Sharpie66

Me, too (both French Huguenots and one Spanish), in Ulster County. When is Who Do You Think You Are? returning to NBC? I found out that a former coworker of mine is going to be on it (she’s Nick Offerman’s aunt).

Sorry!!

Annber03, thanks!! I just have a few more biographical details to pin down (where and when her second marriage started and ended, when exactly she moved to Montana to become a homesteader after divorce #2) as well as research the Chicago Spiritualist community around 1900 (that’s where I think she became a believer, as well as the HQ of the American Spiritualist movement). Oh, and try and get anything on hubby #3–he’s an utter mystery before he’s in the 1909 Billings, MT directory as co-owner of a lunch counter, a year before he’s living on Carrie’s farm as a farmhand. His complete absence from any records, even with a birth date, place, and parents’ names in the marriage certificate to Carrie, makes me think he might have started out their marriage as a grifter, using a fake name. If so, he stayed with her the rest of her life, so that’s something, at least. I just want to get a professional genealogist to verify my lack of research results. Then I can get started writing! As for the arrest, the police sent in a young woman to pose as a client and then swooped in to scoop her up. She was originally sentenced to 30 days and a $50 fine, but after the appeal, they only had her pay the fine. The local spiritualist community assisted in paying for her defense.

My sister has that same reaction of, “Wait, is that K again?” when she hears it from the next room. I tend to rewind it to rewatch even though I have it saved on my devices. Carrie had a remarkable life that I am researching to write a book about her. The last decade of her life was the most unusual—she spent the 1920s as a full-time Spiritualist, the pastor of the First National Spiritualist Church of Oklahoma City which she ran out of her house and a trance medium charging $1 per reading. She was arrested for illegal fortune telling in 1920, and her unsuccessful appeal (on the grounds of infringement of her freedom of religion) was reported in newspapers around the country, since it was obvious that she and her lawyer were trying to get the appellate court to rule on whether Spiritualism was a religion.They deliberately dodged that issue entirely in their opinion. Transcripts from some of her readings as well as another OKC medium were published in a book titled “Voices from Beyond the Vale” in 1928, the year she died. Her third husband (after her first two ended in divorce) was a “divine healer” who was referred to as Doctor even in his obituary. And I had no idea about any of this before starting my family history research!

The commercial that makes me smile when I hear the beginning notes is the 15-second Ancestry commercial that has four women featured—a woman who “started a legacy of education in my family,” a woman who ran for office, a woman who “had no problem breaking the norms,” and a woman who had a restaurant. I grin when I hear it start, because my voice is the third one, talking about my great-great-grandmother Carrie McMaster. It was really fun working with the company, who did not just the ad, but also gave us a full one-minute video just on Carrie for their Instagram and Facebook pages. I hadn’t expected the ad to run for more than last spring, but I still see it a lot, especially on PBS. (I can’t attach it here since the file is too big.)

HBOMax is featuring a film every day this month for TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar. Today it’s Cabaret, which is one of my all-time favorites. I hadn’t seen the (rather old) documentary on the movie, The Musical That Changed Musicals, which is a good look at it and its impact on the genre. I was rather horrified when Kander talked about “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” He gets requests for song usage and it’s obvious these people have no idea the context. The one he was absolutely floored by was when a Jewish summer camp asked if they could use it for the camp’s theme song!

It’s funny—in what vague memories I have of the original series, none of them include Peter Davison’s Tristan. As an old-school Doctor Who fan (since 1980), anything Davison in my head is the Doctor (oh, and his later role on Law & Order: UK). So, I don’t have anything to compare the new version to. But, I really like Woodhouse’s performance in the part—he is charmingly feckless, but vulnerable and wonderfully loyal, too.

I’m listening to the latest episode of Leonard Maltin’s podcast Maltin on Movies, which is an interview with Karen Dotrice, who played Jane Banks in Mary Poppins. It is simply delightful, especially for me who’s a lifelong fanatic about that film. She talks about being a child actress, first starting on stage with her father Roy’s Shakespeare productions and then with Disney. Maltin will get really great interviews with a wide range of entertainment people and he is very good at pulling out stuff I had never heard before.

I just recently started watching this show on the PBS app. I’ve been working on my own family history, so I am loving the different stories that the show’s researchers are finding. Leslie Odom really resonated with me. Having a grandparent who had no stories about their ancestors to pass down happened to me, too, but mine was my paternal grandmother. It’s only through my research that I think I’ve figured out why her parents didn’t talk about their families—their childhoods were just too painful. I’ve been lucky enough to have discovered a fascinating second great grandmother whose story is interesting enough to get Ancestry’s attention, so they’ve included us on a tv commercial and a video for their social media platforms. The first thing they did was have a few long interviews with me via Zoom, and they also kept hammering on “How do you feel? Has she inspired you personally? How does your research change your life?” I felt almost guilty to tell them that I find my research fascinating as a lover of history, and I love the individual stories that I keep digging up, but no, they don’t change me fundamentally!

When my mom and I were in Britain in 2012, we spent several days in Scotland, and the only people I met with an accent I could barely understand were a couple from Glasgow who we chatted with in a B&B near Inverness. Three days in Edinburgh and four days in Orkney, no problem, but that couple was really hard to follow!

I guess people calling Skeldale House and not getting an answer would do what people always did before answering machines/services—called back later, or call someone else, since there is at least one other local vet. I don’t remember having an answering machine until I got my first apartment in 1988. I really like the actress playing Mrs. P, she has some great line deliveries. I particularly liked the way she told Siegfried how kind he’d always been to her.

