Cyborg is another character I found through my children. I watched the 2003 Teen Titans series with my older daughter when she was a small fry. The theme song is forever stuck in my head. We still have a lot of them on disk and break them out when we need a pick-me-up.
The show was a lot of fun for both of us, and part of what I appreciated about it was the complete lack of darkness and angst. Sure, the heroes fought (bad guys and each other), but they didn't delve into the deep, dark recesses of the soul. Even Raven, the resident grump, was much lighter than similar characters on other shows.
Cyborg especially had some serious joie-de-vivre on this show. He loved being a Teen Titan and took friendship seriously, but knew how to have a good time. He and Beast Boy bonded over pizza and videogames, but he took the female characters at face value, too. I always felt like Cyborg would be a good friend to have.
And who could forget his Boo-yah!
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This post is part of the A to Z Blogging Challenge. I'll be writing about superheroes I love all month. You can check out other bloggers and see their creative takes on the challenge here.
Don't forget to check out my own superhero stories:
This is about the television series. We're going to pretend the movie was never made.
I can't remember if I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was first on television. In the later 90s, I was living in Nome, Alaska, and was a bit disconnected from popular culture and television. What I do remember, is watching it a few years later with my older daughter when she was about five (and several times since). We both loved it. Heck, she even had a credits dance to the Nerf Herder song.
I think what I loved (and still love) about Buffy, the character, was the way she messed with my
expectations. She was little and pretty. She'd been a cheerleader. In my own judgy way, I'd expect her to shallow and uninteresting. But she had a calling, a calling that made her life dark and messy, full of weapons, stealth, and secrets. The show didn't hesitate to explore the toll the work took on the young woman: how it affected her relationships, her social life, her finances, and her soul.
Buffy also had a fully realized supporting cast: The Scoobies. It's a reminder to me as I write my own superhero stories, that the people who surround your heroine are vital to the life's blood of the story. Their presence or absence, their expectations, support and disappointment, the pressure and conflict they provide: all the juicy stuff of story.
I'm still a Buffy fan today. I've read some of the comics. I have the musical memorized. Buffy is definitely a hero who stuck with me.
This post is part of the A to Z Blogging Challenge. I'll be writing about superheroes I love all month. You can check out other bloggers and see their creative takes on the challenge here.
Don't forget to check out my own superhero stories:
Ant-Man is a newer find for me. I know he's been around in various incarnations for a while, but the first time he caught my eye was in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, a cartoon series I watched with my husband and daughter on Netflix.
On that show, he was Hank Pym, genius, and really bad boyfriend to Janet Van Dyne, Wasp. In fact, their relationship dynamic was one of the pulls of the show for me, even if it was all subtext. They loved each other, but were not all that well suited in a lot of ways. He was a pacifist and a bit of a chauvinist; she was a feminist with a warrior's heart.
I also really enjoyed the movie incarnation. Hank was there again, this time being played by Michael Douglas, a few years older than the cartoon hero. The title character is really Scott Lang, though, the new Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd.
Rudd was excellent as that poor schlub who can't seem to catch a break no matter how hard he tries. I'm a sucker for underdog characters like that, so I was rooting for him early on. It didn't hurt that he was a Daddy trying to build a relationship with his little girl.
The movie had heart, and didn't take itself quite as seriously as most of the rest of the Marvel franchise movies. Don't get me wrong: I loves me some Captain America, Black Widow, etc. But I also like to smile and have my heart warmed on occasion. And for that, there's Ant-Man.
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This post is part of the A to Z Blogging Challenge. I'll be writing about superheroes I love all month. You can check out other bloggers and see their creative takes on the challenge here.
Don't forget to check out my own superhero stories:
I'm so proud to announce that my debut novel, Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel, has received a Jaquis Award from Legendary Women.
"The Jacquis is an award nominated by feminist readers and given to feminist authors — stellar penwomen who capture the lives of women in their pages. Women of all colors, creeds and backgrounds."
Obviously I'm pleased beyond all reason. The origins of this novel are in my own feminist ideals and frustrations, and to be honored on that platform is the best way to end my first year as a published novelist I could imagine.
When most folks think about spring break, they are probably thinking break in the sense of a respite and a rest. And that's definitely part of what Spring Break is for teachers.
But each year, when I get to this point in the year, I can't help think about other kinds of break: as in break-downs, broken spirits, rifts and fissures.
As the countdown to spring break begins, you can see it in the bent backs of the educators, drifting through the halls with glazed eyes and a death grip on their coffee cups in those few quiet moments before the chaos we call children descend upon us. There are fissures in our vision, too many things we've tried that didn't work, too many obstacles, too much vitriol instead of fuel. The cracks spread across our souls the way they spread across glass--that little crack in your cell phone screen that slowly takes over the entire view.
