My Jazz Age Grandparents - The Movie

One of several reasons there has not been a lot of content recently here at JunkThief is two fold.

First, my work computer went bust, and I decided that it was also a good time replace my now four-year-old personal computer with a new VAIO. Besides speed and looks, it has a much better DVD making program. What had started out as a simple project of putting a 7-minute montage of old Christmas photos with music (which I was almost finished with around the time of the crash), has evolved into an already 30+ minute epic documentary. Actually it's a series of short 5-7 minute documentary films about my ancestors and other kin. Imagine a cross between MTV and a Burns brothers docs. Or maybe it's better described as video tone poems. Though historical, they are much more mood pieces conjuring up both good and sad memories of the past.

Fortunately it is much more about happy memories, especially about my mother's parents. I loved both sets of grandparents. Both came from modest backgrounds, but my father's parents faced enormous obstacles to the end and endured with valour more than achieving great goals. My mother's parents were a different story. Always employed during the depression, ever stylish and fiercely ambitious, I always wanted to grow up to be just like them.

The only bad memory I have is that my grandfather died young at 62 -- 40 years ago December 26. My grandmother followed him a decade later. It's only been recently that I could see my resemblence to my grandfather, maybe the best Christmas gift I could imagine.

Making the documentary was a way to remember them the way I will always picture them as in the photos with this entry -- eternal icons of the Jazz Age.