Annie

As an Anne, I went through an especially intense Annie phase: I even ran for class president once (9th grade?) with an “Annie”-themed campaign. The dear one has the dvd and it’s in heavy rotation here now. I find that the same lines that delighted me years ago still delight me now, though I hear some of them differently. I think, on reflection, that my love for the movie is less sophisticated now then it was twenty five years ago. Unchanged is my love of the couplet “No one cares for you a smidge / When you’re in an orphanage.” The dear one loves it too, though her sense of the meaning of both “smidge” and “orphanage” is a little vague.

I remember loving these lines from “Little Girls” that seem so a propos now—

Some women are dripping with diamonds
Some women are dripping with pearls
Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I’m dripping with—
Little girls.

The sarcasm is delicious and I know I loved it at ten or fourteen as much as I do now. The humor is less subtle, less abstract, however, when I am literally draped in girls—with a babe in arms and a toddler nearby, insisting, that she, too, need be fed by hand.