, trading quips and making deals.
WOODY: I’ll tell you what. If you come to one of my movies, I’ll come to one of your revival meetings.
BILLY: Well, now, that is a deal! (They shake hands) I would like to come back and report on that. …
WOODY: You could probably convert me because I’m a pushover.
Like other bloggers before me, I must remark on how good natured and honest they are with each other, and how unlikely such a meeting seems in this day and age. And what a mix of character and charisma that Billy Graham has! He was something else in his day.
One thing about books on tape is that you can’t skim, and you can’t skip around. I find this excruciating. Some books stand up really well to being read aloud– especially those Hemingway-esque ones where every sentence is stripped down. You don’t have to worry about a writer trying to get fancy with a sentence and going awry. Other books suffer, and I along with them. Case in point: The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers, one of those Christian historical romance sagas. That genre is typically not my thing, but the whole series was sitting there on the library shelf, and I had hear more good things about her than most authors in that genre.
So. The plot was interesting, a few of the characters engaging, the latin prhases thrown in a nice diversion (apart from “peristile” which got old pretty quick). But. Way, way, way too long and repetitive. With these epic stories, I think the writers have to focus on keeping the plot moving forward, getting their characters in the right places at the right time, more than wordsmithing like they would for a shorter book or story. That’s fine, and that’s why we invented skimming. In this one, certain phrases were used dozens of times, and I heard every syllable of every one.
His mouth tipped
He said sardonically
He said huskily
A muscle twitched in his cheek/jaw
She went cold
Her hand trembled
Fear gripped her
He smiled ruefully
Yikes! Watch out for those adverbs, Ms. Rivers. Well, you can kind of get the gist of the story from them, excepting the happy ending.