Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! Here are some book and movie recommendations to celebrate some fantastic mom characters!
Terms of Endearment (1983):
Starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson. Directed by James L. Brook, Shirley MacLaine is magical in this as Aurora, and Debra Winger as Emma. They play two personalities that clash constantly but come together as mother-daughter when times become difficult.
Betty by Tiffany McDaniel—I read this book two years ago. It touches on topics such as poverty, violence, and abuse. Betty is one of eight siblings living in a dilapidated farmhouse the town claims is haunted and cursed. Therefore, anyone who lives in it shares those same characteristics as the farmhouse.
Carrie (1976):
Starring Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie and Amy Irving. Carrie is not like your average teenager. She doesn’t make friends easily and has an extremely strict household.
Mommie Dearest:
Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford. I read this book every couple of years. I remember when I first read it, I was taken aback by Christina’s shocking claims. However, reflecting back on what I read and the recent claims that have come out about the book, I still wonder which parts were the truth and which were not.
Baby Boom (1987):
Starring Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard. A few years ago, I was in a bad mood and wanted to slip away and watch a funny movie. I turned on Turner Classic Movies and saw this movie was on. It was such a cute and funny movie about J.C. Watt, who is very career-minded; however, everything stops when she learns she has inherited a baby.
The Exorcist:
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty: Regan and her mother live in Washington, D.C. Her mom is a famous actress currently filming a movie in the area. Everything seems pleasant and wonderful until Regan starts to act weird.
What movies or books do you usually watch during this time?
Nannie Doss had many nicknames: “The Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and the Giggling Granny. She was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama, on November 4, 1905. She had four other siblings and had an abusive and micromanaging kind of father. He often did not want Nannie and her sisters to wear makeup or any revealing clothing because he wanted to deter any men from sexually bothering them. Her father also would never allow them to go to social events such as dancing or socializing with other people outside the family. This made her despise him because he forced Nannie to work on the family farm and not go to school, which caused her to have no formal education.
When Nannie was seven, she was on a family trip to southern Alabama. She hit her head on a metal bar while sitting down on a train when the train made a sudden halt. After that accident, she had various headaches, blackouts, and major depression. Nannie said that this accident served as a significant culprit to her mental state when she killed those people.
Growing up, Nannie Doss enjoyed reading her mom’s romance magazines and fantasizing about her future love life. She was particularly fond of the Lonely Hearts section.
Her first marriage was to her co-worker at the linen factory, Charley Braggs, at 16. They dated for only four months before her father gave them consent to marry. After the two got married, her husband was steadfast in wanting to continue to live with his mother since he was her only child.
Charley Braggs’s mother took up an extreme amount of time and attention. The couple had four children and were utterly dependent on Nannie. This resulted in Nannie constantly drinking and smoking, which became a nasty habit. It created a rift between the two and started the blame game of them having affairs, and Charley Braggs would not come home for days on end.
Tragedy struck in 1927 when two of their daughter died due to food poisoning, which caused Braggs to take their other daughter and run away from Nannie. Only the youngest, named Florine, stayed with Nannie and Braggs mom, but she also shortly died. The couple got divorced in 1928 because Braggs was scared of Nannie.
Nannie remarried in 1929 to Robert Franklin Harrelson and moved to Jacksonville with Melvina and Florine. A few months into their marriage, Nannie discovered that her new husband was an alcoholic and had an assault charge. However, this was her longest marriage on record, 15 years.
In 1943, one of her daughters, Melvina, gave birth to a baby girl. She went to visit her mother shortly after she gave birth. Melvina was heavily tired and groggy due to the fact she was given ether while giving birth. She was not sure, but she thought she saw her mother put a hatpin into her baby’s head. However, when she asked her husband and sister to recall what happened, they said that Nannie had informed them that the baby had died, and they saw that she was holding the hatpin when they were told. The couple had another baby shortly after the death of the first one.
The death of their baby drove Melvina and her husband apart to the point that Melvina was dating a soldier. Nannie did not like the soldier and constantly argued with Melvina about it. While visiting her father, Melvina left Nannie to care for her baby, and the baby ended up deceased on July 7, 1945. The cause of death was asphyxia for an unknown reason. However, this did not stop Nannie from collecting a life insurance claim for $500.00 two months after he was deceased.
In 1945 Harrelson raped Nannie, and the following day she put rat poison in his whiskey jar. Harrelson was deceased by that evening.
