also: explain the evolutionary advantage of this worrying thing (use both sides of the paper).
"President Clinton permitted himself to put pressure on Russia. It seems he has for a minute forgotten that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons."
To what "pressure" was President Yeltsin responding? (And in a really, really childish way, I'd like to point out.)
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Back when I moved down to Los Angeles to attend USC, Stephen King was publishing the installments of The Green Mile. Darin would buy them and save them for the next time I flew up north or he flew down to see me. Darin, who is famous for misplacing things, always knew where the latest installment was. Both of us agreed that having a structured setup helped King's writing immensely: he couldn't go off on 200-page tangents, he had to stick with the story.
It's a pretty good story, very much up King's alley: good meets evil, moral choices have to be made, and miracles happen on the death row block in a Louisiana prison, circa 1935. John Coffey, a giant black retarded man, is sentenced to death for the murder of two little girls. Paul Edgecombe, the head guard on death row, comes to believe that Coffey couldn't have done it, not only because Coffey is gentle and sweet, but because Coffey has an awesome power--he can heal severe illness and even bring the dead back to life. (As others have pointed out, note Coffey's initials. Stephen King has all the subtlety of, say, Sam Raimi.)
Knowing what he does about Coffey and his powers puts Edgecombe in a difficult position, to say the least. And Coffey isn't the only problem they've got down on death row: there's the sadistic wuss prison guard Percy Wetmore, nephew of the governor's wife, the psychopath Wild Bill, and the antics of the preternaturally intelligent mouse Mr. Jingles. And King manages to tie all of these threads together, which was a neat trick, because he swore that he didn't have the story planned out when he started--he made it up as he went along. On the other hand, the man is a trained professional.
Frank Darabont, who adapted "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" into The Shawshank Redemption, adapted The Green Mile for the movies, thereby capturing for himself the title of "Best Adapter of Stephen King Prison Stories." Okay, not an original joke. Tom Hanks does what he does best: he plays Paul Edgecombe, surely the most decent prison guard to serve anywhere, in any time, let alone Depression-era Louisiana. (It's really best if you don't look to the movie for historical accuracy...or good accents.) Michael Duncan plays John Coffey--he's not really as huge as he appears, if you watch the camerawork. David Morse is great as Hanks' best bud on the death row beat, Brutus, and Doug Hutchison surely earns a place in hell as Percy Wetmore.
You might have heard the movie is slow. It is. But, as Darin put it, it's a much shorter three hours than Titanic. And several orders of magnitude faster than the interminable Meet Joe Black. I wasn't bothered by the length of the movie, which I was afraid I would be, given my, uh, problems these days. (During the Thanksgiving week episode of Law and Order I went to the bathroom 5 times.)
The movie is so long in order to build the mood and tone--watch how Darabont captures everyone's reactions to events. How moments that should take 10 seconds in reality are several minutes. If the movie concentrated solely on spitting out the events of the plot, it probably could have made two hours easy. But there would be no impact at the end. Compare and contrast Michael Bay's style of moviemaking--Bay's movies sure feel a lot faster and lot more energetic, but you couldn't give a good goddamn about anyone in them.
I found the movie really effective. I got invested in the characters--Percy's casual viciousness provoked adrenaline responses in me, as the pathos surrounding John Coffey--particularly at the end--appropriately tugged at my heartstrings. I didn't cry, but I cry very rarely at movies. I was thisclose, though. I recommend seeing The Green Mile, if only to see a movie in which the story is king, but not to the detriment of everything else--there are good characters and an actual directorial style.
The movie has possibly the worst poster I've seen in a while, worse even than the atrocious one for Random Hearts. A very waxy-looking Tom Hanks glancing up at some bright light. Clearly they had no idea how to sell this movie other than, "We've got Tom Hanks!"
My sister puts a picture of my niece Madeline on the web every day for friends and family to peruse. (No, I'm not including a link; I haven't asked my sister if it's okay and frankly, I don't want you tacky people looking at my niece.) I check out how Madeline's doing every day. She's really cute. She's a totally cute baby.
I, of course, react to this with: what if I don't have a cute baby?
Just one of those worries. I worry about the other things too: what if there's something medically wrong with my baby, what if something goes horribly wrong when I'm in labor, what if, what if... You can't help it. You get poked and prodded and measured and tested every 3 to 4 weeks and you're sure that one of these tests is going to come back with a big Uh Oh attached to it.
Just today I got word that I passed the gestational diabetes test okay; however, I turned up anemic. What does it mean? Well, for one thing, it means I have to start taking iron pills, as if I were having enough, uh, trouble due to the prenatal vitamins. I have no idea what effect the anemia has on me or the baby. Probably none. But if something goes wrong, I'm going to be able to blame myself: I did this wrong, or I didn't do something I should have. I mean, after all, I will have had sole care of this baby for 40 weeks, aren't I responsible for what goes wrong?
It's much easier to phrase these worries as, "What if I don't have a cute baby?" Seems a lot more trivial than, "What if my baby has a serious medical problem?" or "What if my baby dies?" And those fears flit through my mind all the time, even though I have no reason to expect that. I guess that's just the way I am, always wondering where the dark cloud is. The only thing that's kept my sanity is knowing I'm not the only one.
I'm on a list for women who are all due to have babies around the same time (which I found on Pregnancy Today, courtesy of Tamar). It's a weird and inclusive list. There are the mothers who are planning on having 6 kids, despite not having very much money, or the woman whose boyfriend doesn't want anything more to do with her now that she's pregnant, or the 16-year-old asking for basic information. And I realize that the people I know fit into a much narrower range than is available on this list.
Some of the women have had babies before, and some have had problems. One gave birth to a baby who died the same day. Another has a child who has spastic quad cerebral palsy. And I think, My God, how do you cope? You get pretty attached to this person who's inside of you. You don't want bad things to happen to someone who's so small, who's so defenseless.
Among the ones on the list who are pregnant for the first time, no one's mentioned getting any bad news from the ultrasound or the amnio tests. But one woman went into premature labor at 21 weeks and lost her baby. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, that could have been me. It still could be, I guess. There's no reason to think anything's going to go wrong--everything's been right on target so far. But you never know.
What's always fun are the people who prey on your fears. One woman on the list mentioned that she felt this weird vibration in her tummy and wondered what the baby was doing. I'd felt the same thing, so I was interested. The response from someone else was that it was the baby having seizures--she'd felt that vibrating and her baby had been born suffering massive seizures. Well, thanks. Doesn't matter if it's true or not; it can't be unsaid. Now I have that in mind whenever I feel a tiny trembling somewhere.
I have 90 more days of this scheduled. Until I have an actual person to be this afraid about. I mostly concentrate on how cute the baby's going to be, because thinking about anything else is paralyzing.
Having a baby is a silly idea. Don't do it.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com