It's A Cold, Cold Hell I Live In

I come from the land of four seasons. We have our picture perfect Spring. Our hot and lazy Summer. The brisk Fall. And Winter. The cold, bitter winter. And truth be told, I love all four seasons. I am not one who dreams of retiring and moving south to God's Waiting Room. Or becoming a migrating Snow Bird, causing population booms all over Florida from November to March. I can't imagine the holiday season without scarves and hats. Without bundling up as you walk from store to store doing your shopping. Without some occasional snowflakes against the twinkling Christmas Lights.

But, I am currently in a Cold, Cold Hell. I love the cold winter months...from the inside of my windows. My husband was on a fourteen month layoff. Times were tough. We started cutting back. Now, that he's back to work, we are still holding back on some luxuries and expenses because...well, bills need to be caught up and we need to be prepared for the next lay off. Just in case. Because quite frankly the economy sucks right now and his job isn't the most stable.

One of our cutbacks is the heat. We have heat. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to warm my house with my oven like my mother used to do. She also used to dry my school uniform in the oven because we didn't have a dryer. Almost burned the house down with that. But that's a different post for a different day.

Anyway, we have heat. It's just that my husband idea of warm and my idea of warm are two different things. Plus, we have a large house that needs to be heated. And no carpeting, so it's not insulated well enough to maintain a comfortable temperature.

My husband thinks 66 degrees is warm enough. I think 76 is just barely right. Even though we have just been through one of the worse blizzards in New York State History and it is FREEZING OUT, the thermostat is set at 66. 66 degrees is warm enough for my husband to walk around wearing jeans and a wife beater looking like a damn redneck with a beer in his hands on a Saturday night. Me? I'm wearing sweats, a fleece zipped up to my ears, and I'm huddled under three blankets on the couch. With two of my three dogs laying on top of me for body heat. I trained them well.

And I cry. "I'm coooooolllllddddd!!!" And he groans. And mutters that I'm crazy. It's not cold.

While he looks like this:

(only minus the smoldering look and add a can of beer in his hands).

I look like this:

(Minus the scruffy beard and receding hairline. But I'm pretty sure I got that same crazy look in my eyes.)

And with the cold winter months, I begin to hear the haunting cold score of a movie called Promised Land play in my head. Promised Land is a movie that was released in 1988, in the middle of my obsession with Kiefer Sutherland. I had seen him as Ace Merrill. I had seen him as David the Vampire. Now, he was making odd, independent, little movies and I was determined to see every movie he ever released. I was a love sick teen that was pretty convinced that Kiefer and I were destined to meet and fall in love. I had a scrap book dedicated to him. My first, and only, published piece of work was a short little blurb (I like to call it an article, but who are we kidding) where I sang praises of Kiefer to BOP Magazine. Do they still even publish BOP Magazine??

Since no one else really knew or cared who Kiefer was, my poor mother got suckered into being dragged all over the place to see his limited released movies. We went all the way out to Long Island to see a lame movie called The Killing Time. Kiefer was awesome. The rest of the movie? Not so much.

I dragged her to some dingy hell hole of a theater in some rotten neighborhood to see Bright Lights, Big City. And to the city. Twice. Once to see Crazy Moon (what? exactly. No one knows this movie. We were the only people in the theater. I'm pretty sure we were the only two people who saw this movie, EVER!) And another time to see Promised Land.

Promised Land was such a cold movie. Bleak and filled with cold scenes. Lots of despair in the movie. I don't mean a cold movie as in cold hearted or cold performances. I mean the movie was COLD!! I remember lots of white and crisp blue skies. Lots of snow. Lots of vapored breaths. It was COLD! Beautifully filmed, but really should have been watched on a hot dog day of summer afternoon and not on a cold Saturday afternoon in a big, old drafty theater in February.

The plot of the movie is cold too. It follows the lives of two students after high school: the hotshot jock (Jason Gedrick) and the awkward misfit (Kiefer Sutherland). Two very different young men from the same small town with bleak outlooks. Though Kiefer shines as he always did, Meg Ryan steals the show as his off the wall, somewhat trashy, lonely and searching bride who has some great, humorous lines.

And every winter this movie's musical score finds it's way into my brain. The music is beautiful and there is something cold to the notes. It fits so well with the movie. Especially Plymouth Waltz. If I ever get rich I want to buy the rights to Plymouth Waltz, produce my manuscript into a movie and use that music for the trailer and for certain themes. I'll rename it Paige's Theme and....Sorry. The whole Mega Million Craze of the past few days had me dreaming and wishing what I would do with hundreds of millions.

Anyway. The music is beautiful. And cold. That was my point. It was fitting for a cold day in New York City, watching a cold movie, in a cold, old theater. And it haunts me every summer.

I'm trying something new with the blog. It's a New Year, so might as well try something new. I'm not very computer savvy, so hang in there with me. I'm attaching a video. (I hope it works!) A trailer for Promised Land. Watch and listen carefully about halfway through. You can catch the music. Maybe you'll even be intrigued to rent this movie. But I do advise waiting until the snow melts and the weather warms up.



Feel free to comment on whether or not the video works. But don't expect me to fix it if it doesn't. My brain is too frozen and my fingers have been exposed to the cold air long enough as I type. It's time for me to get back under some blankets and dogs.