My week in Cinema
I finally found time to watch the A Prairie Home Companion, which I borrowed from Martha about a month ago. It was as good as I had been led to believe. Good, but...

Meryl and Lily didn’t sound like they grew up in Oshkosh. There is a discernible difference between the English as she is spoken in Oshkosh and a few hundred miles to the west in Minnesota. They sounded like they had honed their accents through repeated viewings of Drop Dead Gorgeous and Fargo. Not that repeated viewings of Drop Dead Gorgeous are an unusual concept...(Oh, Yeah, Frida, sure. She was the oldest living Lutheran. Now she's dead as a doornail...) After repeated viewings, I am sure that the “Airport HoJo’s” where the state pageant took place was really the Radisson where we spent our honeymoon. Ya. Sure. You betcha.

If I were the extremely cranky sort I would submit to the imdb a factual error, i.e. people do not turn into angels when they die. I was good with the Dangerous Woman as an angel...up until she revealed how she had once been a living listener of the show. And after death, wouldn’t the penguin joke have made sense to her? She’s working for God, she helps people when the time of transitus comes, yet she still hasn’t absorbed the penguin joke? Just doesn’t make sense. And people don’t become angels.

I have difficulties with willful suspension of disbelief. I know that this suspension is possible. I like musicals, a genre which hinges upon the audiences yielding of their disbelief. And my favorite musical is Brigadoon, which is a serious stretch within its own genre. Did I walk out of The Simpsons Movie last week protesting the likelihood of that plot? No, not at all. Not even for a movie based on a TV show that has jumped the shark so many times that it is living on top of the shark or perhaps has just killed the shark altogether.

Why did I let the ‘angel’ in the white trenchcoat bother me so? The devil is in the details. Which details varies by the viewer. Some people are caught up in continuity errors and have their entertainments ruined by buttons that open and close and shadows and clouds out of place. The Dangerous Lady’s white trenchcoat could have been buttoned differently in every shot and I may not have noticed it, but the angel business was as glaring as the lightbulb in the gaslight in Gone With the Wind.

More details:
...In June, my parish hosted an evening with Fr. Alfred McBride. On top of a thoroughly delightful and edifying lecture, I was tickled to hear Fr. McBride (who now resides near Green Bay) make mention of a “bubbler.” Did I need any more proof that this man had just driven in from eastern Wisconsin? (yes, he was born in Philadelphia and there are pockets of New England which also use this quaint and onomatopoeic term for drinking fountain but I would like to think that he learned it it in Wisconsin.) It was as if he had spoken directly to me in some long forgotten dialect.

...My sister has a ‘new’ black cat named Guy Noir.

...My sister once saw Garrison Keilor in the supermarket. And he looked just like he does on TV.

...BookTV on C-Span carried an address Garrison Keilor gave to the ALA this June. Enchanting. Until my TV went kerflooy. It just won’t stay on any channels between 65 and 95, drifting into ‘picture noise’ and shrill sound that gives me goosebumps. EWTN is 96 and thereby spared. I think this could be a message.