Wearin' of the Green

Top o' the evenin' to ye! I started off a sunny St. Patrick's Day with some reading The Colliers Harvest of Holidays anthology only has one piece for the holiday, but it's a lengthy biographical essay on Patrick himself. Also did a short story from the Disney anthology Storybookland based on Darby O'Gill and his first encounter with King Brian of the Little People.

Move on to two Irish-themed cartoons while I ate breakfast. "Wearin' of the Grin" brings Porky Pig to a castle in Ireland, where he dreams that leprechauns think he's after their gold. They force him to wear green shoes that dance forever in a surreal Irish nightmare.

Woody Woodpecker encounters a somewhat more benign member of the wee folk in "His Better Elf." A woodpecker-like leprechaun grants Woody three wishes. Woody wants money, but the bag of gold he finds comes from a bank. He has to escape a stereotypical Irish cop who thinks he stole it.

Wish my Cranberry-Lime Pancakes had come out better. I was out of eggs, but I hoped the lime juice would give them enough lift. Nope. They burned in the pan and fell apart when I tried to turn them over. They tasted ok, but were mostly just a mess.

Did an episode of Moonlighting while I attempted to make breakfast and cleaned up afterwards. Maddie and David go "Somewhere Under the Rainbow" in the second season when a young woman who claims she's a leprechaun asks them to protect her from the men who are after her pot of gold. The two detectives follow her across LA while arguing over the idea of fantasy and believing in the things we can't see.

Headed off to work shortly after the episode ended. It was relatively slow when I arrived. By noon, we were swamped. It hasn't been this busy in over a month. There's a lot of good sales this weekend, this is the closest thing we've had to a holiday weekend since President's Day (and the closest we will have until Easter), and the weather was gorgeous. While it remained windy, the wind wasn't as wild as yesterday, and the sun was warm when you could get in it. Other than the ten minutes I ended up in a register early-on and the fifteen minutes I spent doing full trash and recycling bins, I spent almost the entire day rounding up carts that kept vanishing, often with little or no help.

I'd thrown together beef cubes, chopped cabbage, and sliced potatoes and thrown them in my Crock Pot for Beef and Cabbage Stew, which I had for dinner when I got home. Not bad. Might add a little more seasoning if I ever do this again. Watched one of the stranger third-season episodes of Wonder Woman while I ate. Dave and Maddie aren't the only detectives who have a strange encounter with a human version of a leprechaun. In "Pot of Gold," Diana has to help an Irish shoemaker keep the pot out of the hands of a British gangster, who wants to exchange it for counterfeiting plates that are needed by a local mob group.

Worked a little bit on writing after dinner. I was so tired, I basically just re-wrote the sequence with Rudy and Charlie sneaking onto a garbage truck. I made it a furniture-hauling truck that had its doors open in stead...a truck driven by one Luke Weston, a college student who works for his Uncle Owen, making deliveries and selling furniture. He's more interested in the comics and sci-fi books he reads than in his job. He wishes he'd find a life as exciting as that of his comics heroes. Little does he know that there's a sci-fi plot among the chairs and couches in the truck behind him...

Finished the night online with The Quiet Man. Former boxer Sean Thornton (John Wayne) has come home to Inisfree, Ireland from the US. He buys the cottage where his family had lived for years off the wealthy Widow Tilane (Mildred Natwick), hoping to settle down. He falls for strong-willed Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara), but her brother Will (Victor MacLaghlen) wanted the cottage for himself and disapproves of the match at first. Sean and the local matchmaker (Barry Fitzgerald) trick Will into thinking Tilane wants to marry him in order for Kate and Sean to court and get married. When he figures out what's going on, Will won't let Kate have her dowry or her family furnishings. Sean doesn't get what she's fussing over, but Kate wants her family's heirlooms and their sense of history. They do manage to get the heirlooms, but not the money. Fed up with Sean's unwillingness to confront her brother, Kate decides to leave...only for Sean to stop her and finally confront her brother, leading to a knock-down, drag-out donnybrook that not only ends up involving all of Innisfree, but half of Ireland as well!

John Ford's love letter to the land of his birth is a wonderful comedy-drama on how one American views Irish society in the 20's. The glowing cinematography, mostly of the real Ireland, won a deserved Oscar; Ford got his fourth Oscar for best director as well. Wayne and O'Hara are fine as the spirited lovers; MacLaghlen got a Supporting Actor nod as Kate's bully of a brother.

If you're a fan of Ford or the cast, you'll want to head on over to Inisfree and check this one out.