Have spent the last few evenings, after the girls have gone to bed, watching the 2-disc DVD edition of "The Philadelphia Story". I can recommend it for the movie itself, of course, but the extras are good too. Film historian Jeanine Basinger provides a commentary -- she sounds more than a little professorial at times (at one point, in fact, shuffling pages can be heard), but nevertheless she gives a lot of interesting information about the film and its cast and crew. (I can, by the way, highly recommend her 1993 book "A Woman's View : How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960", a fascinating look at "women's movies" and their stars.)
The DVD also includes two full-length documentaries, one on Katharine Hepburn and one on George Cukor, both about an hour long and packed with details on their respective careers. There are also two (!) radio versions of the play, with the main cast from the movie. One, from 1942, cuts the play down to about an hour, including war bond commercials and a war effort plug from the four stars and Cecil B. DeMille at the end -- the other version, from 1947, is a zippy half-hour total, including Lady Esther ads for hats and face powder. (Actually, here is the "Lady Esther" version itself. Apparently Lady Esther was a cosmetics company in the forties. And for a rather long digression about advertising as a "reflection of society" in the 1920s and 1930s, read this, which is in some ways related to Basinger's book that I mentioned above, discussing how a particular social group reflects and is reflected by a particular media, being both its audience and its target.)
I am not sure why the Robert Benchley short "That Inferior Feeling" and the MGM cartoon "The Homeless Flea" were included on this DVD, as they seem to bear little relation to either "The Philadelphia Story" or to any of its cast -- perhaps the DVD producers wanted to give us an idea of what it was like to see "The Philadelphia Story" in the theater in 1940. It is kind of fun to do the whole movie thing, pop some popcorn and watch a short and a cartoon and the feature! (It was funny to notice that the first set in the Benchley short was used in a Spencer Tracy movie featured in the Cukor documentary, even down to the Holbein print on the wall behind the desk.)
Well, back to knitting -- I'm making an effort to schedule some regular knitting time, since I've had to let things sit for so long. I decided to rip out the two squares I'd done so far for the green baby blanket. I still like the idea of the stripes of the Nature Wool going in different directions, and I had grafted the two squares together, then come to the conclusion that the seam as worked was too stiff for what one hopes will be a soft baby blanket, after all, and I did not want to use the limited time at my disposal in fiddling with grafting methods. So -- out it all came, back to the beginning, and started again as a Big Bad Baby Blanket proper. Luckily, being worked with two strands at once, it grows fairly quickly.
I love the Escher-ness of the center, where the four squares come together -- always going down the staircase.