Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Rainy Day Blues

Ugh. I was up for about 20 minutes this morning, and I hear the phone ring. Yup, it was the Acme. Could I come in at 10? Um, no. It was 9AM. I hadn't even had breakfast or gotten dressed or written in my journal! I finally went in around 11:30.

I was only supposed to stay until 3:30. Much to my surprise, despite the day's perpetual downpour, we were off-and-on busy. Between the weather and this being the middle of the week and the middle of a month that usually isn't that busy, I wasn't expecting the crowds. We were genuinely short on help, too. Many people had called out; a cashier had to be pulled from the front to help stock the shelves, and stock people were pulled to help up front. I heard the one woman dealing with the bakery that she had trouble there, too. She couldn't take calls and decorate cakes and take orders at the same time! One of the women at the customer service desk went home sick.

I ended up staying until 5:30. I don't mind the extra hours. I would have taken them under any circumstances. I do need them. I just wish they'd given me a little more warning. You can't call someone an hour before you want them to come in and automatically expect them to be ready, especially in the morning and when that person doesn't have ready transportation.

I was good and frustrated when I finally made it home. I ran an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, then more public domain cartoons. "The Princess and the Pea" is another comic Hans Christian Anderson story. An unhappy prince (Tom Conti) will only marry a REAL princess. His stuffy mother (Beatrice Straight) wants him to wed either a silly bimbo or a ruthless gold-digger. Prince Richard really prefers talking to the pretty girl who turned up during a rainstorm and claims to be a princess (Liza Minnelli). This girl is hardly the Queen Mother's idea of royalty, and she has a rather novel way of testing this girl's virtue...

In a way, it's a gender-reversed version of "The Princess Who Never Laughed." Here, it's the prince who learns a lesson in having fun and taking a chance from a woman who may or may not be royalty...but does know how to be a friend.

The cartoons on the public domain set just keep getting weirder. Fraidy Cat is a strange mid-70s show about a cat on his 9th life whose other lives "went bad." Whenever he says a number, the other lives appear in ghost form to make things worse. Some of Betty Boop's shorts, even in her later, less sexy incarnation, get pretty odd, too. One has her fleeing to the country to avoid city noise until she's attacked by mosquitoes; in a variation, her puppy Pudgy chases off a cat who was keeping his mistress awake.

Oh, and the rain that had gone on for most of the day was gone by the time I went home. As of now, it's still cloudy but not damp.

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