Act One: Produce

Jodifabulous:  To self.*  "I'd like thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat, if we could cycle down some lane.  I'd like thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat if we could ride into the rain, no macs getting wet" ... I need bananas.  Asparagus.  Cucumber and tomato sandwiches.  I'm hungry, but not hungry enough to eat cucumbers and tomatoes on pumpernickel without salt and pepper.  I mean no salt and pepper -- dis-gus-ting.  Tripe-washed spinach.  I doubt that.  "Say a sunflower I became, I'd be growing in your rain."

Sateen NASCAR jacket guy: Beg your pardon?      

Jodifabulous: Heh.  Nothing.  To self (for real, I hope).   He needs a shave.

Act Two:  Deli-side

Bell: Ding!

Shower cap girl: What kin I gitcha?

Jodifabulous: I'd like a half-pound of the munster cheese please.

Scale: To self.  34, .44, .54

Jodifabulous: Humming.  "And in no tah-ahm, you'll be fah-ine."  Oh.  That's good.

Shower cap girl:  You sure?

Jodifabulous:  Yes, a little over.  It's fine.

Scale: Beep. Chick chick chick.

Shower cap girl: Anything else I can gitcha today?

Black Sharpie marking pen: Squeaky, squeaky, squeak.

Jodifabulous:  Nope.  I'm all set.

Shower cap girl:  OK.  You have a great day.

Jodifabulous:  OK.  You too.  To self.*  Skip the chip aisle.  Hey, beer!  Bass, Sierra Nevada.  Bass, Sierra Nevada.  Bass, Sierra Nevada.   Guinness? No.  Bass?  Sierra Nevada.  Now when I buy Tide, that'll go underneath ... yes ... underneath.  Jodifabulous places 6-pack in shopping trolley undercarriage and sings.  Out loud.  "Ohh, when you're cold I'll be there. Hold you tight, to me, to me, yeah. Ohh, when you're alone, I'll be there.  By your side, baby."  I love Sade.  Even though I eat it, ketchup is wrong.  The song ends.

Flourescent lights:  Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

Act Three: Pet Sundries and Dairy

Jodifabulous: To self.*  This is the coolest grocery store ever.  "Have.  You.  Fed the fish to-dayayay."  I've been singing this whole trip.  I know all the wor ... JESUSTHISISAFARMERJACK!!! I'm adult Contemporary.  Yep, 27.  I'm 27.  If I were Kurt Cobain, I'd have my toe in a shotgun trigger right now ...  and now I know why.  What are the evil grocery lords going to play next.  Manic Street Preachers?  Suicide is Painless?  Oh well, I'm more of a crazy-old-hermit-lady-who-spites-love-because-she-lost-it-type anyway.  "Good night, you moonlight ladies."  I'm going all Miss Havisham tomorrow.

Curtain.

*By "To self," I mean to anyone in my general vicinity.  I lost the ability and the impetus to distinguish between "in my head" and "out loud" with punctuated "NO CLOTHES!" outbursts while giving birth for the second time, naked in a roomful of relatives who, taken separately, are allowed to see me naked, but at the same time ... awww man.

When I learned that Gwyneth Platrow was slated to play Sylvia Plath, the consumately mischaracterized arch poetess of blue-black-haired teens girls -- their boots worn through from gazing -- I prepared myself for the worst.  I imagined Margot Tenenbaum transposed with twill skirts and pearls.  The Sylvia Plath mythos has unfolded an Eeyore-esque cutout of the young woman confessional poet who kicks a stone across the grain of American literature toward her demise.  But reports of her anti-socialism have been greatly exagerrated, as has the emphasis placed on Ted Hughes' affairs as the trigger for her suicide. 

Still, loving and loving alone undid Sylvia Plath.  Her Unabridged Journals reveal an intensely neurotic whimsy that latches lamprey-style to the ideals of romantic love, motherhood, language and the poetry of each.  This film reveals the same intensely neurotic whimsy.  While her subdued nasality works against the role, Gwyneth Paltrow becomes the woman whose quietude stems not from melancholy, but from paralytic anxiety -- a mind that won't slow down.

The slope-sliding production design is both beautiful and uncanny, spanning cerulean Massachussets to gray-green Devonshire.  The latter creates a hauntingly stark backdrop for the gold-haired writer and her fuzzy penumbra.  I don't feel like I'm giving anything away when I say how stunning I find the cranberry-red body bag in which Plath is removed from her dingy brownstone after meticulously taping door cracks to gas herself to death.  Biopics aren't about what happens.  People who care know how she cut crusts from bread, poured milk, cracked a window, kissed her babies, sat down and died.  But people don't know why -- not really anyway.  This film is about how Sylvia Plath was silenced when she didn't want to shut up.   

Post-partum depression is often not even mentioned when Plath is discussed, so I find the fact that at several points in the film when Paltrow finds herself alone in winter with two crying children, she drops her head into her hands and cries "I'm so exhausted.  I'm just so tired."  At these moments, jaded as I am, I am moved to tears, and I don't think it's only because I identify completely; Paltrow is just that good.  Daniel Craig humanizes the enigmatic Ted Hughes who is alternately villified and knighted by literary critics.  They apparently see only those two options as viable handlings.  While I think he was more than a bit of a butthole, this picture gets at the guts of the relationship and rightly trivializes liquoring, carousing and outright infidelities as inherently destructive forces, underscoring memory and their isolating effects of "negative" behaviors as the true culprits.  

Far be it from me to question Lake Superior State University as a safeguard of integrity for the academy, but eliminating "LOL," "bling" and "metrosexual" from the English language would effectively leave me vocally bored.  Words themselves are not cliche; usages are.  I think this annual publication attempts to appear starkly observant based on cheeky, literal oxymorons that have or nothing to do with the relevance of the name to the thing itself.  For example, the list suggest that "sanitary landfill" fall out of favor, supporting said suggestion with the anecdote "'Ever been to one?' asks Stan Slade of Long Beach, Mississippi. 'Not the cleanest place in the world. What happened to the county or city dump?'"  Clever Stan.  You're clever. 

This fails to reconcile the importance of linguistic specificity.  Analogy, metaphor and multiple words used to describe the same object or idea only serve to provide clarity, not fodder for smart-alecky "scholars" of whom I tire, by and by.