Till Death Do We Part

The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, June 26 that same-sex couples can legally be married means the final hurdle in equality has been crossed.
Half a century ago, interracial couples had to hide their nuptials in some parts of America. A century ago, couples of different religions were frowned upon even if it was just Catholics and Protestants getting married.
People say look to the Bible but when you look at traditional marriage, it's about property. Fathers gave up their daughters so they could get livestock or acreage. Marriage was an arrangement and people didn't get along.
Following World War I, divorce became more prevalent in America. People were getting married for the wrong reasons.
I've known people who have gotten married even though there was trouble in paradise and their reasoning for going through with it all is that they had so much invested in the wedding. Other people I know have had double thoughts because they have arguments.
But for the most part, people at one time got married because it was expected. If you wanted to have sex, you had to get married. If you wanted to have a child, you had to get married. If you were 30 and unmarried, something was wrong with you. This wasn't in the Dark Ages, this was a few generations ago. You needed to get married to a woman to make "an honest woman" out of her. Any woman who didn't ever get married was labeled as a lesbian or as an "old spinster." Being a bachelor was frowned upon because it meant you slept around with women.
Not true.
And still some people think that.
Now, times have changed. It's deemed okay for someone to work some years saving money and building their careers so they can take care of their families.
And there's nothing wrong with being single. I know some people who tried relationships and it didn't work out. People need to grow because relationship take work and if you don't want to work on it yet, there's no point in getting stuck in a job you can't quit.
So, now, same-sex couples can get married. The sun will rise tomorrow. And for some people, it will shine a little brighter.
All same-sex couples want is the excitement, joy and acceptance heterosexual couples take for granted. Being a newspaper editor for many years, I would get many features about couples celebrating 25 or 50 years together, but they were always heterosexual couples. Not until their obituaries were published, was it known that they were involved in a homosexual relationship.
Now, it's time for people to have their silver and diamond anniversaries reported in the same community newspapers their parents' anniversaries were reported in.
All people of the LGBT community are asking is for a seat at the table. You don't have to carry on a conversation with them throughout dinner, but at least pass them the butter and bread and admit they're there.
Same-sex marriages isn't going to destroy the sanctity of marriages. Other factors, such as adultery, child sexual abuse, domestic abuse, incest, infidelity, lies, and poor financial decisions, have already done that.
Marriage equality also means more rights for people after death. There is a next of kin established and this keeps estranged families from coming in and have a legal leg when they shouldn't.
Some times, there's always going to be someone in your family or a friend who make not like that you're with another person. It happens for same-sex couples and heterosexual couples. There are moments in which your partner is not good enough for your parents or your friends. But your partner is good to you and loves you, what does it matter what other people think? We live our lives sometimes wondering what other people think, but our friends and family are not always going to be there, you partner, significant other, spouse, will be.
It's time, today, for everyone to realize that they should focus on their happiness and stop worrying about other making others happy when that is never going to happen.

A Deadly Adoption: Subtle Satire or Straight Drama?

