Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Movies

A Stranger Things Birthday Party for Laylee – BARB IS ALIVE!!

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A couple of weeks ago my friend’s husband came to pick my kids up for church youth night. He is also my friend but this story feels more dramatic if I refer to him as “my friend’s husband.” While he was waiting for them to get ready, he asked me a question.

“Does this Saturday work for Laylee’s birthday party or would you rather do it next week?”

I had no response to this.

A. I’ve never had one of my friends’ husbands approach me about the timing of my teenage daughter’s birthday party.

B. I had momentarily forgotten that she had a birthday.

“I mean,” he continued, “We’ll want to have it fairly close to her actual birthday. We could do it at my house, but I’d rather do it at yours.”

What.

This only made it worse. I mean, he’s a good friend, but. What?

It turns out that, as he was driving the jazz band carpool, he had been talking to Laylee about the “locked room” party craze. He’s super creative  and wanted to plan an elaborate puzzle like that. And so they hatched a plot. Mike would spend hours creating a locked room/puzzle birthday party for Laylee and her friends, one of whom was his daughter.

It was just that no one had told me about it. So. The confused face.

Once I was up to speed, we got to work. Mike did all the mad genius stuff and I set the mood.

The mood?

Retro 1980s Horror Show That Half of Laylee’s Friends Aren’t Allowed to Watch Because it’s Practically too Scary for Me. Perfect. Here’s how it went down.

The girls arrived at our 80s abode and we fed them dinner. Eggos. 80s dance music was playing.

As they were finishing dinner, I knocked at the front door, dressed as Joyce Byers. This was convenient because I just recycled my Halloween costume.

Joyce was crying as usual and told them to come out on the front porch. It was an EMERGENCY! You see, she believed that Barb was ALIIIIIIIIIVE!

While we were out on the porch, Dan and Mike threw grey thrift store sheets over everything to make it Upside-Downy and then dimmed the lights and flipped on some blue ones.

Joyce told the girls they had to go into the Upside Down and save Barb.

Back inside, Chief Hopper awaited to tell them how the puzzle worked. Everything they needed to unlock the secret door under the stairs and save Barb was on one specific book shelf and table. Then he gave them a walkie talkie and told them to contact him if they needed assistance.

The way Mike set up the puzzle, there were three numbers they needed to find that corresponded with three stickers next to a padlock.

The first riddle involved them sorting books by height. Each book had a letter on it. When sorted properly, the letters spelled Tolkien. When they looked in the Lord of the Rings books, they found a clue to another detailed puzzle. Once solved, that puzzle gave them the quote “rings for mortal men.” There are 9 rings for mortal men in LOTR, so the number was nine.

The second riddle involved an unfolded cootie catcher. Remember those little paper folded fortune tellers from when we were kids? When they folded it and held the points together, it contained a musical staff with a line of music. When they played the song on the piano, it was the theme from Star Wars.

In the Star Wars VHS tape on the shelf was an oddly cut out piece of paper. There was another piece of paper with similar markings on the table. They had to hold up the cutout paper a foot above the table paper with a flashlight shining through it.

The combination of the projected light from the first paper and the symbols on the second paper spelled out the word “quinze”, which means 15 in Portuguese. Good thing there was an English/Portuguese dictionary on the table. The second number was 15.

For the third and final clue, there was an 80s Troll puzzle half-assembled on the table. They had to put it together, squish it between two cookie sheets, flip it over, and read the message on the back. The message contained 4 quotes they recognized from Harry Potter books. Now, I know Harry Potter is not 80s appropriate, but we needed to pick books the girls would all be familiar with and time is irrelevant in the Upside Down.

They found the correct books and in their pages were the pieces to a brightly colored Sudoku puzzle. The colors matched the colors of M&Ms in a jar on the shelf. They had to solve the Sudoku puzzle, count the number of M&Ms and then do a math problem with those numbers, giving them the final number for the code.

They unlocked the door.

And found this VHS video from Barb inside.

She was ALIVE!!! And she’d left them some rad treats. Scrunchies, Coke glasses, hot pink nail polish, and makeup bags with Nerds inside.

Here is a picture of the girls watching Barb’s message. I love the older kids’ delight contrasted with Wanda’s horror. Eaten by monsters? Gross.

And I let them eat cake.

And monsters ate no one.

