Hysterical Inaccuracy

Recently, I became aware of a new series on Showtime:

I'm not sure if, on this blog, I have referred to my obsession with British history. There was a time, not too long ago, when I could name every ruler from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II from memory. I probably could get pretty close now. But none of it holds as much delight for me as the saga of the Tudors, the "inspiration" for this new television series.

I say "new" because it's new to me. There are two completed seasons, with season three out there somewhere. I don't get Showtime, so I wouldn't know.

This show has been an utter delight for me, because of its wonderful treatment of historical fact. "The Tudors" does for English history what "North and South" did for the Civil War. To give you a hint, here are some of the comments I made to Sven during Season 1:

"Wow, you wouldn't think it would be so easy to remove your own corset."

"Do you think he knows her name?"

"Don't you think that would chafe?"

Leaving that part of it aside, here are some of the more glaring inaccuracies:

Henry VIII is played by a slender brunette.

Anne Boleyn has blue eyes.

Henry VIII only has one sister, who marries the King of Portugal, and they call her Margaret, and it's just a muddle.

The Duke of Richmond dies when he's still a young child.

Now, if you no nothing about English history, these things mean nothing. Perhaps my ramblings are akin to those Twilighters who boycotted the movie because Bella's shirt wasn't blue in the scene where she meets the Cullens, or the Harry Potter fanatics who insist that every. single. scene. from the book be included in the movie, or it Just Isn't Right.

But this is different! This is HISTORY. This is FACT. People are forgetting that.

Someone posted online the other day that she and her mother were discussing "The Tudors." The mother said, "I can't wait to see what happens with Jane Seymour next season." The daughter said, "Oh, that's going to be sad, when she dies." The mother said, "Well, thanks for spoiling it!"

Jane Seymour died over 400 years ago! Spoiler alert: EVERYONE IN THE SHOW IS DEAD NOW! Sorry!

But the show is effective in one way. The acting is really good. It has humanized elements of the story that never seemed "real" to me. At the end of the second season, Anne Boleyn is executed. (Sorry, spoiler!) I knew Anne Boleyn was going to be executed. I have watched Anne Boleyn get beheaded in several film adaptations and have never reacted to it with anything but a nod of the head.

But when "The Tudors" did it, I cried. They did a scene, which I will describe for you, that just made me realize that Anne Boleyn was a real person, more than any other adaptation ever has.

In the scene, Thomas Boleyn (Anne's father) is being released from the tower. He leaves, and on his way out passes under Anne's window. She looks down and sees him leaving, and she gets a big smile and waves, obviously thrilled that her father is going to be all right. He stares at her for a moment, unsmiling, then walks away. And that was when it really, truly hit me: her father set her up to be the king's mistress, then his wife; he plotted with her, advised her, and controlled her, but when it came time to pay, he walked away while his daughter died.

And I cried. I cried and cried. How silly am I?

Hysterical.

Good News, Bad News

I was cleaning my house today.

No, that's not all, but it's fairly momentous in and of itself, since I simply don't "do" household chores.

Anyway, I was cleaning my house the other day, and I uncovered a box we inherited when Sven's oldest brother, Olaf, passed away. Olaf, who was the oldest of the boys, was 7 years older than Sven. He was only 39 when he died; he passed away the day we brought Princess home from the hospital. Understandably (I hope), when Olaf's partner Jim gave us boxes of things Olaf wanted us to have, we simply weren't able to get through it all. We tried, but the demands of a newborn won out over everything else.

Then, two years later, another newborn came along.

So now, almost four years after Olaf's death, I uncovered this box. Inside the box was Sven's father's watch (Sven's father died when Sven was 17), some other costume jewelry pieces, and some mysterious bagged objects.

The bagged objects contained some real treasure.

As many of my readers know, I'm LDS. We LDS spend a lot of time on family history, or "genealogy," to use the technical, outdated term. My mother's family comes from a long, long line of LDS folks, so much of my family history, at least on her side, is done.

Grandma and Grandpa Debmom.

The Debmom Family Reunion, 1998

Sven's side, on the other hand, is a huge mystery.

