June 13, 2005

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  A MESSAGE FROM THE PAST:

  
  

  Never one to “burn bridges”, I still keep in touch with a lot of “old girlfriends”. This past Sunday morning I received a telephone call from my ex-girlfriend Pat. We lived together from 1992 through 1995, and my relationship with her was the longest I’ve ever had with a gal, and the stormiest.  I met her at work where I was a designer and she was in charge of the assembly department which builds our switches. I’d known her for a year or so as workmates, and she was part of our “lunch crowd” but I didn’t really pay too much attention to her until our company Christmas party in 91. She sat next to me. We both had a quite a bit of Christmas cheer. I wasn’t driving, since my bike had blown a head gasket and the Cadillac was in the shop. She drove me home from the Christmas party and spent the night. For the next few months, I spent almost as much time at her apartment as I did in my own bed.

  
  

  My friends thought our relationship doomed from the start. I moved in with her in Long Beach right before the riots in 92. We had a combustible relationship and our “family unit” included her daughter, 14, and her son, 12. Both of the kids were little hellions.  I can, and probably will, someday, write a “reminiscence” about Pat. The gal had a hard life, and for three years at least, I tried to provide her with a good home. She was a “party hardy” sort of girl, and liked to go honkey tonkin. Although I had passed my interest in going to the bars on Friday nights, she was “into the scene” when I met her. She also had some commitment issues. (I asked her to marry me three times) The end of our time together came when I discovered that she was cheating on me, and that’s when I “moved out” into our garage, which I had turned into a recreation room, and which now became my bedroom. When our lease was up, I moved into the house I now share with Joel, my roommate.

  
  

  Pat was involved with her new guy for six months after we broke up, but he proved abusive, and she finally moved into an apartment of her own. I began to see her again, visiting her at her apt., spending half the night, then getting up and driving home, so I could shower and get to work. I almost thought we would get back together. A lot of our problems as a couple centered around her kids, and by this time, Laura had graduated from high school and had joined the army, and Charlie was living with his dad. The light of our continued relationship faded fast when Pat met a guy at a country bar in Long Beach and decided to move in with him……in Virginia.

  
  

  That relationship didn’t work out, but Pat stayed in Virginia, moving from one low paying job to another. In our conversations, she would express regret that she didn’t realize how good she had it when we were together. I was always glad that our relationship ended, because she was too headstrong and rather opinionated, and was not easy to live with when she didn’t get her way. Each time she called me over the past 10 years, it seems that her life was boring and mundane. She got a license to drive a big rig truck, something which she’d always wanted to do (even though she is a deplorable driver) and she was a cross country driver for a few years. I saw her during Thanksgiving in 2003 when she was in California on a haul. We talked of perhaps getting back together. I asked her why she didn’t move to California, since she didn’t really have anything back in Virginia, and had recently lost almost everything she owned when her rented house was flooded after a winter storm. She opted to remain on the other side of the country, so any “plans” were essentially just talk.

  
  

  During our conversation this Sunday morning, I found out that she isn’t driving long haul anymore, because she wrecked a company truck, and now drives a dump truck for a construction firm, but the work is sporadic. She has no friends, and rarely sees her kids. Laura, her daughter, is on her second marriage, and Charlie  disappeared after stealing money from Pat years ago. She didn’t even talk about them in our conversation. She is living in her brother’s RV in the driveway of his house, after having been homeless and living out of her car. Her brother is thinking of selling the RV, and Pat will be homeless again. She doesn’t seem to think this is unusual. We always seem to joke about our previous relationship. I told her it’s tragic that she might become homeless again. She said, “Well, I can come live with you, can’t I?” I told her that she wouldn’t be able to live here with Joel and I, there is no room. She’s not really serious, but then she nearly broke my heart when she said, “We’re never going to get back together, are we?” Of course she knows the answer. I told her when I left her that she had closed the door to our relationship, and nothing would ever open it again. I still feel that way.

  
  

  But I’m not coldhearted, and it always pains me to hear from her. Pat was the type who liked to read the newspaper, but with her limited vocabulary, she would “make up” definitions for the words she didn’t know. She would make her own “interpretations” of anything she read. She always had a skewered sense of reality. When we talk, she can ramble on for many minutes about things which don’t seem to make sense. Like the time there were “insects” crawling under her skin. I think that’s the last time she saw a doctor, about four years ago, and he recommended her to a psychiatrist, but she scoffed at the idea she might be “crazy”. I asked about her health, and she complained about the usual aches and pains, but admitted she had’t seen a doctor for a long time.