Every now and again, a movie is made in which you don't know if the filmmakers are serious or if it's a subtle parody of a genre. Look at movies like Stephen King's Silver Bullet and Starship Troopers. You're not sure if they were intentionally made to be bad, or meant as comedies but marketed as serious, or poorly made serious dramas.
A Deadly Adoption is so bad of a movie, it's good at being bad. It stars Will Ferrell, sporting a beard and wearing plain light blue and cream buttoned down shirts, as Robert Benson, a popular financial adviser writer and Kristen Wiig as his wife, Sarah, an owner/operator of her own organic gluten-free food supply or whatever. It doesn't matter. They are so plain and borderline parody, you're waiting for a joke to emerge and it never does and that's what is both good and bad about the movie.
Released on June 20 on Lifetime Movie Network, it's a love letter to those awful movies that have been staples on the channel for many years.
It starts off with Wiig's character suffering a near-fatal fall. She fell off a dock while pregnant and the trauma led to the death of the unborn child. Ferrell's character throws a "Get off the dock," line that is similar to his "Get off the shed!" skit in one of his earliest and most awful Saturday Night Live sketches.
Flash forward 5 years later and the family is living well in a suburban town and they decide to have another child. Apparently, Wiig's character can't have any more kids, so they quickly look to adopt a baby. Enter the Jessica Lowndes as Bridgette, a young pregnant mother, who Robert and Sarah immediately take in after talking with her after being introduced through an agency. Little by little, Bridgette isn't what she seems especially after a shady character, Dwayne, played by broody Jake Weary who proves that having a goatee means you're a bad guy in movies.
Eventually, we learn something about Robert and Bridgette, who have a history together and there's more to her pregnancy. There's the friend/co-worker of Sarah's who is the first to suspect something is amiss and the first, of course, to meet an unfortunate end.
The movie does fall apart at the end, but I think it's meant to. Most of these LMN movies are poorly scripted and paced and after an hour or so of watching the show, you wander why they just don't wrap things up, but there's still a lingering third act in which people just show up as if they have a sixth sense of where people will be.
A Deadly Adoption got a little bit of buzz on April 1 after it was revealed Ferrell and Wiig were pulling out of production because the TV movie had been leaked. Don't know if it was an elaborate joke or they were serious and reconsidered, but don't care.
You don't have to see a LMN or any other movie to understand what is being mocked here. Part of the problem with parodies now, like those made by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is the filmmakers are taking too much time to explain to you what they're making fun of and why. Movies like Blazing Saddles and Airplane! presented themselves as part of their genres they were mocking first and then decided to let the jokes in.
It's hard to rate A Deadly Adoption. It's terrible and the dialogue is awful. You can guess the plot twists 10 minutes before they happen, but that is the goal, I think. This is a movie that wants you not to like it and in a way, we do, even though we don't.

