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The Secrets of Mary Jane …Somebody

She was born Mary Richards, or Mary Jane Richards. Or Mary Elizabeth. She married and became Mary Bowser/Mrs. Wilson Bowser. Also Mrs. John T. Denman and/or Mary J.R. Gavin. Sometimes she used the name Mary Jane Henry or Richmonia Richards. Maybe Ellen Bond, although that has been disputed. Maybe this is her photograph, although that has been disputed.

Grainy photo Mary Bowser
Mary Bowser, but which one? Photo from Wikipedia and Pinterest.

If you were an educated black servant in the slave-owning state of Virginia in 1861, little would be known about you. Your words would not have been written down and what was written about you by others, even the wealthy abolitionist friend whose family you served, would be filtered through their lenses. Scraps of information remembered later by family members who were children when they saw you would come to be taken as fact, whether true or not. Grainy photos replicated might be mislabelled, speculations treated as accurate, oral embellishments become history. All truth would be distorted, like seeing through a glass darkly. This would be especially true if you were a Union spy in the Confederate White House.

Continue reading “The Secrets of Mary Jane …Somebody”
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Speaking of BS…

My father was a consummate BS artist.  He would tell stories about fellow soldiers pulling scams when he was in Germany in the 1950s or describe 45-minute solos taken by jazz musicians in the smoky nightclubs of Detroit. The exaggeration was part of the atmosphere. He could talk about going to the bakery at the Food Lion in Sarasota, and end up with a lengthy yarn which included fake southern accents and mishaps about Danish crates that fell off the delivery trucks.

See, right there, I’ve already lied.

What We Bloggers Do

Fellow blogger fivedotoh suggested a provocative question for today’s post:

How do you feel about people who always seem to exaggerate when relating a story? Do you equate embellishment with lying? As a blogger, when, if ever, is stretching the truth, other than when writing fiction, permissible?

Of course, I immediately thought of my dad. I also thought about a news story I read the other day about Duke University.  I was chewing over using it for this post but hesitating because maybe it would be too snarky. How about both?

My answer to this question is that there are Memoir Facts, Sarcasm/Snarky Facts, and then there are Fact Facts. As a blogger, I would feel entitled to use all three, yet in a way that the reader can clearly tell the difference.

I Only Lie 25%

At home, I occasionally find myself exaggerating, usually to win an argument with my spouse.  I will stop and correct myself, if I think it’s particularly unfair, although I’ve also been known to keep track and write down the number of indiscretions by the other person, which may win an argument but is not conducive to marital harmony. Now, if it’s a story about a particularly rude other person driving, everyone knows that you must exaggerate those stories because of the risk to your car and your very life. These are Memoir Facts which are highly likely to contain exaggeration. I went back and looked at some of my memoir blog posts, and I calculated. Continue reading “Speaking of BS…”

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Give Love and Attention, the Kids Will Be Fine

I’m fuming a little today over an article I read in the New York Times yesterday on “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.” The essay purports to explain how parenting has become increasingly difficult due to the increasing cost of child-raising and the demands on parents time, yet I couldn’t help feel throughout that the author kept undercutting her own argument. The graphs and underlying data didn’t necessarily make the points intended, the expert quotes didn’t arise out of the studies cited, and the underlying premise itself seemed misguided. In short, the argument was like a caricature of itself, and, like many articles that seem to sympathize with modern readers, did more to stoke the flames of anxiety than to soothe them.

Whose Kids Are We Talking About, Anyway?

The gist of the article by Claire Cain Miller can be summed up in the header quote:

Raising children has become significantly more time-consuming and expensive, amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.
–“The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,” NYT 12/25/2018

This is illustrated by a graph that shows annual spending on children childcare, education,&c). For those in the top income quintile, spending has almost doubled in the last 35 years. Obviously, spending on children has become prohibitively expensive–practically unaffordable–and the ROI for this top fifth of households is apparently insufficient. They’re spending so much more money and not having enough to show for it! Continue reading “Give Love and Attention, the Kids Will Be Fine”

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The Metrics of Scrooge

pictures of "A Christmas Carol"
The many versions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”

What a favor I have done you, my gentle readers and Dickens lovers! I have taken it upon myself, in keeping with the situation, to evaluate the universe of versions of “A Christmas Carol.”

This was no easy task. There are four or five widely known versions of this holiday classic, but the off-versions, the non-Scrooge versions–the American, Scottish, musical, Rankin-Bass, Disney, Pixar, pop star, African-American, Canadian, mobster, Susan Lucci, British, and trailer trash versions have become plentiful, indeed!

Since the Seymour Hicks first non-silent ACC (“A Christmas Carol”) film debuted in 1935, another 43 film and television-based versions of Scrooge’s story have been produced, not counting several live once-on-TV teleplays done in the 1950s and also not including every single skit or sitcom-inspired takeoffs ever done.  (Ref. see Alex P. Keaton and French & Saunders).  My universe included anything recognized on IMDB (or Rotten Tomatoes) or on a Scrooge ten best list. Interestingly, at least five sites purported to have the complete list, but none did. Even Wikipedia under the heading “Adaptations of ‘A Christmas Carol’ only listed 25 of these 43 adaptations of “A Christmas Carol.”

Meanwhile, I have cracked my ol’ Excel Ninja knuckles and settled down to pivot table away to provide some Fascinating Analysis ™of these versions. Continue reading “The Metrics of Scrooge”

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The Origins of Greensleeves and Syphilis

Greensleeves illustration
Greensleeves illustration by Walter Crane. Based on a theme written by ??

This may not seem like a holiday-themed post, but in the theater of mad decorating that took place at our house last week, listening to Christmas carols led to all sorts of topics. One of my favorite carols popped into the mix: “What Child is This?” played by Vince Guaraldi on The Charlie Brown Christmas CD.  Naturally, the song led to a discussion of “Greensleeves” which naturally led to… anyone? anyone? Henry the Eighth… which naturally reminded of something I recently learned about syphilis.

The Earworm Virus of “Greensleeves”

The lyrics to “What Child is This?” were written as a poem by William Chatterton Dix, who mused on what the magi might have said besides, “Where the Holiday Inn?”  Dix was an English insurance company manager whose near death illness invoked a spark of divine inspiration so intense that he began writing poems like “The Manger Throne.”  At some point, when a hymnal was later created in 1865, his poem was set to the ‘borrowed’ tune from “Greensleeves.”

The little ballad, played by strolling bards at Renaissance festivals and the more famous pick-up lute quartets, had been around for nearly three centuries. The song has long been attributed to Henry, and the legend goes that he wrote it for Anne Boleyn as she was rejecting his advances. Continue reading “The Origins of Greensleeves and Syphilis”