The Connie Willis . Net Blog

WEBSITE UPDATE–GOOD BY GOD, WE’RE GOING TO MISSOURI–PART I

A couple of weeks ago, we loaded up the car, pointed it east, and headed for Missouri. Mark Twain used to tell a story about a family’s moving to Missouri, and the little boy leaning out the back of the wagon and saying, “Goodbye, house, I’m goin’ to Missouri. Goodbye, trees, I’m goin’ to Missouri. Goodbye, God, I’m goin’ to Missouri.” “Now,” Mark Twain said, “you know he never said such a thing. He said, ‘Good, by God, I’m goin’ to Missouri.”

That was us. We were headed to the tiny town of Hamilton, Missouri (1500 residents), which you’ve most likely never heard of, but which is known to quilters as Quilt Town, USA. The home of the Missouri Star Quilting Company, the town is a mecca for them and for sewing machine collectors. My husband Courtney is both, and he’d wanted to go ever since a quilter friend first told him about it.

Missouri Star began as a tiny family quilting enterprise with a single long-arm sewing machine, selling quilting services and supplies to locals. Unable to make enough from that, they went online and began making how-to quilting videos, which Courtney says were actually fun to watch and easy to follow (unlike many which are deadly dull and/or unnecessarily complicated. I remember watching one where the teacher used two nearly identical shades of cream you couldn’t tell apart to show how to piece a quilt.)

The online business was quickly a hit, and the store in Hamilton, MO, expanded to two, then three, then a whole line of stores, buying up abandoned buildings in Hamilton’s dying downtown and turning them into what Forbes called “The Disneyland of Quilting.”
At this point they own one entire city block (except in no way can Hamilton be called a city) with two floors of undivided stores. Babies and Kids, Sew Seasonal (holiday fabrics), the Batik Boutique, Modern, and even one devoted entirely to fabrics with Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, and sports fabrics called License to Sew.

One of the stores was originally the J.C. Penney’s store in town and the fact that J.C. Penney was born here is the town’s other claim to fame. The appropriately named James Cash Penney (his name is what’s called an aptonym, a name that matches the person’s occupation, like William Wordsworth, runner Usain Bolt, tennis player Margaret Court, or John Blow, the pipe organist at Westminster Abbey) was one of ten kids, and the house is a museum.

Penney started out as a clerk in a dry goods store, but his health was bad, and he was forced to move to the drier climate of Colorado. He bought a meat market which went bankrupt, and then, in 1902, started his own dry goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming called “The Golden Rule Store” which eventually became the chain known as J.C. Penney, the first truly nationwide department store chain. Penney is on record as saying, “Boy, am I glad I failed as a butcher!”

On the other side of the street are the main Missouri Star store (with T-shirts, baseball caps, tote bags, jigsaw puzzles, etc.) and shops devoted to florals, old-fashioned quilting prints that look like the calicos and flour-sack prints Grandma made her quilts from, and primitives, including flannels that look like wool for making the pioneer wool sugans Courtney loves.

The stores are decorated on the outside with quilting murals (it really is Disneyland) and inside with quilts (of course!) and quilting maxims like: “Quilt till you wilt!” and “A Clean House is a Sign of a Broken Sewing Machine” and “She Who Dies With the Most Fabric is Not Sewing Fast Enough” and my favorite, “Do not question the size of my fabric stash unless you think it should be bigger!”

For anyone who loves fabrics and/or colors, the stores a a rainbow-colored paradise. Courtney bought some batik fabric that’s the most beautiful red I’ve ever seen, and I succumbed to a pinkish-orangeish-reddish-coral called “Crush,” which is this year’s “Kona Color of the Year.” (No, I haven’t suddenly started sewing. It’s for a blouse.)

Besides the quilting stores, there’s a sewing machine shop and “Man’s Land,” a place for bored husbands with a TV tuned to a sports channel, a pool table, and a long row of leather recliners. (Note: Every time I sat down, there or anywhere else, I was asked, “Too much shopping?” and had to explain that no, my husband was the quilter, at which point they assumed we quilted together. It’s sort of like the sexism you encounter in hardware stores, only in reverse.)

