Kit Kittredge

The movie theater on the base is basically a second-run theater, and really you can't beat going for $1 on Monday. So last night, leaving a PEO sister babysitting for BLuebonnet, I joined a couple other friends and their daughters for the show.

I had been a tad apprehensive about this latest installation of the American Girls' Collection movies, being the purist that I am for the stories. The trailers I saw earlier were indicative that there was a lot changed between Valerie Tripp's original writings and what appeared on the screen. That was true, and yet something didn't bother me as much about the alterations as it had when the Molly movie came out. Perhaps it's just that I'm far more familiar with Molly than with Kit. In any case, the Kit movie did hit on many of the essential story elements of the Kit books. It was pretty funny to see Wallace Shawn as the newspaper editor, too. And of course, not that I'm the first to observe this, but it is extremely refreshing to see such a clean movie, in which the children are children, the women (except Miss Dooley, who's sort of a caricature and definitely not to be taken seriously) are dressed and behave modestly, the men are respected, and so on.

I think I'll really enjoy when Bluebonnet is big enough to be interested in the American Girls. There's something sort of unusual about having this thing in common with women and girls across an ever-widening age range. I'm toward the oldest end, of course, although there are plenty of women who were a few years older and got into the stories sooner than I did. As yet I haven't heard any rumors about which character will be the subject of the next movie, and I don't know really which to hope it will be.