the victory of de feet

Lizzi got my RAOK and it has prompted her to begin her very first pair of socks! Oh, to spread the madness of sock knitting around the world. First you think you're just going to try a pair of socks, and the next thing you know, you're buying souvenir sock yarn just like The Harlot on vacation. Lisa got my RAOK and so did Pam. This was fun! I think I'll wait a couple of weeks and send out some more. Weee!

I finished the index finger on my fingerless Koigu gloves last night while watching Million Dollar Mermaid (Thanks, Janice, for telling me about the Esther Williams marathon on TCM!). I didn't quite finish but it was one of the more watchable films in the Victor Mature oeuvre. Does anybody actually like him? What is up with his facial expressions?

One of my employees just came back from Virginia and brought me a brochure about William Haines. The title is "From Films to Furniture: The Extraordinary Careers of Staunton's Own William Haines." The whole thing is a biography of Haines' life, including his great-grandparents' lives and their histories in Virginia, and who Haines knew in Virginia. What's funny is how the name-dropping is written; for example, William Randolph Hearst is not mentioned is a newspaper magnate, but as someone "who was proud of his relationship to the Randolph family of Virginia." Nancy Reagan is only mentioned as someone "whose mother was from Petersburg." Joseph Cotton "was originally from Petersburg." I guess I wouldn't assume that any of today's readers of this brochure would automatically know who these people were. The thing is filled with grammatical errors and typos, too.

More amusingly, among the "great sites" related to William Haines are the Staunton City Courthouse, where "Billy" performed in a production of "The Mikado" (sic), and Stonewall Jackson School, his elementary school. Wow, such a list of historical sites! Staunton will surely be on my short list of vacation hot spots!