There are also several quilt-themed (of course!) gift shops and places to eat. We had a wonderful lunch at a tea shop called Mrs. Little’s with the Missouri version of high tea: cream cheese and ham or turkey sandwiches, corn chowder, orange carrots and pineapple jello, and lemon-frosted cakes. The other day we ate at the hamburgers and cokes place (which has lattes and ice cream, too.)

There’s also an ice cream shop which was fun to go to because it was presided over by a young guy who all the high school girls came in to flirt with. “Are you serious?” he asked one pair of giggling girls. “No, I’m 16 and she’s 14,” they said. “And jail bait,” we added silently.

But the highlight of Hamilton for Courtney was the Missouri Quilt Museum, located three blocks away from downtown in a 1903 high school building. It had an impressive array of antique quilts (one embroidered with names including that of J.C. Penney’s father) and an even more impressive array of sewing machines (4000 at last count) Courtney even saw one he’d never heard of. (Note: Courtney knows almost every brand, machine, and model ever made, so a machine has to be really rare to be one he doesn’t recognize.) It was a Singer Model 76-1, a small machine used specifically for gathering (making the loose stitches to be pulled to form gathers or ruffles).

He went home the first night and did a bunch of research on the machine and then went back the next day, armed with his computer, to ask if he could take a closer look at it to see exactly how it worked.

The Singer 76-1 was in a huge basement room lined with toy sewing machines (the museum people had mistakenly classified it as a toy) which was the largest I’ve ever seen. They had hundreds of toy machines in dozens of colors.

Some of our favorite displays included:
–antique toy machines complete with domed wooden cases, just like their full-sized counterparts
–toy treadle machines with narrow stands
–a large quilt made of tiny black and white pieces which, when you stood back from it, formed a portrait of Albert Einstein. It was displayed next to the classroom’s blackboards with Einstein’s famous “E=mc2” equation and quotes by him.
–a room full of miniature quilts made for doll beds made of pieces so tiny you couldn’t imagine anyone being able to sew them
–an entire room devoted to crazy quilts, the fancy silk and velvet and ribbon quilts sewn in irregular shapes with embroidery stitches edging them. (“Stitched with more than common pains, offspring of artistic brains…”)

The building itself was wonderful, too, with its stairways at either end, its gymnasium with wooden bleachers, and its built-into-the-wall blackboards. One of the visitors I talked to said he’d gone to school there and couldn’t believe how small it had gotten. “It seemed huge to me when I was a kid.”

Out front is “the World’s Largest Spool of Thread,” which is 22 feet high and has a million yards of thread on it. Visitors are welcome to bring their own spool of thread and add it to the mix.

The museum–and the town–were full of visitors who wanted to talk, sharing where they were from and comparing notes on other quilt places to go. We talked to people from California and Maine–and a group from back home in Colorado Springs.

Connie Willis

Visit Quilt Town, USA
MISSOURIQUILTCO.COM

“What is the finest sight in the world? A Coronation. What do people talk most about? A Coronation. What is delightful to have passed? A Coronation.”
Horace Walpole

Saturday I got up early to watch Charles III’s coronation. It was the second one I’d seen. The first was Elizabeth II’s which I watched seventy years ago on someone else’s TV because we didn’t own one yet. It was an impossibly grainy image on a tiny screen of a Cinderella-looking carriage drawn by four horses. I was only seven years old, but I have a vivid memory of it, probably because I was so fascinated by fairy tales and princesses and queens and golden coaches made out of pumpkins.

This time my husband and I watched it in color on a much larger screen while talking on the phone to our daughter in California the whole time as she kept us updated with texts from her friends and comments on Tumblr. Now, seventy years later, I am no longer all that fascinated by princess and carriages, but I am fascinated by history, and in terms of historical events, a coronation simply can’t be beat.

The coronation of England’s rulers has taken place in Westminster Abbey since 1066, when William the Conqueror was crowned there on Christmas Day. All British kings and queens except two (or three, depending on how you’re counting–Jane Grey, the
Nine-Days Queen” was executed before they could get her crowned) have been crowned in the Abbey since William the Conqueror in 1066. Only the boy king, Edward V, one of the little princes in the Tower, and Edward VIII, were never crowned, Edward V because Richard III had had him declared illegitimate and then had him disappeared and Edward VIII because he abdicated before his coronation took place, leaving his brother holding the bag. When George VI was crowned on May 12, 1937, the date for Edward’s coronation, the king wryly remarked, “Same date, different king.”