Movie Flashback: How Jaws Changed A Lot

Jaws was released on June 20, 1975 after quite possibly one of the worst productions in movie history. Crew members called the movie Flaws because of all the problems. Richard Dreyfus comically talks about the radios stationed all around Martha's Vineyard, where the movie was filmed, with a production assistant repeatedly saying, "The shark is not working. Repeat. The shark is not working." Mother nature, technical problems and boaters in the background hamper the production.
When pre-production began, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown had to fire the original director who didn't know the difference between a shark and a whale. They brought in Steven Spielberg, who had directed a TV movie, Duel, and one feature movie, The Sugarland Express, as well as some TV episodes directing. Spielberg was the new kid on the block, surrounded by veteran filmmakers who probably didn't like some 20-something telling them what to do.
The production could've ended Spielberg's career if it hadn't been a hit. Spielberg, himself, said he had apprehension about being thrown into the ocean by the film crew on the last day of filming that he set everything up and allowed an assistant director to handle it and left town.
Jaws became a blockbuster and it scared people out of their seats and more importantly out of a favorite summer past-time swimming in the ocean and hanging out at the beach. The days of Annette Funnicello and Frankie Avalon twisting their hips to that rock and roll music was over.
A horror movie, which Jaws is, works best when it takes something we take for granted and shows how vulnerable we are. Jaws is about taken for granted the waterworld that makes up planet Earth. There's a whole different world beneath the water and we don't know much.
It's ironic that the fishermen from the suburbs who go fishing for the shark don't know anything about chumming or when Dreyfus' oceanographer Matt Hooper tells them they killed a tiger shark, one of them looks at him confused and says, "A what?"
We knew little about sharks. We saw them as violent apex predators devouring anything in their way. Ironically, great white sharks, one of which is the titular character in Jaws, don't have an affinity much for human flesh. They prefer sea lions. Most shark attacks are by curious sharks mistaking bathers in the ocean for their food. If they bite an arm or leg off, the taste will make them spit it back out. Bad luck for the bather who could die, but their animals and their natural instincts are to eat.
What works in Jaws and what hasn't worked in the numerous sequels and imitators is that it presents suspense. Alfred Hitckcock said if the viewers know a bomb is under a table and it doesn't explode, that's suspense. Take for instant another scene where some wannabe fishermen tie a chain around a dock with a hook with a roast attached. We don't see the shark but it pulls out the chain, causing the dock to break and the fishermen nearly become shark food, but they don't, because we see part of the dock changing directions from away shore toward shore, but surprise to surprise, there is nothing but the dock being led in by the tide.
The technical problems with the shark animatronics led Spielberg and the production crew to show less and it fits with the understanding that we don't know what is going on. Quint, the professional fisherman hired to track and kill the shark, shoots the shark with cables attached to barrels to keep it from going under much as well as to track it. Seeing the barrel pop up shows us that the shark is near.
There is also John Williams' "da-dum-da-dum" score that is simple but terrifying. Like the Halloween theme by John Carpenter, it is able to terrify us by its simplicity.
Finally, there's characters we care about. Hooper is the rich college-boy who thinks just because he's gotten his feet wet, he knows all he needs to about sharks. There's Quint, the veteran fishermen who has a hatred of sharks that we learn is from incidents that happened following the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II. Finally, there's Martin Brody, the street-smart cop trained in the mean streets of New York City, who has wanted to move his family to the small island town of Amity in New England. During one scene, Brody walks, doesn't drive, down to the local store. I like this scene because it shows the small-town feel that Brody and others want.
Unfortunately, Brody is being pressured by the mayor of Amity played by Murray Hamilton, and other civic leaders who think the death of a female youth by the shark was a boat accident.
Actually, the movie opposed to the book, downplays the severity of the pressure Brody, whereas in the book, the civic leaders are in debt to the Mafia for building Amity and need summer dollars to pay off the Mafia and go so far as killing Brody's cat in front of his children. Brody's wife also has an affair with Hooper, who is more sleazy and dies a horrible death. Hooper was supposed to die in the movie but some actual footage of a real shark attack a cage changed that.
The movie works because when Brody says the iconic line, "We're going to need a bigger boat," he is not referring just to the shark but also the egos of Brody, Quint and Hooper on the boat as they battle the shark. Reportedly, Shaw and Dreyfus didn't get along on set and Spielberg had them use that.
The success of Jaws led to many imitators, Orca, Tentacles, Piranha, and Great White (or The Last Shark) which was sued by Universal for plagiarism and can't legally be shown in America for more than 30 years. You can find bootlegs online.
There were the sequels. All you need to know about Jaws 2 is that the tagline "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water" is better than anything else in the movie, which slowly turned into a dead teenager slasher movie. Also, you wonder why would the civic leaders act so stupid a second time.
Then there was Jaws 3-D, which should've made people not like SeaWorld as much as Blackfish. The movie is laughably bad but enjoyable. Jaws:The Revenge, on the other hand, is so bad, it defies everything, such as people having flashbacks to memories they didn't witness, the notion that you can have your arm bitten off and not going into shock or to be gushing blood, and probably the climax in which a shark rises up on its back fin and roars. I was 10 when I saw this and even then, didn't believe it.
Worse, Jaws presented many myths of sharks, forcing people to savagely hunt them. Peter Benchley, who wrote the book and is credited as a co-writer, spent the latter part of his life advocating conservation of sharks.
The hunting of sharks led to changes in the ecosystem which have been blamed on more shark attacks as the killing of sharks led to an abundance of sea lions and other foods, which led to an abundance of more sharks.
Now, there's Shark Week, which was always a favorite when it began, but now, has been hit with criticism for false documentaries and misleading the public on the dangers of sharks. Yes, sharks are dangerous, but taking a step out your front door and getting stung by a bee can be dangerous to many.
Jaws was just a movie, a great movie, but a movie nonetheless, a world of make-believe on a fictional island detailing fictional people doing fictional things. Great white sharks hardly grow to be 25 feet long and Quint's retelling of the Indianapolis sinking was only partially accurate. Many sailors died from exposure, and the sharks fed on their dead bodies.
For the most part, Jaws changed a lot. It turned a film-school kid from the midwest into one of the major Hollywood players for the past 40 years. And many people said that while it may have driven dentists and accountants from the same midwest area Spielberg was raised to hunt and kill marine life, it also encouraged more people to educate themselves on marine life and hopefully, we have a new generation of shark conservation.

Black? Like Me?

