Baby, Dream Your Dream

Started my day the old-fashioned way - with cereal and milk in front of Saturday morning cartoons. In today's Strawberry Shortcake, Strawberry went on a trip to "Pearis," France to visit her pen pal Crepes Suzette, bringing her beloved pets Pupcake the Dog and Custard the Cat with her. The pets cause quite a commotion when Pupcake wanders off into the streets of Pearis and Custard and Crepes' poodle Eclair go after him. Crepes is no help - she just panics (in a nice spoof of the French tendency towards dramatics). It takes both girls working together to overcome Crepes' freak-outs, find all three pets, and even stop a runaway city bus!

An unusual friendship was also at the heart of today's Care Bears. Wing Nut, the little robot who acts as a gardener/street cleaner and is Oopsy Bear's best friend, was made an "honorary Care Bear" by the rest of the crew. Wing Nut accidentally crashes himself when he tries to get a flower for Share Bear, who has been trying to teach him the fundamentals of being a Care Bear...like sharing. The little lavender bear ends up learning a lesson in her own emotion when her heart-shaped locket is the one thing that could fix Wing Nut...but rather than part with it, she goes to nasty Grizzle the Mechanical Bear and asks for his help. Grizzle programs Wing Nut to capture the Care Bears instead of befriend them, but Share Bear inadvertantly overloads Wing Nut when she reminds him of their friendship. She and Wing Nut finally learns an important lesson - it's not easy to give your heart (or heart locket) to a friend, but in the end, it's worth it.

This was a surprisingly touching episode for Adventures In Care-a-Lot, a sweet cross between Wall-E and Short Circuit. Wing Nut, like Oopsy, often feels out-of-the-loop, making the attention Share Bear gives him all the more important. Grizzle, for his part, is an improvement over previous regular Care Bears villains Professor Cold Heart and Beastly, Shrieky, and No Heart. Though he can be menacing when called on to be, he's generally more of a comic/pathetic character - he lives all alone in a huge old workshop high in the sky and only talks to his wacky robot creations, including one that doesn't talk back.

I ran the usual weekly chores after Care Bears ended. Went to the Acme for this week's grocery shopping. The Acme was as busy as yesterday, but the express line wasn't bad, and I was in and out fairly quickly. The Acme was having a lot of really good sales - 39 cents for Acme and Yoplait yogurt! - that I couldn't resist taking advantage of. After I got home, I put everything away, had a Blueberry Preserves and Peanut Butter Sandwich for lunch, and headed to the bank.

There was still plenty of time left in the day after I finished with the bank's ATM machine. Despite the cloudy, chilly, damp day, I didn't feel like sitting inside for half the afternoon like I did on Thursday. I hiked down to Newton River Park for a walk, then went over to Collingswood and got my hair cut at Haddon Hair Designs across from the thrift shop. The only other customers there were very old ladies, but the owner and her daughters and younger workers were bustling and gossiping and teasing each other, reminding me a great deal of my sisters and mother and I when we all lived together.

A young lady named Stacy did my hair, and she did a beautiful job. It's down to my shoulders, very cute and curly and bouncy. It's a little shorter than I normally keep it, but then again, I like wearing my hair down at this time of year anyway. It feels so much better to finally have all that hair off my shoulders. I love my hair, but it does get really thick.

My next stop was the Friends In Deed Thrift Shop to say "hi" to my friend Erica and see what they had. The place was packed, almost literally elbow to elbow! I was probably lucky to find three records (the original casts of Annie, Sweet Charity, and Subways Are For Sleeping) and two vintage children's books (a Raggedy Ann and Andy picture book and a 1949 Nancy Drew novel, The Clue of the Leaning Chimney). I couldn't get Erica's attention until I went up to the counter with my purchases. She's fine, but her mother's sick and she's taking care of her, which means we won't be doing any dinner or going anywhere together for a while.

I browsed around Collingswood a little while longer after that, but finally decided it was getting late and colder and was just time to head home. I stopped at CVS for eggs on the way back.

The rest of the evening was spent baking cake, making Merlin's Magic Chicken, and watching Hello, Dolly!. Dolly is one of the last of the really big Broadway adaptations of the 60s and early 70s, the uber-musical comedy. The lady in question is a widowed young matchmaker in 1890 New York. She intends to match herself to a "well-known half-a-millionaire" feed store owner in what was then small-town Yonkers, but he's after a pretty milliner in Manhattan. Dolly eventually involves two stock clerks eager for adventure, the millionaire's niece and her very tall artist sweetheart in her plot to win herself a millionaire...and give everyone in Yonkers the adventure of their lives!

Barbara Streisand really was too young to play the widowed Dolly, but she goes to town with the part anyway and has total blast. Michael Crawford is also charming (awkward American accent and all) as the eldest of the two clerks. Gene Kelly's amazing ensemble numbers "Dancing," "Before the Parade Passes By," and "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" makes the most of those huge New York sets and show off Michael Kidd's athletic choreography and Irene Sharaff's gorgeous costumes.