Fast and Not As Furious As I Should Be

I believe my IQ dropped significantly after Friday night. My husband convinced to see Fast Five, the fifth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise. In truth, it didn't take much persuasion. He even gave me the choice between Pirates and Fast Five, but, alas, I chose the latter. And I'm not even sure why.

Maybe it's because I have (sadly) seen all of the other Fast and Furious movies, and I had some neurotic impulse to complete the cycle. Perhaps I thought if I saw something extremely masculine, Dan would be more likely to take me to Jane Eyre on my birthday in a couple of weeks. Or it could have been some unexplained void that only sweaty versions (and I mean, dripping off the body like molasses) of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the Rock could fill. (There - how do you men like being treated like some objectified piece of meat?)

I was also just plain curious. The film, unlike its predecessors, has been garnering critical acclaim with high scores on both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. (What is the world coming to when a car-racing movie - sequel number five, no less - scores higher than Water for Elephants?)

Vin Diesel was quoted in Time as saying, "I wouldn't be surprised if there is some Oscar talk around this."

Ummm . . . okay.

I don't know that testosterone-laden stare downs qualify a movie as Oscar-worthy.

Every time beefy Vin Diesel donned an especially intense mien and made a comment like, "Change of plans" or "Big mistake," my husband, Dan, would lean over and whisper, "Now that's an Oscar-worthy performance."

Nonetheless, the Fast and Furious movies have always been one of my guilty pleasures as contradictory to my nature as that may seem.

I've never enjoyed such a blatantly sexist set of films in my life. We're talking scantily clad women galore with lots of cleavage . . . and not just in the pectoral region. Even the weapon-wielding token female characters, who are apparently the male characters' equals in toughness, use their sexuality to get the job done. And the ratio of women (supposedly with brains, but that's debatable) to men on the Fast Five crew is about 2:9.

And the line that elicited the most laughs?

"Sexy legs, baby girl. What time do they open?"

The response?

"They open at the same time I pull this trigger (she pulls a gun on him). Want me to open them?"

Throughout my two-hour swashbuckling theater experience, I found myself wondering how much carbon was emitted into the air during the making of this movie. Every time the characters smashed a vehicle through a building or took out a bank or a concrete wall, I thought, "Who is going to clean up that mess?" And this was a source of great anxiety for me during the film because of some irrational fear of mine that I, in fact, would be the one cleaning up everything in the end.

I don't make it a habit to go to movies where the audience members interact with what is happening on screen. But during this flick, there was an outburst of (most definitely male) hoots and hollers every time there was an explosion or a fast-moving car making hairpin turns.

"But did you like the movie?" Dan asked me as we exited the theater.

I said I really enjoyed it, especially the heist story, "But don't tell anyone; it might ruin my reputation as a self-sufficient, chauvinist-hating feminist."

"I did get a little bored during car chase scenes," I added, "but I guess those were to be expected."

"Duh. It's a car movie."



(These are a few of the cars from The Fast and the Furious film franchise. They were on display at Universal Studios in Orlando when we visited in 2004.)

Going Gray (Un)gracefully

Personally, I think thirty-four is too young to start going gray. Unfortunately, the biochemical pigmentation on my scalp does not share this opinion.

I have held off on dying my hair, reluctant to introduce unnecessary chemicals into my system. Or perhaps I have refrained for reasons of vanity, plagued by distant memories of my hair taking on an orange-ish tint when I attempted to dye it once in college. Besides, I am kind of partial to my natural hair color, despite those pesky gray hairs that have appeared in recent years.

To make matters worse, my gray hairs are shorter because when they first started showing up, I plucked them. Now those wiry little suckers stick straight up as though I have a chronic static electricity disorder.

My husband, Dan, enjoys tormenting me about my new hair follicle additions.

“I only see them when I’m standing right over the top of your head," he says to me. "If you weren’t so short, I wouldn't even be able to see them.”

One afternoon, I was having issues with our computer, and (as is my custom) I was blaming Dan, Software Engineer Extraordinaire, for all of the technological problems in the world.

“Watch out. You’re giving yourself more gray hair,” he said, peering at the top of my head.

“You can't possibly see them. I covered them with mascara," I retorted, proud of the quick remedy I had just read in a magazine.

“You didn't cover that one, or that one, or that one, or that one . . .”

Then I chased him around the house, snapping him with a kitchen towel while he laughed in hysteria. He had truly amused himself.

Later that evening, Dan touched the top of my head and said, “Gross. You hair is stiff. It feels like you have mascara in it."

Then he broke out into belly-bouncing laughter again.

Dan caught me checking my hair - specifically the gray hairs protruding from my scalp - in the car mirror one weekend. He snickered.

When I glared at him, he said quickly, “This is a funny song, huh?”

“It's about the death of his father.”

"Oh . . ." Dan pursed his lips sheepishly.

I remember admiring a family friend's newly highlighted hair at a picnic one summer.

"Once I started going gray, I realized it was easier to go light rather than try to stay dark," she told me.

I didn't give much thought to her hair color philosophy until recently. That is probably the reason my husband's hair still seems to so closely resemble his natural color - blond hair hides gray better than brown.

Just you wait, Dan. Your day is coming. Blond doesn't trump gray forever. Of course, as a result of our gender-biased society, you will simply be referred to as a "gracefully aging, distinguished older gentleman."