Let's face it, the reason the Rachel Dolezal story is making so much news is because it's just so unbelievable. A white woman who looks like she could be Laura Linney's baby sister, tans her skin and either wears weaves and wigs or restyles her hair in order to pass herself off as black. And she has done it for about 10 years now.

This is a recent photo of Dolezal. Now, looking at this photo, one would deduce this is a photo of a white woman, possibly from the 1980s, after getting a nice sun tan in the tropics.

This is a younger photo of Dolezal. This is not a black woman. Her parents say that her ancestry is mostly Czech, German and Swiss.
No way is that black. And she can't pull a Trevor Noah or Charlize Theron and say she's African-American, because she grew up in Africa.
Dolezal resigned on Monday, June 15 from her position as head of the Spokane, Wash. chapter of the NAACP amid reports that she had falsified her ancestry.
If this seems familiar, then there was a movie that came out in 1986 call Soul Man, starring C. Thomas Howell, plays a Harvard law student who is able to tan his skin to pass for black to win a scholarship.

The image above is a scene from the movie in which Howell's character has been invited to dinner by the daughter of his rich landlord, played by Leslie Nielsen, and he envisions them married. Of course, the whole scene is offensive as Howell's character talks about doing heroin and calls the daughter "slut" and "bitch" and ends by breaking the fourth wall and screams, "What'cha lookin' at?!"
Soul Man was trashed when it came out, but is probably more memorable for its cast including a young Julia Louis-Dreyfus as well as Ronnie Reagan, son of Ronald and Nancy, as a college student who assumes that because Howell is black he will be a great basketball player.
Soul Man is a movie that exposes many stereotypes white America has about black people. Even Howell's character is guilty as he walks into a study room, dressed like a militant Black Panther-type, only to recognize the other black college students are very well dressed and groom. Other people tell racist jokes or have racist thoughts that Howell wants to rape white women, commit physical harm to people who think he has a knife, etc.
Dolezal says she identifies as black and there are allegations she or someone she knows may have falsified hate mail that she received in a post office box. There are reports that Dolezal sued Howard University for racial discrimination because some people there thought she was black because of her paintings, which now they say may be allegedly plagiarized.
So, whatever more happens with this story will happen, but people it brings a lot of people who grew up in the late 1980s and 1990s back to a time in white youth sometimes pretending to be black.
While Soul Man has a white man pretending to be black for a scholarship, other movies have white people pretending to be black, just because.
There's Gary Oldman as Drexel, a pimp in True Romance.

There's Jack Black in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

And there's Seth Green in Can't Hardly Wait.

Then, there was Vanilla Ice.

And his Canadian counterpart, Snow.

Yeah, it was a crazy time.
When Eminem came out in the latter 1990s, it's probably no surprise many people thought it was a joke, but he was hanging out with rappers like Busta Rhymes and Dr. Dre, but was this an elaborate joke like when Joaquin Phoenix pretended to be a rapper for a few years. No, Eminem was the real deal and like the Beastie Boys, he seemed to be the diamond in the rough of white rappers who could really back up their persona with good music.
Unfortunately, the Beastie Boys are no more as the death of MCA, aka Adam Yauch, in 2012 ended their 31-year career. Now, Eminem has won an Oscar and other awards, earning him respect and recognition.
That being said, it has ushered in a new young blood.
Like Macklemore, whose name sounds like it should be a type of Girl Scout Cookie.
And Iggy Azalea, who looks like Marlon Wayans in White Chicks.
But none of them compare to Chet Haze.

Chet Haze's real name is Chester Hanks. He is the son of Tom Hanks, who is the white person version of Wayne Brady, and Rita Wilson, who helped bring My Big Fat Greek Wedding to wider audiences. When your parents are Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, you're not gangsta. Ozzie and Harriet are more gangsta.
I mean look at this:

That is one of the cutest photos ever. The only way this photo could be cuter if they were holding kittens and puppies.
Chet is a frat boy rapper, who attends Northwestern University. No way are you gangsta.
Your name is Chester. This cartoon dog, also named Chester, is more gangsta than Chet Haze.

