Moving to Substack

It's obvious that I don't post here anymore. The last post was two years ago. With all the different social media platforms and outlets, it can just get overwhelming. I've had to chop a lot of stuff out of my life and concentrate on the most important things. So... I still like to post more long-form ramblings on occasion. Stuff that's too much for Twitter or too controversial for Faceboop. I only have Insta' because a few friends and family post almost exclusively there, but I rarely do. Snapchat and TikTok: nope. 

I've entered a new phase of life where I'm getting serious about my writing, and working toward actually publishing. Almost every author I know stays in touch with readers and peers via Substack, so I'm trying it out. So far it's kind of confusing. Is it a blog or a newsletter or some kind of weird hybrid? O well, I'm there now. So far I've made one post...entry? Hope to see you there!

https://nancyfrye.substack.com/

Celluloid Days #9 - Thomas Edison: The Variety Stage & Oriental Dance

For several years I enjoyed, and sometimes contributed to, a fun podcast called Coffee With Jeff. Jeff has a new podcast where he focuses on movies and film history. It's called Celluloid Days, and I just had to stick my finger in that pie, too, and have become a regular contributor with my "natterings".

Since podcasts are audio only, and sometimes the things we talk about really call for imagery, I’ve decided to put my segments on my blog, with appropriate pictures. Here we go! This entry covers my segment for Episode 9: Thomas Edison, released on March 6, 2022.

You’ve probably deduced by this point that I like movies, or as we used to say back in the day, the “moving pictures”. One of my favorite genres is historicals or “costume dramas”. I’m also a sci-fi buff, and when you combine sci-fi with history you get another one of my very favorite genres: time travel stories. 

Not content to merely read or watch time travel stories, I wanted to experience it, so by the time I was into my teens I was into historical clothes and material culture. There was no internet back then, so I got my information from reading historical novels, straight history books, and historical film and television. I wanted to live in the past!

Later it would dawn on me that living in the past meant no antiseptics, anesthetics, or hot and cold running water, so I decided just visiting was the better option. In my college years I discovered the wacky world of historical reenacting. These are the people who study history by DOING it. Medievalists, neo-Victorians, and Civil War reenactors all fall into this category, and I’ve participated in just about all of it except Roman Legions. 

At one point in my life I ended up living in the Bay Area of California. I was heavily into American Civil War reenactment at the time, where I started out as a Confederate cavalry trooper, then a sailor, then switched sides to drive wagons and an ambulance for a Union Artillery unit (See photo, right, of me as a Union Hospital steward. Ferrotype by Wm. Dunniway). I met some amazing people, including my second husband, through this hobby. One of the people I met was my friend Elizabeth. She’s an architect who also loves historical clothing and cooking and everything else. She was also a big fan of traditional oriental dance. 

You might know “oriental dance” by its modern, westernized term: “belly dance”.

I can't remember the inciting incident, whether it was around the campfire one night after a day of robbing trains in the Santa Cruz Mountains, around the punch bowl at a Victorian ball, or at a potluck at somebody's house, but somehow we came up with the idea of doing old world, old style belly dance. We had no interest in modern belly dance, with its full orchestras, skimpy costumes, and sequins. We wanted to emulate the professional folk dancers of Egypt and North Africa. Characters like the infamous “Little Egypt”, who was in reality a number of different dancers using that name throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

There’s plenty of documentation for folk costumes of the world, but reading about dance isn’t a great way to reinvent it. Several books on the origins of belly dance reference footage shot by Edison, or more likely his associates, including one by Donna Carlton literally named “Looking for Little Egypt”…which is literally what we were doing. 

If you go to the Library of Congress web site and search the “Variety Stage” film collection, you’ll find a window into the history of ethnic dance in America. Unlike the Black Maria footage, Edison’s Variety Stage films were shot at places like the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY in 1901. 

Some of these very short documentary films, or “actualities” as they were called, are clearly of the dancers imported from Algeria and elsewhere, while other clips are most likely priceless documentation of burlesque performers who blended a few ethnic moves into their existing “hoochie koochie” style and called it “oriental”.

