what happened to the cast of the christmas story?
Can We Talk About the Mom in 'A Christmas Story'?
The woman hasn't had a hot meal in 15 years and she's ever cooped upwards at habitation. 2020 is the year to give this character from a classic holiday picture show her due.
It's been tough to lookout movies in 2020 and not project our frustrations and anxieties onto the screen. Maybe the extravagant wedding ceremony sequence in "The Godfather" suddenly felt garish compared to all of this year's Zoom "I Dos." Or mayhap you lot put on "Elf" to laissez passer some quarantine time, and the crowded mall scenes launched you into a cold sweat, considering everyone is inside and no one is wearing a mask.
When I watched the classic "A Christmas Story" recently for the 20th time (at least), my pandemic-weary brain zeroed in on something I'd never really noticed. I looked past the cute kids and the leg lamp and the famous tongue-stuck-on-the-pole scene, and became light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation focused on the mom. One look at her disheveled pilus and shabby robe and exasperated stare and I thought: This woman is a damn hero.
"A Christmas Story," which TBS has played on a loop every holiday season for over a decade, takes place in early on 1940s Indiana, and follows a young boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who desperately wants a Cerise Ryder BB gun for Christmas, fifty-fifty though his mom (Melinda Dillon, referred to as "Female parent" in the credits), says his dream gift is too dangerous. That'due south pretty much the plot, just the director Bob Clark and the writer Jean Shepherd somehow created an oddball, timeless Christmas motion-picture show that manages to be both darkly comic and sweetness. Every year I've watched this flick bold Ralphie is the protagonist. Now I'thou not so certain.
When nosotros meet Female parent, she'due south frazzled, serving food and wearing dowdy clothes that await like rags side by side to her husband'southward insufficiently haute couture accommodate. While The Old Man (Darren McGavin) reads the paper or grumbles about the faulty furnace, Mother cooks, cleans, wrestles the kids into their gigantic snow suits and frets about everyone's well-beingness, even though no one frets about hers.
Normally I wouldn't find her plight so enthralling, but on this viewing, equally soon as her husband and kids left for the day, I desperately wanted to know what this woman did with her lonely time. She wasn't juggling home school and work during a global crisis, so did she just keep on cleaning? Possibly she mixed herself a clandestine Tom Collins and took a chimera bath. Where were the scenes of her celebrating her freedom by dancing through an empty house, like Jill Clayburgh in "An Unmarried Woman"? Was I projecting?
Something tells me she was not sipping cocktails and pirouetting from room to room.
Instead, we see Mother serving up cabbage and meatloaf, which practically makes her a saint in my book. I've occasionally handed my toddler son Goldfish and some grapes for dinner over the past year (toddlers are picky!), and then at to the lowest degree her uninspired meals are domicile cooked. Nosotros also come across her washing Ralphie's oral cavity out with a huge bar of red soap after he says "the queen mother of dirty words." My son said his first curse discussion this year besides, simply he'due south 3 years old instead of 9 like Ralphie. Rather than stuffing soap in his mouth, I looked away to hide my laughter and to avoid giving the word any attention. Female parent didn't accept the luxury of reading fancy books by kid psychologists instructing her about what to practise when kids curse. What she did take was a big bar of soap.
Mother might non get treated like a superstar, but Dillon received summit billing in "A Christmas Story." She came to the film with a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in "Who'due south Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," plus ii Academy Award nominations, for "Close Encounters of the Tertiary Kind" and "Absenteeism of Malice." Dillon started out as the first coat check girl at the improv theater The Second City in Chicago, but when her career quickly took off, she was overwhelmed by the prospect of fame. She turned her energy away from acting and toward marriage and kids. The office of real-life suburban mom apace lost its allure, though.
"I got buried alive," Ms. Dillon said of her stay-at-home stint in a 1976 interview with The Times. She went back to work.
Reading that, information technology'southward hard not to imagine that Ms. Dillon brought some of those feelings to the role of a adult female who, as Ralphie says early on in the flick, "hadn't had a hot meal for herself in xv years."
She's not but a meatloaf baking pushover, though. Mother has mastered the art of outsmarting her married man. She uses stealth tactics to convince him not to turn on the hideous leg lamp he won in a contest, like suggesting he proceed it off and then they don't waste electricity (this qualifies every bit a stealth tactic in my eyes). She later on non-so-subtly asserts her authorization past destroying the leg lamp in a fit of rage. I cheered her on with every off-camera smash. Deprived of hot meals and cooped up at home, she needs this.
At the end of "A Christmas Story," Ralphie and Randy tear open up their many presents, and The Former Human being opens a gift from Female parent, a shiny blue bowling brawl. As I watched her observe her husband and sons' delight effectually the Christmas tree, I noticed that she was holding something that could either exist a gilt spatula or a fly swatter. I hoped that any her gift was, it was non either of those things. Of a sudden, on the umpteenth viewing of this moving picture, I needed to know if this woman, the saint of the film, got a Christmas nowadays.
Frantic Google searches combining "mother" "Christmas Story" "souvenir" and "spatula" yielded nothing, so I emailed A Christmas Story Business firm & Museum in Cleveland, the site of the actual business firm from the movie, hoping for answers.
"Who cares what the mom gets for Christmas," replied the museum'south owner Brian Jones. Turns out he was joking, but still. "No ane has ever asked me that in nearly two decades in the business concern," he wrote.
According to Jones, Mother is indeed belongings a fly swatter. If she gets any presents, we never see them. Is her Christmas gift the fact that her married man and sons are all happy and fulfilled? Where is her reward for multitasking and keeping everyone fed and clothed and protected from blizzards, all while sacrificing her ain time and energy to make still another cabbage stew? They could have at least given her a card!
From now on, when I watch the terminate of "A Christmas Story," I won't be focused on Ralphie'southward BB gun or Onetime Man Parker's bowling ball. I'll be rooting for the mom, and imagining a deleted scene where she kicks up her feet, has that Tom Collins and gets a quiet moment all to herself.
Dina Gachman is an Austin-based writer and the author of "Brokenomics."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/movies/a-christmas-story-mom.html
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