And no one named Chet has ever been gangsta.
Take Chet from Weird Science:

Not gangsta at all.
But ironically, as Chris Rock once said, no white people would want to change positions with him and he's rich.
Do people want to be stopped just for riding in the car with a white woman, which happened to some people I went to college with? Do people want to be followed in stores for no reason other than they "look suspicious" or even have the cops called on them, which has happened to people I know?
No one wants to go in a store and be told something is "very expensive" even though they have the money to pay for it. No one wants to have their job applications immediately rejected just because their name doesn't sound Anglo-Saxon.
No one wants that, but it happens. It happens far too often in this society even though we would want to admit it doesn't.
We have praised the redneck culture by encouraging white people to wear trucker hats, sleeveless-shirts, and torn blue jeans but we have condemned black people for the way they dress. I don't want to see saggy pants or butt cracks so everyone needs to pull up their damned pants.
But we have turned a blind eye. And also blind are the white people who pretend to act black, but on any given day, definitely wouldn't want to be black.

White Flight

It's been a week since the events of the McKinney, Texas pool party and the nation is divided between who was right and who was wrong. Let's not kid ourselves. If these children had been white, there probably would have been a few police officers show up and tell everyone to leave. You don't need a dozen officers to tell a bunch of teenagers to go home.
Tatiana Rose, who hosted the party, said that it all started because an older white woman, called people, "you black fuckers" and told them to go back to their Section 8 housing.
Rose lives in the neighborhood and this was a pool used in the affluent neighborhood. Accidents happen when you tell someone there is a pool party. Too many people can arrive uninvited. And if this was posted on social media, then that was a problem because anyone could have seen it. Also, with text messages, smart phones and Instagram, you can pretty much tell anyone what you are doing with the click of a few buttons, so people can show up.
This isn't a black or white issue. It's a common courtesy issue. People sometimes show up uninvited and it doesn't matter if they're 17 or 70. When you host an event, you always face this possibility. I covered an event at a social club and when some of the attendees brought their children, there was some talk because, well, the kids were not supposed to be welcome. But no one told them the kids had to go. Needless to say, it was predominantly a white-only attendance. Being in Oklahoma, there can be some people of Native American descent in attendance.
It happens. No one wants to be left out of a celebration, but sometimes, we have to let the people celebrate they way they want to. You wouldn't take your kids with you on date night and you definitely don't want the parents, in-laws and other family coming with you on the honeymoon. Sometimes, you have to be anti-social.
So, Rose, or whoever, may have made a mistake.
But if an older white person did make that comment, it poses a more pressing problem. Gated communities, Homeowners Associations, mini-mansions, etc. all seemed to be another destination in white flight.
One hundred years ago, there was mostly just urban or rural communities. You either lived in the city or in the sticks. Then, non-white people began to move into the more traditional white communities in the cities. So, people moved out of the cities, blaming the violence, even though there has always been gang and violent issues in big cities dating back to times before the Emancipation Proclamation.
The suburbs seemed to be the place to go in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. And as black people moved out, there were mostly in the poorer neighborhoods, the ones traditionally closer to industries and other eyesore scenery. But with the end of Jim Crow segregation and the Equal Rights Act, black people did move into the nicer suburban homes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Then, as we closed the 20th Century, building developers realized that rural farm land was sitting untouched for livestock or agricultural, so why not turning it into residential track housing with two-story, two-garage homes with high ceilings? And people moved from the suburbs, where it was a few blocks from the park or convenience store, to the outskirts of towns where the homes costed a little more, but that's why God created mortgages.
Now, at 2015, more black families or interracial families are moving into these neighborhoods and just like on Blackish, white America doesn't know what to do.
There's no question that Eric Casebolt may have acted differently if this had been the local football, baseball or soccer team, cooling off. He definitely wouldn't have drawn his service weapon and he probably wouldn't have slammed a teenage girl to the ground. He probably wouldn't even responded because another officer would have handled. He was too busy dealing with a reported suicide and an attempted suicide.
He has resigned and it was all for the best. To stay on would only anger other people in the world who think the police are out of control and probably the department's insurance is going to skyrocket, and it would make it almost impossible if he stayed.
But his resignation anger Karen Fitzgibbons, a fourth-grade teacher at Bennet Elementary in Wolforth, Texas, who actually said what many people want to say about segregation. The problem is her views are ignorant and they seem to be the views expressed by many about black people.
White people flunk out of high school every year and many parents, white and black, are oblivious to what they're kids are doing. Remember all the reports of parties in which parents are supplying booze and drugs for their kids? What's the difference?
The difference is race.
And speaking of parents, people are quick to defend the question of "What if it was your child?" with "It wouldn't be MY child."
Really?
Maybe it would.
I hate to bring this up, but Adam Walsh, the little boy from Florida who was kidnapped and savagely murdered probably by Otis Toole, just happened to be next to some other kids at a department store who got into a scuffle and security made the assumption he was with them and made them all leave. That gave whoever killed Adam the opportunity to snatch him.
Besides, it doesn't matter if it was or wasn't your child being slammed to the ground, it was someone who didn't pose an immediate threat to anyone, except maybe the officer's vanity.
Speaking of vanity, you haven't heard much of the white woman being investigated for smacking the black girl with Rose, do you?
And while we defend Adrian Peterson for using a stick to spank his son and Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who hit her son on the head multiple times, we know that we're only doing it because they are black. If a white parent did either one of these things and it was recorded, CPS would be at their door in no time.
But that's an issue for another post...

