FoxCraft

Darby O'Gill and the Scared Little People

The Hipp Theatre needs my help—yours, too, if you're interested.

For the past several years, the movie theatre in my home town of Gregory, South Dakota, has been run as a nonprofit organization staffed completely by volunteers. In order to keep showing movies, they'll need to buy expensive digital equipment. They've sent fundraising letters to all the Gregory High School alumni they could find, asking for donations to help today's kids enjoy movies "the way we did."

Great idea. Except I don't remember ever enjoying movies at the Hipp Theatre when I was in high school. Maybe the fact that my social life consisted largely of reading four or five library books a week had something to do with that. Surely I must have gone to a movie at least once or twice. If so, apparently neither the movie nor the date was that memorable.

What I do remember vividly about the Hipp Theatre, though, is watching a Disney movie there called Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Darby O'Gill was an elderly Irish man who kept trying to catch, or maybe did catch, the king of the leprechauns. His daughter was courted by a handsome young man who kept singing a lilting little song to her. The song still pops up in my mind at random moments: "Oh, she is my dear, my darling one, her eyes so sparkling, full of fun . . . "

Besides the song, the most memorable part of the movie included wailing banshees and something called the "death coach." I'm a little hazy on the details, mostly because I watched that part in terror with my hands over my eyes, huddled in my seat next to my Aunt Ginny and peeking every now and then to see if the scary things were gone yet. As I've always remembered it, I was about four years old at the time.

Well, thanks to the marvels of the Internet, I looked up Darby O'Gill and the Little People just now. I discovered two facts, one startling and one disturbing.

The startling fact was that the handsome singing lover was a young actor named Sean Connery. Maybe that explains why I've had a crush on the man my whole life.

The disturbing fact was that the movie was released in 1959. I was born in 1951. When I sat there in the theatre, not breathing, trying not to peek at the fearsome banshees, I wasn't four years old. I was at least eight.

That realization was a bit embarrassing. At least until I remembered that, in another theatre and another decade, I watched Jurassic Park the same way. I was 42 at the time. At least by then I was adult and sophisticated enough that I didn't have my hands over my face. I just shut my eyes and held my breath whenever I thought another dinosaur was going to burst through the wall and grab somebody.

Meanwhile, my daughter, at the blasé age of 11, sat there calmly munching her popcorn.

Either I was emotionally scarred for life by the banshees, or I'm just a wimp. I don't think I care to figure out which.

Still, I guess my memory of Darby O'Gill and the Little People is reason enough to donate a bit to the Hipp Theatre. Good for all the hardworking volunteers who think a small-town movie theater is worth keeping open. I hope they succeed.

I also hope, even in today's world, that there are still a few kids who watch the scary parts with their fingers over their eyes.

Just Make Mine Scrambled

"How would you like your eggs?" The waitress waited, pen poised over her order pad, while the customer pondered for a moment.

"Basted," he finally said.

Basted? Scrambled, sure. Over easy, okay. Poached, perhaps. Sunny side up, sometimes. Even Eggs Benedict, if you're up for something fancy to feed your brain while you wonder who Benedict was.

But basted? How many people order their eggs "basted?"

Especially when they (the people, not the eggs) are only seven years old. Several of our friends meet at a restaurant for breakfast every Saturday, and on this particular morning one of the women had brought along her grandson.

Listening to him order his eggs with such aplomb, I was jolted back in time to the first time I ever ate breakfast in a restaurant. We were on a rare family vacation, right here in the beautiful Black Hills. I was ten. With a little encouragement, I asked for eggs and toast, and the waitress asked me, "How would you like your eggs?"

I didn’t have a clue what to tell her. Oh, I knew how I wanted my eggs, all right—fried, with the white cooked all the way through and the yolk still soft. Just the way my mother cooked them, in other words. What I didn't know was how to describe them.

Seeing my baffled expression, my father chuckled and told the waitress, "Over easy."

It was the first time I'd ever heard that term. Eating in a restaurant was a rarity in itself for us. Until that day, it hadn't occurred to me that people would actually get breakfast at one. I knew all about where eggs came from and had a painful first-hand familiarity with the term "hen-pecked," but I had no idea there were various ways to fry eggs and various words to describe them.

For seven-year-olds like my friend's grandson, eating out is simply one of the available options for any meal, including breakfast. Watching him chat with the adults at the table while he ate his basted eggs, I didn't know whether to be amused or amazed at the different set of skills little kids learn in today's world. Of course he knows how to order his eggs just the way he wants them, just as he knows how to text or take pictures with a cell phone.

Trying not to feel too out of touch, too unsophisticated—okay, let's face it—too old, I shut up and ate my own eggs (over medium, thank you).

Later, pondering eggs basted and otherwise, I did some research. I discovered that there is some dispute over which of several contenders gets the credit for Eggs Benedict. Benedict Arnold is not one of them. I also confirmed my guess about how to baste an egg, which essentially is a matter of scooping hot grease over it instead of turning it over.

Learning all of that was simple; I just looked it up on the Internet. It only took a minute, and then it was over. Easy.

Does a Bear Melt in the . . .

. . . microwave? For those of you who have been losing sleep wondering about this vital question, here's the latest scientific research. Like so many great scientific discoveries (think penicillin), it owes its most important conclusion to serendipitous accident.

Step One: Put muffin on plate. Decide to have it with honey. Get from cupboard one quart-sized plastic honey bear bottle containing about an inch of honey. Discover honey has hardened and can't be poured out of bottle.

Step Two: Place honey bear in microwave oven.

Step Three: Set timer to 30 seconds and power to 50%.

Note: Here's where the serendipitous accident comes in. The researcher had done this same procedure many times, with uniformly successful outcomes. This time, however, the researcher's thumb slipped too lightly over the button when inputting the power level. Instead of 30 seconds at 50% power, the microwave was inadvertently set for 3 minutes and 5 seconds at full power.

