19 September 2024
I’ve got to quit these late nights scrolling through Instagram. Last night I went to bed at 12:30 am and the night before, it was 1:30 am. I’m really a morning person but I sleep until 7:30 which is late for me.
I decided not to exercise today. There’s no good reason but laziness on my part. I could tell you I needed a rest from exercise from yesterday but more likely, it’s the late night to bed routine.
Last night was movie night. The movie was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a 2002 movie that probably didn’t make the money the producers wanted even though it has an all star cast. It had some of my favorite actors: Ellen Burstyn, Ashley Judd, Sandra Bullock, James Garner and Maggie Smith.
The movie takes place mostly in Louisiana and it’s about mother/daughter issues which include the mother pulling a stent in a mental hospital. Of course the daughter blames everything on the mother. Anyway, three of the four sisters of Ya-Ya go to New York to kidnap Sandra Bullock and bring her home to settle the issues between mother and daughter. All’s well at the end of the movie.
Parts of the movie were flashbacks to the 50’s. There’s one scene where the weather is so hot and there’s no breeze so they still the mother’s car to make their own breeze in the convertible. As they begin to shed their clothes, and eventually their bras, the get pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy.
If I were to describe the movie, it would be a little like a rom-com, a little like a drama and a little like a pure comedy. It holds you interest and it also takes me back to some of my Louisiana memories when I was stationed at the Coast Guard Communications Station at Belle Chase.
In one scene of the movie, the cast are at a Cajun crawfish boil. I once stumbled onto one of those while in Louisiana and they did a great job of portraying a real Cajun boil. There’s music and dancing and drinking and eating and fighting. It’s an all-in-one entertainment for the day. Kids running around, people laughing and crying, and a lot of beer.
One Cajun/Creole term used a good bit in the movie was bébé. The Cajun dialect is mostly French from French Acadia. When you get down into the small souther towns of Louisiana, you hear a lot of Cajun French or Creole.
One year, I took a bunch of Scouts to the Charles L. Sommers canoe base in Minnesota. We did most of our canoeing in Canada in the Quetico. One of my groups was made up of all Cajun Scouts and their Cajun adult leader. After a while, you begin to pick up the dialect but the Sommers’ staff person who took their group out never could understand a word they said.
Also, the staff have been taking groups out all summer and so they are the most proficient paddlers. The Cajun group of Scouts left their staff person in the dust. They were used to paddling pirogues. They had energy to burn because pirogues are wooden and slower moving and they were in aluminum canoes.
There were some places in Louisiana back in the 70’s that you had to speak Cajun French or you wouldn’t get served at a restaurant or bar. Once they learned to trust you, they would become your best friends.
Stay tuned!