Madama Butterfly – Fathom Events Giveaway

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I’ve only attended one live opera. I wasn’t expecting to like it since I’d spent my entire life making fun of opera singers and their vibrato but I figured I had to go to one once in my life. The show I attended was La Traviata and I fell deeply in love with Verdi and gained an appreciation for opera music in general. The music was so passionate, so intense, and the level of skill needed to perform it was so high that I’ve been an opera fan ever since.

So, when Fathom Events reached out to me to see if I wanted to give away some passes to their upcoming live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, I couldn’t pass it up.

The show is Saturday, April 2nd at 9:55am PST and the tickets I have are for AMC Southcenter near Seattle. The show is being broadcast all over the country and there’s an encore performance on April 6th. They have an amazing cast and crew and it should be a gorgeous production. If you love opera or if you’re even curious about it, I recommend you check this out.

If you’d like to see the show, leave a sentence or two with your feelings about live opera and how many tickets you’d like. I have 5 admit-2 passes to give away and I’ll draw for winners this Friday night, March 25th, at 10pm PST.

Tomorrowland: The World is Hopeless Because of You so Be Hopeful, OKAY!?

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I blame Johnny Depp for the letdown I experienced watching Tomorrowland with my kids on Memorial Day. It’s a summer blockbuster based on a Disneyland attraction so there’s no chance it can be good, right? Well. I was surprised by my love for Pirates of the Carribean – Part One of A Thousand and that love left me with a ray of hope that Disney could pull off something like that again sometime. But Johnny Depp was not in this movie. Neither was joy.

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Tommorowland was a hundred minute prologue leading up to a 30 minute propaganda fest about never giving up hope and working together for a better tomorrow. Now, I’m all about never giving up hope and working together for a better tomorrow, but I hate being beat over the head with messaging.

I like to be entertained, and gently educated by a filmmaker who tells me a story and lets me draw my own conclusions. There can be some direct messaging but it has to be done right.

Tomorrowland ended up looking like a TV commercial for clean energy and youth engagement. Yay clean energy! Yay youth tackling social issues! That’s great.

Tell me a story.

Recently we watched Rudy with the kids for the first time. I had forgotten how much I loved that movie. Mid-twenties dyslexic runty athlete struggles repeatedly to get into the college of his dreams, won’t take no for an answer and ends up getting the stuffing beat out of him as he tries to prove that he’s an athlete – unsuccessfully. What he proves is – he’s got heart and you can succeed at anything if you never give up. He starts a legacy of higher education in his family. He makes me cry. And then he becomes a Hobbit.

Rudy didn’t have nearly as many decapitated flesh-covered robots as Tomorrowland and it definitely had more swearing, but it’s hands-down a better movie. And there are pep talks in the movie about never quitting and about having hope, but they are part of dialogue between the characters, not direct address to the audience as the next generation of robot recruiters marches off into a sea of wind turbines.

Yes they do.

A highlight of the film was Hugh Laurie as the evil bad guy who doesn’t love hope or spunky kid robots with British accents or humanity. That guy could make Anakin Skywalker’s lines from Star Wars Episode II seem moderately interesting. He’s that good. But not good enough to save this movie.

My five-year-old was simultaneously scared and bored and the other two, who love just about every movie by virtue of us seeing it in a theatre, were both highly underwhelmed.

“It was pretty anti-climactic and didn’t really have a story,” Laylee said, “But thanks for taking us.”

If you’re looking for something to do next weekend with your kids, I suggest blowing up lego models of the Eiffel Tower in your back yard and reading pamphlets from the Gates Foundation in your best George Clooney voice. It will be cheaper and probably more fun.

After writing this review, I decided to peruse the internet and see what critics were saying, something I failed to do before going to the movie. My favorite snippet came from A. O. Scott at the New York Times:

“My son briefly had a youth baseball coach whose way of inspiring his demoralized players was to stand at the dugout entrance screaming at them to have fun. “Tomorrowland,” Brad Bird’s energetic new film, a shiny live-action spectacle from Disney, reminds me of that guy. There is nothing casual or whimsical about this movie’s celebration of imagination, optimism and joy. On the contrary: It’s a determined and didactic argument in favor of all those things, and an angry indictment of everyone who opposes them.”

Yes.

Just Draw a Doggone Dragon

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For the first time ever, Magoo has a teacher who is requiring participation in the PTA art competition, Reflections. It’s always been optional for him in the past and when he said he wasn’t interested, I said a quiet prayer of thanks not to have one more thing to mount on styrofoam board and told him that was just fine with me.

