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Hi.

Welcome to This Awful/Awesome Life! My name is Frances Joyce. I am the publisher and editor of this magazine. We'll be exploring different topics each month to inform, entertain and inspire you. Meet new authors, sharpen your brain and pick up a few tips on life, love, entertaining and business. Enjoy and please share!

Next Month in This Awful Awesome Life - December 2018

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I can’t believe it’s the end of the year! Last year at this time, my right hand was in a cast and I could hardly move it.

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It took most of this year before I regained full use and strength in my hand. I’m looking forward to wrapping presents using two hands and cooking our Christmas meal without a designated food lifter and oven tender.

Let’s celebrate the holiday season…Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year’s Eve and focus on making 2019 better, healthier and more kind.

Our wonderful writers will be back with fun and insightful articles and we’ll have pictures, recipes, book recommendations and reviews and of course, our last quiz of the year.     

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 See you Next Month!

 

Answers to our November 2018 Thanksgiving Movie Quiz

1.    Home for the Holidays

2.    Planes, Trains and Automobiles

3.    A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

4.    The Ice Storm

5.    Pieces of April

6.    The House of Yes

7.    Funny People

8.    Tadpole

9.    Free Birds

10. Krisha

11. Son in Law

12. Addams Family Values

13. The Daytrippers

14. Alice’s Restaurant

15. Nobody’s Fool

16. Dutch

17. Hannah and Her Sisters

18. Scent of a Woman

19. Grumpy Old Men

20. The New World

21. Garfield’s Thanksgiving

Dutch (16) Ed O'Neill stars in this 1991 comedy about two combative characters and a road-trip home for Thanksgiving.

Free Birds (9)Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Amy Poehler, and George Takei lend their voices to this animated comedy. A turkey named Reggie is pardoned on Thanksgiving by the POTUS only to be kidnapped by a wild turkey named Jake. Jake, a member of the Turkey Freedom Front, wants to take Reggie back in a time machine to the very first Thanksgiving to rid turkeys from the menu for good.  

Garfield’s Thanksgiving (21) A fat cat who likes to eat and the Thanksgiving he gets put on a diet.

Hannah & Her Sisters (17) Woody Allen's 1986 comedic drama starring Mia Farrow, Michael Caine and Diane Wiest which won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor and Actress statuettes Caine and Wiest.  

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (3) Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock and a Turkey  

Son-in-Law (11) Pauley Shore stars as Crawl, the unlikely boyfriend to small-town-girl Becca (Carla Gugino). Becca brings Crawl back home for Thanksgiving, much to the shock and horror of her conservative farmer father.  

Pieces of April (5) Katie Holmes invites her dysfunctional family from suburban Pennsylvania to her tiny apartment on the Lower East Side for Thanksgiving only to have her stove break forcing her to try to find a working oven in her building. Patricia Clarkson plays her semi-estranged mother who is battling cancer.  

Alice’s Restaurant (14) Folk-rocker Arlo Guthrie (son of Woody) plays himself in this offbeat comedy film inspired by his song of the same name.  

Tadpole (8) Love is complicated at 15, especially when you have the hots for your stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), who is oblivious to your affections. Over Thanksgiving break, Oscar plans to seduce Eve's best friend in order to make her jealous.  

The Daytrippers (13) Hope Davis stars as Eliza, a happily married woman who finds a love letter from her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) to an unknown woman while at her parents' home for Thanksgiving. With her family in tow, Eliza sets out in the family station wagon from Long Island into Manhattan in search of answers.  

The House of Yes (6) This 1997 American black comedy film stars Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Geneviève Bujold, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Tori Spelling. Hide the knives when Marty brings Lesly home for Thanksgiving to meet the family with disastrous results.  

The New World (20) This 2005 drama is about the founding of Virginia's Jamestown settlement and the mythical romance between British Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Native American Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher).  

Funny People (7) A Judd Apatow film about the comedy world and how friendships evolve into familial relationships, highlighted by a Thanksgiving toast given by Adam Sandler’s character to his “family. “ Also stars Seth Rogen.  

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (2) John Hughes, Steve Martin and John Candy – I shouldn’t have to say more.  

Krisha (10) A woman arrives at her sister's house for a Thanksgiving celebration after years of estrangement from her family. Overwhelmed by her return to this seemingly normal life, she secretly starts drinking and popping pills causing emotions to run high while family secrets are exposed.  

Grumpy Old Men (19) John Gustafson (Jack Lemmon) and Max Goldman (Walter Matthau) act like feuding immature children while trying to win the affection of Ariel Truax (Ann Margret) which makes for an amusing Thanksgiving dinner in Wabasha, Minnesota. 

Addams Family Values (12) Your favorite family is back and a new nanny, Debbie (Joan Cusack), plans on marrying the uncle for his money before killing him off. The kids know something’s up, but Debbie convinces their parents to send them to summer camp—where they are forced to participate in a completely bonkers musical rendition of the first Thanksgiving.  

Home for the Holidays (1) 1995 comedy about the Thanksgiving get-together of Holly Hunter’s dysfunctional family played by Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning and Robert Downey Jr. 

Nobody’s Fool (15) Paul Newman stars as an upstate New York construction-worker hustler at odds with his boss (Bruce Willis) whose wife (Melanie Griffith) he fancies. The arrival of his estranged son (Dylan Walsh) at Thanksgiving, leads to an amusing and touching reconciliation.  

Scent of a Woman (18) Over Thanksgiving weekend, Chris O'Donnell's prep school student comes of age while caring for a blind retired army lieutenant (Al Pacino). It's a touching story of an unlikely friendship between two strangers.  

The Ice Storm (4) Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, and Elijah Wood star in this this Ang Lee's film about two well-to-do families in Connecticut trying to keep up appearances while dealing with infidelity and other family secrets during Thanksgiving.

 

 

Building a Team

October 2018 in This Awful Awesome Life