"Die Hard" for your holiday viewing

Die Hard and Die Hard 2, taking place at Christmas, are definitely on the list for holiday viewing, and you can add Die Hard: With a Vengeance to the playlist, too. Sure, it takes place in the summer (presumably late summer, since school is in session), but it gives a nod to the Christmas setting of the first two movies in several scenes:

After he blows Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue store to bits, terrorist Simon Gruber (Jeremy Irons) forces Lt. John McClane (Bruce Willis) to walk the streets of Harlem wearing a racist placard. Shop owner Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) helps McClane and the pair have made it safely back to the station house when Gruber calls the head of Major Crimes:

Gruber: Where are my pigeons now?
Inspector Cobb: Pigeons?
Gruber: I had two pigeons, bright and gay, fly from me the other day. Why was it they did go? You cannot tell, you do not know.
Inspector Cobb: You mean McClane?
Gruber: No, I mean Santa Claus.

--

Soon after, most of NYPD converges on the financial district after a subway explodes under Wall Street. McClane and Carver stop a kid stealing from a sidewalk vendor and have this exchange:

Kid #1: It's Christmas. You could steal City Hall.
McClane: Come on.
[Carver and McClane take the kids' bikes]
Kid #1: My bike?
McClane: Let's go. Come on.
Kid #1: That's my bike!
Carver: Yeah, it's Christmas!

--

McClane: [to terrorists stopped in a tunnel] Hi, fellas. Mickey O'Brien, aqueduct security. Hey, listen, we got a report of a guy coming through here with, uh, eight reindeer.
[shoots the terrorists]
McClane: Yeah, they said he was a jolly, old, fat guy with a snowy, white beard. Cute little red and white suit. I'm surprised you didn't see him.

--

[Bomb squad expert is defusing the bomb in Chester A. Arthur Elementary School]
Expert: Six booby traps, four dead ends, "and a Partridge in a pear tree." Okay, honey. Let's dance.

--

There may be more, but these references should be enough to satisfy fans of the franchise. I haven't yet logged the Christmas connections in the fourth and fifth movies, having seen IV only six times and V only three, but will keep you posted! btw, although Willis has stated, "At the moment, I can run and I can fight on screen. But there will come a time when I no longer want to do that. That's when I’ll step away from the Die Hard films," a sixth installment is planned.

Designated Un-Birthday?

November 28th is not a likely candidate for “favorite day of the year.” It’s never Thanksgiving Day (the closest it can ever get is the Saturday after) and the post-holiday let-down has settled in like the leaden dark meat making its slow trek through your lower intestines. You spent the holiday with relatives you can’t stand and the ones you wanted to call, didn’t. You were forced to go to the mall when all you wanted to do was watch football and then the teams you had money on lost.

All the leaves are down and sitting sodden on the lawn, there are less than four weeks until Christmas and you haven’t started shopping yet for anyone, New Year’s is less than five weeks away and you realize you kept none of your resolutions—again.

So what’s to get excited about? Sure, the holiday is over. But sometimes getting back to the grind is a relief. It feels “normal,” not like the four-Sundays-in-a-row the Thanksgiving weekend feels like.

The turkey is down to the bone. Now you can go back to eating “normal food” (Taco Bell, McDonald’s, etc.) and forego consuming Turkey Day leftovers out of “prosperity guilt.”

All right, you had to put up with Uncle Huck. But wasn’t he impressed with your story about seeing the guy from “How I Met Your Mother” buying furniture at Sam’s Club? And sure, you forced a smile while choking down Aunt Hattie’s tomato aspic salad—but was there not some satisfaction in watching her dip chip after chip in your homemade humus? She doesn’t have to know what’s in it.

Yes, the leaves are all on the ground. Let ’em stay there. Let ‘em soak up snow and ice and rain and make good compost as they break down come warm weather. The lawn will be all the better for it. And as for Christmas coming in less than four weeks—that means you have twenty-six days before you simply must start your shopping. You can worry about those resolutions on Dec. 31st. (They’re the same every year, anyway.)

The best that can be said for Nov. 28th is, it’s probably your un-birthday. Unless you’re Jon Stewart or Judd Nelson or Berry Gordy, Jr. (turning 49, 52, and 82, respectively.) Or Ed Harris (61) or Randy Newman (68). Or Friedrich Engels Engels (191). It’s the 47th anniversary of the Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack” hitting #1 and the 17th of Jeffrey Dahmer getting killed in prison. Willie Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway were married 429 years ago today. I keep track of these things and send such trivia along with a few quotes and jokes to various and sundry people every Monday to start the week off with a smile. If you’d like me to include you in this nonsense, leave your email address at http://www.3amblue.com/contact.html. Enjoy

The Best Present of All

Cranky shoppers—including John and me—crowded the mega store. At the point we could not fit one more packet of gravy mix in the cart and were debating what Christmas carol the muzak was playing (I still say it was “Up on the Housetop”) we finally admitted we needed a break and sat down with sodas at a table in the deli. After a few minutes I started telling John about a story I was writing for an anthology. I was pretty happy with it but was worried he’d think the whole idea was silly (a sculptor becomes obsessed with releasing a beautiful woman from a ton of stone) and still wasn’t sure about the ending.

I needn’t have worried. He thought the premise was solid and even contributed an alternate ending that the editor eventually chose. (John’s a terrific writer himself and has that much-pursued and rarely discovered ability to bring out the story a writer really aches to tell.)

In the middle of the store, in the unforgiving heart of the Christmas crunch (only twelve shopping days left!), we sat next to our cart full of groceries and talked story. The ice cream was melting, the turkey thawing, the mac ‘n cheese from the deli cooling down. Supplies for baking twelve dozen cookies and a half-dozen loaves of bread awaited checkout, too. So did a number of gifts that needed immediate wrapping and mailing. But there we sat, happily oblivious to all the noise, twinkling lights, and sweaty, smelly, hustling and bustling workers and shoppers, talking story. We sat there for a half hour. It was wonderful.

Over the next couple of weeks, despite the baking, shopping, wrapping, mailing, delivering, cleaning, cooking and socializing demands of the holidays, John helped me carve out writing time and I finished the story by the deadline of December 31st. Traps came out the next year. I can’t remember what other presents I got for Christmas that year, but that thirty minutes John gave me in the deli is the one I remember.

That was three years ago. This year we found ourselves in the same mega store two weeks before Christmas, this time with two full carts (we’ve taken on shopping for John’s elderly mother), feeling a little overloaded from several hours of shopping. We went to the same deli and plopped down. Again, I started telling John about a creative idea that I wasn’t sure about. I’ve been futzing around with several mysteries, all with solid plots and good characters but missing that essential element that grabs the reader and propels him onward.

I thought perhaps I’d chosen the wrong narrator and proposed the idea of using myself as a model for one. Would an interested bystander based on myself who observes and reports on the action around her be viable? He warmed to the idea and suggested I try it. “See what happens,” he advised. I’m excited about it, especially in view of the good luck that came my way three years ago after talking story in the same spot. (I knock on wood, won’t pass salt directly to the person who asks for it, and avoid walking under ladders, too.) But I think the magic will hold because it comes from the love and support of a very honest and true partner—the story he encouraged me to start today will be done soon.