I still have quite a lot of content from this last weekend’s Festival of Nations, so I’ll subject you dear reader to one more day of it. Anne snapped the preceding picture of the three Indian Princesses. They were posing for their mothers in their changing tent.
As an aside I heard this joke about blogging on NPR this last weekend:
We all remember the old saw that if you had millions of monkeys and if each monkey had a typewriter, then given enough time, you could probably have them create the complete works of William Shakespeare. Now we have the Internet and now we know that this story is not true.
The preceding picture and the picture to the left show a Saint Louis Scotsman reenacting the process of how medieval Scotsmen once got dressed. Back in the day, Scotsmen did not have khaki shorts, but this little discrepancy kept the police at bay.
Apparently, medieval Scots did not have sewn down pleats in their kilts. This was added later. What a Scotsman had was a single rectangular piece of wool cloth. He also had a leather belt. Laying the cloth on the ground, with the belt underneath, he would first fold it. Then instead of smoothing it flat he would pleat it on the ground.
Lying on top of the cloth, grabbing the belt, he would roll the garment around him and then stand up. Fastening the belt, one edge of the pleated kilt would be tucked into it and the rest folded over the belt and thus hiding the belt. Arranging the pleats and throwing one end of the cloth over his shoulder, he would be the very picture of a well dressed Scotsman.
On last Friday night, Anne and I watched the movie Sunshine Cleaning. It just came out on DVD last week. Sunshine Cleaning was produced by the same producing team that brought us that gem of a movie, Little Miss Sunshine. Although Sunshine Cleaning did well at it’s Sundance opening it was not without some grumbling from critics about it’s so called “sequel nature”.
I’ve seen both movies. Here are the similarities as I see them. They both have sunshine in their titles. They both have Alan Arkin playing the same role, that of the eccentric grandfather of a dysfunctional family and they both have the same producers upon which scorn could be heaped. Other then these points, they are different movies in my mind.
In addition to Alan Arkin, the movie stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as daughters and sisters in this family. Adams, the principal actor, is a single mom and has a sweet but sometimes problematic son. Emily Blunt, who played the character Emily in the Devil Wears Prada, plays Adams younger, druggie sister. Together the two sisters form Sunshine Cleaning, a crime scene cleanup service. Moving from Rent-a-Maid to crime scene cleaning, the two sisters quickly find themselves out of their depth. But with the help of a cleaning supply shop’s proprietor, who generously lends them a hand, they mange to transform what could have been tragedy to bittersweet.
I’ll leave you with one last photo from the international festival. This one is from the first act we saw on Saturday, the African Dancers. As I have mentioned before their dance was very energetic. This made for great performance art, but it also made them difficult to photograph. My digital camera just couldn’t keep up.