It all helped us add some authenticity to our existing folk dance vocabulary, and for several years we had fun performing as 19th century “oriental dancers” at reenactments, parties, and sometimes our local Moroccan restaurant. (See image, left, of my friend and me, Nabila, as "Little Upper and Lower Egypt". Ferrotype by Wm. Dunniway)

Edison may have been a cad, but time travelers like me are grateful his films have been preserved for the ages.

 

Covid recovery update #2

 As of today, my taste and smell are up to about 90% or more, depending upon the thing I'm trying to taste or smell, so that's pretty nice. I'm also about 90% back to full muscle strength and general stability. My weight is hovering around 170, down ten pounds from my pre-covid weight, so that's good, too. I have some more weight to lose, but let's not to it via a pneumonia this time, 'kay? 

On the minus side, I've lost about 40% of my hair volume. This is not breakage, this is hair falling out by the root. Really disheartening, but according to a slew of other long-haul koofers this shall most likely stabilize and re-grow. Yay! In the meanwhile I'm taking collagen and silica and washing my hair with stuff that's supposed to stimulate growth. Baking soda "no poo" with vinegar rinse, some fancy hair growth shampoo and conditioner, etc. Once a week is plenty. My hair doesn't get greasy, especially at this time of year (cold), and I'm not swimming and getting all salty (because it's cold).

New symptom as of a week or so ago, gradually worsening: lymph node pain, left armpit, radiating out to lower rib cage and around to my back, all left side. Gets worse as the day goes on. At night I'm doing contrast hydrotherapy to flush out the nodes, which alleviates a LOT of the pain and helps me get to sleep. By morning it creeps back up to "annoying" levels, and I'm avoiding waistbands because after awhile they just hurt. I'm a sensitive flower now, for awhile. Whee. The plus side is that every day seems like a net positive gain, so there's that.

Covid Recovery update

For those who don't know me personally, my spouse and I had Covid in the first part of September. He lost three weeks of work. I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and ventricular tachycardia. We're "recovered", but full recovery is taking a lot longer than any virus should. We've had some devastating flus before, this is different. This is dystopian sci-fi territory. This should make you think. Anyway...

This week's symptoms: 

Dull pain, bottom rib left side...which is kind of weird, since I had a dull pain bottom rib right side the month before I got the coof. Precursor? Coincidence? I was checked out and was not gallbladder issues, etc.

Hair is still coming out at approximately 60% more than usual. I've lost about 40% of my total hair volume at this point. Taking collagen, biotin, etc. should help, according to other long-haulers. We'll see. Not ready to chop off what I have left just yet.

Still having GI issues, as in everything just shoots through me. Actual diarrhea about half the time. I wouldn't mind so much if were actually losing me some weight, but, no. I'm hovering around 170. Could be worse, since I was around 180 BC (before coof).

Can't get blood O2 above 93. Gordon has been at 100% for weeks, the stinker. And that's another thing I'm noticing between our personal experience and the accounts I'm reading in the Covid Long Hauler support group on Facebook: this virus is NOT normal and natural. Read into that what you will.

Everybody has a different experience and different symptoms long-term. There are some commonalities, like diminished taste and smell, fatigue, hair loss, etc., but then it just feels like everybody else is experiencing a super specialized reality after that. Rashes, cardiac issues (mine was only at onset), swollen digits, recurring pneumonia, continuing weight loss, lack of appetite, numbness and/or tingling in extremities or an entire side of the body. The list is long. I really wish people in that support group would list their BC medical conditions and what prescriptions they're currently taking, because I think that is a huge factor in all of this. I think Gordon and I are amongst the very few of the cases who aren't obese and/or on one or more drugs.

Still happy to be in the "vaccine" control group, though. Wait this out, people. The next five years is going to be interesting, but probably not in a 100% happy way. Tell your friends and family you love them, whatever their medical choices.

Book review: The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****Spoilers*****


I love Penny's fictional village of Three Pines, tucked in a valley in the woods somewhere between Montreal, Quebec and the US border. I love her characters, from Chief Inspector Gamache to Ruth the irascible poet laureate to all the other denizens of Three Pines and Gamache's fellow LEOs. What I don't love is how socio-political topics are becoming more and more prominent in her stories. Although not unexpetcted, it's getting to be a bit much.

