It’s Not a Dudley DoRight Experience


The Mounties came to tame our noisy low-rent neighbors last weekend. My husband wrote about the incident in more detail on his blog, but the short version is that our next door neighbor is a Guitar Hero junkie who likes to fire up around ten or eleven at night probably after he is finished watching the hockey games or CBC’s line-up. I guess it could be worse. He could be one of those who then switches over to the soft porn shows on the Montreal or Toronto stations (yes, Canadians are very European after hours). I guess we should be grateful for a loud and lousy air guitarist neighbor instead of a quiet pervert, right? 

Anyway, Rob called the RCMP, which is Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Mounties to the rest of the world. One of our loyal readers, Girl, made the comment saying, “Man, I want to live in Canada, just so I can call the Mounties on noisy neighbors! The Mounties!” And I can understand why she would. I am an American too, and my only experience with the Mounties was the cartoon Dudley DoRight.

 He was in the Rocky and Bullwinkle line up on Saturday mornings. Just a take off of the silent film area kind of like Penelope Pitstop. There was a villian, Snidely Whiplash and a love interest, Nell, who creepily in retrospect seemed to have a thing for Dudley’s horse, Horse. Dudley wore the old time traditional outfit of the Mounted Police, the jodpurs with the red jacket and the cool looking hat and riding boots. I thought it was a very smart outfit, and I am apparently not alone in my female admiration for it. Rob’s father was a Mountie back in the 1950’s and wore the uniform when he was standing guard duty at the Parliament building in Ottawa. He told tales of American girls who would proposition him while he was on duty. Many of them wanted to take him off into the trees and have their way with a “man in a Mountie uniform”, but he would keep them waiting until he got off duty (which if you knew the tales of Rob’s dad that I knew you’d be marveling at his self-restraint). I don’t know if he wore the uniform to met any of these girls, but American girls, in late father-in-law’s opinion, were pretty forward as my husband would more delicately put it.

The RCMP of today do not wear the garb of old. They aren’t mounted anymore either unless it is for a parade or other ceremonial duty. They are fairly typical of law enforcement officers anywhere, in my opinion. I have had only one encounter myself when I went to get my fingerprints taken for my immigration application. It wasn’t a Dudley DoRight experience.

Lisa Parker lived close to the heart


Like most WordPress bloggers (or any blogger really) I am fascinated by the searches that people do that lead them to by blog. Probably the search term that comes up most often here is the name Lisa Parker. I first wrote about her in a piece called Going to the Movies. Rob and I had taken in the Viggio Mortensen film, Eastern Promises. Parker was the production unit manager for the film and it was dedicated to her, which is not uncommon in the movie industry when a member of the cast of crew dies during its production. Being me, I googled her at the first opportunity only to find that while her body of work is well-documented, there was little to no personal information to be found. That was frustrating to me at the time but now I find it quite fascinating. The public has this image of those in the movie world being eager for recognition to the point that any and all things about them are fair game and here comes Lisa Parker. A film is dedicated to her memory. A good film. And there is nothing to be gleaned about her save the work she left behind. How about that? Being remembered for your accomplishments only and not your dress size or tumultuous personal life.

I have searched and searched, in vain mostly, for more information on Ms. Parker. I haven’t uncovered much. She was just 39 when she died on June 4, 2007 at Charing Crossing Hospital after a brief illness. She was well-known in the Irish film industry and had worked on international films as well in many capacities. Her funeral was held shortly after her death in London with another memorial service in Dublin, Ireland the following fall. She was survived by her mother, sister and many friends. Donations were asked to be given to the Battersea Dog Home.

The second tim I wrote about Lisa Parker was in a piece about search terms. I thought it an odd memorial to her that people would find in the original blog piece that often brings them here. One of her obituaries carries the quote “she lives life close to the heart”. What a beautiful thing to have said about a person after he/she has gone. To me it means that she lived out her life doing what she loved and with that people who mattered most. What a lucky woman. And what better way to be remembered than as someone who followed her heart.

My Dinner with David Duchovny


Okay, I am not really having dinner with David Duchovny. Calm down. But if I had several thousand dollars to drop on an eBay auction bid, I could have dinner with David. And Nicholas Lea. And Chris Carter. How cool would that be. The best part would be that my husband would be totally psyched for me because he is an X-files fan himself; although he would probably want to know where he could bid on a Gillian Andersen dinner date, and he is very handsome, with a great ass and she is single – so I would be less cool. Women look way too much at my husband’s rear view. Despite the fact that he doesn’t notice, and I am too wonderful for him to consider upgrading to another model, I know Gillian would find him hot.

But getting back to the original topic, David and company are being auctioned to raise money for a Canadian actress who’s had a cancer recurrence. I am not familiar with Canadian TV or theater, so I didn’t recognize her name, but she is important within the industry and it’s really nice to see people give so generously of their time to help someone who is ill. 

When I mentioned this to Rob, he was surprisingly not cool about it. “I learned everything I know about sharing from you,” he told me and that made me laugh. I wouldn’t go to dinner with David without Rob anyway. It wouldn’t be as much fun without him to share the experience with and I am not the type to star worship or enter bidding wars or contests to meet them. Although meeting David Duchovny might be fun and interesting, I can’t think of too many famous people I would go out of my way to encounter. They are just people after all and just because they seem funny or smart or even attractive in the far away surreal kind of way they do in magazines or on the screen, big or small, that doesn’t mean they are that way at all. I am reminded of the often run feature in celebrity tabloids of actresses without make up. Scary. And just like anyone you run into at the grocery really.

Dinner with David Duchovny? Who would you want to dine with?