September 22, 2009

After two likable hit comedies, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, writer-director Judd Apatow goes the serious route with Funny People. The results are disastrous.

At my 20-week ultrasound appointment, my husband and I learned that the baby that we are expecting has a fatal birth defect. Sometime very early in his development something went drastically wrong. His skull never formed—the whole top and back part of it simply did not exist. We will probably never find a medical answer to why he developed this way. Babies with acrania have a fairly good chance at living to full term and even some chance of being born alive, but they usually don’t live more than a few days after birth.

I learned to install a door one day in small-town Arkansas, on a nondescript tract home with pinkish, mottled brick that was dated even before the mason finished his work. The door was delivered from the lumberyard as a unit, already hinged and hung in its jamb, and my boss, Dave, gave me all the information I needed to install it. He told me how to make sure the studs on the hinge side of the opening were plumb in two directions, and how to tack up shims to correct for the framers’ hurry. He explained that a push on a corner in one direction would effect a logical movement in another.