Lady Jane Grey and there's a story there...

I grew up in a small town in Washington state.

That's perhaps an oversimplification.

I was born in Tennessee.  We moved to Washington when I was 9, in the middle of third grade.  I went from having the nicest 3rd grade teacher you could imagine to having this absolutely cruel, witch of a teacher.  As you can tell it has scarred me. 

Where was I?  Ah, yes.  When I was 17 we moved back to Tennessee.  It's a long complicated tale and one that we don't talk about much because it's not particularly relevant to the present.  But this particular memory I'm about to share, takes place in that fateful year in Tennessee when I was a senior in high school.

We moved in June, I think.  And we moved back to the same smallish town I had lived in as a small child.  My first week of school I kept meeting people who remembered we had this really great tire swing in front yard.

Which we did.

Anyway, a group of us kids from church had all driven over to another town for a dance and had congregated at a friend's house.  Jody.  She and I had been friends as small children and we easily picked up that disastrous pairing of personalities upon my return.

I say disastrous because we were (are I suppose) both too smart for our own good, easily bored, sarcastic and mischievous--but not in the cute, charming sense of the word.  Devilish might be a better word.  We were constantly hatching plots and scheming and making plans for trouble.  The only thing standing between us and destruction was the better sense of others.  Of course, from another perspective the only thing standing between us and world domination was the better sense (and intervention) of others.

Anyway, I'm thinking of Jody this week because at the tender age of 17 she introduced me to the film Lady Jane. 

I can clearly remember lounging in our pajamas in her parent's basement, eating popcorn and drinking fresca and rhapsodizing on the brilliance of the movie starring Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Elwes. 



I don't know why I got the sudden hankering to watch Lady Jane again.  I love a period drama, as you all know, but I don't own it, it's not something I would be drawn to on a regular basis.  But I recently staged a heist of the netflix queue--I do this periodically just to shake Chris up a bit and also introduce him to a little culture.  And I impetuously added Lady Jane.  He's never seen it and I haven't seen it since I was a kid, so I thought, "Hm.  I can maybe recreate the whole thing.  We have popcorn and fresca!  This could be FUN!"


Poor Chris.  I'm pretty sure when he comes home from the hospital that LAST thing he wants to do is indulge his wife, drink fresca and watch a period drama about a young queen fated to be executed after a 9 day reign.