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The official Billy Joel video for "Uptown Girl" is absolute top notch, inventively choreographed, styled beautifully, a star turn by Christie Brinkley; still it pales next to Homer's car dancing here. Those moves can be topped by no one.
Dance Craze: The Double Fist Otis |
This is not Club 8. This is Hannah Spearritt of S Club 7.
You might remember her from Seed of Chucky. |
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The worst was getting a line of dialogue from the 1984 "Commies are Invading Murika!" film Red Dawn so stuck in my head that I came to regard it as sensible life wisdom, missing entirely its B-movie context and terrible delivery.
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I was also at the time fairly convinced that Class of '84 was indisputably the highest achievement in cinema. In this clip from it a young Michael J. Fox may be spotted holding what I believe is his trumpet.
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Costa Rica, 1982: the end of the family
I showed this photo to my dad when he was sick in hospital. He snorted and said, "I was just a kid!" You couldn't have told him that at the time. My dad believed he was uniquely chosen by God, and that he spoke in tongues, the language of angels. He never really understood what all the subsequent kerfuffle over boarding schools was about. His defense was the usual denial |
two-step: just following orders & a few bad apples. Yes, that is a bowl haircut on me: like actually I had a bowl placed over my head. I hated it. Now I just like to pretend that my dad, in one of his personal one-on-ones with the almighty (just yakking angel with the big man, son!), was shown the future, and knew that one day every hipster in the world would want this haircut and was making sure I got in on the ground floor. Solid.
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Don't Mess With A Missionary Man('s Kid) does not have a ring to it "The layers of loss run deep: Friends, community, pets. Family, toys, language. Weather, food, culture. Loss of identity. Loss of a place of comfort, stability, a safe and predictable world. Home.These children are losing the worlds they love, over and over. They cycle through the stages of grief each time they move — or they don’t, and push it down, submerge it, only to have it bubble up later in life, unexplained. The grief of children is often invisible. They are told they will adapt, they are resilient. They are told they’ll get over missing that friend, they’ll get another pet, they’ll have a nicer room in the new house. Their family is rushed; they don’t have time to mourn their losses. And they are children, and don’t know how to express what they are feeling." ("The trouble with third culture kids," Nina Sichel, Children's Mental Health Network) Let me try now to express what I was feeling then: perpetual grief, non-stop mourning that I was forbidden from ever acknowledging, on pain of corporal punishment. I feel like I lost my parents years before they physically died. I grieved them so often and so deeply that soon it became necessary to think of them as dead even while they still lived. Every Alliance church I went to back in Canada was some elder or pastor saying to me tacos, burritos, enchiladas, it must be so hard to choose! The last two years of Regina, after my parents had "heard the call," was a whole heap of Christians I barely knew pumping me up for an exciting adventure, didn't I feel so lucky!? If the C&MA had operated a school in Canada the way they operated overseas, their name would be just underneath Jonestown (and, while we're here "From Jonestown Punch to Viet Cong: Calgary bands and the shock exploitation of others' tragedies" is probably too long for a book title, but good work, people- let's take five). |
First Alliance Church in Calgary is the wealthiest church of any denomination or faith in Canada. You'd be flummoxed too, if you saw the way we were treated. Jesus, at least put some effort into your patronizing small talk: I doubt if you could have found an enchilada anywhere in Chile. But since you asked: my mom's favourite Chilean dish was machas a la parmesana (baked clams), which was introduced to us by our first maid in Chile (we'd had one already in Costa Rica). We had a couple maids who also made a silky pastel de choclo (corn pie, but more of a casserole). Is it weird that my missionary parents sent their children away nine months of the year, and still couldn't find the time between them to do some dishes, mop when it needed mopping, make their own oddly satisfying corn pies? Weird AF, but never fear: when it came time to grill meat, my father wielded all tongs. Chileans grill so much meat over open flame that during the national men's football team glorious World Cup run in 2014 the city of Santiago issued an emergency smog warning in an attempt to curb the celebratory barbecuing. My dad liked to barbecue chicken, skin on, and the more burnt it became the more sauce he applied. The only miracle to which I can bear personal witness is that we all didn't die of salmonella. There was a good decade when my dad's official position on chicken was that the need to cook it well was a politically correct conspiracy: by serving it to us burnt, but medium rare, he was teaching our taste buds to fight secular totalitarianism-one drumstick at a time. Tasty sauce, though-onion heavy. |
The macha is a clam native to Chile: in English it's called pink clam or surf clam. We ate this first in Viña del Mar, where the seafood is best, and where this dish is everywhere and everything. According to the article from which I've taken that picture, the dish was invented in the 1950s by an Italian immigrant named Edoardo Melotti Ferrari. I only got to live in Viña three months total-three weeks at Christmas, and then again two months in the summer, July and August. Which wasn't summer in Viña. Chile is in the southern hemisphere and August in Chile is very cold. Also, because it is not summer, no one else is on summer vacation. All children who are not me and my brother are in school. The beaches are deserted. I don't remember the name of our maid in that house, and I'm sorry about that. What I remember about her is two things: 1) her machas tasted so much better than anything I'd ever eaten, it was like worlds opening up. 2)The whole family was packed into the Peugeot, and we were off on holiday, a road trip. A half hour in and my father realizes he's forgotten something. We turn back. My dad goes into the house. He is gone a long time. A man runs out of the house. He is not my dad, and he is not wearing all of his clothes. He dives under some bushes. Now my dad comes out. That is the end of that maid and those machas. Caught in flagrante delicato. A Chilean girl from a humble neighbourhood has brought sin into his house, which is two-storeys, three bedrooms, on the same street as the Presidential Summer Palace and about to sit empty for the next three nights: savages! Next time I come back to Chile, it's a different house in a different city so I get to go through the whole thing over again one more time.
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Actually three more times. My parents kept feeling the call towards increasingly more affluent neighbourhoods. The machas in Santiago were never nearly as good. In Santiago our house is robbed while we sleep. Our car is hijacked at gun point. The highlight of my dad's time in the country, the story he'll recount a thousand times later, is presiding over a wedding attended by one Augusto Jose Ramon Pinochet Ugarte in full military regalia, a president who has staged a military coup d'etat only six years earlier, and who runs torture centres to make sure crybabies still moaning about the mass executions of artists, journalists, students, and other malingerers don't get too rowdy: I feel like we got about what we had coming. I've also heard machas are actually razorback or razor clams. I don't know if that's the same thing as pink or surf.
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