Nannie went on to marry another husband, Arlie Lanning. They met while commuting through Lexington, North Carolina, through the Lonely Hearts column. They married three days into their relationship; however, Arlie shared traits similar to those of her previous husbands. He was a womanizer and drank heavily, but Nannie would be MIA for months at a time but still played the dutiful wife when she did come home. So, it was no surprise that Arlie Lanning died of supposed heart failure. In Arlie’s will, he left his house to his sister; however, it burned down under mysterious circumstances, but the insurance money was given to Nannie since it was still considered the couple’s home.
Nannie quickly left North Carolina and went to Arlie’s sister’s place to stay. However, Arlie’s sister became bedridden and promptly died under Nannie’s care.
Nannie was still looking for a husband and married Samuel Doss in June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was a Nazarene minister who did not like his wife’s romance novels and did not allow them in the house. In September of that year, Samuel was in the hospital with symptoms that resembled the flu; however, he was diagnosed with a severe digestive tract infection. On the mend from treatment at the hospital, he was released from them on October 5. Unfortunately, Samuel ended up passing away on October 15, 1954. Nannie killed Samuel to collect two life insurance that she put on him. The doctor who treated him saw a red flag in that and ordered Samuel to have an autopsy. There was a noticeable amount of arsenic found in his body, and finally, Nannie was arrested.
Nannie Doss admitted to killing her mother, her mother-in-law, four husbands, and her grandson. However, it is believed that she may have killed more than what she pleaded guilty to. Her guilty plea was made on May 17, 1955, in the state of Oklahoma, and she was sentenced to life in prison since the death penalty was not an option due to her sex.
She died in 1965 in Oklahoma State Penitentiary from leukemia.
With the new spring season, I am always interested in what books come with it. Here are five books I am looking forward to reading this spring season:
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal. Professor Kathleen DuVal teaches early American and American Indian history at North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is her second book, and this new book discusses how Indigenous Americans made multiple cities way before North America was founded.
Bugsey and Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin. This collection of five stories brings funny and creative tales that break away from your regular reading material.
The Swans of Harlem by Katen Valby concerns five ballerinas from the Dance Theatre of Harlem during the Civil Rights movement. This absorbing book finally tells the stories of endurance, dance, and friendship.
Husbands by Holly Gramazio. Lauren goes to her house one night and sees a lovely, fully decorated home. She is greeted by her fantastic husband. The only problem is that she is not married!
Spring always feels like a new opportunity and a new beginning for me. I guess it is because winter has always been so bitterly cold. When warmer weather comes around, I feel like it’s a new chance to look at things and people differently. This winter was a bunch of twists and turns regarding challenging my personality and limits. I was also able to expand my frame of mind and have met many new people in the process. What does spring mean to you? Comment below!
One of my favorite Sesame Street songs ( mind you, I have tons of them!) is “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon,” sung by Ernie and written by Jeff Moss.
This song was originally part of the “The People in Your Neighborhood ” album from 1980. However, it was part of Sesame Street season 15 on November 28, 1983. We find Ernie expressing his total interest in visiting the moon but not wanting to live there. He also discusses other places he would love to visit, like the ocean, to see all of the fishes of the sea. However, Ernie prefers to just visit those places because he would rather stay with his friends and loved ones and return home.
There are many different versions and interpretations of the song, including a book of the same name released in 2001. Even different languages sing this song, like the one from Plaza Sesamo.
What is your favorite Sesame Street song? Comment below!
“Throughout Simone Leigh’s 2023 exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, several visual motifs and themes within her works kept reappearing. These themes suggested the idea of the black woman as an intertemporal sempiternal being. Leigh created several forms of the black woman that were visually monumental, almost to the point of a commemorative statue that is somewhat modernist in concept. These works visually were heavily inspired by cultural African forms such as the D’mba Headdress, or West African bust (Figure 1). One of the main themes displayed in the exhibition was the idea of the black woman as a nurturing and intellectual vessel or an architectural being through a skeuomorphic lens, with other objects to support this idea. The exhibit had a contemplative atmosphere that helped produce a meditative frame of mind while viewing the works. Many of the works instead of being close to each other, or in a sequential row to be viewed, were instead spaced out, often occupying their own sections of the rooms placed in. This spacing helped give the viewer time to deeply think on what lay in front of them without being overwhelmed, or uninterested because the work in front of them was substantial enough to view on its own (Figure 2).
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The placement of lighting within the exhibit also greatly accentuated the colors and primary features within the works. It helped add to the harmony of the spacing of all the pieces displayed. Leigh presented African sculpture inspired Afrocentric depictions of black women as shelter-like objects, or symbols to be engulfed in or protected by.
