Look who visited! Our high school teacher, Mr. Quiring – all the way from his new home in Nebraska. Here he poses with Mary, Stephen, and me.
Mrs. Quiring visited, too. We learned that she used to grade our reading journals (with terrific speed, as I recall). Credit to her.
Mr. Quiring was a good teacher when I was in school; ten years later, when I visited his class – Stephen was his student then – I thought he was even better. Afterward, he must have improved even more (although, now, he hasn’t been a classroom teacher for several years).
Yesterday he was brimming with pedagogical ideas – perhaps because he was in a room of teachers.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Normal Life
This sad movie is in the tradition of
Bonnie and Clyde,
Badlands,
Deep Crimson (also released in 1996), and, later,
Monster. The criminal twosomes seem less glamorous and more pitiful with each passing movie. (I am not including
The Honeymoon Killers, which I haven’t seen.) The distinctive feature of
Normal Life is how mismatched and disconnected from one another the two criminals are. They quarrel their way through a pretty appalling marriage before they begin robbing banks. At first, they don’t even rob together; it’s the straitlaced husband, the ex-cop (Luke Perry), who does it by himself to make up for the spending of his unstable wife (Ashley Judd). But it’s the chilling, heartless wife who’s the adrenaline junkie. Once she learns what her husband is doing, she wants in on the fun, and it’s only a matter of time until each of them goes out in a (separate) blaze of glory. Another good movie that
Normal Life reminds me of is
At Close Range, with a criminal father-son duo played by Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Both of these movies evoke a brutal U.S. ordinariness – in
At Close Range it’s rural Pennsylvania, and in
Normal Life it’s the blander Chicago suburbs. No poetry here – this isn’t
Badlands.
Normal Life opens with a long drive past suburban housing developments and strip malls. It’s almost painful how similar they are to the housing developments and strip malls of today. The movie was filmed on streets and in parking lots and banks where the real-life robbers operated; the locations couldn’t have been more generic if they’d been scouted.
