Calendar Girls

I have a new favorite theater. With movie prices at roughly a gazillion dollars per ticket, and popcorn selling more per gram than pharmaceutical grade cocaine, I can heartily point to the independently owned Keller 8 as a place to see movies on the big screen, so long as you don't mind waiting a few weeks, and don't care if the print is a bit beat up.

Tickets are a mere $3.00 each in the evening. Not as cheap as the actual "dollar house", but then, expecting a theater to run a film for a dollar a head is a bit much to ask. Even ore glorious than seeing Lord of the Rings for three clams is to enjoy a big 'ol bucket of popcorn and a large soda for five bucks. My wife and I share a soda, which we can refill for a dollar, and have our fill of popcorn. Eleven dollars is the cheapest date we've been on in months.

Friday night, when I should have been working to get the Kids' Directory uploaded to Dallas, Gemey and I went to see Calendar Girls. Starring Helen Mirren and Julie Waters, the story revolves around themes of grief, loss, friendship, fame and…prudence. The main characters, Chris (Mirren) and Annie (Waters) are longtime members of a women's group in England who compose a close-knit, supportive group of friends, the kind a lifetime of proximity and shared experience will forge. Gathering weekly, the thirty or so members engage in community-oriented activities, such as fairs and modest acts of charity.

Annie's husband passes away after a battle against leukemia. Chris, an outside-the-box thinker, channels the grief she shares with Annie into a project to replace a worn-out sofa in the hospital waiting room. Through a series of circumstances, she is inspired by Annie's deceased husband's winsome comparison between his beloved flowers and the women of the province to suggest a radical theme for the next Women's Institute calendar. Instead of the usual staid pastoral scenes for old churches or flowers, she suggests that they photograph the flower of the Yorkshire womenfolk - in the nude.

Based on a true story of English women in their sunset years posing nude with strategic objects obscuring the prurient bits, the story unfolds with the meteoric media frenzy that follows publication of the calendar. The tale is funny, and I have a soft spot in my heart for both British women and ladies of a certain age.

Of course the schtick is the juxtaposition of otherwise staid and proper ladies and their tradition-steeped organization and nudity, but the main story is about coping with loss and the effect a strong community can have on the bereaved. In the end, Calendar Girls is a sweet movie full of likeable characters. In a culture that worships youth, a movie that tastefully exposits (if not completely exposing) the beauty of a woman's twilight, it is a welcome deviation.

Tim McNabb