Bit of a pickle

Happy zany news day! This is from Revolutionary Girl's LJ.

Another founder was writer John Ehle (apparently pronounced Eelee?). You may not know his name himself, but he has great connections. First, his wife is Rosemary Harris--you may know her better as Aunt May from the Spiderman movies. (ROCK!!). Second, his daughter is Jennifer Ehle--you may know her better as Elizabeth Bennett from the A&E Pride and Prejudice. ROCK PART 2!!!

So he and Rosemary Harris were running around yesterday for the panel discussion thing, and I gave them programs and whatnot. And they were nice (she always is, anyway--I'd never seen him before).

Last night they had a big dinner at the Stevens Center before the orchestra concert. So he came down from the dinner afterwards with a present of some sort that was circular and wrapped in blue tissue paper. My boss was taking him into the theater, and I was just standing by the door.

This Ehle guy stopped and turned to me. He looked at me a second, and then he held out the wrapped things. "Here, my dear," he said, "this is for you."

"...Why, thank you!"

I was walking around, feeling like some sort of Chosen One because a dude who writes books for a living and has pretty good connections gifted me with his complementary kitsch candle (or so I was thinking), which was already kind of stupid on my part. But here comes the punchline.

I was putting it back in the coatroom with the rest of my stuff when two other people who were at the dinner came in to leave their umbrella. "Oh, ha," they said to me, "where'd you get that? Did someone leave it?"

"No, John Ehle gave it to me. I guess he figured I needed it worse than he did."

"Do you know what it is?"

"No, what is it? A candle or something?"

They held up two green jars. "It's a jar of pickles." (For some strange reason that I haven't been able to understand, that's NCSA's mascot--the pickle.)

I unwrapped it, and sure enough there was a jar of pickles with an NCSA label on it: "Where artistic gherkins become really big dills!"

So Aunt May's husband and Elizabeth Bennett's dad gave me a jar of pickles.

...well, it amused me, anyway.

Ha! Me too.

And this was funny too, from zoomeister.

Funny how costume drama has such an effect on one's language. I did nothing last night save watch Pride and Prejudice, a terrific yarn from the BBC broadcast firstly in 1995, and based on the Jane Austen novel.

After this I would find that my speech would be most viciously inflected with all kinds of laborous language! I now speak in lenghty sentences, big words, and stand around rooms looking at the mantlepiece with my hands behind my back.

Jennifer Ehle is lovely too, and a terrific actress. Swoonsome even. Colin firth is cool, but looks every time he enters a room to speak to someone like he's left a porn mag in there and is trying to find it without making it look like he is. All that pacing and staring. I conked out, laughing as I imagined the dvd released with swearing packed into it, thus utterly ruining the whole drama.