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The first piece featured in the beginning of the exhibit titled Cupboard (Figure 3) emulated a voluminous women’s dress. It was massive in stature with a chalk white cowrie shell, a common motif in Leigh’s work, on the top and light brown raffia palms ballooning from below the shell. The physical structure of the sculpture created an image that resembled a shell sitting upon a bell shaped haystack, or even a head peeking out of one.
According to the work’s plaque description (Figure 4),
Leigh “pointed to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which established the hut within a colonial iconography” when creating this piece. Within this exposition, France mounted the hut along with other significant cultural items from different colonized countries to display the vast expanse of cultures France’s imperialism had reached and was then in control of as a form of shared culture immersion and assimilation. In the context of this work by Leigh, she utilized the imagery of the hut to create a sense of “gathering places or dwellings” according to Figure 3. The work signifies a divine energy, which the cowrie shell is often representative of, while also giving a sense of shelter for one to reside in, like a cupboard for a small child or a hut for communal gathering.
The series of three bronze works in the third room of the exhibit titled Vessel (Figure 5), Bisi (Figure 6), and Herm (Figure 7), all continued the idea of the black woman as a structural being.
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All three had a structured architectural elements to them, with Vessel having an Afrocentric asphalt black eyeless female figure with a permed hairstyle similar to that of a stereotypical 1960s housewife, and an exaggeratedly elongated concave torso standing on one right foot. Bisi featured another eyeless female figure in asphalt black, but as an armless bust, cut off at the shoulder with close cut hair. The half below the torso of this work had a semi cylinder shaped like a skirt that is said to be able to enclose “Leigh’s own body” (Hampton, 2023) within it. The last work featured in this series Herm (Figure 7) displays another figure asphalt black female figure, eyeless as well, with their armless torso attached to a pedestal, a small almost scar like slit in the middle, and one slightly bent leg perched out behind them. Of all the three Bisi was the most visually striking of them all however, and resonated with the concept of the black woman as a shelter. The structure of the skirt was built wide and long enough to shelter over a small human being, as if being engulfed in one’s womb. Through this exhibit the idea of intertemporality within art and overall the black woman, and how a modernist view of certain cultural views in art can be translated in a contemporary way was expressed. The architectural formatting of the works evoked a sense of meditation on how in the outside world the black woman should be perceived by those who are not, and highlighted the structural imagery of the essence of a black woman.”
If you would like to learn more about Ambe. Here is the following social media information:
The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, and Janet Landgard, was made in 1968 and directed by Frank Perry. It is one of the few movies that stuck with me after I first watched it. Concerning the dialogue and tone of the film, I always put this movie under the rich gothic category.
The idea for this movie came from a short story from The New Yorker Magazine on July 16, 1964. It was also titled “The Swimmer ” by John William Cheever. Originally, John Cheever wanted to turn the short story into a novel but decided against it, and it ended up being the only work of John Cheever to be adapted into a film.
Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, a tan and buff man who goes around an affluent Connecticut suburb swimming in people’s pools. He dons a dark blue swimsuit and swims through neighbors’ pools, and every time, he walks into acquaintances he once knew. Those acquaintances are shocked, happy, mad, or confused about why he is there.
He pleads with his acquaintances that he must swim through their pools to reach his. Along this journey, he meets an old babysitter, people who gossip about him, and a former lover. This all leads to the sad reality that has become Ned Merril’s life.
Here are some interesting facts about the movie:
Burt Lancaster considered this the best role of his acting career.
Burt Lancaster took extensive swimming lessons from UCLA coach Bob Horn to conquer his fear of water.
George C. Scott, Glenn Ford, and Paul Newman were some of the actors who had turned down this role before Burt Lancaster accepted it.
Burt Lancaster had seventeen pairs of blue swimming trunks similar to his wardrobe for this movie.
Actress and writer Illeana Douglas discusses why she loves this movie from Trailers from Hell:
About ten pools were used in the making of this movie.
This is Joan Rivers’s first acting credit, and it took about seven days to shoot her scene:
The short story that John Cheever wrote was about 12 pages.
The song “Everytime You Go Away” first attracted my attention as a kid. I absorbed everything on MTV for many years by watching every music video and show. The version of this song I heard was sung by Paul Young. It was the middle of the night, and the beginning intro to this song caught my attention. It felt breezy, like someone was about to open their heart and let you inside, only to have the wind carry you back out when the song ended.
