Multi-media weekend

T'was a pleasant weekend, and I hope so for you too. On Saturday I met Kelly for lunch -- she is the first blogging friend I have met in person! I felt like I already knew her, and not at all like it was a first-friend-date, but it was! If you're not familiar with her site, do check it out and see her beautiful paintings, and marvel, as I do, that she has only very recently discovered art. I mean, just in the past few months! I love knowing that a person can turn into an artist all of a sudden. The cookbook writer/illustrator Susan Branch first started dabbling when given a gift certificate to an art store at the age of 30, and now she's a best-selling artist-author. There's an acorn of creativity in us all, just waiting for the proper encouragement to sprout! What would happen if we all gave art store gift certificates to our friends?

Later that day Jim and I went to my parents' house to watch the movie Serenity on their giant new plasma TV. The TV was giant, the new red cabinet my mother was compelled to buy for it was lovely, and the movie... wonderful. It's the third time we've seen it, and every time I am filled with wrath that Fox network canceled the show Firefly on which it is based, and also that not enough people went to see this movie in the theaters to secure the hopes for a sequal. Are you one of those people who don't think they like "genre" movies and TV and so have never given Joss Whedon a chance? I'm speaking of Joss of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and yes, if you have never seen that show -- it IS better than you think. I think Joss is one of the best screenwriters/ creators working today, in any genre, but tragically his core audience hasn't been able to grow beyond the "genre" fans to ensure his oeuvre the fame it deserves! Buffy was fantastic, Angel was great, and Firefly was even better. All... sniff... 14 episodes of it... I hope you will rent it and watch it. Don't be put off that it's about space. I'm not into space either. Or that it's a western. I'm not into westerns either. Just trust me. Sigh. Any other fans out there, please chime in!

(Also, upon learning that Joss Whedon is writing and directing the upcoming Wonderwoman movie, Jim and I have decided that no one could be better cast as Wonderwoman than the exquisite Gina Torres from Serenity. I mean, she looks a heckuva lot more like an Amazonian princess than Linda Carter!)

Our multi-media weekend continued on Sunday with an author reading at Powell's City of Books, otherwise known as the best bookstore in the world, where we went to hear Christopher Moore speak about his new book. If you're not familiar with him, it's another "cult/genre" phenomenon -- in this case "supernatural horror humor"! He's a very funny irreverant writer AND speaker and much fun was had. In my college days I worked at a great bookstore that hosted author readings, and I even got to introduce some of the smaller events. As fun as it was to meet the authors, it was kind of terrifying to feel responsible for having an audience show up (not guaranteed!), and to write and deliver an introduction that did them justice. Oh, how I used to fret as I read the publicist's material and cobbled something together, and with what relief did I sink down in my chair when the author took the podium! One introduction I remember was Karen Armstrong, the amazing former-nun & theological writer, author of The History of God. Also, a guy whose name I can't even remember but whose stories about Albania have been burned into my brain ever since. (I can't resist sharing this: according to him, the brutal dictator of Albania in the communist years had a number of men abducted and forced to undergo plastic surgery to serve as decoy body doubles for him -- and that after he died these men were just cast adrift with their horrible false faces, looking like the dead dictator, with nowhere to turn! Oh, and he had the plastic surgeons murdered after the surgeries!) Could it be true? If so, fact really is stranger than fiction. But not EVER stranger than Christopher Moore's fiction. You need look no farther than the book Fluke for confirmation of this!