As I said, Sven's dad died when Sven was 17. His parents had been divorced for over a decade at that time. His mother, Helga, was an only child; Helga's mother died when Helga was 18. Helga's father, Rufus, lived to be 97, but was a fairly incoherent man by the time Sven knew him. (He knew Sven as "the other one.") Sven's relationship with his paternal family was somewhat distant after the divorce, so he didn't get to know them very well.

In short, there was a lot of missing information. So, imagine my joy when we opened the box to see this:

Sven's dad's Bible

And this:

Cassette tapes of Sven's Uncle Snookie telling the family history and lineage

And these:

TONS of pictures and newspaper clippings, mostly preserved in the Bible.

That's the good news. The bad news was this:

Yes, when I opened the family Bible, I was greeted by a wad of anonymous human hair.

Many of the pictures had no captions or notes, so I'm writing letters to Sven's surviving aunt and great-aunt to see if they are interested in helping me find this information. I sincerely doubt they can help me with the hair.

But what a joy it was to see my children's faces echo some of the photographs! Having grown up myself with a strong sense of my own family history, I am so excited to get to compile some of this for Sven and my children.

We're a good looking family, if I say so myself. I know you can't see much detail, but trust me.

However, all of this got me thinking about the nature of family "heirlooms." There are some heirlooms that I love, I mean LOVE to have. My grandmother's pearls come to mind. In fact, I have a jewelry box so full of current and future "heirlooms" that I just ordered another jewelry box, so I can use this one just for costume stuff.

I have a problem. Don't judge me.

However, when I was going through the box, I laughingly pointed out to Sven that, ha ha, Olaf had saved two gas bills Rufus had received in 1956 for the house we no longer own in Beaumont, Texas. Ha!

"Heh," Sven said. "You know Olaf, he saved everything."

"Ha," I agreed. "Throw those away, okay?"

He didn't throw them away.

So, of course, when I broached the subject of throwing away the mystery hair, Sven poo-poo'd all over it. (Figuratively.)

I get that the Bible, which we're sure was Sven's father's, is an heirloom. It's cracked and old, but it's something of his dad's, so I have no problem keeping it.

But the mystery hair? Is that really an "heirloom?"

One of my friends made the point that she saves things because she knows who the things belonged to, but her kids don't so they can feel free to throw them away. (She pointed out that the things she saved were quite ugly.) Sven and I are keeping a wad of hair, hair belonging to various deceased persons, because that hair PROBABLY came from Sven's relatives.

So, I have contained the entire Bible in two gallon-size Ziploc bags, thusly:

and shall label the entire package "Papaw's Bible And Dubious Hair."

I'm sure my progeny will shiver with delight.

Hixploitation

It is with sadness that I reveal a shocking truth of which I had, heretofore, been unaware:

The History Channel has sold out.

Yes, my friends, that last bastion of wholesome, educational, boring television has gone the way of the sexy, go-go hipness of Discovery and The Learning Channel.

A few days ago, I was staying at the quaint Sky Harbor Bavarian Inn in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Really. Our room was nestled into the side of the mountain, with a balcony that extended into the cradling arms of the surrounding trees. As I lay on my side, the eastern window that looked out onto the balcony gave me a gorgeous view of a mountain sunrise.

That was the first day.

On the second day, clouds obscured the sunrise, Dexy was fussy, and Sven lost the remote control sometime during the night. The last thing he had been watching was The History Channel, so I was stuck. After two infomercials (Your Baby Can Read! and something about how to trick the government out of money) I watched a riveting documentary about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel System. (Get it? "Riveting?" Because it's about road construction? And they use rivets? Never mind.)

By the time this documentary ended, we were all awake. The remote control was still nowhere to be found. Since the hotel used digital cable, we couldn't change the channel manually. Fortunately, the next thing to come on looked like something the kids would like: Uncovering the World of the Paleo-Indians. Computer animated Columbia Mammoths? Cool. Computer animated saber-toothed cats? Cooler.

Computer animated saber-toothed cats ripping the face off of a mother while her child stands there and watches? Not so much.

"Mommy?" Princess' anxious voice sounded as I ripped apart the bed in attempts to find the remote. "Mommy, what happened to that mommy? Did the bad tiger kill the mommy?"

