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“Baltimore industrialist Wendell Armbruster crosses paths with London shop girl Pamela Piggott when they come to Ischia to pick up the bodies of her mother and his father, who have been killed in an automobile accident after a ten-year summertime affair. Straitlaced Wendell tries to avoid a scandal while free-spirited Pamela is impressed by the romantic setting. After some confusion with the bodies and a blackmail attempt by unscrupulous locals, Wendell and Pamela extend their parent’s affair into the next generation.” via IMDB
Before this week, I had never even heard of this movie, called Avanti! (circa 1972). I know of actor Jack Lemmon; I’ve seen a few of his older movies & TV shows in the past (eg. The Odd Couple with fellow actor Walter Mathau). I know little of actress Juliet Mills. If I hadn’t “Google searched” her name, I would not have immediately recognized her. I only remember her from her days on a long-ago cancelled daytime American TV soap opera, & as the wife of fellow actor Maxwell Caulfield (whom I only recognize from the movies Grease 2 & Empire Records). I just happened to stumble upon this movie one evening while I was channel surfing on my bedroom TV. I often enjoy watching the classic movie channels, & sometimes I’ll uncover a real winner…like this one.
In just this one week alone, I’ve already watched this movie THREE TIMES. Yes, I understand that I sound like a crazy person, but I really, truly enjoyed this movie, & found it to be quite romantic even though some may argue that this movie glorifies & beautifies the act of openly & freely committing adultery. I choose to look past the sordid details of adultery & focus on the budding romance between the two main characters Wendell Armbruster Jr. & Pamela Piggott. I can’t quite understand how a man, back in those days, could go on vacation to Italy for one moth every year for ten years without his family, & it doesn’t raise any red flags. I get that in the movie, it was mentioned that the main male character’s father had health issues & was visiting the Italian hotel to relax & relieve his ailments. However, staying in Italy for ONE MONTH, alone? If I were the wife of Mr. Armbruster Sr., I’d tell him to take the kids with him. I need a vacation too. [laughs]
There were definite parts of the movie that I enjoyed the most. I really liked how, through the course of the movie, Jack Lemmon’s character Wendell Jr. has a change of attitude & a change of heart toward’s Juliet Mills’ character Pamela. Jack’s character is at first cold, surly & impatient.
“Look, Miss. On a train, or on a boat, there’s nothing I can do about it. But when you come barging into my room…” – Wendell Armbruster Jr.
“I thought maybe tonight we’d do something different…our thing.” – Wendell Armbruster Jr.
However, Juliet’s free-spirited & happy-go-lucky character slowly thaws his icy heart & slows his quick-tempered pace. Eventually, the two main characters grow to enjoy each other’s company & build a relationship without immediately realizing it. My most favorite scene(s) of the movie has to do with Juliet’s character Pamela Piggott. I absolutely LOVE that Pamela shows a little vulnerability & sensitivity toward her not-so-slim figure (a.k.a. her weight), yet she is able to keep a sense of humor about it all. Through the course of the movie, Pamela becomes increasingly confident about her voluptuousness. I wish I could be as confident about my body as Pamela is about her own body.
“I’ve been called plump. I’ve been called pudgy. I’ve been called chubby. But I’ve never been called fat…ass.” – Pamela Piggott
“Mrs. Armbruster, just to put your mind at rest, you needn’t be worried one bit, because if you saw me, I’m short, I’m fat, & I’m not very attractive. OK?” – Pamela Piggott
Besides the two main characters, there are a few other colorful characters worth mentioning…such as:
1. Carlo Carlucci, the charming, witty & quick-thinking hotel manager
2. Bruno, the cheeky valet with a penchant for taking raunchy photographs
3. Anna, the mustachioed housekeeper with a trigger finger & an unrequited passion for Bruno (Throughout the movie, I thought this character was played by an effeminate man, only to discover that she really was a woman…Oops!)
This movie starts off rather cold, with Wendell Jr. desperately trying to keep Pamela quiet about their parents’ love affair. Wendell sees the affair as a sordid black mark on his well-respected & high-profile father’s life, while Pamela only sees the pure & genuine love the two shared between each other. After spending a night of reliving their parents’ past, the two warm up to each other & start to really see things the way their parents saw things when they were together at the hotel. One of my favorite lines from this particular part of the movie comes after the pair decide to take a morning swim in their birthday suits (& a pair of black socks…because some people are in mourning.)
“Well here we are…basking like two baby seals…” – Wendell Armbruster Jr.
The hotel is very beautiful, & I wish it were a real place that I could visit. All of the rooms seem quite luxurious, & I would love to have a cocktail (or two) at the bar & enjoy a meal of Duck à L’Orange with a side of pasta (perhaps green, for color).
