Dorothy Padilla and Wall-E

by Parsley on Thu, 2009/01/01 - 4:34pm Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK
Hero of the week: Dorothy Padilla
My Aunt Dorothy died last week and I was catapulted over to California for her funeral. She was a remarkable woman.

During the war she looked after her younger brothers Reg and Sid (my Dad). After the war she told me she used to walk with her brother Fred from Kilburn to Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night just to look at the fine people having a night out there.

She worked with my mother at Rolex watches. She’d been good at bookkeeping but her father (my rather Victorian Grandad) told her she should stay at home and look after the men. She was brave enough to set off round the world instead.

After living in Canada she ended up in California and fell in love with my Mexican Uncle, Pete Padilla, who was a lovely man, and whom she married. She used her head for figures to help Pete’s hairdressing business and also took on the very difficult task of bringing up his 3 children by his previous marriage with love as her own.

I first got to know her in the summer of 76 when I went over for a month. Uncle Pete cut my hair and Dorothy treated me like a prince, buying me nice clothes from J C Penney where she worked because it had the best medical insurance she could get for Pete. She bought me a massive strawberry tart at Marie Callender’s & used to repeat my words on seeing it - ‘is all that for me?’

Pete was loved by everyone who met him in England. He was the first person in my life I felt close to who died. Before he died he consoled Dorothy with words she used to repeat to me - no more pain.

Over the years Dorothy made several visits to England and had several visitors in the USA. She was strong-minded and sometimes infuriated my Dad who’d refer to her as ‘my sister’. Strength of character, a fierce code of loyalty, and not accepting things you don’t think are right are our family traits and she exemplified them.

I took my Dad and Aunt to the theatre once and we ended up in the accident and emergency ward after she had felt queasy and my Dad had lent her his inhaler, causing her to black out. All were fine afterwards and we spent the evening chatting.

She made the difficult journey to my Dad’s funeral at a very cold time of year. She stayed with my Mum and re-kindled their past friendship. Whilst she was over we went out for the day and visited an historic church. It had a book where you could leave thoughts. I wrote something about my Dad and Dorothy wrote - I hope my nephew will be alright.

Her last years were difficult and sometimes frightening as she, someone that had taken pride in good judgement and strong actions, lost her strength and was at the mercy of others and her failing health.

Dorothy was always a good listener and provided good and kind counsel to me. I’ll miss her.

Film Review : Wall-E
Caught this on an in-flight viewing after my friend Phil had raved about it for being an extremely well done creation of an intricate alternate reality. I guess the back of a headrest wasn’t the ultimate way to experience that.

It’s a traditional story of humans leaving earth in a spaceship, a basic mechanical robot falling in love with a super robot of amazing destructive power, rediscovering life on Earth, then leading a battle against an army of automated robots.

I thought it was good Disney Pixar stuff, although I felt some aspects of the translation of human behaviours into animated, albeit robot ones, were almost conventional. In particular I was interested by how empathy and sympathy could be brought about by animation.

In the film Wall-E (pronounced Wally) is the last of a series of ‘rag and bone men’ robots, left to tidy up the world while the human race goes on a 5-year vacation. Unfortunately something has gone wrong, and humanity has drifted off for 700 years until a robot called Eve verifies that life has restarted on Earth and tries to let them know to come back. Wall-E is the cassette player to Eve’s iPod.

The animation of the robots is the most successful, as even in their new overweight blobiness (brought on by their slothful weightless life), humans give away their ‘animatedness’ much more. Some irony in the thought of fat slothful Americans sitting at home watching this on DVD. Several ‘2001:A Space Odyssey’ pastiche moments in the use of music and visuals.

Couldn’t quite believe the ship’s blobby Captain finding the will not to be a couch potato, when the evidence is that Americans are quite happy to go about their obese business. The film’s thought of the waste dump that we are making of the world doesn’t seem to have made any significant changes to our behaviour yet. Not even with the highly hyped profile of the film.

Overall Review : thumbs mildly up. Reasonably engaging family film, probably more successful in its early solitary phases than its later full on action phase.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]