Great episode! I really liked the writer with her personal anecdotes of school. (Shallowly, I noticed that she has the same mug as I do, the first time I’d seen that pattern outside of my cabinet!)

Speaking of James and Helen being cute, I loved the little moment when James drives out to check on Candy, Helen greets him with a kiss, obviously smells Mrs. Hall’s bath salts on him, then puts a few feet between them on their walk to the horse. Jenny’s comment about not needing geometry to milk the cows hit home for me, because I think my grandfather probably had similar thoughts. He, too, was a dairy farmer, and he left school in 1912 when he was only 11 years old, even though he loved reading. Mom told me that, when she would see me lost in a book, she knew her dad was still around in some fashion (he died when I was a baby).

The interesting thing about Tristan’s book is that, after Siegfried leaves and Tris is back on the couch holding the book, Mrs. Hall looks over, smiles, and asks him if it’s a good book. She’s noticed that he’s holding it upside down and is obviously not reading it but occupied with thinking about the horse.

Yeah, I also thought Mrs. Donovan might be a Traveler. Definitely was someone living on the margins of conventional society. I forgot to mention that I really liked seeing that Helen has gotten to know James just as much as he’s gotten to know her. Her calling him out for being a bit hesitant to take a chance, as well as having a tendency to “gabble” (great word!), was nice to see.

I watched the whole season when it started streaming on the PBS Access site, and this is my favorite of the lot. It had the romances, both Helen/James and Mrs. Hall/ her clock fixer. It had animal emergencies, with both a sad conclusion and a few happy ones. It had the landscapes (where Helen said yes was just stunning!). It had the interesting human clientele, between Cranford, the Dalbys and Mrs. Donovan. It had the buildup to the war, an element I appreciated this season since it is set in 1938 and that looming threat was a fact of life in Europe. And best of all, it had the families—the Herriots, the Aldersons, and the one at Skeldale House. I really like how the writers have developed all three families and their dynamics this season. Mrs. Herriot has annoyed me, but I can see why she’s been fixated on getting James home—the countryside is utterly foreign to her, she has a husband out of a job, and her boy is hours away, with a possible war on the horizon. Mr. Herriot is just wonderful—I love his big hug for Helen. Everyone at Skeldale House giving James grief over proposing was so funny, especially Siegfried’s quotations. As for the Aldersons, well, that’s been my big discovery this season! Mr. Alderson acts like the gruff farmer, but he loves and really knows his daughters deeply. He was just waiting for James to ask him, because he had that ring waiting. And Jenny just might be my favorite character this season. Her teenaged acting out in episode 1 moved in a believable way to her becoming the one running the household in this ep. Her expression of sheer delight over James and Helen was just terrific. BTW, I loved that stray dog! He had the coat of a wolfhound with the body structure of a smallish greyhound.

Jenny did reassure the neighbor that she would be sure to keep Scruff on their land.

I really liked Jenny here in S2Ep1! They’ve done a good job of making her a believable young teen, with parental conflicts and lashing out by running away for the morning and eating as far away from her dad as possible. They also have developed her relationship with Helen, as hinted at last season—I loved them bonding over appreciating James’ looks.

Since this took place Christmas 1938, I am sure that plane was a foreshadowing of next season, especially with that look Mrs. Hall gave Tristan and James immediately afterwards.

Just watched this. So much fun! Rahul was definitely more likeable here than in his winning season—I liked his appreciation of his fellow contestants, especially Nancy. Nancy’s season was my second favorite (after Nadiya’s, which was the first I watched), so seeing her again was just terrific.

Me, and me. Although I am tempted to venture to the theater for the first time since early 2020 just to see this.

The YouTube channel Wait in the Wings just dropped an excellent video about Tick Tick Boom, both the play and the movie.

Thank you so much for those articles!! The first one points out Roger Bart’s cameo, which I completely missed seeing. I was lucky to catch the You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown revival of the late-90s when it came to the Chicago suburbs in tryouts. Roger Bart played Snoopy, Anthony Rapp Charlie Brown, BD Wong was Linus, and Kristin Chenoweth had her breakout role as Sally. Mom and I went into the theater anticipating Anthony and BD, but walked out talking about Roger and Kristin (who we pegged immediately as an upcoming huuuuge star). (Complete tangent—I just looked up Anthony Rapp’s IBDB page to verify the YAGMCB date, and noticed that his 1982 musical of The Little Prince, which my mom caught on Broadway during previews when she was in NYC for a nursing conference, never actually got an official Broadway run, but died in previews! Mom was looking forward to seeing him as Charlie Brown because she had seen him 17 years earlier. Also, he’s from our hometown of Joliet.) As for TTB, I really loved it! Garfield is amazing, as was just about everyone else. I think my two favorite numbers are Sunday, a beautiful homage to one of my favorite Sondheim songs (it never fails to bring tears to my eyes), and Come to Your Senses (btw, I loved how Lin showed the inspiration in the musical notes at the bottom of the pool).

As stated above, the final stage is a celebratory jaunt into the edge of Paris, and then becomes a positioning scrum in the multiple laps that go around the Arc de Triumph to get the sprinters’ teams in their spots, then the sprinters go for it in the final straightaway. If someone has a mechanical problem in that last lap, they are screwed.

Damn, Tadej! Two mountain stages in a row. He’s going to win three jerseys in Paris for the second year in a row, too. Dan Martin’s last minute sprint was also impressive. I remember several years ago when he went from the far-lagging peleton to the front group while in the middle of a two-peak ascent, and this reminded me a bit of that move.