A 12th Anniversary and a Happy New Year

It is late afternoon on December 31, 2023. There are only a handful of hours left in the year and I am determined to celebrate Once Upon a Screen before the clock strikes midnight.

This year has been a difficult one on several fronts. Still, my love of movies has not diminished just as much appreciation for those who visit this blog has not. Despite a dismal year of blogging, many of you still visit, still comment, still seem to care about what I think about movies and the people in them. I am grateful and wish every single one of you a 2024 filled with hope, dreams that come true, health, and the truest joy your hearts can find. For the world I wish peace and understanding. We are in desperate need of both.

To celebrate Once Upon a Screen, I default to tradition in the way I have always done. That is, celebrating the number twelve in relation to movies (where possible). Twelve years is a milestone representing a substantive number in history and society. The number twelve appears many times in scripture aside from the Twelve Apostles. Twelve has mythological and magical symbolism. There is a certain type of completeness to twelve, an order to it making it easily attributed to several things in our everyday lives. For instance, eggs and roses and bagels and all sorts of other things come in a dozen because usually things are cheaper by the dozen. I looked up the origin of the phrase “cheaper by the dozen” and was surprised to learn it has quite the negative history. I much prefer to remember Walter Lang’s 1950 picture starring Clifton Webb, Myrna Loy, and Jeanne Crain telling the story of the Gilbreth family and its twelve children.

In case you did not know there are twelve days of Christmas. Unfortunately, on the twelfth day your true love gives you twelve drummers drumming. To my true love – I forbid you from giving me that anoying gift. Thank you very much.

I was surprised to learn that there is a phrase, “daily dozen,” which refers to daily exercises, especially those done first thing in the morning. Of course, the exercise thing is the reason I had never heard of the phrase. An idiom I am familiar with is “dime a dozen,” which means something is easy to obtain and therefore does not have a lot of value or is ordinary. This originated thanks to those eggs and other goods people could obtain at a bargain way back in about 1800. Interestingly, from a good deal the phrase now has a more negative connotation and can be used as an insult in the right situation. It depends how you use it – six of one half a dozen of the other.

A deck of cards has twelve face cards. There are twelve months in a year and therefore twelve signs of the zodiac. And unbelievably, the human ribcage consists of twelve pairs. How’s that for the stability of twelve?

To make this celebration official I offer the traditional gift for a twelfth anniversary, silk. I can think of no better way to commemorate this gift in this instance than by sharing this Jean Harlow portrait in which she is dressed by Adrian for Dinner at Eight (1933).

There is an old idiom that says “twelve good men and true” referring to a jury of upright, honest, trustworthy people, which at one time meant only men. When Sidney Lumet put twelve of those men in a jury room in 1957, they were angry.

On November 21, 1789, North Carolina became the twelfth state in the union. Among the many things to see in North Carolina is the Ava Gardner Museum honoring one of the most famous North Carolinians.

In the year 1912:

• RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton for her maiden (and final) voyage
• Al Jolson has the first unofficial gold record with “Ragging the baby to Sleep”
• The Beverly Hills Hotel opened
• Paramount Pictures Corporation was founded
• Carl Laemmle incorporated Universal Pictures
• The first Mack Sennett Keystone Comedy movie was released, Cohen Collects a Debt
• Among those born in 1912:

Mystical powers are sometimes attributed to the number twelve in some way. Greek and Roman hero, Hercules, as an example, was tasked with Twelve Labors by the gods as a punishment. There also happened to be a total of twelve Olympian deities.

Finally, no homage to twelve is complete without these guys…

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Best wishes to you and yours for a Happy New Year! I hope to be back soon with a centennial celebration of 2024.

Until then…

Thank you for visiting.

Aurora