Some thoughts on traveling to Washington D.C. this season

I'm at Sacramento Airport!>

   It is 6 a.m. at the bustling airport and a mad house.  It is pouring of rain and many passengers arrived late and had to be re-scheduled, luckily I am on time.   The departure lounge does not hold the usual business travelers on this early morning flight to Washington D.C. but is full of interesting looking people.  As an anthropologist I particularly enjoy airports, watching all the different type of people traveling all over the world.  Today is a feast for my eyes.  Where do all these people come from, they don’t look like the usual passengers at Sacramento airport?   A 6 year-old girl bounces past me tossing her head to ensure we notice the large red feathers in her blonde hair.  Her mother equally blonde with many fluffy scarves following dragging a brother.  Then I see the dark curly haired father, wearing equally highly colored clothes, a red sweater this time, and pulling three cases on a rack.  Where do they come from?  They do not look like any Europeans I have seen before; perhaps from Russia or Eastern Europe?   Then I spy an interesting looking woman.  She is very short and very round.  She is dragging two suitcases on top of one another, a computer bag over her one shoulder and purse on other shoulder and the largest plastic bag I have ever seen!   This type of plastic bag I have seen in the Middle East or Europe.   She is like a round apple and rolls along with these appendices hanging from her body. She is obviously very strong.  How will she get them all on the plane?
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> The boarding agent has obviously had a bad week.  She keeps calling out asking people to check bags and she won’t charge them.  It is a full flight, she says and space is at a premium but nobody is listening, they are all determined to get everything on the plane and consequently we are forty minutes leaving.  I see my round lady, a few seats ahead, pushing her plastic bag into an overhead, she made it!   Across the aisle I notice a Moslem young woman adjusting her head scarf; she seems to have trouble with her head phones.  In fact, she constantly finds it necessary to adjust the scarf; it comes off and she looks furtively around, in case anyone see her hair presumably and pulls it down across her forehead and twirls it around her neck.  She is very slim and tiny, wearing jeans and a brown jacket and very high heel sexy black sandals.  I find the modesty of the hair and sexy sandals such a contrast. Of course I can‘t take my eyes off her.  She is aware of me and I feel guilty about watching her.  I must smile the next time we catch eyes.  I smile and she responds and asks me the time, “How far are we away from Washington D.C.?”  We figure out we are about half way there.  She speaks very softly so I get up and move over to her. I ask if she is a student from Davis University, I know they have many foreign students.  No, she is attending Sac State University, studying languages.  She is going home for the holidays and misses her family so much.  She has two brothers and two sisters and talks to her mother and family on Skype  every day. She is traveling to Frankfurt and on to her home town.  I tell her I am an anthropologist and interested in people who are different from me.  Doubt she understands exactly what an anthropologist is but understands the concept.  I tell her I like her dark eyes and skin and she tells me she loves the Californian people with their big smiles.  Everyone smiles at her, she says.  I am glad about that because she is very brave to come from such a long way away and study in a culture so different from her own.  Where is she from?  Saudi Arabia, she says.  Oh good I think the first person I have met from Saudi Arabia.
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> I have traveled to the Middle East many times and love the people. The first time was the trip I took with my daughter nearly twenty years ago to Egypt on this same flight to Frankfurt, then 6 hours lay over in Athens and finally into to Cairo at 10:30 p.m.  It seemed we had been flying for days, but the second we saw the bright lights of the hotels in the city, we were awake.  The Egyptians had decorated the hotels with Christmas themes for us and Disney land characters. It was a magical trip and led me to travel to Jordon, Syria, Tunisia and Libya.  The people were always very kind and considerate to us, I never will forget the man, walking with his wife, who nodded to us with hands together, saying “Welcome, welcome” in Syria. 
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> I think of another young woman I met many years ago who was traveling around the world.  She went back to New Zealand and I have an urge to visit her and her family.  So a new trip is planned.
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>  Hope everyone enjoys their time with family and friends during this holiday season.  Christmas was the holiday Judy particularly enjoyed and loved decorating her homes.

Comparison of two movies-"A Star" and "Show Business"

Lose that Long Face from "A Star is Born"

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I’m watching “There’s no Business Like Show Business” with Ethel Merman (who managed to get herself into nine numbers yet!!) and Dan Dailey; vaudeville couple with three children, Johnnie Ray, Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor set in the early 1900’s.  This is a typical 20^th Century musical and suddenly I realize it was made in 1954, the same year that Judy made her “A Star is Born” masterpiece.  What a difference!   The first thing I noticed that there were no close-ups, absolutely none – even on Marilyn Monroe who had a small part in the movie. I can only assume that the director or cameraman did not know how to handle them in the new CinemaScope! 

Judy and Johnnie Ray

I enjoyed the Fox musicals and I particularly liked Betty Grable in movies like, “Mother Wore Tights” and there were so, so, many of these vaudeville movies.  

The powers to be who put together “A Star” had a deeper insight into what was happening in “show business” in the mid 1950s.  Of course we had a touch of vaudeville with Judy showing her rise in The Born in a Truck sequence.  

Born in a Trunk 

I thought of what a different path Judy was taking from her friends, and she had many friends in this movie.  I wonder if they ever met during the making of the two movies and discussed their projects.  Judy had met Donald O’Connor as a child in vaudeville and they were good friends through the years.  She and Ethel were certainly long time friends – I remember her telling us (Lorna Smith and I) in London in 1960 that she should be meeting Ethel and Kay Thompson in Italy.  And certainly at the end of her life she was friendly with Johnnie Ray and performed in Europe with him and was living in his rental house in London when she died.  Marilyn and Judy were social friends in Hollywood and fond of eachother.

Judy and Marilyn

How different these movies were and to consider them together makes us realize just how magnificent A Star is Born  was.   Judy was taking control of her career and shaking off the light hearted musicals of MGM.  What a pity that the three film package with Warner Bros. did not happen when she and Luft put together their original plans – just think we might have had two more movies of the caliber of The Star!

  

Still from "A Star"