Christopher Lee, One of the Last of the Great Movie Icons

Recently, actor Robert Duvall announced he was slowing down and asking his agent to find him smaller roles in movies. Smaller roles like his scene in Sling Blade or The 6th Day, for instance.
At 85, some might think Duvall deserves some downtime, but Sir Christopher Lee would have probably laughed at him. When many people, not just actors, reach their 70s and 80s, they look to slow down, but Lee didn't.
His one-scene appearance in Sleepy Hollow, which Lee made in his mid-70s, would probably be what Duvall is looking for now. But that wasn't the end. Lee continued to act in somewhat physically demanding roles as the evil wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the villainous Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel. Quite frankly, he was the only good thing, aside from learning the origins of Boba Fett, about Attack of the Clones.
With his tall stature and baritone British voice, Lee was often cast as the bad guy, even in comedies such as 1941 as a Nazi captain working along with the Japanese Navy.
But long before he ever picked up a lightsaber, sorcerer staff, Dracula cape or the golden gun used to hunt James Bond, Lee fought against Nazi Germany in the Royal Air Force.
He was a singer and recorded several albums.
And he was good at mocking his image, such as in Sleepy Hollow and came close to appearing in one of the best comedy movies ever, Airplane!, in which he would play the role of Dr. Rumack, which was played by Leslie Nielsen.
Lee had appeared in the movie Airport '77 in one of his few roles as a nice guy, but unfortunately, his character, dies.
Then, there was his role as the maybe mad doctor in Gremlins 2, in which we're not for sure if the genetic splicing doctor is evil or just too caught up in his work, like the scene where he casually asks for a napkin his secretary has sneezed into to have it analyzed.
But of course, the role he is most remember for is Count Dracula. Like Bela Lugosi, the role would forever follow him around. Lee seemed to embrace his stature and appeared in many horror movies through the Hammer studios.
But he didn't always play the bad guy. Remember his roles as Sherlock Holmes?
Regardless of who he played or what the movie was, he had obtained the type of recognition many actors want among directors and actors.
In the 1980s, there was a Garfield Halloween special in which a creepy old man seems to be modeled after Lee, both in appearance and voice.
Whether or not it was just a coincidence, it should that he had reached a level in which he was being compared to and that is what it means to be a movie icon.
Rest in peace, Sir Lee!

