The Magical World of Cinema
Lately, the hottest movie in this house is Cinderella. Madalyn calls it Rah-rah, and Evan asked me if the prince was Jesus and if the fairy godmother was Mary. (She is draped in a blue cloak.) The other day they lay on Evan's bed side by side on their stomachs, elbows propped, with their chins cupped in the palms of their hands. It didn't last long, but man were those 5 seconds of Kodak-ready perfection.
Second to Rah-rah would probably be the movie-choice Madalyn passionately refers to as Fugger! (Only the "g" is really pronounced as a strong "ck" sound which makes sense when you discover the real name of what she's spouting out in this backwards, dyslexic fashion.) Should I even admit how many laughs have been shared and savored over this one... how many times we've prompted her to say it and clutched our stomachs in pain. And we're not total middle schoolers- part of it is just her voice and inflection. (We'll have to catch a clip of it soon.)
In line after these selections would be Finding Nemo; Madalyn's "Dawdy" interpretating to be the character Dory, and main character, Nemo is "Eh-mo." Whenever it ends she says, "Bye bye, Dawdy. Bye bye Ehmo. Bye bye wawduh. Bye bye fish."
Evan and I had a long, long, long talk about this particular flick that began by him asking if Dory was Nemo's mommy. Feeling oddly defensive of the cartoon character, I wanted to be sure the mommy wasn't percevied to be the dingbat Dory, but rather the tender and intelligent Clown Fish at the beginning. In other words, I set a trap and stepped right into it because then he wanted to know what happened to Nemo's mommy at the beginning, which,though left somewhat vague, was portrayed as her being consumed by a larger member of the food chain along with all her offspring except for Nemo.
Now I tried to think of a creative and happy answer to his question, but everything I came up with would make the cartoon mother out to be a dead-beat mom who abandoned the parenting scene for a livelier reef. Every alternate explanation left me staring at the truth; "a shark ate her," I finally said. (I know, I know- you can't believe I told him that, but sometimes you wind up in these situations when a toddler probes at you; where your brain just sort of liquefies and oozes out your mouth with some raw and morbid response.)
Anyway, naturally this led him to then ask "Well is a shark going to eat you?"
I wanted to say, "If one does, I'll be sure to live in its belly like Jonah from the sheer guilt of this conversation till it spits me out and gives me up to be good for my word, I swear it..."
But instead we talked about how fish don't really talk or have feelings, how it was just a movie... but then he asked if sharks live in the ocean where we swim. "No, no, they're out at sea- far, far, far out- away from where we swim," I insisted, wiping the media-driven Summer of Shark Attacks far from a few years ago far from my mind.
He wanted to know why Nemo touched the boat... was he looking for his mommy? Did he know what happened to his mommy? I tried to turn this one to my advantage in saying Nemo didn't obey his daddy when he told him to stay near him and not run off and so somebody took him.
Then we continued to talk until Evan came up with his own satisfying solution to the vague disappearance of the mother Clown Fish; she was probably lost and Nemo and the daddy would look for her at the end, after they found each other... the answer I probably should've given at the beginning; "The mommy was just scatter-brained like Dory and got herself all lost and the daddy would have to find her after he rescued Nemo."
Or in other words; "Yes, the mommy is just a ditz... and anything else that's self-abasing to me as long as you hear Butterflies and ice cream and balloons and happy endings... and never, never depravity or darkness..."
My grandmother doesn't read the newspaper or watch the news, I won't talk about missing people and regret it if I hear much about them, nor do I watch so much as the previews for C.S.I., and by golly, Evan won't accept the death of Nemo's mother. Why should he? Denial-schmile. What about Philippians 4: 8? In light of that, who can blame him?
Who can blame any of us for loving Cinderella and big red dogs and all things lovely and soft? For insisting on happy endings? These things whisper of a Romance and Reality to come that will be far deeper and far more tangible than anything we've yet known. So dream on, Evan. You and Madalyn both- keep dreaming.
