Ashley Alley

The Kellerman’s Song, Layers in Bed, Orbach and I/Me?

When it comes to eighties movies, I’m not as solid on Dirty Dancing as I am on Fletch, but I watched it recently with my children, because what I remembered about it as I flipped through OnDemand Family Movies was the Kellerman’s song, and I had definitely forgotten how much of the plot hinges on back alley abortion. I think the rating is only PG-13, whatever that means, but my eight-year-old felt it should have been R. When I asked him why, he explained it was because a boy and a girl were in bed together “totally naked” (though this is implied) and the staff kids are dancing together in a way that suggests “they must be in love with each other.”

In the last scene, when Baby finally nails the lift and regains her father’s approval, I can identify with Jerry Orbach for a moment—in part because I too am a doctor,* but also he decides to admit his huge, cruel mistake only because he’s feeling powerful and energetic, and he’s in a crowded room where no one is paying attention to him. “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong,” he tells Johnny, and I bet he actually believes himself when he says it. I’m wrong all the [darn] time–I went ahead and edited my language so Christine won’t have to do it in her Facebook comment—but whenever I realize it, I tend to have these tedious internal conversations about it, more or less on the level of pairing wine with food. Then, as with food and wine, I eventually realize I am either too uninformed or too tired to pursue the matter. I would like to think if I had misjudged Johnny and Robbie, and hadn’t had too much Pinot Noir or Gewürztraminer–depending on the dish–to articulate my mistake, I would have done the same thing.

Once in a while, though, I fixate on something trivial–I may have bored or offended someone at dinner the night before, or blogged ungrammatically. I might start thinking about one of my mistakes on a long drive, and Brad might ask, “Watcha thinking about?” “Nothing,” I might say, since I know husbands like this answer better than anything very complicated. (“What I’m planning to cook later” is also acceptable.) I had a thing like that happen on the way back from the Rochester camp bus drop-off yesterday. Some time ago, in a post about establishing intellectual authority over one’s children—a pursuit I will have to abandon after the Dirty Dancing debacle, I used an abbreviation for the word microphone. I started with “mike” but I didn’t care for its informal, un-capitalized look, so I changed my spelling to “mic.” That looked better and more familiar to me, but I had no idea which spelling was correct. I’m chagrined that this preference puts me at odds with Ben Yagoda, and aligns me with layers in bed who are not blankets, but like me, the “c” spelling is rooted in hip-hop. So maybe there’s no mistake after all.

*pretend

Vampire Novels, Grover Cleveland, Misunderstandings

One Christmas—one which I will place after the birth of our first child because I didn’t make all my cards by hand with thousands of tiny hand-painted hole-punches and a glue stick, but before the birth of our second, because I wasn’t yet sending around a cynical Family Christmas Letter–I bought a bunch of very pretty Christmas cards that turned out not to be Blank Inside. “Especially at Christmas, it’s always nice to think of you,” the cards read. Before they had been translated from the original language, the sentiment might have brought a tear to my eye. Unless it was Russian—then I wouldn’t have understood, since Ashley Alley only ever taught me to say “one of my breasts hurts.” One hopes—okay, I am the one hoping this—that being understood all the time isn’t the most important thing. For instance, I spent a very long time trying to memorize John 3:16 in Spanish one time from the Gideon Bible in my hotel room, and everyone thought I was talking about using an airplane seat to polish my spittoon. Unless I’m confusing several other useful Spanish phrases. Apologies to Jill, Billy, Samia, Anne, and any other Spanish language mentors I may be leaving out.

English is my Muttersprache, and even in this I think I tend to wander a bit, which is why I was so relieved to hear from a wise and reliable person that the author Stephen King–whose writing on writing, my reliable anonymous source and I agreed, is much less scary than his novels–has promised being misunderstood is okay. It is also a fine segue to the next thing I wanted to discuss, which is the book I haven’t quite finished reading, The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates. Stephen King reviewed it for The New York Times, but I will have a different emphasis, and a more curated readership.

I suppose I could have waited until I was finished with it to review this book, but I’m anxious to be known as a person who has a book in the hand that does not have a drink in it, or in the hand that is not putting the drink down for a moment, on a coaster, and tousling a child’s hair to soothe that child, or, more likely, to replace an unruly lock. There—now that I’ve used a word like lock, you will know that I am not making up the thing about reading a book. On second thought, I don’t think I’m going to write an entire review. You can read Stephen King’s review, if you enjoy spoilers, but I think I’d prefer you were surprised. Here is a taste: Woodrow Wilson has a stomach pump and despises Grover Cleveland, whose wife is a glamor puss! Anyone might be a vampire. Upton Sinclair is trying to join forces with Jack London. Why? Talk about a meat-eater! If you have finished this book, shhh! Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei.