"I can’t count how many messages I’ve received over time about my appearance. Especially that I have ugly teeth and thin hair."

"The fact that I have an ugly 'wart' on my nose and good advice on getting Botox. I’m fine with my body. Such as it is, when you are a woman approaching 50."

Wrote Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who got a text that asked "Do you want to get that little spot on your nose fixed?"

She's quoted in "'I’m Fine With My Body': Danish Leader Responds to Unsolicited Beauty Advice/Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had just returned from Ukraine when she received a message from a plastic surgeon asking if she wanted to fix her nose" (NYT gift link).

The Times makes this a discussion of the pressure on women to meet beauty standards. I think that's an important issue. I'd like to see it tied to the massive celebration of Dolly Parton, who went to an immense amount of trouble to manifest her ideal of highly exaggerated feminine beauty.

But what I want to talk about is the facial phenomenon often called a "wart." First of all, it's not a wart!

"So, in Poor Things, Emma Stone’s character is basically a woman with a child’s brain. And in this particular scene, she’s encountering dance and music for... the first time."

"How did you start to develop this dance? It’s such an interesting concept."

Asks the Slate writer Nadira Goff, in "How Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo’s Delightfully Weird Dance in Poor Things Came Together/Choreographer Constanza Macras on the standout scene, working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and expanding the idea of what dance is."

The choreographer answers: "It’s described in the script as a dance that is really going off because she’s just finding out [about dance]. So, with that in mind, I tried to create. [The director] was not convinced about some things; it looked too much like acting. When we passed it to the actors, then it grew and took shape. Emma Stone also had really good suggestions about her character because she was working, already, on this way that she moves. She brought in locking the knees. That gave shape to this dance as well."

Stone's character is a Frankenstein creation, so we may well compare the dancing to the Frankenstein in "Young Frankenstein":

That Frankenstein monster is able to dance smoothly, but his singing is very rough. That's the joke, and that gets to the question I was googling when I found that Emma Stone dance: Why do dancers always try to look as though what they are doing is very easy (for them) and pure joy (for them) while singers often act as though it's quite difficult and even painful? That's a big difference between singing and dancing, and I don't think it's because singing is more arduous and hurtful. Perhaps it's because the opposite is true, and the dancer must hide his feelings lest the audience turn away. But we don't turn away when a singer displays a horrible struggle and deep pain. We like that. What's our problem?!

I formulated my question after watching Fred Astaire and George Murphy in the first part of "Broadway Melody of 1940" (now streaming on the Criterion Channel). The first musical number is "Don't Monkey With Broadway" (modeling, for future satirists, how 2 men dance together in formalwear while wielding canes):

The men are unhappy with their job. We see them complaining back stage before they stride out beaming with joy — joy that does not exist but that the audience demands.

Come with me, and I will make you fishers of the sun.

I wanted to get the text of the Jesus quote right so I could transform it for the post title. Of course, there are many translations of Matthew 4:19, but the one I wanted was "Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men."

I couldn't find it. Translations that ended with "I will make you fishers of men" began with "Follow me" or "Come ye after me." Translations that began with "Come with me" had clumsy endings: "Come with me! I will teach you how to bring in people instead of fish," "Come with me. The work I will give you will be to catch people,"  and — I am not kidding — "Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass."

The most fascinating part of this research project came at the beginning, when I started to search "Come with me...." Google guessed that I wanted "Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure imagination...."



As long as I'm googling, I search for Willy Wonka is like Jesus. Of course, people have talked about that on the internet. One answer:

Jesus is not like Willy Wonka. Our God is not a God who delights in keeping people in the dark, only to pull the rug out from under them in the last minute and deny them the rewards he promised. He is not a miser looking to withhold blessings on a technicality.

Instead, God delights in saving his people. Jesus says that he “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). That is why he came to earth, to save us from our sins. If he didn’t want to save us, he would not have come in the first place. Jesus is not a cheat. He is not a swindler. He is not an inhumane monster. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"When I listened to 'West Side Story' again, when I read it again, I discovered this very brutal world, a divided world where people search for unity by exclusion of the other—the person who is not like you."

"It seemed as if it were written yesterday," said Ivo van Hove, the director of the new Broadway version of "West Side Story," quoted in "How Ivo Van Hove Remixed West Side Story for the 21st Century" (Vogue). I was reading that this morning because it was discussed in "New Broadway 'West Side Story' to Kick Up a Fuss: No Intermission, Famous Song and Ballet Cut, Video Projections for Sets" (Roger Friedman's Showbiz 311), which is linked at Drudge.

Back to Vogue:

[T]he show will be trimmed to run without an intermission by cutting the “Somewhere” ballet and—gasp—“I Feel Pretty.” The changes have not only been approved by the creators’ estates but, in fact, reflect the original desires of Sondheim, still going strong at 89, who candidly confessed in his 2010 book Finishing the Hat that he had long been uncomfortable with some of the lyrics of the latter song. Van Hove isn’t streamlining to be perverse; the show’s action takes place over 48 hours, and he wants the production to capture that race against time. “I want to make a juggernaut,” he says. “You feel that these people are running toward their death and there’s no escape from it.”

An intermission can serve some good purposes, giving people a chance to discuss the show and share interpretations and maybe compare notes and decide to get the hell out of there and maybe to help each other appreciate what's going on. You know, something like this:



But I like when a show has no intermission. Movies rarely have an intermission, and we are used to plunging straight through the story, keeping the momentum. Recently, I saw a play that had no intermission. It was the George Bernard Shaw play "Man of Destiny" (at the American Players Theater). Running time, an hour and a half. It was great.

But what about cutting "I Feel Pretty"?



Aside from the declaration that she feels "gay," this song and dance strikes me as very of the moment. Maria seems like she's got an Instagram account. Maybe the problem is that the audience isn't going to see Maria as delightfully hopeful and innocent, someone we don't want to see hurt, but a narcissistic fool who deserves a harsh dose of reality.

"You’ve told this amazing story about Gilda, about how she came to your house to observe you and your husband living. What was she trying to learn?"

Michael Schulman asks, interviewing Jane Curtin (in The New Yorker):

CURTIN: She just wanted to see what it was like.

SHULMAN: To be married? To be normal?

CURTIN: Just to live. “What is your day like?” So she came over in the morning, and she sat on the sofa. And we went about our business. She drank coffee. I think she actually walked the dog at one point.

SHULMAN: What did you do?

CURTIN: I did laundry. Patrick was working in the office. We made lunch. It was just a day.

SHULMAN: Do you think she was really that mystified by normal people?

CURTIN: To a certain degree, yeah, because she wanted a relationship so badly, and she didn’t like being alone. But she hadn’t been very successful at it. She just didn’t know how you could be in a relationship with somebody if you didn’t work at it all the time.... She was very much of this world, but she skipped through this world, because her energy was just constant—until she got sick. When she was feeling good, no one felt better, and it was hopeful and funny and fun. It wasn’t a bipolar thing—she didn’t crash. But she could turn it up, and she could sort of temper it. She would tap-dance for hours and hours, just trying to get rid of some of the energy.

Of course, Gilda Radner went on to marry Gene Wilder, and, as Curtin puts it, "She finally found someone that she could be with."

After reading the news in the morning, I'm often surprised, when I go outside, at how warm the cold feels.

It's quite absurd, the hysteria the news media wants us to come down with. About Trump, for sure. I'm not going to talk about that here. But this weather business is truly over the top. I'm reading "‘Bomb cyclone’ to blast East Coast before polar vortex uncorks tremendous cold late this week" in the Washington Post.

"Bomb cyclone" is new to me. I remember when "polar vortex" was new, but it's another terrorizing phrase. "Uncorks" would have been better 3 days ago, with its New Year's Eve evocations, but it's at least a visual image in words that goes along with the graphic, which is bright-colored, hurricanesque whorls over the Atlantic Ocean, right next to the famous cities, the cities that matter — Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.

As for "tremendous cold," that's at least amusingly anticlimactic. What other words did they consider before landing on "tremendous"? "Huge"? Trump ruined "huge." The rapacious glutton gained ownership of it. "Humongous"? Too childish. "Brobdingnagian"? Too schoolmarmish. Colossal, elephantine, enormous, gargantuan, jumbo, mammoth, massive, monstrous, prodigious, super, super-duper,  titanic, tremendous,  walloping, whacking, whopping...?



Speaking of monsters....

First, a monster storm will hammer coastal locations from Georgia to Maine with ice and snow. By Thursday, the exploding storm will, in many ways, resemble a winter hurricane, battering easternmost New England with potentially damaging winds in addition to blinding snow.

I'd like to say the media are turning us into snowflakes, but the one thing snowflakes shouldn't be afraid of is cold.

And how much snow are we talking? Enough to groom the ski trails?

From Norfolk to the Maryland and Delaware beaches, including much of the southern half of the Delmarva Peninsula, 3 to 6 inches of heavy snow are predicted.... To the north, Philadelphia and New York have a better chance for a coating of snow, but — unless the storm edges closer to the coast — the more significant snow should remain to their east from Atlantic City to eastern Long Island, where at least four to six inches could fall late Wednesday to late Thursday.

I'd really like some good snow around here so we could get the cross-country ski trails groomed. Six inches sounds great. Remember when snow was beautiful and fun? Now, everything's a nightmare.

Laurence Tribe calls Trump's misspelling of "Frankenstein" "at least subconsciously antisemitic."

Trump tweeted:

The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps? .....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2017

Lawprof Laurence Tribe tweeted:

Was it an accident that Trump had to override autocorrect to come up with the one distinctively Jewish spelling? Freud would say it was at least subconsciously antisemitic. I’m inclined to agree. https://t.co/hMhUr24EiT

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) November 18, 2017

All right, this has us rereading and highlighting the hilarious, mean, and thought-provoking things Trump crammed into his little tweet. He's got the memorable, powerful nickname for Al Franken, connecting him to the famous monster. Yeah, it's obvious and Franken himself has done it...

... but it's lodged in our head now. And Trump successfully raised an issue that I hadn't thought of, that the photographer would have taken bursts of images and the one we are seeing is the one Franken himself chose to give to Leeann Tweeden to inform her of the prank, so he must have thought he looked rather impishly cute. What about the other pictures?

But let's concentrate on the misspelling. Why would Trump do that? Laurence Tribe is presumably serious when he says he wants us to believe that he thinks Trump thought the "Frankenstien" spelling would convey anti-Semitism. What other reason is there to spell the word wrong? Well, first, there's a simple mistake, perhaps influenced by the "i before e" rule.

Tribe — who must know about Occam's Razor — tries to exclude the simple mistake by stating that "Trump had to override autocorrect," but I opened a compose window in Twitter and typed "Frankenstien" and it did not autocorrect. I tried another "i before e" mistake and wrote "recieve" and it autocorrected, so I know how Twitter autocorrect works, and it doesn't reject "Frankenstien."

So Tribe just sounds ridiculously conspiracy-theory-oriented. Why didn't he test autocorrect before making that assertion? I'm so careful about things like that that I feel the need to say right now that maybe Tribe's Twitter experience, perhaps in a different browser, works differently from mine. And I'm not spreading scurrilous hate by calling somebody anti-Semitic.

I'm so embarrassed for Tribe, dipping into this kind of crap. I wonder where his hands go when he's typing out tweets that he chooses not to publish to the world? This is what he thinks is impishly cute or brilliantly smart or importantly alarming??

And the dumbest part of it is, who thinks of "Frankenstien" as "distinctively Jewish" in a way that "Frankenstein" is not? There are many Jewish names that end in "-stein." If anything, the "-stein" ending might cause me to think Jewish. But of all the names that end in "-stein," the last one I'd think of as Jewish is "Frankenstein." Who thinks of the Frankenstein monster as Jewish? Here's the full text of Mary Shelley's novel, and there isn't one reference to Jews or Jewishiness or Judaism.

But if the subject is on your mind, perhaps you'd get the idea that misspelling the familiar name would be a way to make it seem Jewish, but who thinks about "-stien" as being Jewish? I've never even noticed that name before and have no association with it. I don't think it's familiar enough for Trump to have thought the old e-i switcheroo would trigger something anti-Semitic in his readers. I had to look up the name, and I'm still not seeing it as Jewish. Ancestry.com calls it a "Norwegian: habitational name from any of numerous farmsteads." I looked up my own last name on the same website and got "Americanized form of German and Jewish Althaus," which surprised me, as that was the first time in my life I'd seen the name called Jewish. But that shows that Ancestry.com doesn't hold back from calling a name Jewish.

I can't believe the badness of that Laurence Tribe tweet. Maybe the idea is something like: Trump's bad tweets work for him. Bad is good. You've got to tweet badly.



You're putting me on.

ADDED: If anything here seems anti-Semitic it's jumping to call something "distinctively Jewish."

"It's only with the heart that one can see clearly..."

"I want... I want... I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!"

"I'll do it! By God, I'll do it! I'm Leo Bloom! I'm me! I can do whatever I want! It doesn't matter! I'm Leo Bloom!"

He was Gene Wilder.

Barack Obama's new line: "Yes we can."

The highlight of his speech last night — which got the crowd chanting the refrain. Video. Text:

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea –
Yes. We. Can.

Okay, this strikes me as somewhere between grandiose and cornball. I'm not there in the crowd, where it might have worked very well. But these things are supposed to work on TV and YouTube. I don't want a preacher for President, though — and I know this will sound like a contradiction — I've been excited about the potential for Barack Obama to inspire us and transform us spiritually. But I have a problem with "Yes we can." It means: I can win the Presidency.

That's a very ordinary thing that any candidate wants to say to his supporters, so what makes it deserve this comparison to founding the country, ending slavery, and going to the moon? I've never before noticed that he was saying we ought to make him President so that America can have its first black President. But he seems to be saying that now.

Or maybe he's only saying that he's been inflating people with big hopes and the bad old Clintons have been trying to puncture them and we shouldn't let them.

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds is reminded of this:



But I thought first of this:



But if we're going to talk about children's stuff, there's this:



IN THE COMMENTS: Blue Moon writes:

"Yes we can" = "Si se puede" which was a slogan used by the late Cesar Chavez. "Yes we can" is intended to be code to Hispanic voters and remind them of the United Farm Workers and Chavez's crusade for better wages and better treatment.

Blue Moon cites the upcoming primaries in states with a large proportion of Hispanic voters. Not just Hispanic voters, I'd say, but union members. I see the Chavez theory already enshrined in the Wikipedia article about the slogan:

Sí se puede (Spanish for "Yes, It can be done!") is the motto of the United Farm Workers. In 1972, during Cesar Chavez's 25 day fast in Phoenix, Arizona, he and UFW's co-founder, Dolores Huerta came up with the slogan....

Sí se puede is usually translated in English, colloquially, as "yes, we can." The more literal translation that the United Farm Workers uses is "Yes, It can be done!"

Senator Barack Obama appropriated the English version "Yes, we can!" for his presidential campaign following his second place finish in the 2008 New Hampshire primary.

AND: "Si se puede" was also the chant heard in the huge pro-immigration rallies in 2006:

Organizers said their "national day of action for immigration justice" included events in more than 140 cities in at least 39 states, with drum-banging and flag-waving masses chanting "Si se puede" -- "Yes we can" -- in rallies from coast to coast.

"American Idol" -- paring it down to 12 girls and 12 guys.

There wasn't much singing on tonight's show, though there was a lot of riding up and down a tiny elevator. There was a camera in the elevator, so we saw various contestants spewing emotion from a cramped little space, where each was all alone, except for us millions of Americans who were watching them and occasionally even feeling some real some real emotion. Let's list a few high spots (which don't include the news, which we already knew, that the Brittenum twins have problems that took them out of the competition).

1. Katharine McPhee cracks her knuckles cutely as she waits nervously. She makes it and kisses all three judges on the lips (even though at a later point in the show a contestant reminds herself of the rule that they cannot approach the judges).

2. Ace Young is the new and improved Constantine. We see him singing. He's cute but why must he slur his words like that? There's something smarmy and deficient about him. But he is cute. He makes it.

3. Eugenia Littlejohn. I'm sorry but I'm completely distracted by her reverse French manicure: the tips are painted black. Anyway, she doesn't make it.

4. Robert Bennett, Jr. freaks out in the elevator. He's made it and he's all manic. He reminds me of a comedian that I just can't quite remember. Oh, it's Gene Wilder! Yeah. I remember now. He's not very attractive, but when he gets all emotive like that in his small space, you've just got to love him.