Laylee, on the other hand, ALWAYS does reflections. Sometimes she does art, sometimes poetry, and one year she composed a song because, “Hardly anyone does songs, Mom. I decided this was the easiest way to make it to State.” This year, she is using the shotgun approach, entering a piece in pretty much every artistic discipline.

Then there’s Magoo. I asked him what he wants to do and he said, “Make a movie.”

Now, I majored in film in college and still aspire to pick up where I left off and direct documentaries when I grow up, after my kids grow up. However, I was not thrilled with this choice. There are a few reasons for this.

1. The entry is due in four weeks.
2. He has never shot footage of anything other than his own tonsils as he pretends to eat the video camera.
3. He has never used video editing software before.
4. And this is the big one – HE WANTS THE FILM TO BE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT OUR FAMILY A CAPELLA GROUP.

We love a capella. Our whole family loves it. We have not been able to get enough of Vocal Point since they were on The Sing-Off. (GO COUGS!)

And every time we listen to one of their songs and my sweet, adorable and betimes suspiciously-close-to-tone-deaf children sing along with the various parts, I talk about how one day we will have our own VonThompson Family A Capella group. I’m a little bit serious about this, but mostly kidding and I don’t dwell too much on logistics, like the fact that all the females in our family are altos or four-year-olds, and all the males in our family are Dan and Magoo.

Magoo can do a mean hi-hat sound and his beatbox skills grow stronger every day… but the actual formation of the group at this juncture is premature at best, deranged at worst. Making a documentary about the process, which ends with a video of our family performing an a capella version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Where all filming, editing, and planning needs to be done by this person?

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Oh, sweet mercy!

The problem is not that it will be bad and he’ll feel rejected when he doesn’t make it to State. The problems is that it will be what it will be and he will make it to state because what other third grader is making a film OF THEIR NON-EXISTENT FAMILY A CAPELLA GROUP for their project when they could do a pencil sketch of a dragon and put their dear mother out of her misery?

And I should be excited about this. I majored in docu-freakin-mentary film production, for the love of Pete’s Humongous Reptile! Alas. I am not.

But when I tried to dissuade him, he shed tears, like actual moisture dripping from his ocular cavities. Now, what can I do? What would Martin Scorsese’s mom have done? I guess I teach him how to storyboard and get Wanda into some emergency voice lessons. She turned four earlier this month. Maybe she could be our soprano.

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Wherein One of My Wildest Parenting Fantasies is Fulfilled on Mothers’ Day Eve Courtesy of Martin Scorsese

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Some Mothers’ Day gifts are planned. A hand squished in cement and bejeweled with fish tank marbles. A scarf. The hammock you texted a picture of to your husband and he asked if it was lame if you picked it up while you were at Costco. (You said “no” because you really wanted the hammock and you’d really rather spend the night canoodling with your husband rather than sending him back into town to buy the item that you were standing right next to earlier that day.)

But some gifts come unexpectedly.

Tonight, we finally watched the movie Hugo and it lead to one of my wildest parenting fantasies coming to fruition.

I studied film in school. I initially had hopes of becoming a screenwriter or director, possibly even a cinematographer, but when I took my first documentary film class, I was hooked. I could imagine nothing more wonderful than making films about the beauty of real life, about actual human experience. My Hollywood dreams melted away and I settled into a burning passion for all things non-fiction, if there is such a thing in filmmaking.

This doesn’t mean I wasn’t more than happy to act as script supervisor for the occasional student vampire flick, or fumble my way through being key grip on an all-female crew woman power film, the plot of which I’ve long forgotten. I loved movies in all forms, especially fascinated by documentary and early film.

After graduation, I took a job at a public library with a gigantic, I mean truly remarkable, film and music collection. I was in heaven, every day working amongst the greatest films ever made, and Tommy Boy. I got to help develop programs to teach people about film history or a certain unknown-to-the-public-but-staggeringly-brilliant foreign film director.

I once led a man on a several month journey of film discovery, culminating in handing him what I believe to be one of the greatest films ever produced, sure to lead you to a place of self-discovery and religious transformation. When he returned the film, he brought it to me personally, with a thank you note. One day I’ll show that film to my kids, but they’ll need to work up to it. And Scooby-Doo ain’t gonna get them there.