And now, we come to the end of the movie. It’s time for Wendell to wrap up business in Italy. After all, he was there to claim his deceased father’s corpse & rush to a hasty funeral, not to fall in love with his father’s mistress’ daughter. The whole time in Italy, Wendell is cursing his father for having a ten-year secret love affair. All the while, Pamela is just happy that her mother was happily in love (whether her mother’s lover was married or not did not phase her at all). My final favorite scene in the movie was when Wendell asks Pamela about her mother. He asks her, in a roundabout way, if she was a kept woman. Pamela assures him that her mother was not receiving gifts from his father. Her mother was a working woman who paid her own way in life. Her mother never wanted money or gifts from Wendell’s wealthy father. She only wanted his love.
“I told you the first day, she loved him. She didn’t want any tips.” – Pamela Piggott
Isn’t it rather romantic (& a lot of Hollywood movie magic) that the son & daughter of the two former lovers end up falling in love with each other, & carry on the romance their parents once held at that very same hotel? Of course a storyline like that only happens on extremely rare occasions & in flashy Hollywood movie scripts. However, I quite enjoyed the storyline all the same. I guess you could say that I am in love with LOVE. I am a sucker for a sappy good romance. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, & believe it or not…most likely you will…I was watching this movie yet again, simultaneously while writing this blog post…and NO. I am not going to watch this movie after I finish this post. Cheers.
Today’s song of the day:
As a child, I was never very fond of stuffed animals (a.k.a. plushes). I was always led to believe that they attract loads of dust, germs, & bacteria, which will lead to further chaos in my battle against allergies. My mom severely disliked a cluttered bedroom, & always thought those furry little critters made the room look messy & cluttered.
Therefore, throughout my childhood, I only kept one stuffed animal as my furry little sleeping companion. It was a caramel-orange colored kitten with light brown stripes, soft ears & paw pads, & a fluffy white tummy. That was one of my most treasured possessions as a child, not only because of it’s infinite cuteness & cuddliness, but also because my beloved grandmother gave it to me as a gift. I still have that same stuffed animal to this very day. It is wrapped in tissue paper, boxed, & carefully stored away in our home’s storage closet. I hope to keep this treasured stuffed animal for many years (perhaps even generations) to come.
This brings me to current times. As you can clearly see from the name of my blog, I am a huge lover of both rabbits & foxes. I’m not quite sure how I came to love both animals together, especially since foxes have a penchant for hunting rabbits. My earliest memory is from my youth, when my oldest brother had a pet rabbit. It was a dark chocolate brown color & was quite a mischievous little one. My brother’s rabbit was incredibly adorable & relatively well-behaved with a slight naughty streak. Since then, I fell in love with rabbits.
As for foxes, I fell in love with them after reading my all-time favorite Japanese comic book series (a.k.a. manga) called XXX Holic. This comic book series made various spiritual & mythical references to foxes, & that just ensnared me straight away. I just fell head over heels in love with the spiritual nature of foxes as well as their beauty.
Combining my two loves together, I created the title Rabbits & Foxes. It began a couple of years ago with my feeble & half-assed attempt at creating a free website on Wix. Why? A part of me was reminiscing about the late 1990s when everyone was jumping on the Yahoo! GeoCities bandwagon & making their own fan pages. (I remember those good ol’ days, when you could slap a bunch of JPEGs on a colorful background with rainbow-colored text & call it a fan page.) Another part of me was actually trying to make my own personal stamp on the World Wide Web. I was overly ambitious, & strapped on britches that were way to big for my petite size.
It was well after that failed attempt in which I created this blog. I was following Jian on a business trip to Shanghai, China & had nothing to do except stay in our hotel room on a day full of severe lightning storm warnings. So, I made up my mind to start a photo journal of my two week trip. I promised myself from that point on that I would diligently stick to this blog. Being the weirdo that I am, I came up with the idea of collecting trinkets & other useless things to go along with my rabbit & fox theme.
My first pieces to my small collection were these two felt figurines that I bought online. I haven’t given them a name yet. So far I just call them Rabbit and Fox. I am very picky regarding the things I collect, so my “collection” is pretty sparse at this moment. I recently acquired these two new additions to my themed collection.
Irving
Gaspard
best friends
The rabbit plush takes a bit of explaining. It starts with my niece. She has a larger version of this exact stuffed animal that she sleeps with every single night. She plays with this stuffed animal daily, & it has become one of her most prized & treasured toys. I frequently like to tease my niece (all in fun, of course) & hide this stuffed animal behind my back, which makes her hyper-excited & chase me around the house to get it back. For fun, I got this smaller version of her favorite stuffed toy, which she named Bun Bun, just to match with her & to show her that I got my own stuffed rabbit. She was over-the-moon when she saw my toy. She told me that now I have to get all the other small sized plushes of all of her other stuffed toys to match her. I named my stuffed rabbit Irving, but my niece calls it Bun Bun (to match her toy’s name).
