May 3, 2024: Simmons Island Marina in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Another Week: Number 71
There’s a certain bird species that visits my backyard every spring — the White-crowned Sparrow. It looks just like all the other sparrows except that is has stark white and black stripes on its head from front to back.
Because the stripes remind me of a cycling helmet, I have traditionally called these birds “helmet-heads.” They show up, hang around for a week or so, and then apparently fly north to breed. While they’re here, they try to nonchalantly fit in with their fellow sparrows, but you can see the regulars glancing at the helmets and thinking, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I had been wondering about them, then finally spotted one rummaging around under the Red Twig Dogwood on Monday. Thursday, a helmet-head was making small talk with other sparrows in our birdbath.
Continuously steering my mind away from the past, I have looked optimistically to the warmer months. Now they have arrived. There were two days this week of perfect, windows-open-all-day weather. The challenge will be keeping up with it and not getting steamrolled.
The Kentucky Derby was held on Saturday. My interest in the event peaked when I read “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” in my teens, but my mom and my sisters use it as an annual excuse to touch base, so I played along during our weekly dinner-and-a-movie night. Mom studied the field on my phone and chose Sierra Leone because she liked the sound of his name. She had not heard of the African nation.
Between rain, weeding, mowing, work, and so on, I only got one dedicated walk in this week — my 3.49-mile, one-hour loop around Kenosha’s lakeshore and downtown.
On the home stretch, I encountered the same jokester with his walker who first engaged me on the Ides of March. This time, he asked me what was black and white and red all over. I lamely guessed “the newspaper,” but he informed me that that was the old answer.
The new answer is “a skunk in a blender.”
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STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces
On Thursday of last week and Thursday of this week, my mom, my sister Karen, and I watched
Morgan Neville‘s new, two-part, Apple TV+ documentary on Steve Martin. It’s a mixed bag.
The first part chronicles Martin’s long, tortuous climb from a Disneyland magic shop to the pinnacle of standup comedy, with him eventually selling out entire stadiums in his mid-thirties. Among his impediments: He’s a diffident guy who received no emotional support from his dad, and he tries to arrive at funny via analytics. He engineers gags like they’re gadgets, takes extensive notes on audience reactions, recalibrates his bits, and painstakingly tinkers his way to the top. He’s kept all the notes, and we get to see some of them.
So in part one, Martin is admirable — both for his persistence and his humble openness. It’s a fairly inspiring story.
But then in 1981, he quit standup comedy. Part two encompasses everything since then — movies, plays, art collecting, marriages, a child, his comedy shows with Martin Short, and some banjo playing.
This second part is a sloppy mess. A few movies get touched on — The Jerk was well-received, Pennies From Heaven was not — but most of his 50-some movies are disregarded like some sort of phase he went through. The banjo comes out, but it’s not considered seriously. His Hulu series is briefly mentioned and we see Selena Gomez for a second.
Instead, we get Steve Martin seated at a table for some pointless discussion with the ever-pretentious Jerry Seinfeld, plus a ton of behind-the-scenes comedy writing and poached egg cooking and card playing with Martin Short. It reminds me of last year’s Smartless: On the Road series which assumed that celebrities sitting in chairs or eating salads would automatically be captivating.
Martin’s wife Anne Stringfield does offer some worthwhile insights, but mostly part two is a letdown.
Sergeant York (1941)
On Saturday evening, my mom’s affection for Sergeant York was surfacing, as it does from time to time.
“Did you ever see Sergeant York?” she asked, as we started to eat dinner.
Yes, I think so — but she clearly wanted to watch it, so I googled and there it was on Tubi. We live in an amazing age, and I can only imagine how the VHS rental stores must be suffering.
Sergeant York is the true story of Alvin York, starring Gary Cooper in the title role. York is a poor hillbilly in rural Tennessee with a love of drinking and a talent for shooting. Eventually, with the firm guidance of a local pastor played by Walter Brennan, York sobers up and applies himself to hard work, hoping to buy a parcel of fertile bottomland.
Later still, York gets drafted into World War I, where his marksmanship is soon recognized — but war also poses a conflict with his religious beliefs.
All of this — hillbilly life, the old-time religion, patriotism — is heavily salted with hokeyness.
But Sergeant York is nevertheless the true story of an American war hero — released in 1941, just before America entered World War II — and my mom remembers her dad and brother’s reactions to the film at that time, and Tubi went very light on the commercial breaks.
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