I left the job after Laylee was born and have let the film world slowly drift away. There is more of Disney than Errol Morris or Zhang Yimou in my collection now. And for the past 7 years, struggling off and on with crippling anxiety and panic disorder, my film searches now have more to do with content than craft. Too many images I’ve seen in the past have become the raw materials for my waking postpartum nightmares.

But, I’ve always wanted to share my love of filmmaking with my kids. I keep a copy of Landmarks of Early Film, a collection of the first moving pictures ever captured and I think, One day my kids will appreciate these. One day I’ll show them Lumière brothers’ actualities and tell them about how and why they were made and they’ll be as captivated as my audiences of three at my public library programs. One day, they will beg to see A Trip to the Moon or anything starring Harold Lloyd.

I’ve brought the DVD out a couple of times and it’s been like a kale and turnips fiesta. You can make us eat it but you can’t make us like it.

Then tonight we watched Hugo, a quiet film about an orphan and a robot and a whole lot of film history, and when it was over, Laylee and Magoo were begging me to watch A Trip to the Moon and the Lumière actualities and listening with rapt attention as I spouted my rusty film history knowledge. They were AMAZED that I knew this stuff! They were thrilled that I owned these movies. They interrupted our family scripture study three times to explain new ways we could do our own special effects with Méliès-style editing.

It was an almost out of body experience for me, something akin to Wanda suddenly asking Dan to tell her all about how to write code… and soaking it up like he was the genius that he is… and then trying to write her own code all the way through family scripture time.

It was like Dan had paid them to do this for me, so I could cross one huge unimaginable thing off my parenting bucket list… and then they had suddenly transformed into the world’s greatest thespians and pulled it off. Now, tomorrow for actual Mothers’ Day, they can clog the toilet because they used it ten times without flushing, tell me to kiss off with their piercing eye daggers, and fight about a lollipop… because… MINE. You know? The usual.

I guess I want to thank Martin Scorsese for making a film to help me bridge the gap with my kids, to make them hungry to learn about one of my long lost passions, to transform the turnips into chocolate. I want to thank him for one of the best Mothers’ Day gifts ever.

Meeting Maria

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I stayed home from church today with a pathetic sickly Wanda. She’s got a snuffly nose, a cough, a rattle and a roll. She can’t sleep without a binky but she can’t breathe WITH a binky so we are at an impasse. There is a lot of crying and snarfling going on.

I’m just getting over something similar to what she has, although I looked a lot less cute when it was my turn so I tried to nap in between rescuing her from the suffocating bink and alternately calming her with it.

When I woke up from my nap, the kids were watching a movie, something we don’t do much of on Sundays and Dan and I decided it wasn’t a great Sabbath day movie choice. I’m not sure that there’s anything religiously wrong with Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, although the male/female relations are somewhat of an archetypal muddle. I think we decided it wasn’t a great Sunday movie because it sucks.

So we let them watch a movie that does not suck. According to my Grandpa, who saw it around one hundred times in the theatre when it was released, it’s about the un-suckingest movie that has ever and will ever be made. The hills are alive with it. You guessed it. We watched The Sound of Music.

I cried when they sang about the problem with a certain young novitiate named Maria. I cried when she had confidence in sunshine. I bawled my eyes out when she taught the children how to verbalize Solfège and don’t get me started on Maria’s favorite things. It is too much. I love that movie. It’s in my blood.

I love it because it reminds me of how happy my childhood was, even though my sister made me be Rolf when we danced along with “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” It was a charmed childhood. Tonight I proclaimed that when Dan and I dress up as Rolf and Liesel for Halloween, I get to be the girl, all pretty in pink and he can be the pre-Nazi messenger boy.

Laylee was enthralled, talking about what an amazing governess Maria was. As I child I liked Maria, but I don’t remember thinking she was all that amazing. Weren’t all moms kind of like that? She very much reminded me of my own mom but with shorter hair and a guitar.

The best comment of the night came when the nuns were singing about Maria at the beginning of the movie and Magoo sat with a disgusted look on his face and said, “Why do they just go on and ON and ON and ON about it?”

We stopped for bed just as the Von Trapp family singers were climbing trees, about 5 minutes pre-firing, about 7 minutes pre-Edelweiss, somewhere near 20 minutes pre-most-romantic-dance-scene-ever.

So far my kids think it’s a happy movie with lots of singing and too many nun parts. But wait. It gets better. Tomorrow we get to finish up with icky romantic love and Nazis. Maybe we should just watch the first half again.

P.S. “Favorite Things” is still not a Christmas song.