I Gasped

I don’t often find yourself gasping, but I gasped three whole times this past weekend. 

I  gasped  at the big ‘reveal’ four-fifths of the way through Disney’s  Frozen  when we find out that one of the most  benevolent-seeming characters is actually wicked  down to his toes. (And let me pause and say what a charming movie that is, even without Idina Menzel’s  gorgeous full-throated warble as Elsa. The little snowman with his moveable carrot nose alone!) But you’re just not ready for that drop of evil that spreads its stain all over.

 I gasped again when I went Sunday to witness the beauty of the Chinese performance known as Shen Yun which I saw with my friend Lois, as wise, perceptive, and able-bodied a woman in her mid-80s, as she was when I met her 25 years ago. (Hmmmm, in fact, I think she’s even wiser, and more perceptive, come to think of it.)

I gasped when the curtains part and 20 woman dancers are seen – or rather not seen, since they are at first hidden by a rolling mist – as they crouch on the stage floor, holding aloft ivory-colored pink-tipped lengths of silk that they cause to rapidly flutter like flower blossoms in a soft spring breeze. In a twinkling the mist dissipates and they start to dance in the portion of the program called Lotuses in Bloom. In fact everyone gasped. We gasped as one, and 2,000 of us and remembered why it is we go to seek out communal activities such as you have in a theatre.

 And finally I gasped at the restaurant when this little boy….

…who has the same name as my husband his grandfather, opened his mouth wide and threatened to pull out his own loose tooth,.

It sent a chill clear through me to see it, I  weep to see him those baby teeth go, and the soft-skinned curve of cheek as well. Too soon ! Too soon do they lost that look! 

But let us turn to the cheerful theme of NOT hiding your light under a bushel and watch now as Idina-as-Elsa sings this instant classic from Frozen:

Blessed are the Monks in Swimming

It’s not every day you get to feel superior to Idina Menzel but I did for a second when I heard her say on the radio that she went to Hawaii to get married to actor Taye Diggs.

“Yup it was a destiny wedding,” she said and ha HA! I thought; she said it wrong! She meant a destination wedding, the kind where your friends and family have to cough up a couple of grand for hotel and air fare just to see you lurch around drunk on a dance floor. (That’s sure what I did as a child bride. I didn’t even know what a Sloe Gin Fizz was until that day never mind what a bright pink stain it would leave on that fancy white dress now sleeping its charmed sleep on the top shelf of the linen closet, the mummified remains of little Terry Sheehy late of the Drama Club and Special Chorus, the biggest nerd in the nerdbox.)

It didn’t last; the superior feeling I mean. Thirty minutes after hearing Idina make this mistake I was sitting before an industrial bunkbed salesman who was telling me how his company’s wood was so much better than some cheap old crap like oak.

“Oak just sits there for 30 years”, he said.

“Unlike your wood which you can milk?” I said.

Exactly!” he said. “They make these spirally cuts on the bark and out comes…. latex!”

Latex? I thought. All I know about latex I know from that box of slippery gloves the doctor keeps on his shelf to scare us with. I had just been going for the joke, comparing trees to cows.

He thought I was smart. A half-hour before I thought I was smart. The truth is no one is very smart for long; It’s like my little girl used to say in her four-year-old attempt  to recite the Lords’ Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come I will be dumb.”

“You’re tellin’ me!” God says to Himself on hearing that one. Are we sure I’m the one who made you people?”