5. Mandisa Hundley, the new and improved Frenchie. She's a large woman, and Simon has insulted her. She says: "I figured that if Jesus could die so that all of my wrongs could be forgiven, I can certainly extend that same grace to you." That moves Simon to say: "I'm just so appalling, aren't I?" She makes it, and as she walks back to the elevator, she says: "Y'all are looking at my bottom while I'm walking out, aren't you?" And, yeah, we are. But we love her. And, damn it, we still love Frenchie, the great lost hope of the show. Remember when we said we'd never watch the show again, because of how they treated Frenchie? But somehow we went back...

6. Lisa Tucker. They're concerned that she's only 16. But so what?

7. David Radford. He's got a bit of a Tom Cruise vibe. He makes it.

8. Sway makes it. Elliot Yamin makes it. Brenna blabs and makes it. Gedeon McKinney is a little arrogant -- "I'm ready for America to see what God has done" -- but he makes it.

9. A new favorite of mine, Stephanie Scott, makes it. She's tall and sweet and classically trained. "I love opera!"

10. Ayla Brown, the basketballer, makes it. Patrick Hall, who's not pretty, but is good, makes it. Kevin Corvais, who's heart-rendingly nerdy, makes it.

11. Paris Bennett, who was so good in the audition, but not all that great in Hollywood -- and knows it! -- makes it.

12. Kelley Pickler, who's good and innocent -- a bit Carrie Underwoodish -- makes it. She might be a bit dumb, because when she's told she made it, she seems as though she can't understand, and then she blabs inanely about her mascara.

13. Taylor Hicks, the guy with the gray hair, pours it on, walking in playing the harmonica. He makes it. Great!

14. They end with two pairs, two women and then two men. In each case, we know there is only one slot. One of the guys is William Makar. You know, my new favorite. Phew! He makes it.

Movies and their books -- especially "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Usually people who've seen the film and read the book think the book is better. But lots of people just see the films and feel that's as close as they need to get to the underlying the book. Here's a piece by Caryn James in the NYT about various movies that overwhelm the books they are based on.

Then there's the special case of the film that overshadows the book, where deficiencies in the original book-to-film transition justify remaking the film to tap the aspects of the book the first film missed. Take "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." James is sure to rile a few fans of the 1971 Gene Wilder movie with this:

The Johnny Depp version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (opening next week) comes from Roald Dahl's children's novel about a boy who inherits Willy Wonka's candy factory. The book is not exactly unknown, but there are plenty of people surprised to learn that it is not called "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" like the creaky 1971 film. It's hard to get past that movie's old-Hollywood musical numbers; what child really likes the song "Candyman"?

I was just reading the recent cover story in Entertainment Weekly on the new Depp film (subscription link) which was somewhat more deferential to the old "Wonka" film, even as it reminded us of the ridiculous Gene Wilder complaints about the remake:

Whether or not 1971's Willy Wonka is a great film, or even a good film, is almost beside the point. Neither commercially nor critically successful at the time of its release, Wilder's film only later snowballed into a sort of camp classic. Now, three decades later, it's become a sugarcoated time capsule for a generation known for its nostalgic sweet tooth. On the set of Charlie, virtually everyone is careful to respectfully sing the praises of Wilder and his film, but that didn't stop Wilder from bad-mouthing the new Charlie, telling London's Daily Telegraph recently: ''It's all about money. It's just some people sitting around thinking 'How can we make some more money?' Why else would you remake Willy Wonka?'' Wilder declined to comment for this article.

Depp says he was taken aback when he heard Wilder's remarks. ''Hearing about that was disappointing,'' he says. ''But I can understand where he's coming from, I guess. The one thing I didn't understand was that apparently he was quoted as saying 'Well, they just did this for money.' Well, hey, man, where have you been? When didn't they ever do anything for money? Nobody's ever made a film in the history of cinema where they weren't expecting some return on their dough.''

Hmmm.... I see Wilder very recently retracted his criticism. Good move. He sounded like an idiot. His film just isn't that good. If the new film is great -- as it should be! -- he can't possibly hope to prevail with his contention that his film is so perfect there's no room for a remake. The fact is the 1971 film is rather crappy. Who are the people who love it? That movie always struck me as intended for the pothead/acidhead audience of the day. Then it became a cult film when those people got older and bought VCRs and needed to entertain their kids.