Mary, mother of Gen Xers

Before moms became hot, there were a lot of hot moms on TV. You had Joanna Kerns on Growing Pains, Meredith Baxter on Family Ties, Judith Light on Who's the Boss, Diedre Hall on Our House, Jane Seymour on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Phylicia Rashad on The Cosby Show, just to name a few.
But if you needed a mom who looked like a real mom, not an actress playing a mom, you had Mary Ellen Trainor. And she was beautiful, funny, caring, authoritative and considerate. Everything a mom should be.
She passed away on May 20 from pancreatic cancer and we're just hearing about it this week. And Trainor hadn't worked in almost a decade, so as younger generations may have forgotten her, those who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s didn't,
She was the mom to The Goonies. One minute she was pleasantly telling a housekeeper that she would like her house looking nice when it is bulldozed down to make way for a golf course. The next, she was getting onto her son for saying a curse word and her sons' friends for making a mess in the living room. Yes, she might have seemed a little oblivious to see that her son has been crudely tied up or being overprotective concerning her other son's asthma, but a lot of Goonies fans probably thought, she's just like my mother.
Trainor had a resume many would love. Along with The Goonies, she costarred in all four Lethal Weapon movies, Die Hard, Romancing the Stone, Forrest Gump, Ghostbusters II, Scrooged, Back to the Future Part II and the cult movie The Monster Squad. She also appeared in the first televised episode of Tales from the Crypt in "All Through the House," which was a remake of the vignette from the 1972 movie, filling in for the Joan Collins role as the murderous housewife, who is terrorized by a sadistic killer in a Santa Claus suit. Incidentally, footage from this episode was showing in Lethal Weapon 2 as both an Easter egg and plug for the show.
Trainor may have gotten some of her acting gigs from her then-husband Robert Zemeckis or from producer friend, Kathleen Kennedy, but she was able to play the roles regardless of screen time. Like the old saying, "There are no small parts, just small actors," Trainor was a good example of that. And she seemed to be okay with being a character actress.
Sadly, her retirement and death leaves some emptiness. Everyone wants to be the star of the movie or the scene stealer, but sometimes, we need an actor like Trainor who knows that someone has to play a certain part, even if it's only for one scene.
And for many fans of her movies and shows, it's like when a teacher or the mother of our friends passes away.
And we know there'll be no one else like her.
Rest in peace.

I love the month of June.
There is no other time in the year that feels like summer than the month of June.
The kids are finally out of school. Some of you have your vacations coming up. It's not too hot and you have the July 4 holiday to prepare for.
Then, it ends on July 5, ironically only two weeks into the "official" start of the summer season. You walk into a Walmart or Target on July 5 and they're taking down all the July 4 stuff and putting up the back to school stuff.
Didn't school just end like a few weeks ago?
Yes, and rather than just enjoy every day of the summer, people cringe like they do on a Sunday afternoon knowing there's just a few more hours, before they have to go to bed and get up and begin another work week.
School starts back in the first of August in this part of Oklahoma. Other states, it's the end of July.
Really?
We're mad because our kids get a few weeks off during the summer, so now, we have to ruin their summer because we have to put on a suit and tie or pantsuit and go to work in 100 degree temperatures.
Even worse, you have these egotistical parents who are afraid their child might forget to add 1+1 over the summer and they're forcing their kids now to do school work at home, during the summer. I used to have teachers threaten to give students homework over the summer. But now, parents are doing it. Worse, these are the same parents who 25-30 years ago were in classrooms where those teachers made those empty threats.
Only, they're not empty threats now.
All we hear on the news is how the kids are out of shape and they spend too much time inside. Well, if you make your child spend hours inside working on math and reading, then, they're going to get out of shape.
Parents don't let their kids play anymore unless under adult supervisions. Parks are empty because kids can't cross the street to go to them without their parents being arrested for letting their kids go to a public park.
Maybe parents are afraid to even let their kids outside, even in the front or backyard because some nosey neighbor may call police and say the kids are outside.
With the Internet and social media, there's more perverts out there trolling after your kids by every pic you post than there are perverts riding around in old-model cars. Judging from the recent arrests of teachers molesting students, they're probably safer NOT being in school.
So, what's the solution?
Simple, give the kids some time to have fun and not dictate what fun can happen. Give a kid a stick and let them dig a hole for an hour. Or five minutes.
Playdates have micromanage childhood the same way little league baseball has destroyed the sandlot teams.
People get so nostalgic for the good old days in which their parents allowed them to ride bikes without helmets and hang out in treehouses, but yet they act like someone else changed all that. No, they did it themselves.
They're the parents now. They're the adults getting cautious when they see a kid playing by himself in the park. 
It's time for parents to grow up and let their kids be kids.