Step Four: Go into dining room and sit down at computer. Become absorbed in a project.

Step Five: When around two minutes have elapsed, the researcher's colleague, busy in the kitchen with a different project involving hot water and dishwashing liquid, says, "Your honey must be melted; I can smell it." (Note: the lack of precise timing here is troubling. In the interests of valid science, this experiment should be repeated under closer observation.)

Step Six: Rush into kitchen and open microwave. Observe results of serendipitous accident. The honey-melting part of the procedure has been very successful, given the pool of boiling liquid spread across the glass microwave plate. The bottom half of the plastic bear has also melted. It is collapsing onto the glass like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Step Seven: Carefully pick up glass plate. Carry it quickly to back door, keeping it as level as possible in order to avoid dripping boiling honey onto floors, furniture, or feet.

Step Eight: Carry entire mess—er, scientific project—outside. Rest glass plate on deck railing and tip it to allow liquid honey and semi-liquid plastic bear to slide off onto grass below. Plastic doesn't slide. Request colleague to bring spatula from kitchen. Scrape melted bear off of glass plate—very carefully, as plate is too hot to touch.

Step Nine: Lean over railing and observe free-form remains of honey-spattered plastic bear. Note its strong resemblance to something that died in the woods some time ago and was recently dragged home by the dog.

Step Ten: Go back into house. Place glass microwave plate on a cooling rack until it reaches a temperature at which it's safe enough to scrub off the remaining honey and melted plastic.

Step Eleven: Eat muffin with jelly instead of honey.

Step Twelve: Leave microwave open to dissipate slightly charred sweet aroma. Consider more research to investigate possible names and markets for desserts made with triple-melted honey. Just Bearly Honey? Honey Overcomb? OverBearing Honey?

They may be faint, but there are possibilities. After all, since its name just means "burned cream," this is probably how crème brule was invented.

I wonder how you say "burned honey" in French?

The Secret to a Clean Garage

"We need to clean the garage." It's one of those phrases that strikes fear into the hearts of organization-challenged homeowners everywhere.

And with good reason.

Suppose you've decided it's time. You're going to take on this task. You're going to march right up to it, look it full in its glaring red eyes, and challenge it on its own turf, with every intention of conquering.

You head out to the garage, with energy in your step and determination in your soul. Then you take a good look at the clutter. You realize you don't have a clue where to start. You remember that all the unsorted junk on the shelves and in the corners is there because you couldn't decide what to do with it last time. You feel your determination starting to leak out through the soles of your grubby old tennis shoes.

Before long, overwhelmed, you remember several very important things you need to do in the house, like finishing the Sunday crossword puzzle and filing your toenails. You slink back inside, with a faint hope at the back of your mind that a tornado will come along and rip the garage off the house—leaving the house itself undamaged, of course—to take care of the garage clutter for you.

Take heart. There is a better way.

Sometimes the best way to take on a big job like cleaning the garage is to sneak up on it. It helps, too, if some outside event pushes you into action.

On Thursday of last week, two guys spent the day in our basement and garage installing a new furnace. In addition to banging and clanging and using power tools, this necessitated moving a cache of vertical stuff standing in one corner of the garage. When they were done, we had an array of skis, ski poles, old mops and brooms, curtain rods, and leftover pieces of woodwork piled on the floor.

On Sunday afternoon, we went out to spend a few minutes putting these things away to make room to put the car back in the garage.

Two and a half hours later, we had two garbage cans full of stuff to throw away, a big pile of stuff to give away, and a lot of other stuff put away. Without intending to, we had cleaned and organized one half of the garage. All it took was something to get us started. With the help of the furnace installers, we had sneaked up on a dreaded task and discovered it wasn't really so bad.

So now we know how to get the garage cleaned. Just start by buying a new furnace, and the rest takes care of itself.

Of course, that strategy only works once every 30 years or so. Somehow, I can't bring myself to see that as a problem.

Just Give Me a Sign

The family of blondes had planned their vacation for months and were very excited about going to Disney World. After two long days of driving, they were almost at their destination. Then, just ahead, they saw a big sign: "Disney World Left."

Disappointed to the point of tears, they turned around and drove home.

The wonderful complexity of the English language can make using the right word challenging enough when you have whole sentences and paragraphs to work with. When you only have enough room for a handful of words, on a sign or in a headline, it can be even harder to say precisely what you intend.

When I was in high school, there was a sign near our mailbox that read "Slow School Bus Stop." We were never sure exactly what it meant. Was it a bus stop for a slow school, a stop for a slow school bus, or a slow stop for a school bus? At least that sign wasn't as bad as the ones that announce so unkindly: "Slow Children Playing."

A couple of recent headlines in our local paper point up the difficulty of communicating clearly in small spaces. One read, "Chicken Rules Needed." As someone who used to have to gather eggs from cranky hens who didn't want to give them up, I wholeheartedly agree.

One with a little more drama was "Lions plant trees with fourth-graders." It would seem to me that shovels might be more efficient, but hey, they're lions. If I start challenging their tree-planting strategies, the next headline might read, "Lions plant nitpicking editor."

When you try translating from other languages, of course, the chances for error are greatly increased. When my partner was in Mongolia a few years ago, he ate at a restaurant that offered him a menu in English. One of the featured items was "Roasted Chicken Spit." Considering the difficulty of collecting enough for a meal, the price wasn't as high as one might expect.

Last week, though, in a residential neighborhood in Spearfish, we saw an example of abbreviated communication that was refreshingly direct. At the top of the post was a sign reading "Dead End." Below it was a second sign with an arrow pointing to the left and one word: "Cemetery."

It may not have been tactful, but at least it was clear.