Weekend Homework

This week's AOL-J homework:  Describe your second-favorite of the following: movie, book, album, school teacher, ice cream flavor, sports team, comfort food, celebrity crush, cartoon character and way to relax. If you feel like it, add in any other second favorite you like.

Wow.  I adore this question.  It’s funny ‘cause I was just thinking about this the other day.  Someone asked me what my favorite play was.  And I actually answered with my second-favorite play.  Because my A-number-1 favorite play of all time is just so above and beyond everything else, there’s sort of no point in mentioning it, and a discussion of second favorites is actually more interesting.  So, yeah.  And, by the way, when I see “sports team,” I’m just going to replace that with “play.”  Because I barely have a favorite sports team, and I think my second favorite would be “whoever I have tickets to see.”

 

My second-favorite movie:  Aladdin.  I know.  But I just remember how absolutely caught up I was in this animated picture, digging the score, sitting on the edge of my seat watching Aladdin swoop around on the carpet… when I realized (right about the first time he sat down for some quality time with the lamp) that I had totally forgotten that Robin Williams was gonna come on in a second as the voice of the Genie.  And I thought, “Wow, all this and Robin Williams too?!  Cool.”  Can’t think of any other time I’ve had so much FUN at the movies.

 

My second-favorite book:  When I thought about this one, I realized that my favorite book changes all the time, but my second-favorite book is always the same.  Isn’t that weird?  Whip Hand by Dick Francis.  (It’s actually a sequel, and the first book, Odds Against, ain’t too shabby either, but Whip Hand is the really special one.)  See, Dick Francis writes all these fast-reading perfect-if-you-need-something-for-a-plane-flight mystery novels set in the world of British horse racing.  One of the trademarks of his books is that the protagonist always finds himself on the wrong end of a very unpleasant situation which he has to endure and/or escape.  In Whip Hand, Francis goes beyond his usual hero-getting-the-crap-kicked-out-him scenario and the torture he ends up writing is psychological.  Francis really outdid himself on that one, and it’s a terrific read.

 

My second-favorite album:  (Uh, what’s an album?)  Probably R.E.M.’s Document.  But I reserve the right to change this to something showtuney at a later date.

 

My second-favorite school teacher:  Second favorite teacher was Miss Cunningham – who taught me English (junior high, I think – but I’m honestly not positive).  Miss Cunningham made me rewrite a paper once because my style was too informal and full of pop culture references.  She knew I wanted to be a lawyer and said, “A lawyer would never write like that.”  I rewrote the paper all nice and dry and without all the fun stuff.  Miss Cunningham called me back, threw out the revised paper, and told me to forget everything she’d said, because, “This is the way you write, and you’re a thousand times more persuasive this way.”  I’ll always be grateful to her for having the nerve to do that, and ultimately encouraging my voice -- rather than forcing me into some mold of how she thought a lawyer ought to write.

 

My second-favorite ice-cream flavor:  Chocolate.

 

My second-favorite play:  Arcadia by Tom Stoppard.  A masterpiece in the truest sense of the word.  If you’ve seen some of Stoppard’s earlier plays, you can see he’d been playing with the concepts involved for years – the difference between a historian’s history and the truth, illustrating scientific concepts through the interaction of human characters, and so forth – but he only really got it right with Arcadia.  A brilliant, heart-stoppingly good play about landscape architecture, entropy, mathematical recursion, literary scholarship, and love – all wrapped up in a perfect little package with smart, funny dialogue.  It isn’t what I’d call an easy play; and a less-than-ideal production of it can be painfully bad.  But, damn, when it’s right, it freakin’ sings.  

 

My second-favorite comfort food:  Frito’s.

 

My second-favorite celebrity crush:  Hugh Jackman.  (Oh please, oh please, don’t let Van Helsing be as cheesy as the posters make it look.)

 

My second-favorite cartoon character:  Daria.  I think I might have been Daria in High School.

My second-favorite way to relax:  Watching a DVD with the kitten beside me.