Little Red Dress...

It’s Wednesday, half way through the week! I can’t wait for the weekend, the horrible part about being on holiday is coming back and being very very tired because you have to get used to going to bed early and getting up early again. It’s also getting very cold – my car had ice on it yesterday morning!

This dress used to be hideously long! But it had such lovely detail that I knew it would be a great winter mini dress – it’s certainly bright enough to warn away the winter blues. The only small problem I have with it is that it’s a two man job to get into. It doesn’t have a zip down the side which means unbuttoning about 50 little buttons down the back and then having some one else do them up for you. And the other small problem I have with this is that David and I live by ourselves and he leaves in the morning before I even get up (although I have been trialing getting up just as he’s leaving at around 6am – and although I did rather well on Monday and Tuesday, today I slept right through and only woke up at about 7.30am!!) which means I have no one to do it up for me in the mornings. My cunning plan is to go to work with it unbuttoned but with a jacket over the top and have someone at work do it up for me when I get there – a hassle, but something that must be done if I ever want to wear this dress during the work week.


Now, I’ve read a lot about Grey Gardens on other blogs lately and honestly I had no idea what it was, except that it was a documentary filmed in the mid 70’s about Jackie O’s cousin and Aunt who lived in squalor in a mansion and that they have just finished filming the movie version of it with Drew Barrymore. So naturally, with all this talk about it and lots of beautiful photos of a dolled up Drew Barrymore floating around, I had to see what this documentary was all about.

'Little Edie' and 'Big Edie' from the documentary Grey Gardens

Honestly, I can’t say I loved it (it’s that whole ‘people are telling me it’s great so it must be amazing’ thing kicking in and then getting disappointed when it’s not what I expect). Its from the 70’s so the film quality is bad, little Edie’s voice is far to high pitched for me at times and half the time I can’t understand what they are going on about because they talk over each other all the time and they have very thick American/New York accents, so its very hard to listen to.

Drew Barrymore as 'Little Edie' in Grey Gardens

What I did find very fascinating about the whole documentary though was wondering how on earth they got to where they were. Looking at photos of both of them in their heyday they were both beautiful and had very privileged upbringings living in beautiful houses with the best of furnishings. The film doesn’t explore this enough and I don’t think the makers asked many questions, it seemed like they were just there filming and not thinking about what direction they actually wanted the film to take. This means the doco just kind of ended, with the audience wondering what on earth happened after that, so much so, I had to Wikipedia both of them just so I could find out a little bit more about what happened after the film and about their early lives.

I am still wanting to see the newest film version of it though (they made a very short running musical based on the doco), maybe it’ll shed some new light on both of the Edie’s and I am very interested to see how they actually make the film (will it be like the documentary or more like a story?).

I’m going to stop waffling now! Have a great Wednesday,

XX
Jen