Chairs...

This weekend I worked on a project I should have started earlier: covering my dining table chairs.

Now, they aren't wonderful chairs - I think they originally came from Ikea, though there's nothing like them in their catalogue now. They came to me second-hand from a friend about 12 years ago. They needed recovering then, and I recovered them - they have a metal frame with padded back and seat covered in fabric. They're very comfortable, and as long as the seat covering isn't worn to rags, they look good. I use these chairs at my computer and at my desk. They are good all-purpose chairs.

After twelve years, give or take a few, the fabric had started rather suddenly to wear out. Yesterday I went to Rockland Textiles and spent quite a while browsing the fabric. Am I fussy? It took ages to find the right thing. Nothing in their regular fabric section seemed to be what I wanted, so I went through all their remnants - for both upholstery fabric and heavy-weight cottons. I kept finding fabrics that had good colours, but were covered with depictions of elephants. I really didn't want elephants on my chairs. I would have liked an Egyptian motif... no such luck. I finally found a fabric in gold and green that looks Florentine to me, and I love it; and they only had 2 yards of it, so I got a matching green for the seats.

Then I got to work. What a job. Exhausting. But I was determined to have all the chairs recovered by 4 p.m. today, when Beulah and Lyn were coming over for supper, and I did. Tired but happy. They admired my chairs and then Lyn sat down for supper and the padded back fell out of the metal frame.

Oops.

Okay, so I'm better at sewing the fabric than I am at weilding the screws that hold the chair together. I fixed it. With any luck it will stay together when the next person sits down.

The Man Who Cried...

In my ongoing project of seeing all Johnny Depp's movies, this evening I saw The Man Who Cried.

The plot is... okay. Not full of surprises.

The best thing about it? Johnny Depp as a very sexy gypsy. Johnny Depp in a uniform on a horse in an opera. Johnny Depp looking as good as Johnny Depp can look (how good does good get?).

The second best thing about it is all the opera in it, which absolutely suited my new-found passion. The theme (reprised on several occasions during the movie) is the same thing Lionel Luthor was listening to on Smallville, Bizet's "Je crois entendre encore" from The Pearl Fishers. My ear isn't good enough (yet) to be able to tell whether the recording Lionel was listening to was from the sound track of the movie, but I thought it might be; at one point, the tenor in the story is singing it in Italian, but the original theme has it in French (as Bizet did) and Lionel was listening to the French version. It was also fun to see Johnny Depp and his horse on stage in a Verdi opera I couldn't identify. Yeah, I've read Opera for Dummies now, and The History of Opera by Ricahrd Fawkes, but I still can't identify many visually (or even musically). They did show a moment of the tenor singing in The Pearl Fishers in a rather bizarre costume that looked like Robinson Crusoe with oyster shells in his hair.

Another good thing about this movie is a Johnny Depp sex scene.

I liked it that Depp was a gypsy. He makes gypsies look pretty good. I know little enough about gypsies, and would like to know more.

There was a moment I found rather odd. The movie is set in Paris in the 1930s; the heroine is Jewish. At one point someone scorns the Johnny Depp character for being a 'dirty gypsy' and she speaks up for him. Later, he's angry with her for the conversation, on the grounds that she isn't 'one of us'. She says, "But I'm not one of them." "So what are you?" he asks. We don't hear what she tells him, but presumably she says she's a Jew; but I wondered why he would think a Jew was any closer to being a gypsy than anyone else. Maybe it was just that in that time a place, it put them in the same sort of danger?