This week

Well, the fence posts are in, waiting to have the rails put up and the gates made. The goats can soon run free, instead of being on a looong leash so they don't wander in the road.

Yma Sumac has died, Gerard Damiano has died. Footnotes to American culture? Perhaps. I wonder about all these people the younger generation has never heard of, and in the case of Yma, probably wouldn't even "get". From all genres of the entertainment world there are these people who have impacted our society in small ways, but how do we explain them? Someone about 20 years younger than I am said to me a few years ago, "I don't watch anything in black and white -- it's boring," when I brought up "The Honeymooners". I had no answer to that...how can one respond to a dismissal of Capra, Wilder, Welles -- Casablanca has no value anymore? All of D.W. Griffith, Chaplin and Keaton should be dumped in the ashcan. It's hard to compare Damiano to Griffith and the other directors, I know, but he did break the mold and his films were as reviled as "Birth of a Nation," though for obviously very different reasons! :-)

Happily there is youtube, so just maybe the digital generation will be able to get a bit of insight into our now "camp" heroes like Yma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LUSUel_kck&feature=related (one of my favorites of her recordings) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOgE0b5DzLo&feature=related which is Yma on Letterman Show in 1987 Somethings just are, if they have to be explained to you, it's already too late.

And my college resident advisor has been named Obama's chief of staff... had I stayed in touch I might have been able to be the next White House Chef. (I could bring the goats and chickens to the South lawn).