What I did not know about this song was that Paul Young sang a cover version in 1985, and the original song was written and made by Daryl Hall. Yes, Daryl Hall from Hall Oates:
This song was on Hall and Oates’s “Voices” album, which came out in 1980. Although both versions have different vibes and feel in their melodies, I fell in love with Paul Young’s version.
“Everytime You Go Away” appeared on Young’s The Secret of Association album, released in 1985. It was one of his well-known songs, and he even sang a duet with George Michael at Live Aid in Wembley Stadium in 1985.
At its peak, the song hit number 4 on the UK Singles Chart in March 1985. The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also won British Video of the Year in 1986 at the Brit Awards. This song is constantly on my music playlist, mainly because it holds memories for me, or maybe it’s just a darn good song.
Well, hello there! My name is Billy Lilly and I am from small town Brandenburg Kentucky. Population: 2,913. There’s a few things of interest in my town: a farm with a silo that has a real tractor placed on top, a pretty good fair,(voted best in the state a time or two) and an old jailhouse turned pizza place that’s supposedly haunted. Outside of that, there aren’t too awful many ways a fellah can get any culture without taking the nearly hour long drive to Louisville.
So, a few years back, I started making my own micro movie theater. I call it LillyLand. Some day when it’s all finished it will seat a modest 18 people. I’ll have it open free to anyone who would like to come for a visit. I’m not interested in making money off it, I would just like to meet some nice folks and maybe make some friends if I’m lucky.
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I get a little lonely sometimes so I watch a lot of movies to keep myself in good company. I just love watching movies. I’ll watch 2 or sometimes 3 or 4 in a day. They are a great escape. I even wrote a little poem about it. It goes like this:
Sittin on the couch
Alone as I can get
Tv set
Tv set me free
Free as a bird
A sedentary, introverted bird
Free as a bird
A big ol couch potato with wings!
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I started out painting pictures of movie stars to hang in the rafters and all around for decoration. I believe there are 100 or so in there currently. Lately, I’ve been teaching myself how to carve. I like making low-relief pictures. I got the idea from looking at ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. I paint mine bright colors and put glitter and sand on them sometimes for extra texture.
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Another thing I’ve been making is these beaded, sorta chandelier kinda, things. I got one that is my homage to Jackie Chan that I call Jackie Chandelier. My favorite one so far is one based on the movie called They Live. It’s a ufo with flashing lights and a tractor beam made of little hubba bubba gum packs. In the movie, Rowdy Roddy Piper plays an unnamed drifter who discovers through special sunglasses that the ruling class are aliens. And one time he spots some of them aliens at a bank and says, “I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” Haha! Classic!
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Well, that’s my progress so far. I thank you for taking the time to read about me and my little theater project. I do hope you’ll stop by sometime. Have a happy day! Love, BiLLY LiLLY
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If you would like to donate any money towards the completion of the theater, please contact me through Direct Message on my Instagram billylillyuniverse
Hairspray premiered on February 26, 1988. The first time I watched Hairspray it was on a Sunday afternoon and it was the Sunday movie on channel 20. I was cleaning my room and wanted to have some background noise so I decided to turn on the TV. This was the first image I saw on the screen:
My first thought was “OMG that hair!!” But then I decided to watch it because it felt so much fun and there was so many interesting dance moves that I automatically became a fan of the film.
Hairspray is one of those movies that stays with you and I have often quote it with friends.
Here are some interesting facts about the movie:
This is director John Waters only PG-rated Film.
Baltimore director John Waters and drag queen extraordinaire Divine, aka Harris Glenn Milstead, share a light moment outside the Senator Theatre at the world premiere of “Hairspray” in 1988. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)
The amazing Rachel Sweet sings the title song: Hairspray:
The great Jerry Stiller who play the role Wilbur Turnblad in the 1988 version of the movie:
Divine stands next to Jerry Stiller in a scene from the film ‘Hairspray’, 1988. (Photo by New Line Cinema/Getty Images)
Plays Mr. Pinky in the 2007 version of the movie:
At first the role of Edna Turnblad was wrote for Christine Jorgenson but when the role of Tracy Turnblad was rewritten. John Waters decided to also rewrite the role of Edna in order to keep Divine in the movie.
This was also Divine’s last movie with John Waters.
John Waters decided to cast Pia Zadora when he saw her in the movie Voyage of the Rock Aliens:
What is your favorite John Waters movie? Comment below!!!
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