I'm All Right

I'm glad I got out early for my weekly farm market/yard sale run. Today was a hot one. While still not humid, the breeze that had made the last few days so tolerable had died down. It wasn't so bad this morning when I started out. Made a quick stop at the bank to deposit this week's (much-needed) paycheck. The bank was dead, but they'd just opened.

The farm market, on the other hand, was bustling with people buying food for their Father's Day barbecues and graduation parties. I didn't need nearly as much as last week. I restocked my celery and bought blueberries, radishes, cherries, an ear of the first New Jersey corn of the season, and grapefruit and apples from the wholesaler. I also stopped and bought a bottle of water and a soft pretzel from a booth raising funds for a local marathon.

I'm glad I bought the water. I spent the next hour riding around, looking for yard sales. There weren't any in Collingswood this week (they were all out last week), but I did encounter a few near-by in Oaklyn. I found two of the Disney 80s Cartoon Classics tapes, Mickey and the Gang and the "Special Edition" Happy Summer Days, and Maroon 5 and Three Doors Down CDs at one yard sale on Landis. Picked up the soundtracks for the first two Shrek films at a sale on Kendall. I also checked out one on the end of Manor near the hill that goes into Audubon, but I had no luck there.

After I got home, I watched the Disney videos and ate tuna salad, blueberries, peas, and cherries for lunch. When lunch and the videos were over, I rounded up a stack of books I wanted to get rid of and headed to the Oaklyn Library for their Spring Book Swap Party.

(Among the books I got rid of were the Ethan Mordden history of musicals series. I'm tired of my inner critics...and I've kind of had my fill of ones outside of me, too. Many of the people who write about musicals often come off as pretentious snobs, and I've had enough of that. I've learned all I can from those books. If nothing else, I freed up enough room in one of the crates in the music section to move some of the records that were overflowing in the dark brown crates to under the lamp next to the big chair with all the WebKinz.)

I was late getting to the Book Swap Party. It seems to have mostly been set up for Oaklyn's volunteers..ie, families with young children and old people. There were raffles for cakes and home-made blankets and Father's Day baskets and arts-and-crafts and face painting tables for the kids. There was also food, but everything but the bread and the banana pudding was gone by the time I got to the Library.

I spent an hour digging around the boxes and piles of books everyone had brought and that had been brought in from the library's book sales. I ended up with two videos of rarely seen operettas, the 1938 bio-pic The Great Waltz and the 1952 version of the 20s hit The Desert Song. I also grabbed the kids' book The Phantom Tollbooth, which many older friends have often recommended.

When I got home, I debated going back out for a swim, but I really didn't feel like hiking around in the heat again. I puttered around online and finished editing our Monkees role-play for a while (it'll be up later tonight), then spent the rest of the afternoon watching my finds and crocheting.

The Desert Song is Warner's third adaptation of the wildly popular 1926 operetta. It's about as prototypical of an operetta as you can get. A dashing desert chieftain who leads the Riffs of the Sahara Desert to victory against the French and an evil sultan is in reality a gentle young anthropologist who loves the people of the deserts and abhors fighting. He's trying to get the new General in command of the French to listen to his views on the hypocritical sultan, who has stolen the French army's guns and blames it on the Riffs, but he can't get through...until the General's beautiful, willful daughter arrives from Paris. She wants adventure, and El Khovar is ready to give it to her, and more...

It's The Scarlet Pimpernel in the desert, and as such, isn't bad. To be honest, the hoary melodrama was dated in the 50s, much less now. Kathryn Grayson does fine with the spirited Margot, but Gordon MacRae is too stiff for the passionate desert leader. If you love Superman/Scarlet Pimpernel stories as much as I do, you'll probably get a kick out of it if you ever run into it on TCM. (Alas, to my knowledge, neither it nor the previous 1929 and 1943 versions of The Desert Song are on DVD at press time.)

Caddyshack is just as typical of an 80s comedy as Desert Song is a 20's operetta. Stop me if this sounds familiar - a group of awkward misfits and a couple of loony adults (lead by the obnoxious but almost sort of lovable Rodney Dangerfield) raid an elite country club owned by a very snobby Judge Smalls (Ted Knight). One of the caddies at the club is hoping to win a scholarship and cozies up to the judge and his very attractive niece. Meanwhile, the insane assistant groundskeeper wages an ongoing war with an intelligent groundhog that comes to a literally explosive conclusion at a golf tournament in the finale.

It's as dated as Desert Song, but in a different way. Nothing makes any sense, Chevy Chase's playboy character is laid-back to the point of non-existence (especially in the second half), and the plot is mostly just a series of skits vaguely related to the "snobs vs slobs" theme of so many 80s comedies.

On the other hand, there is still some comic gold to be mined here. Chase has some funny moments on the field early on. Dangerfield and Knight's various attempts to get to each other's goats are hysterical. And then there's Bill Murray's loony groundskeeper, who seems to belong to another movie entirely. And of course, the infamous dancing groundhog. Not my favorite 80s comedy, but it's enjoyable if you're a fan of any of the comedians involved. There's also some great music that includes the smash hit Kenny Loggins song "I'm All Right."