His coronation was broadcast over the radio and Elizabeth II’s over TV, but otherwise they were almost identical to that of earlier coronations, and the ceremony itself is nearly identical to the one Mark Twain described in The Prince and the Pauper or to the one in 1066 of William the Conqueror.

The ceremony begins with a procession down the Mall from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, with the king/queen riding in a coach (not the golden one) accompanied by the Lord Mayor, the members of the royal household, an assortment of clerical, court, and parliamentary officials, and mounted officers. Once at the Abbey, the Sovereign enters, wearing a red-velvet-and-ermine cape with a long train and a crown, though not the one he or she will be crowned with.

The coronation itself is a complicated ceremony with a number of steps which have remained essentially the same since William the Conqueror’s coronation. The Sovereign sits down on the Coronation Chair, underneath which is the Stone of Scone (which actually was stolen from Scotland and in the 1950s some Scottish university students stole it back–it’s now on loan from them) and takes an oath to rule the kingdom according to law, to exercise justice with mercy, and to maintain the Church of England.

He’s then anointed with chrism (holy oil) which was originally given to Thomas à Becket, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury by the Virgin Mary, and given the royal spurs (symbolizing chivalry), the royal swords (symbolizing State, Mercy, and Justice), the royal ring (often called “the Wedding Ring of England”), the orb, and the sceptre, and is crowned with St. Edward’s crown.

The gold-and-purple velvet crown weighs nearly five pounds and is decorated with 444 gems, including rubies, topazes, amethysts, sapphires, and emeralds. Queen Elizabeth II commented that you had to be careful not to look down while reading the royal oath or “you could break your neck,” it was so heavy. I thought Charles looked weighed down by it, and I noticed during the communion part of the ceremony he was bare-headed.
After Communion, the monarch changes clothes again, this time a purple robe, and takes the Coronation Oath. The Archbishop then raises the crown for all to see, the congregation shouts “God save the king (or queen)!” and the Abbey bells ring out to announce the ascension of the new monarch.

It’s a very solemn occasion, though some kings haven’t taken it all that seriously. King John giggled and jeered during the anointing and left immediately after the crowning and before Holy Communion, George IV flirted with his mistress throughout the service, and Edward VIII demanded that his mistress, Wallis Simpson, be seated in a special place above the altar, which courtiers promptly dubbed “the Loose Box.”

And even if the monarch does take it seriously, things don’t always go smoothly. At Queen Victoria’s coronation, the Archbishop jammed the ring onto the wrong finger so she couldn’t get it off, and eighty-year-old Lord Rolle fell down the steps during the homage. He “rolled quite down…” Victoria remembered. “When he attempted to re-ascend them, I got up and advanced to the end of the steps in order to prevent another fall.”

Richard II’s shoe fell off and Edward VII’s crown was almost put on backwards. To make matters worse, Edward had just had an appendectomy and could barely walk. Which was still better than Queen Anne, who was having an attack of gout and couldn’t walk at all–she had to be carried in in a sedan chair. The Dean at George II’s coronation forgot to bring the chalice and paten for communion, and at George III’s, he forgot the Sword of State.

Elizabeth II’s coronation seemed to go off without a hitch but behind the scenes, there were “noblemen who split their breeches…and earls and viscounts producing miniature bottles from inside their coronets,” and when one of the peers knelt down to pay homage to the queen, there was a clatter as mothballs tumbled from his robes.

Charles III’s followed most of the traditions, changing the ceremony only by making it shorter and including leaders of different faiths to participate in what used to be a purely Church of England ceremony. There was also a gospel choir, and the traditional church choir included girls this time.

The highlights were Prince William’s kissing his father on the cheek after pledging allegiance to him, nine-year-old George (next in line to the throne after William) carrying his grandfather’s train, his brother and sister, Louis and Charlotte, dressed in black and white respectively and looking like a miniature Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and the fact that it rained (which somehow seemed appropriate.)