A Mother's Day Tribute: Mrs. Helen Watkins (1912-2011)

My grandmother died at age 98 on the evening of Tuesday, April 26 right in the midst of the flooding of the Mississippi and the Ohio. While most of the residents in the town of Cairo, Illinois evacuated, I spent the week trying to figure out how to get down there in time for her funeral (either by plane or, if necessary, by boat). I was unsuccessful.

My grandmother stood at about four-foot-eleven; by the end of her life, she was probably closer to four-foot-nine. She never left the house without wearing pumps and pantyhose, even well into her eighties and nineties. She prided herself on looking good for her age.

"Nobody can believe I'm 93," she would say. "Everyone says I don't look a day over 80."

Once, when we were eating at Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston, Missouri, a pretty waitress with a southern twang kept a vigilant eye on our table. We thought it was because of my athletic, early-twenties brother, Steve. But we soon realized, as my grandmother chattered to the waitress about the events of our day, that Steve wasn't the big draw after all.

"Oh, you're soooo cuuute!" the server cooed. Then she turned to us, "Isn't she just soooo cuuute?"

My grandmother never met a stranger. From store clerks, to restaurant servers, to auto mechanics (my grandmother also drove her own car well into her nineties despite her cataracts), she would talk to anyone and everyone as though they were lifelong friends. And people loved her for that.

During one visit to Cairo, Steve and I were waiting for Grandma in the drugstore, passing our time looking at toothbrushes, while she chatted with one of the pharmacists.

All of a sudden, we heard from behind us, "Woo-wee! She still looks good, doesn't she?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see two bent-over elderly gentleman, wearing trucker hats and sitting on folding chairs against the store's side wall.

"She's got to be ninety-something now. Her sister lives over there on Washington. She's almost ninety too. But she still looks good."

"Yeah," the other man answered. "She looks good."

"Helen, that's her name."

I punched my brother on the arm. He had also heard the conversation, and we watched incredulously as one of the men creaked out of his chair and waddled over to Grandma.

"Helen, how are you doing?" he asked, and my grandmother started to tell him all about her grandchildren visiting and how we were going to have dinner at Alice's tonight and how we all lived in Idaho.

Steve and I stared, sharing the same wide-eyed expression.

"I think she's flirting with him," I said, observing the extra flounce in her gait as she made her way to the front of the store.

"Weird . . . "

My grandmother's love of attention probably originated during her Vaudeville days. The Dunn Children (my grandmother, her sister, and her brother) had an act that they performed around the Midwest circuit. Grandma enrolled my mother in dance and piano, hoping to instill in her that same passion for the stage, but my mother soon tired of this. Imagine my grandmother's delight when I was born craving the spotlight.

Any time I played a role in a theater production or an opera or danced or sang in a recital, my grandmother would say, "The papers called the Dunn Children the 'Eighth Wonder of the World.' I think you must be the Ninth Wonder of the World, Becky!"

My grandmother was endearingly quirky, to say the least.

One of my brother's and my favorite home videos of my grandmother is one where she is holding a newborn Steve, shaking a little stuffed duck over his head. She keeps shaking it and shaking it, not getting any sort of reaction from the calm, stoic baby Steve. Pretty soon, she starts bopping him on the forehead with it over and over and gurgling in his face. Steve just lies there, motionless while Grandma has loads of fun bopping him with the stuffed duck.

Grandma was also known for bringing a slight bit of levity to solemn occasions. The Phantom of the Opera had just been released in theaters the month my mother died. After the funeral, my whole family - my brother, father, husband, grandmother, aunts, and uncles - piled into a couple of cars and headed to the movies to relieve some of the tension. My grandmother fell in love with the little, cymbal-clapping, toy monkey in the Phantom film, and she would start clapping like the monkey at random times throughout the rest of her trip. When my family members would laugh and egg her on, she would clap even faster - always the performer - and say, "I just loved that little monkey."

The presents she would send us were always interesting fodder for conversation. In one of her less politically correct moments, she sent Steve a cartoon about a little girl with long, black braids. "It looks like Pocahontas," she explained in a note she had taped to the video.

She shopped in the juniors department and bought two sets of each outfit, one for my mother or me and one for herself. We knew this because she would mail us a photograph of herself the following week, donning her new clothes. Once, she sent me a bright blue and white polka dotted sleeveless body suit with matching leggings trimmed with lace. Surprisingly, we never received a picture of her in that outfit.

My grandmother sent my mother newspaper clippings about once a week. When my mother died, I inherited the duty of newspaper clipping recipient. One such clipping reads, "One (more) for the money: Elvis sellout accelerates." In the margin, my grandmother has scrawled in blue ink, "Your Mom loved Elvis! Ha ha."

My grandmother sent me one thing frequently throughout the years - the sheet music for the song "I'll Fly Away." Starting at the age of twelve, I have received a different choral octavo every few years (usually an arrangement from the collection of the Cairo Baptist Church Choir, of which she was a proud member until entering the care center). At the top of the music, Grandma would write, "I want this song sung at my funeral."

My grandmother sent me an "I'll Fly Away" arrangement only once more after my own mother died. Grandma included a note that read, "I can't stop thinking of what a beautiful Christian she [my mother] was. Know I'll see her someday and probably won't be long." This time at the top of the music, Grandma had written, "My Favorite."

"Some glad morning when this life is o'er, I'll fly away.
To a home on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away."
-- "I'll Fly Away" by Albert E. Brumley