It's not like she hasn't telegraphed this tendency. Since the first novels in this series, I've been a bit dubious about her giving Gamache an aversion to firearms: a veteran LEO, who's very capable of using a weapon...but won't carry one unless he has to (how does one determine that unless you're pre-cognizant). In this installment even Jean Guy decides not to pull the trigger in the story's climax, because, per the author, of "love". He feels he'd be a terrible father if he were capable of taking a shot at a person threatening another person with a shotgun. I think a man incabable of lethally defending an innocent person is not a "good man". What if it were his child being threatened? If he can't step up, he's useless.

The most onerous facet of this novel is the fantasy "post Covid" world she has constructed. Obviously this novel was written during the worst of the "pandemic", and Penny has drunk all of the government and media Kool-Aid regarding this crime against humanity. This novel takes place a few months "after the pandemic". The vaccines have solved the crisis, there is no more Covid, and everything is back to normal. Yay! Needless to say, this story will not age well in coming months and years. Firstly, things are NOT back to "normal" anywhere. Depending on your location in the world, you may have a free and open society again, or you may be facing restricted travel and economic ruin if you don't have a "vax passport". There are people, as I write this, who are so traumatized by all the fear porn from the government and their media lackeys, that the mere sight of an unmasked person makes them flinch. Secondly, as we deal with increasing cases of vaccine injury and death, coupled with the monumental ineffectiveness of the experimental mRNA drugs (they are not vaccines), this novel, unlike her others in the series, won't be "evergreen". 

Also "post covid" in this novel is a crackpot academic (reduntant?) who has posited that, post covid, the world's resources are limited and that forced euthanasia is the answer. What the actual heck? I have no problem with writing a character like that, but having half of Canada think she's right?! Sorry, not plausible. There is never a reasonable presentation of this character's arguments in the novel, such that a moral, reasonable human being would go along with her proposal. It's literally absurd.

Here's hoping the next novel sticks to a solid murder mystery and leaves the wacky sociopolitical fantasy out.

View all my reviews

Counting blessings or else go mad

Today was one of those days that started out relatively smoothly but rapidly degraded. Since I haven’t posted anything here on the blog for awhile, the backstory is that Gordon and I are recovering from Covid, which we contracted back in September. It’s a long, sordid tale, but suffice it to say that this was not the “I was sick for a few days, it was basically a bad cold” kind that folks we knew got in late 2019 or early 2020. Gordon was flattened for a couple of weeks and I ended up in the hospital for a week. Now, a month later, neither one of us is 100%. Gordon’s energy is about 95%, and he’s back to work full time. My energy can get to around 90%, but any kind of activity knocks me back down pretty quick. I’m lucky if my blood oxygen reaches 93%, I’m fumble fingered, and, thanks to the hospital giving me Remdesivir (without consent) instead of monoclonal antibodies, I’m losing my hair. People like me, with major lingering symptoms, are being labeled Covid Long Haulers, which sounds like the drudgery it is.

By early afternoon today I was reaching for the niacin because I was losing patience with myself and everything around me and working myself up to start throwing things. It didn’t help that my 84 year old father, who we’ve been trying to get to come live with us, decided today that he’s staying where he is for another year. He’s only eight miles away, but he lives alone, doesn’t like to cook, usually doesn’t answer his phone, and has increasing health issues. Add to that he fact that we’re on day six or so of nonstop dumping rain, my general lethargy and brain fog, and the current state of the economy and cultural hysteria over Covid mandates and other political nonsense, and today just kind of went downhill. 

At some point I had to get a grip and remind myself that I had a roof over my head, food and clean clothes, and nobody was shooting at me. Yeah, it was the “count your blessings” response. I’m still tired, and at the moment up way too late, but I’m dry, did some free weights his morning, have a purring cat next to me, and the coffee maker is set for the spouse in the AM. Here’s to attacking another day tomorrow.