My girlfriend and I were on the subject of musicals I hadn’t seen after she showed me the second “Mamma Mia” movie for the first time, and the one at the top of the list to watch was “Grease”. But then her mother, who’d been planning a trip across the country to visit her, caught wind of this plan, and she insisted on our waiting for her to watch it together.
And lo! That day came, and the younger brother and grandmother turned out to be there with us too. In addition to the things I already knew I’d absorbed about the film over the years through osmosis, there was even more I was familiar with in one way or another, regardless of its attribution in my head to the movie.
I did not know that it ended with a flying car though. That was a perfect ending, though the mother’s opinion was rather opposite.
Anyway. Worth the wait.
I’ll admit that this year has seen some proliferation of dystopian aesthetics. Prophylactic masks on everyone, shields around cashier desks, and prescribed sitting circles in public parks. Despite that stuff, I’m not much of a dystopic thinker. Even in areas where things are bad, they’re almost never worse than they were. I think believing otherwise leads to a kind of laziness that can hinder progress when it fosters the fallacy that clearing up some supposedly modern problems will revert the world back to some default state of goodness that it’s assumed to have had at some nebulous point in the past.
But nah. Work has to be done to put that state in place, and it’s going to be harder because it will be an entirely new thing.
Have you ever heard someone say that they wish they could just go back to being the person they were in high school?
But then you look at their high school self and think “Uh, yeah. That’s not really an improvement.”
That’s how talk of societal change sounds sometimes. But instead of high school, it’s the 50s or whatever.
Bonus Question!
Best high school?
I went to a bunch, but I graduated from Blythe Academy and had a pretty solid time there. And now I happen to live across the street! At the time it was a commute.