The New Old Library

Started off today with three fairy-tale-themed Little Einsteins episodes. "The Glass Slipper Ball" was my favorite of the lot. June wants to go to a ball in a castle in Vienna to try on the glass slipper there...but she has to get there before they close at twelve! June teaches Rocket - and the audience - how to move their bodies in time to the music of the day, Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube Waltz." A school of Andy Warhol fish help them find their way in the Danube River. Rocket's even nice enough to make June a gown for the ball.

Headed for the Oaklyn Library around 11:30. The book on serials I took out a few weeks ago was due, and I wanted to get this week's library volunteering session in. The Storybook Hour was on when I was there. I organized the DVDs while they finished, then turned my attention to the children's books.

To my surprise, the kids' section had been almost completely reorganized. The board books now had their own shelves. Ancient non-fiction books were cleared away; the fiction picture books now spanned both sides of the fiction shelves. Biography, which formerly took up a whole back wall, now only had three shelves. The shelves that held the biographies are empty. An area that was once overflowing, dark, musty, and cluttered looked much better. I organized some books that were in the wrong places, moved one non-fiction picture book to the right shelf, and shifted some series books to the right places.

I had lots to do at home, so I went straight back to my apartment after I was done. It was so nice, I made Lemon-Blueberry Sugar Cookie Squares, an adaptation of Stir-n-Drop Sugar Cookies, one of my favorite recipes from The Betty Crocker Cooky Book. It was gorgeous all day, sunny, warm, and breezy, with absolutely no humidity. I had leftovers for lunch.

Dubbed Three Little Words while the cookies were baking. While this is another MGM Technicolor "biography" in the vein of Words and Music and 'Til the Clouds Roll By, it's refreshingly modest compared to those overstuffed spectacles. Fred Astaire and Red Skelton play 20s and 30s songwriters/screenwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, authors of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding," "Who's Sorry Now?," and "I Wanna Be Loved By You," among others. Vera Ellen and Arlene Dahl are the ladies in their lives. That's about it. The only "guest stars" are Gloria DeHaven (singing "Who's Sorry Now?" and playing her own mother, Mrs. Carter DeHaven) and Debbie Reynolds (singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You" with the voice of the song's originator Helen Kane).

This may be my favorite of the MGM "biographies." Fred Astaire would later call it one of his favorites of his movies. I know so little about the real-life Kalmar and Ruby, I have no idea what's fact or what's fiction here. I do know that I appreciate how this is really just a small, sweet story about two guys, two ladies, and their manager (Keenan Wynn) who want to make music and dance. Astaire and Vera-Ellen have two lovely duets to the pretty ballads "Nevertheless" and "Thinking of You." Red Skelton gets to have fun on the baseball diamond. Dahl is underused, though she does get the closest thing to a big chorus number, "I Love You So Much."

Work was pretty much the same as yesterday - busy during rush hour, dead otherwise. Who wants to go shopping on a gorgeous summer day with no storms threatening? I was in and out fairly quickly.

Dubbed A Day at the Races when I got back in. The Marx Brothers are laying waste to society again, this time at the race tracks. Margaret Dumont is a wealthy but paranoid woman at a failing sanitarium who insists on having Dr. Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho) examine her. The problem is, Hackenbush is a veterinarian. After they find out, Harpo, Groucho, and the sanitarium owner's boyfriend (Allan Jones) rope him into help the horse Jones bought. Will "All God's Chillun Have Rhythm" on the racetrack and in the operating room?

One of the best later-day Marx Brothers films. It's probably best-known for Groucho and Chico's "Tootsie-Frootsie Ice Cream" routine at the race track, but my favorite part is the uproarious finale. Jones and the Brothers do everything they can - and then some - to stall the race while they look for the horse!

(And a warning - there are black stereotypes in the "All God's Chillum Got Rhythm" number that PC-sensitive folks in the audience may find offensive.)