  
  

  I still have a great love for this woman, but each time we talk, which is about once or twice a year, I am always shot immediately back to our time together, and the disappoinments and hell I went through trying to establish a home for her are always at the surface of my memory, and I know that leaving her was the right thing for me to do. Perhaps if she was in California, then I would make an effort to get back together, but it’s actually just fine that we’re separated physically by 3000 miles.

  
  

  I never took her name off of my 401k plan as beneficiary however. If anything happens to me, and I were to die early, I will at least be able to “care” for her in some way. There is nobody else on this earth who has touched me in quite the same way, even though we had a rough time of it. She asked me again if I were married yet. It’s almost as if when I tell her I’m still single that she thinks she might have a chance yet, but we both know that our time is long past. I’ll never close my door on her completely, though.  

  
  

  THE HISTORY OF BETTY BOOP CARTOONS

  
  

  I already have an essay about Cartoons in the Cultural Blender website, but since there were a few comments about Betty Boop from the previous entry, I thought I’d outline a rough history of her cartoons. Most people know who Walt Disney was, and he was making cartoons in the teens a long time before Mickey Mouse was created in 1928. A contemporary of Disney’s, Max Fleischer, is the “father” of the Betty Boop cartoons. His studio also made the Popeye cartoons of the 40s. His first cartoon series, began in 1915, was Koko the Clown. In 1930 Betty appeared in the Bimbo cartoon “Dizzy Dishes”. Originally she was drawn as a poodle, and was to be Bimbo’s love interest. Later, she morphed into a woman, and was modeled on popular singer Helen Kane, the “boop boop a doop” girl. She became the “star” of the studio, and her cartoons were very popular during the 30s. After the production code dictated changes in her sexuality and appearance, she began to take a back seat in own cartoons to other supporting players.

  
  

  During her heyday, the Betty Boop cartoons initiated a lot of features which have been popular in animation ever since. A lot of the cartoons were basically “music videos” and moved to the beat of jazz and popular music of the time. Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong tunes provided the backdrop for some of her most famous cartoons. The Fleischer Studio invented “rotoscoping” in which the fluid movements of an actual “actor” are “traced” in animation, allowing for a realistic sense of movement. Some of the early toons might seem racist in retrospect, although there is an aspect of “minstrelcy” in the cartoons, exposure to the jazz tunes in a lot of these cartoons helped to make jazz a popular art form. The animation style is raucous, utilizing music cues and sound effects. Inanimate objects develop a life of their own, and almost every frame includes a sight gag.

  
  

  There is a website that offers streaming Betty Boop cartoons that are in the public domain. I am supplying a link to “The Bamboo Isle” which is a good place to start, and also a page which lists 23 of the complete cartoons, including “Minnie the Moocher.” which can be streamed to your computer and you can watch them on your monitor.

  
  

  

  
  

  CLICK HERE TO STREAM THE BETTY BOOP CARTOON “BAMBOO ISLE” The page will ask you for your connection. It has both broadband and dial up.

  
  

  CLICK HERE FOR A PAGE THAT OFFERS 23 COMPLETE BETTY BOOP CARTOONS There are 23 full size Betty Boop cartoons, including some of her most famous.

  
  

  A lot of the people who maintain “Betty Boop” websites and call themselves fans of Betty have never even seen any of the original black and white cartoons. Most of their exposure comes from the thousands of Betty Boop images from calendars and posters. There is a booming Betty Boopabelia market. I have over $2000.00 worth of collectibles myself, and even though I sometimes go through rough times monetarily, I don’t want to have to sell any of the figurines.

  
  

  COMPUTERS and SUCH

  
  

  At work my computer just had a 1 gig ram stick intstalled, but I still have sporadic crashes. At home, I utilized the “system restore” capability of Windows XP to take my computer back to April. Some of the “problems” I’ve been having with programs running badly or not at all, and freezing up the puter, have been solved somewhat by the restore. But I’m positive I just have a RAM memory problem mainly, and as some point will probably have to get a new motherboard, processor, and more RAM. When I can afford it, that is. In the meantime, the system restore did fix a couple other “problems” I have had, so things are looking brighter this week. Didn’t do much over the weekend. Stayed home, saved money, and worked on The Betty Boop Pages. The four main section pages are already complete, and there are a lot of my composite images online on the allthingsmike server.

  • 9:32 am
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