Some sovereigns, including this one, have had to deal with the fact that some–or all–of the people didn’t want them crowned. The public booed and hissed at Anne Boleyn as she rode to the Abbey, William the Conqueror had to post armed guards outside, and at this one, large numbers of people wearing yellow and black and bearing signs saying, “Abolish the Monarchy,” gathered in Trafalgar Square gathered to protest and were promptly arrested by security.

After the ceremony, everyone recesses to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” out of the Abbey for another procession back to Buckingham Palace. But that doesn’t fully convey the grandeur and panoply of the affair. There are banners and bunting and Union Jacks everywhere, marching bands and horses and troops in scarlet-and-black uniforms and helmets with flowing white plumes.

There’s music–by Handel, Elgar, and Purcell–and fireworks and a 62-gun salute from the Tower of London, and a sea of embroidered clerical robes and peers’ white ermine capes. And of diamonds and jewels and gold, from the Communion plate to the Sovereign’s clothing. Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation dress was white satin embroidered with silver and gold thread. “So glorious was the show with gold and satin,” Samuel Pepys wrote after seeing Charles II’s, “that we could not look at it,” and Mark Twain described the Abbey as being “frosted like a Milky Way of diamonds” and, when the sun hit the jewels, “flaming into a dazzling splendour of many-coloured fires.”

And there are other events, too–an RAF flyover and an appearance by the royal family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and a fancy luncheon hosted by the new Sovereign for all the foreign dignitaries and other invited guests. Past coronations held lavish banquets, featuring roast swans and peacocks and venison, but in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned, post-war food rationing was still in effect, and they had to settle for chicken salad. “Poulet Reine Elizabeth” or “Coronation chicken” as it was dubbed, was a very special chicken salad, made with crème fraiche, apricot jam, curry powder, and wine, and it instantly became England’s most popular dish. (This coronation’s dish was called “Coronation Quiche” and featured spinach, broad beans, and tarragon–and sounded as exciting as Charles.

The coronation’s also a public event, with street parties and local celebrations in every town and village and people willing to stay up all night to secure a space from which to see it. Millions of spectators jam the procession and recession routes to catch a glimpse of the monarch. The weather this time meant that the flyover was smaller than they’d planned (though still resplendent with vapor trails of red and blue and white), the glass windows of the Cinderella coach (which is actually called the Gold State Coach) were spattered with rain, making it harder to see the new King and Queen, and the people along the procession route got drenched.

But there were still plenty of people and plenty of costumes–Union-Jack-printed dresses and suits and T-shirts and cardboard masks of Charles’ and Camilla’s faces and red-and-blue wigs. And there were millions more watching on TV around the world. Like me.
Paul Gallico wrote a delightful novella about an English family–mother, father, little boy, little girl, and crabby mother-in-law who come up to London from Sheffield for the coronation, only to find they’ve been swindled out of their “front row seats and champagne brunch” affair and now it’s too late to even find a place in the crowds where they can catch even a glimpse of the royal coach going by. It’s heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting as the father desperately tries to give his family the coronation experience he promised them, even to the champagne. If you’re a coronation fan, you definitely need to read it.

I’m glad I got up to see the coronation, especially since I may not live to see another one. Or, at this rate, there may not be another one. But if there is, and I’m still around, I’ll definitely be watching.

Connie Willis

This April I got to go to the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales for the second time since the Pandemic, and it was great. My daughter, who always does a forensics presentation, flew out and drove down with me since my husband couldn’t go–he was helping run an American Association of Physics Teachers meeting–and it took awhile since we stopped at every convenience store along the way to buy cornnuts and burnt peanuts and gummy pillows and red licorice and Reese’s peanut butter cups and soda pop and chips and pretty much every kind of junk food there was. (We were attempting to imitate the “Pig Tour” episode of Designing Woman and we did a pretty good job.)

We went the back way to Portales and were a little bit worried we might get lost and end up at the Grand Canyon like Thelma and Louise, but we didn’t, and got to Portales in time to have dinner at the Cattle Baron with Betty Williamson and Patrice Caldwell, my two sisters-separated-at-birth, who I fell in love with the very first time I attended a Lectureship. Betty is Jack Williamson’s niece and a reporter for the local paper and Patrice was, until this last semester, the President of the College, and between them they’ve been the mainstay of the Lectureship for years.

