Glee

I confess I missed the tornado sirens because I was watching Glee on Hulu. I guess the song they were singing at nationals in New York (show choir competition) was 1) too loud and 2) in the same key as the sirens.

I can gleefully report that damage was minimal around here, no injuries, and that the tree in rural Heyworth did not fall on the farmhouse!

(But yesterday's Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" just before the twister did fit the weather post-blog entry.)

Everybody else around here went to their basements, I discovered later on Facebook.

I should pause to say I did check on my family--was talking to folks on phone, who had come in from mowing before bad weather rolled back in, so I knew of the warning in the area. Called daughter, elsewhere with my car, to tell her to stay put, not travel if it was bad, OK to stay longer where she was, etc. Hubby had come home from his staff/student junior high volleyball game, gone out again for gyros, and returned safely, saying daughter shouldn't drive in it--"I called her," I said.

I should have noticed the funny, sly grin he was giving me as the Glee kids kept singing.

Vanity Fair, a sort of glamor magazine with good articles, used to be my guilty pleasure. Now it's Glee, high school kids singing, silly plots, tortured romance, ridiculous grownups. Sue Sylvester, the cheerleading coach you love to hate. (I've played volleyball with her!) I cried when her sister died.

Glee has plenty of redeeming social value. Gay kids get to love one another. Bullies are exposed, resisted, given a chance to change. Incompetence and school politics look as bad in Glee as they are in real life.

But mostly it's unreal life--sudden singing with professional musicians and sound engineers and rolling cameras.

Sometimes life is unreal in this way. I have a poem coming out in Sow's Ear this summer, called "Mowing." It's got five white funnel clouds in it, hanging over the farmhouse I grew up in, doing no harm.