"He bite! He bite!" exclaimed Dexy, looking concerned.

"Look! Handy Manny!" I bellowed, finally discovering the remote on the floor behind the headboard. And all was well. But it got me thinking: since when did The History Channel show such shlocky, over-dramatized pseudo-historical fare like this?

I don't know. But I'm not pleased.

And speaking of not pleased, I have something to say about remote control manners. If you and your partner go to sleep and wake at different times, it behooves the later-retiring partner to make sure the remote control is in a secure, easily accessible location for the earlier-rising partner. If it is not, the early riser is permitted to search the area around the sleeper, including ripping covers off and shoving the sleeper off the bed, if necessary.

That is all.

Minister of New Media

I recently was appointed to a very high position in an exclusive club. The Kettle Social Club is an invitation-only Facebook group made up of a group of us who used to hang out at a 24-hour diner and philosophize, play chess, and swap lies. For whatever reason, I have been appointed Minister of New Media. (Before you get too impressed, my friend Danny is Minster of Midget Porn, a title that makes a lot of sense if you know Danny.)

The Kettle Social club started with Sven and his friend Zeb (short for Zebalebadingalingadingdongshoobop). Sven and Zeb have been friends since middle school. In college, they discovered that late nights combined with gallons of coffee and cartons of cigarettes rendered them intelligent and interesting, so they began hanging around at the Kettle every night. I began dating Sven in January of 1994 and was absorbed seamlessly into the group, bringing along my friends, who brought along their friends. Before we knew it, we had a "core group" of about 8 people, with additional pals that brought the group to as many as 20 people. We had some real characters.

Cowboy Dave, for example, was a pipe fitter, chess player, and AA sponsor who had the most colorful way of putting things. His standard greeting to me was, "Come sit on Paw-Paw's knee." To this day, Sven talks like Cowboy Dave when he's trying to be cute.

Drew was a bit older than most of us, and was a semi-professional magician who worked at the Texas Renaissance Festival. He would bring his latest card tricks to wow mostly me, who was the only one at the table who didn't get how they worked.

Danny, the aforementioned Minister of MP, was (at the time) an aspiring stand-up comedian whose humor was based on surprising you with something completely unexpected, then repeating it again and again until it was funny. One night he had me in stitches for hours by chanting "It's a human thumb!" and showing me his thumb. Really. You kind of had to be there.

Richard was the chess player in his 70's who left the group when he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, who he married.

Cowhig had a pet 'possum. I held it on my shoulder once.

Kim and Tom were our on-again, off-again couple.

Robert was an usher at my wedding.

Owen missed the wedding (he overslept) but he was there when my dad died.

I think my love for all of these folks can be summed up by the following quote from Danny, left on my Facebook wall:

"I've got a heart full of love and a hand full of smackin'."

And I know he means it.

Dedication: Leigh

I would like to dedicate today's post to my friend, Leigh. Leigh moved to my town in Texas when we were 10. Not only was she a much-needed female addition to our class at school (in our GATE* class, there were only 6 girls and 1,274 boys), she was a Mormon! I was the only Mormon girl in my grade, so the addition of another girl was an event to be celebrated.

And Leigh was cool. She had a big family with a funny mom & dad, obnoxious brothers, and an enchantingly goofy sister. She said what she thought and didn't care if anyone else thought she was cool. That was the coolest thing about her.

Leigh was a great friend to me for one magical school year. But, in the summer between 5th and 6th grade, Leigh's dad was transferred again, and she left. She spent time in Korea and Chicago.

I saw Leigh when she came to town to visit her grandmother, but that wasn't often. I lost track of Leigh until 2005, when she happened to be in town on Christmas the year I had Princess. Seeing her was magical, she looked absolutely beautiful and that big, friendly smile hadn't changed at all.

Leigh and I now keep in touch via Facebook, and I was thrilled to see that she has started writing a blog. It's called "The Domestic Flunky," and, for those of you who haven't noticed it in my reader, give it a go. She is amazing.

You will thank me.

Deb

*GATE stands for Gifted And Talented Education. Our school was sort of piloting the GATE program for our district.