So these few days are all about doing what you need to so that you can heal and repair, then come back in swinging for the last few weeks before testing season drops down over us like a plastic dome cutting off the oxygen. You hear different terms for it: filling the well, retreat, vacation. Really, it's self-care, so it's different for everyone. For some, it's a change of venue. For some, it's just sleep or time in the outdoors. For some, it's reading or time on creative pursuits. For some, it's physical activity. For some, it's junk television. For some, it's organizing your cabinets.
For me, it's all these things. Even summer break is no longer long enough to leave me fully recharged, not after twenty years of wear and tear on my teaching muscles. So with just one week to pull it together, I'm trying to do a little bit of all the things that recharge me: I took a short trip to the mountains (family, travel and outdoors). I've been sleeping late (by woman with kids standards, anyway). I did a metric ton of laundry and feel caught up. And I started a new writing project.
And I still have a few more days :-) Maybe I'll come out of this unbroken after all.
I'm very excited to be participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge again this year. This will be my third time, and I always find it to be a wonderful ride. It feels like a real accomplishment when you make it all the way to Z. It's an opportunity to connect with other bloggers, and to explore a theme that is close to your heart.
It's a completely obvious theme for me. I love superheroes. They are some of the stories that touch closest to the heart of me. The combination of "what if" with strong character arcs and moral quandaries makes me squee like the fangirl I am at heart. I even have my own superhero series (Menopausal Heroes) going, the second book of which (Change of Life) comes out in April!
So, I'll be writing about my favorite superheroes and why I love them. Here's what I have in mind, though, as a woman and a writer, I reserve the right to change my mind along the way.
I'm excited just reading my own list, because it includes so many imaginary people that are dear to me for one reason or another. I can't wait to share them with you. You can also check out my offerings from 2015: My Writing/Publishing Journey and 2014: Evocative Words here on my blog.
I love tickets, especially tickets to the theater.
And 2016 has been a great year for going to the theater so far.
There's something about a live performance, even a bad one, that resonates with me. Sure, I love the movies, but LIVE, in person is a one-time thing. No one on any other day will ever see exactly the show that I just saw, even if the same cast is in the same venue. It's like the moment when a dolphin leaps out of the sea. You only see it if you are there. No pause, no rewind.
My first show of 2016 was Ragtime by NC Theatre at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. Groupon was selling inexpensive tickets on a day when I had a few dollars, so I snatched some up and dragged my husband off with me.
We were seated so close we could watch the actors sweat under the lights. It's really a rather awkward show, using a mechanic where the actors stop and soliloquize in third person about themselves to the audience. Oddly for a musical, there were no "catchy" songs. Though performances were solid and even, at times, stunning, there was no song I walked away remembering.
Our conversation over dinner afterwards though was about striking moments, and our curiosity about which elements were true to history and which were fictional. I admired the difficulty of the writing task to present such a story. My husband admired some of the staging decisions to highlight the contrasts between the different social groups represented. We talked about how the play might have accomplished the narration it needed less awkwardly. So, even a play I don't love brings me joy in the talking about it afterwards.
The second trip to the theater was Matilda at DPAC. We bought the youngest Bryant tickets as a holiday gift. She already loved the book. It's always exciting to see these local versions of the Broadway show, even if it makes me a little sad to imagine all these actors working so hard to recreate a performance first created by someone else instead of getting to make a character their own. But still, we loved the clever staging and several of the songs. I got the double-joy of discussing it with my daughter afterwards, talking about what changes they made from the book and whether those were effective or not. She might be my kid :-)
Not too long afterwards, I got a Shakespeare date! (Those tickets were my holiday gift from the hubby). We saw an experimental production of Twelfth Night by Filter Theatre at Reynolds Industries Theater. In a lot of ways, the show was fun, with audience interactive elements and improvisation. In other ways, it was tedious (like when a game they played with balls went on far too long) or just plain confusing (when they had one woman play both twins, making the identity mix-up more puzzling than amazing or comical). Because my husband and I are Shakespeare geeks, we've seen this play more than once together, so we got to talk about how this production compared to other ones we've seen on stage and screen, recounting favorite moments and how different actors and actresses interpreted the roles.
Then, a few days later we got to go the Carolina, one of my favorite venues. This time it was a family date, though the elder daughter had to back out at the last minute due to homework overload. Tao: Seventeen Samurai is a diverse and exciting show intermixing Taiko drumming with choreography, stagecraft, and creative costuming. At one point or another, each of us gasped with delight from the sheer spectacle and impressive feats of the performers.
The conversation in the car on the way home was all "did you see it when" recounting and our cheeks hurt from smiling.
So, three shows in three months, way above average for what my pocketbook will usually allow. The eldest got some theater as well, seeing The Cabaret talent show her school put on and a high school production of Beauty and the Beast in which a friend played Belle.
Each show is a treasure in its own right, a moment in time, shared with those you brought with you and those who just also showed up. Someday, when I'm fabulously wealthy, I'll go to every show in my area. It's wonderful living in the twenty-first century, a time when performers from all around the world can come to my corner of the planet and let me watch them work. Lucky, lucky girl!
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