(A little background: Jack Williamson was one of the forefathers of science fiction, selling his first story in the 1920s and writing all the way through to the 2000s. Along the way, he wrote several classic novels–DARKER THAN YOU THINK, THE HUMANOIDS, and “With Folded Hands”–and his brilliant Hugo-Award-winning autobiography WONDER’S CHILD and coined names for many of the themes of SF, including “psionics,” “terraforming,” and “androids.” He was a Grand Master, had a meteor and a feature on Mars named after him, and served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.)

Jack also taught at the university in Portales, Eastern New Mexico University, and endowed a chair for bringing in guest lecturers in science fiction every year, which evolved into the Lectureship and which has hosted an amazing list of lecturers (including six Grand Masters of Science Fiction–seven if you count Jack–and a veritable Who’s Who of Science Fiction and Fantasy–Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison, Fredrik Pohl, James Gunn, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Jon Williams, George R.R. Martin, Carrie Vaughn, Vic Milan, Jeffe Kennedy, Ian Tregillis, Steven Gould, Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, Emily Mah, Edward Bryant, Charles N. Brown, the editor of Locus, and a bunch of others–and many of them have come back again and again.)

This year’s guest of honor was Arkady Martine, and she brought her wife, Vivian Shaw, with her, so we got two guests for one. They were great, and so were the panels, which the Lectureship features. I especially loved the one on Artificial Intelligence, which focused on the new dangers and possibilities of ChatGPT, and one on worldbuilding. I also loved Cordelia’s lecture on a very out-of-the-ordinary experience she had while working at the Santa Clara County Crime lab. Unlike the usual investigation of shoeprints, surveillance tapes, cell phones, etc., she suddenly found herself in a convoy with a SWAT team in L.A., driving a coworker’s car without the lights on in an attempt to arrest a bunch of human traffickers.

On Saturday, I teach a writers’ workshop for the students, although that’s not really accurate because many of the writers come and serve as an expert panel, so it’s really a group effort. This year’s workshop was on story endings, and everybody gave great advice, and then we all adjourned AGAIN to the Do Drop Inn for lunch. (Eating is actually what the Lectureship is all about–we ate at a vineyard and at the Cattle Baron, had a luncheon at the college, ate enchiladas at the house of one of the committee members, had breakfast at the Do Drop Inn, had coffee at the Do Drop Inn, had ice cream at the Do Drop Inn…well, you get the idea.)

It was great! I can’t wait to go next year, and you should come, too. Everybody’s welcome, and it’s so much fun. Since it’s smaller than your normal convention, everybody gets a chance to really know everybody else and the panels and workshop and lectures and speeches are all wonderful! Plus, you can eat the whole way there!

Connie Willis

From Feb 16, 2023;

Penguin Random House official page including and excerpt from the book and an audio excerpt.

It’s Valentine’s Day–again, as Phil would say in GROUNDHOG DAY (a different holiday. On Groundhog Day you of course watch GROUNDHOG DAY and on St. Patrick’s Day you watch LEAP YEAR and on Easter you watch CHOCOLAT, but what do you watch on Valentine’s Day?

Here’s some of what we watch around here, a short list of romantic comedies, both new and old, that you may never have heard of (I tried not to list the ones you HAVE heard of), but which are guaranteed to make you feel good no matter what your romantic situation:

1. THE DECOY BRIDE (with David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald, two reasons to watch right there)

2. WALK, DON’T RUN (with Jim Hutton, Cary Grant, and Samantha Eggar, or you could watch the original, THE MORE THE MERRIER)

3. PICTURE PERFECT (with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Bacon, and Jay Mohr)

4. HE SAID/SHE SAID (with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins, who both give their version of their sometimes rocky relationship and what really happened…)

5. HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.)

6. A LITTLE ROMANCE (the story of two kids (one of whom is a very young Diane Lane) who run off to Venice, helped by Laurence Olivier, of all people)

7. BALL OF FIRE (with Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, and a bunch of gangsters and absent-minded professors)