I got the fox a few days ago as a little Christmas present to myself. My niece immediately took a liking to it, especially because it makes a rattling sound. (Yes, I bought myself an infant’s plush from the baby section at the toy shop.) There was a larger stuffed animal version of this fox, but I decided to stay with the small size trend. I love this fox because it doesn’t look to overly cartoonish or babyish. It’s just the right amount of cute. I also named this fox Gaspard. As you can tell already, I like naming all of my inanimate objects. I don’t think this is weird at all contrary to whatever Jian might say. I think it’s rather fun & unique. I’d much rather say, “Can you bring Richard over here?”, instead of saying “Can you bring me my iPad?”. Or I’d rather say, “Can you get Stephan for me?”, instead of saying “Can you get me my phone charger?” Doesn’t that just sound more interesting? I think so. I’m so happy I have new mascots for my blog! Let’s all welcome Irving & Gaspard!! Cheers!
Today’s song of the day:
The other day I was eating lunch at one of my favorite cafés, & I was pleasantly surprised by what I witnessed. There were two high school girls sharing their sandwiches with each other (it was a National holiday, so no school for kids). What surprised me was one of the girls said to the other girl, “Let’s put our phones away, so we can have an actual conversation.” That truly shocked me, that there are kids in the Millenial generation willing to put down their smartphones & talk face-to-face with another human being.
Today, I’m back at my local big box coffee shop, writing this blog. I have a difficult time writing at home; mostly, I don’t feel any motivation whatsoever when I’m at home to write anything. I come out to my neighborhood coffee shop, buy an adequate cup of coffee & a less-than-filling pastry, plug in a pair of headphones I confiscated from Jian into my iPod, & begin my mediocre blog writing. Usually I would say that the heavy foot traffic, loud noise, & warm atmosphere coupled with my iPod’s music is what gets my creative juices flowing, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. My house is rarely quiet, mostly cold & drafty, but I’ve got a great portable radiator heater to keep me toasty, & I’ve got an immensely larger music playlist on my home computer compared to my small iPod. Somehow, amongst all this outside raucous, I feel most at peace, quiet, isolated (but not alone), & happy to escape for an hour or two.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
I am so excited for this year’s rainy weather. I am not even going to bother with seasons. I can’t even tell what season we’re in over here on the West Coast. We had no rain at all during last year’s winter, hardly three or four frosty days, then got slammed right into spring, which quickly evolved into summer. Summer was impossibly long this year. What is especially true for the area I live in is that we hardly have any sweltering hot days during our summer months. Real summer weather arrives later for my area. We get approximately two weeks of true Indian Summer between September and October. Then, autumn falls down on us like a ton of bricks. The thick marine layer & fog blankets my area quickly throughout the day & turns into windy, chilly nights.
Over the past few weeks, my area has experienced a few rain showers, & one thunder storm, which caused one of my neighbors (two streets down from mine) to have their backyard tree get struck by lightning. The tree got hit by lightning & split in half with one half hitting their roofline. I remember that day clearly because it was raining heavily in the morning, then a thundercloud clapped so loudly that it rattled all of the windows in my house & shook our house a bit. The sound was so loud that I freaked out & hastily ducked under my bed sheets (not that hiding under blankets would’ve done any good). Jian ran out in his pajamas to check on the rest of the house. I’ve never seen him rush out of the room faster. Later that night, we heard about our neighbors & their lightning struck tree on the evening news. The whole experience was both frightening AND exciting at the same time.
I can’t wait to experience more rain storms with thunder & lightning again. I enjoy watching lightning when it rains. The sound of thunder initially startle me, but I enjoy it once I get used to the sound. I also enjoy going out in the rain. I like being in the car when it’s raining, although I do not like driving in the rain. Driving in the rain, especially by myself, practically terrifies me. I don’t mind if it’s Jian driving though. He has nearly impeccable driving skills (& manners)…especially when it’s raining. I can’t say that I enjoy the frizzy hair part of going out in the rain. My hair gets frizzy the second it encounters anything humid or wet, & I don’t just look like a wet Saint Bernard, I look like a rag doll that’s been dragged through a briar patch by my hair. No amount of hair product, hair brushing, or hair styling can pull my hair out of its frizzy, sloppy, rat’s nest. That’s the only part I cannot stand about rainy weather, but I bet that’s how many ladies feel as well.
It’s a sunny day today. It’s by no means a warm day; the temperatures have been steadily dropping recently, & I hope the weather gets even colder as the days go by. I’m supposed to be going to Disneyland again this Thanksgiving with my nephew & niece. We all go as a family to Disneyland every year as a Thanksgiving tradition, per my older brother’s insistence. Every time we go, it’s always hot. It’s almost December! How can it be hot in December?!?! That’s so not cool (no pun intended). Well, I’m off to enjoy the bright sunshine…and bask in the chilly air with my comfy scarf. Cheers.
Today’s song of the day:
Rabbits & Foxes 
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