matoad: my parents let me shift from the passenger seat all the time...probably why I am such a good driver with a standard! but we didn't have a push button ignition...we had an old VW square back that could be started with the tiniest of pushes from behind. DigitS: My finger print, of course!! Not a worry these days with all that digital technology around. And T.V.! Yeah, we had a tiny box of black and white with "13" channels only not all the channels were there. We only got to watch a very small amount: Star Trek, and any of the programs on PBS, like Nova, In Search Of, that yoga guy, I forget his name, and Sesame Street. I used to get pissy when my mom was watching ... was it Dick Cavet or Merv Griffin? Either way, one of those was on at the same time as Felix the cat...so sad. Funny, I haven't had a T.V. in about ten years but I netflix (on my computer) all the old Star Treks and also that Star Trek Deep Space 9! My brother and I stayed with our grandparents every weekend and they would take us to garage sales. My gram never paid more than a nickel or, sometimes--rarely, a dime for stuff. That is when she would remind me that movies used to cost a nickel. When the prices rose and she could only get away with paying a quarter at rummage sales, she decided they were too pricey! We went to the drug store for ice cream. While gram bought prescriptions, grampa would buy us ice cream for a few cents. Gosh, I think it was 25 cents a cone, for three scoops?? It was cheap. Grampa always got strawberry, I got chocolate and I don't remember what my brother got. My bro and I used to make model cars, rockets and monsters, like Lon Chaney as this or that monster. We would blow up the models with firecrackers and then display them on our shelves. I saw lots of the models we had, un-blown up, on eBay for a zillion dollars. Oops! We had our friends over yesterday (oooh, that is so in the past) and I used the relish tray that I found in grannies attic. It was brand new and pink speckle from...gee, must have been the late fifties. The box it was in was disintegrating, falling apart. In junior high school, I wore clothes from grannies closet, I would fix them up so they would fit as gram was a pretty big gal. All the kids were curious as to why I had such neat clothes. gosh, I loved reading what everyone wrote! J.

Like some of you,i'm always the one taking the pictures,so i don't have many of myself either.This one was 2 years old last week.I'm holding my new GGS Rain.He just turned 2 last week.Time sure does fly. Kathi

Oh, absolutely! Maggie Smith was/is and forever will be Jean Brodie in my mind. I also think young Pamela Franklin as Sandy Stranger was outstanding. I saw the film first back in 1969 and was so blown away that I wanted to read the novel immediately. But, for some reason that I can't recall now, I was unable to locate the book so there was a several-year gap between my seeing the film (two or three times) and my actually reading the book. I found Muriel Spark's style of telling the story rather annoying: She would jump into the narrative and start relating what Sandy Stranger was doing a quarter of a century into the future, in other words foreshadowing without any of the subtlety in which that technique is usually used. I later learned that this was something that Muriel Spark did in some of her other novels -- it was almost a 'signature' of hers. Well, I didn't like it...at first, perhaps because the film adaptation left that 'device' or 'technique' (or whatever is the proper literary term) completely out and instead told a straightforward, though somewhat telescoped, story. I also noticed that some of Miss Brodie's set, the crème de la crème, were missing from the film. There were six girls in the book, but they were conflated to four for the film's purposes and three of the girls (besides Sandy) were composites. For example, it wasn't Jenny in the book whom Miss Brodie said would be "known for sex." But I don't think the conflation of the girls in the film really matters. Neither does the restoring to wholeness of the one-armed Teddy Lloyd (the art teacher) in the book. A two-armed actor playing a one-armed part is sometimes not very believable -- and can be distracting -- so I think that was a good call of the filmmakers. I have a bit of a harder time with what happened to Mary McGregor in the film that was completely different in Spark's novel. I've puzzled over that change for years. The only way I can reconcile it is to say: Well, it happened one way in the book. It happened another way in the film. They both work. I guess I'll have to compartmentalize one from the other. And that's what I've done, basically, for forty years. Has something similar happened to any of you, either with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or some other book/film combo? Well, I was almost certain that the books and films I listed above were ones that I remembered RPers discussing in other conversations and reviewing in monthly threads. I still think they probably were, but the discussers and reviewers must not have been presently posting members, because the only bites I've got so far are about Out of Africa. Are you sure none of you have read or seen The Age of Innocence? :\-)

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places -- Bill Streever (Cold seems like a good theme for today. It's 7 degrees F. where I live.)