A Christmas Memory: Day Three - Judy Garland

When I was ten years old, my father's job made us move to Portugal. I was gay and I knew it since I was five. I was interested in the arts and, especially, in old Hollywood movies. In Portugal I found myself lucky in that the tv stations there loved to play old movies -- the kind I liked to sit and watch by the hour. That is where I got to see films like Love Me Or Leave Me and Swingtime for the very first time. In fact I think that is where I saw most of the Fred Astaire and Ginger films for the first time. When we left Portugal, after four years, I had quite the little movie education. When we left Portugal, we left for Switzerland.

Switzerland was beautiful and it was fun but it did not do much to further my movie education... that is, unless I watched the movies on tv in German. Unlike Portuguese television, the Swiss tv stations translated all the movies into German. My German wasn't bad, so I COULD watch the films... but I didn't want to. I wanted to see them in the original form. So I read instead.

Until Christmas day one year, when my mother called me into the living room to see MEET ME IN ST LOUIS. It had not been dubbed. It was in English and it was sensational. I remember laying across the white and green shag area rug, mesmerized by this, one of the most beloved films of all time; and, especially, by Esther Smith.

I have heard Liza Minnelli say that she thinks this film captures her mother at her most beautiful and I have to agree. Every frame of the movie, every shot of Judy, is pure magic. That Christmas segment, though, is most magical of all. Her comic timing, that red dress... and that song. And the monologue about moving to New York, after Tootie smashes the snow people. She had me in the palm of her hand.

She still has me in the palm of her hand.

To this day, after Thanksgiving is past and the Christmas season is slipping into place, the first day that I start to feel Christmas-y, I get out my dvd and watch Meet Me In St Louis and bake something.

Not til then, can I be in a Christmas mood.