And what are WE watching tonight? Preston Sturgess’s THE LADY EVE, also with the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck as a card sharp and her pathetic dupe, Henry Fonda. (Note: If you’ve never seen a Preston Sturges movie, you’re in for a real treat. My husband’s favorite is SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, and mine is THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK.)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Connie Willis

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Poor Thanksgiving! It gets short shrift all around. Not only is it completely upstaged by Christmas, but now Black Friday means that Thanksgiving only gets a single day, and in the last few years (interrupted only by the Pandemic), Black Friday starts Thursday afternoon so you don’t even have time to do the dishes before Thanksgiving’s over and it’s on to the Christmas spending frenzy.

The same is true for movies. Hallmark devotes an entire month to Christmas movies and there are dozens of other new and old classics to watch, but there are hardly any Thanksgiving movies, and the ones there are always seem to involve a person who’s terminally ill. (Don’t believe me? How about STEPMOM, FUNNY PEOPLE, and ONE TRUE THING, to say nothing of THE BIG CHILL, in which the person’s already died?) Movies like that are the last thing we need in this Pandemic-That-Never-Seems-To-End.

So here’s a list of some cheerful Thanksgiving movies to watch in the ninety seconds or so between Thanksgiving dinner and Black Friday:

The top four in my family are:

1. PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES–This is the hands-down best ever Thanksgiving movie, about Steve Martin’s struggles to get home in time for Thanksgiving dinner, against obstacles including flight cancellations, scary motels, cattle trucks, near-death-on-the-highway, and John Candy. We watch it every year.

2. DEAR GOD–For some reason nobody’s ever heard of this movie, even though it was made by Penny Marshall and stars Greg Kinear and a host of crazies who work in the dead-letter office at the Post Office. It starts in the fall and goes all the way to the day before Christmas, and it has a wonderful Thanksgiving scene–at a miniature golf course.

3. YOU’VE GOT MAIL–This remake of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (which is definitely a Christmas movie and should be watched then, preferably on Christmas Eve) takes place through the fall, and has not only Thanksgiving get-togethers but the shopping you have to do beforehand, with a very funny scene set in a cash-only lane at the grocery store.

4. ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES–The Addams Family are always great, but this one was made even more special by Wednesday’s participation in a Thanksgiving Pageant at her school.

And these are good, too:

5. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS–This movie, which stars Holly Hunter and Robert Downey, Jr., is all about coming home for Thanksgiving and dealing with your highly dysfunctional family.

6. SCENT OF A WOMAN–If you want to avoid going home for Thanksgiving, you can always hire out for Thanksgiving weekend to assist a blind man, especially if the blind man is Al Pacino, who is not at all the helpless invalid Chris O’Donnell expects and who has very interesting ideas about what makes a good weekend, many of them involving Gabrielle Anwar.

7. MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET–I know, I know, this is a Christmas movie, but everyone always forgets that it starts with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Natalie Wood tricking her mother into inviting John Payne to Thanksgiving dinner. (I am of course referring to the black-and-white original version, which is the only one worth watching.)

8. And speaking of the Macy’s Parade, there’s TOWER HEIST, a movie about a bunch of guys (Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck) who’ve lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme planning a heist that will get their money back and get revenge on the guy who stole it. They decide the best time to pull off the heist is during the Macy’s Parade, since everybody’s busy watching the balloons and the bands.

9. PAUL BLART: MALL COP–This movie’s not about Thanksgiving but about Black Friday, which apparently is also a good time to commit a crime, and the only person standing between them and success is Kevin James.

10. SEMI-TOUGH–And if you can’t get through Thanksgiving without watching football, this is probably the best football movie ever made, with Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, Jill Clayburgh, and an incredible storyline involving the playoffs and an EST-type psychological guru.

11. Or if you’re the sentimental type, you can watch THE BLIND SIDE, a heartwarming true football story about a Southern family who befriended a black kid with no prospects and made him part of their family. It’s funny and sweet and has a great Thanksgiving dinner scene.

I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving and that you have a lot to be grateful for.

I know I do.

Including my family, my friends, and all of you.

Plus great Thanksgiving movies to watch.

Connie Willis