fif-teen minutes

[fflo]

I have The Music Man on.  Again.  Surely I have seen this movie more times than any other movie, possibly by a margin of more times that the most times I've seen any other.  My folks, perhaps especially my father, were fans of it, to some extent, at least.  Sometimes I think about them when I see it, and why and how they might've liked it.  Sometimes I think about what a masternugget of Americana the musical is, and is comprised of, to the extent that any masternugget can be great without all the peoples it leaves out, and how it marginalizes some of its characters.  Sometimes I think about its values, and what kinds of human tendencies it has contempt for.  Sometimes I just enjoy the words; sometimes I just enjoy the actors; sometimes I just enjoy the music.  Sometimes I analyze its special ways of getting laughs.  Sometimes I think about its addressing of sexuality.  Sometimes I think about its message of redemption.  This time I find myself thinking about its suggestions about relationships, and how much I might've taken it all in, to heart, sinking down deep, from when I was a pup, and anyway how there might be evidence for that notion, if one were playing that game, which I am.  You can apply recovery to a work of art with its theoretical and philosophical lenses not unlike how you can look at literature through Marxism, or w/e other game.  This game tonight is about knowing me better.  Me knowing me better.  Me liking knowing me better.

Meanwhile it also has me liking Buddy Hackett, the little boy Ronnie Howard, the way we can now see the whole wide screen on our TVs (so all 4 Buffalo Bills, vs. 2 + 2/2), Pert Kelton, Lida Rose, Mary Wickes, that insane Hermione Gingold, the Wells Fargo wagon, the suggestion that there can be no sin in sincere, sthyncopation, the voice of Shirley Jones, and the blessed way the pursestring holders didn't get their way with recasting Robert Preston's virtuoso con man with Frank Sinatra in the part, and how sometimes the pursestring people don't get their pursestringholder way, ruining everything.