A Powerful Movie

This week I am going to go to the BCR Board of Trustees meeting so I took Cely back to visit her Mom this weekend. Cely was going to stay here but I had already booked a flight to the Quad Cities next weekend. People must not be travelling much this weekend. We had great luck getting to the Quad Cities even though there was a big snowstorm and cancelled flights on Thursday. It was just like flying normally in each direction.

The biggest thing was the movie we saw this weekend. Cely heard about this musical that is playing on Broadway called Grey Gardens. It seemed really odd because it is based on these two eccentric women called "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" they were Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin respectively. The musical is based on a documentary done in 1975 by Albert and David Maysles
titled Grey Gardens. IMDB does a better job at providing a description of the movie than I can. This documentary was so funny yet deeply disturbing all because of the two women, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale. The Maysles brothers put together a film that shows truth can be stranger, and sometimes more powerful, than fiction.
The women live on their slowly disintagrating mansion in the Hamptons along with a spectacularly overgrown garden, racoons in the attic, cats aplenty, a mother daughter relationhip that takes disfunctional to new levels of madness. Cely, June and I watched it together at June's and we could not stop talking about it. It had as much drama and depth as a Tennessee Williams play. In fact, aspects of the relationship between the two women reminded me of the Glass Menagerie. This gets my recommendation as a must see movie. There will be plenty of opportunities to see the women's story as there is now the Broadway musical, the 1975 movie, a recent release of outtakes from the documentary, The Beales of Grey Gardens and a fictional version now in production staring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.