The Trials and Tribulations of the not-so-New Bear Icon

Over the weekend Chris and I actually went out and were social. We skipped the True Colors tour on Saturday, though we knew people would would be there. I was a little wary of going out on Saturday night to the Denton County Bears pool party not only because I didn't know too many people who were going to be there, but also because i was a little mad from not being able to get a haircut. Yep, good old vanity. Seems like all the cheap ass haircut places were full of people, and after working yet another saturday morning, I really didn't want to have to wait around reading stale magazines waiting for the one or two people to finally get around to me.

Sadly, our friend the stylist has left the haircutting industry to pursue other interests. Good for his wallet, though. Good for our hair too, because although he's a friendly guy, he gets a little attention-deficit disorder when he's cutting and kind of forgets spots.

We made it out to the pool party fashionably late, but not so late to chow down (are we not bears?). I met some nice folk, didn't freak out once I got warmed up, and had a good time. On sunday our little neighborhood had a get together out by our pool. Again, it was tough to meet people I didn't know. Even after living here a year and a half, I really don't know any of the neighbors. Only one of them recognized me from walking Joey occasionally. Still, it was good to put some faces to townhomes around the area. People started to bring their dogs and eventually the dogs were swimming in the pool - and none of the people were. Joey stayed fascinated by the water, but didn't jump in. I'm not so sure she really cared for the other dogs, except for the big lab puppy who she felt needed to be put in his place.

I think it's both Chris' and my goal to be a little more sociable and get out more often. Over the last few months we've been homebodies and really haven't gotten out much. We do know people, people that haven't moved away, and maybe it's time we started calling a little more often around here.

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Otherwise, in one of those looking back themes that will crop up from time to time in these 40 days, I find that I don't watch old movies. Pretty much anything prior to Star Wars (1977) is out, and certainly anything in black and white. I know this leaves a ton of really great films out, heck, most of the AFI top 100 are pre '77, but there's just something about old movies that makes me want to go do something else.

This isn't the same for old television shows. I'll be happy to watch a black and white episode of My Three Sons, or Bewitched. I love watching reruns of The Monkees or Green Acres. Perhaps it's just the timeframe involved, 30 minutes vs. 90.

It's not that I've never seen an old movie, there's plenty of old Disney films I've seen, animated and not, say, the Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? There's also Song of the South which I saw on one of Disney's re-releases sometime in the 70's before they pulled the picture for good in the US. I wouldn't make a big effort to go see them again.

that's another part of it, I rarely re-watch movies. I see them once, maybe twice, and that's it. I don't buy many DVD's because I really don't re-watch them. Even my Kevin Smith movies sit in a box, unwatched. The movie I've likely seen the most is either Airplane or Sixteen Candles because they ran on Showtime all the time in the summer during high school. they seemed to show The Wiz a lot, too.

Part of this may be due to my Dad. He's such a fan of John Wayne and WWII movies that he'll re watch them over and over. I don't know how many times I've seen parts of The Fighting SeeBees or The Searchers or Force 10 From Navarone. I never saw Saving Private Ryan because it seemed like it would be the same thing all over again, just with Tom Hanks.

There's something about needing to move forward in movies that's bigger than my need to move forward in music listening. I love to find new music, and listen to what others of you are listening to, but I like to mix that in with favorites across the last 60-70 years. Movies seem to be more of an in-the-moment thing. I caught a few minutes of Deep Impact on cable the other day and I was already thinking that the movie looked dated.

I'm sure I could ask for, and get a hundred different classic movie selections, but really, I'll stick to trying to see new stuff and the movies i've missed over the last few years...like over the weekend watching The Italian Job, which was fun. Of course it's based on a classic Michael Caine movie that I really have no desire to see.

Of course that doesn't mean I want to see every remake, either. At this moment, I'm still thinking of skipping Hairspray.

I've been working on a list of cities I would, and would not move to if I had the opportunity. In most cases, it's based on cities that I've travelled to at one time or another. I've never moved out of Texas, so I guess sometime in my life, I should actually consider it. My biggest question tends to be, can I handle snow? I've never been in a place that had significant snowfall...or even snow that lasted more than a day. It scares me.

Places I'd Move to:
Boston
SF Bay Area (Preferably somewhere like Palo Alto or Cupertino, but I doubt I could afford it.)
Chicago
Washington DC
Austin

Maybe:
Montreal (language and snow problems)
San Diego
Madison, WI
Houston (been there, done that)
Honolulu (isolated)

Off the List:
Los Angeles
Baltimore
St. Louis
Kansas City
Memphis
New Orleans
any city in Florida

I'm reserving judgement on cities that I haven't visited, but intrigue me, like Atlanta, Seattle and Toronto. I haven't spent enough time in Philadelphia to know.

Otherwise, in our terrible boredom today, we went out to the Dallas Galleria. That's actually the name of the mall. Houston has had "the Galleria" for almost 45 years, so when they opened up a mall in Dallas some 20 years ago, they had to make sure to let everyone know that this is the Dallas one.

Now over the last couple of weeks, we've visited all the malls in our area except Valley View. Valley View is the old, ghetto mall. I remember when it opened, sometime in the 70's where it was clean and modern, and it was where I got my Sears Toughskins - when we didn't have to order them from the catalog store in East Texas. Now Valley View is the mall that sells Disco Jesus plaques next to the moving waterfall pictures.

The Dallas Galleria has had a Macy's store since it opened. The Houston location added a Macy's in the eighties in an area that you have to know how to get through Saks Fifth Avenue to find. It's a pretty peaceful area. they were both the last stores when Macy's pulled out most of it's stores in Texas in the 90's. I mention this because this was the big weekend when Macy's took off the name Foley's in the southwest, among other names across the country.

The Dallas Galleria has it easy as the Macy's there doesn't have to change a thing. In Houston the Galleria has both a Macy's and a Foley's, and they had already closed the Lord and Taylor, another department store owned by the same company. I'll bet the much older Macy's in the quiet part of the mall will close after the holidays. While the Dallas Galleria store will do fine, I'm going to guess the Valley View store, the one that once was a Sanger-Harris, will close since it's only a few blocks away. Why they build malls a few feet from each other, I'll never know.

The Dallas Galleria is not a mall for us. It's the mall with the fancy stores, like Gucci and Versace (pronounced Ver-sayse but the trendy twink behind us today). There's nothing with a big and tall section. Many stores are just there to impress the travelers that we are some sort of fly-over state shopping oasis. We did notice that the stores got cheaper and trashier as you went higher. this is easily seen as sister stores from the Gap corporation are stacked up at one end of the mall. Banana Republic is on the ground floor, Gap in the center, and Old Navy on the third floor.

On the scary third floor, we found a store that sold a repainted knock-off Batman doll as Superman in the window, the sad "learning toys" store that no child would ever want something from, and Hot Topic.

Chris, remembering xkot's old post about crying in front of Hot Topic asked me if I wanted to reproduce the photo, I said no, because I'd have to cry in front of Torrid instead.

One of the worst things is that the Stroller Bear population is really low at the Galleria. The bearish folks just don't travel there. Really, if you're going to people watch, the better looking crowd in my book is at Stonebriar Center. Even the upscale Shops at Willowbend is better especially as there's the cute bear who manages the pretzel shop there. The Galleria has more pretty people who surprisingly can't pronounce Versace.

We bought nothing, but it did get us out of the house, where we're suffering with a problem with our air conditioning. It also got us to walk - yea exercise! -and waste our time without spending money on some movie that we'll just realize isn't worth the $6 for a matinee showing.