It's Cryin' Time Again

Someone thanked me for helping her start the day yesterday with a jig, specifically the jig known as "All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir". She didn’t say whether the Patriots’ fate in the Superbowl had anything to do with her needing a jog toward a jig. She didn’t even say she was sad. I know I was sad when I composed that post but not because of football. God doesn’t care about football I always say though I don’t say it too loudly, especially in crowds of diehard fans who’ve been pounding down the beers.

I felt sad because of a few things that began falling apart on some other fronts. I had turned the Superbowl off after seeing Madonna, that schoolgirl-thin athlete. I had watched something on Public Television during the first half of the game, and then didn’t watch the second half at all. I really can’t bear to witness situations where the winners and losers are so cruelly labelled. I have to look away from the set altogether when they announce the Oscar winner for any given category and just for that nano-second the camera still lingers on the face of the nominee whose name has just been read. I can’t stand it if the person doesn’t win I mean. I can’t bear the expression, however fleeting, where rising Disappointment gets stuffed underwater; pushed in the face back out of sight while the person struggles to muster that pleased good-sport look.( Poor humans I always think. Poor, poor humans with all their brave trying!)

That’ll be the next thing: the Oscars.

I just saw this video of a woman whining like a spoiled child because her Patriots lost. (Check it out here; you just want to send her to her room without any supper, don't you though? You hate to hear losers cry; it’s bad form as we’ve been told – well, unless you’re longtime public servant Edmund Muskie and you’re crying in the snow because the press said your wife drinks and uses crude language. (The 70s were a spiteful time in politics.)

What I love is to see winners cry. It’s funny, right? Who can forget Sally Field when she won an Oscar for Places in the Heart?!The audience claps and she just falls apart: "You like me! You really like me!” she blubbered. Poor lamb. They liked her til THEN maybe; but after that boy did they make fun of her! Here she is that night with her cute apple-red cheeks.

I'll say this: it's really tough to be in the spotlight, whatever is happening to you...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_8nAvU0T5Y]