feathers&fables

I just came across this still from the 1954 film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and was flooded with memories of watching it at my grandparents farm when I was of early primary school age. My grandfather was an avid collector of John Wayne movies and our holidays were spent thinking we liked them too, falling asleep half way through and then waking up to Nan having made fresh salad sandwiches on buttered white bread.  Every school holidays we would convince ourselves that we loved John Wayne. We loved the West. But we didn’t. Not even close. Then one day we were ploughing through the video cupboard and came across a gold mine of old school Looney Toons cartoons (think black and white Porky Pig), Three Stooges (Pop liked Westerns, Dad liked slapstick) and the ultimate of ultimate- Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It had everything we wanted- costumes, music, love, kidnappings, town vengeance, babies, shotgun weddings, and a group of men dancing and singing as they raised a barn from the ground.

The image of those seven babes in the arms of the seven bro’s reminds me of waking up at 5am and racing to the kitchen to sit with my grandfather, in trousers and a white singlet smoking Camels and sipping sweet black coffee while my grandmother, in her carpeted kitchen, shuffled around boiling eggs and inhaling Alpine Menthols. I can smell hay, and home cooking, and stale cigarettes, my grandmothers nerves, the green poop that came out of me after eating loads of bubblegum icecream and gumboots and diesel. I learnt how to ride a bike there, my grandfather bought my sister and I a horse, he took us for counter meals and bought us FADS so that we could have a smoke with him. Then we’d get tired and go see Nan for some old time dancing in the lounge room to Frank Sinatra and the soundtrack of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. xx