Watched Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast with Katie this evening. She enjoyed it, as did I, but on a completely different level than I did when I first saw it – what – oh, it’s too painful to think about. Maybe 25 years ago. The gorgeous imagery, startling sometimes, worked to bring out undercurrents that a teenager can’t comprehend.

It prompted me to remember how I saw it lo those many years ago, and maybe some of you experienced this, too – the Janus Film Series? In my town, it ran on Saturday nights on the local PBS station. In those days before VCR’s and before I went to college where such films were played at the student union, it was the only way to see classic foreign films – Metropolis, 400 Blows, La Strada, The Rules of the Game – saw them all. The theme music was “The Great Gate of Kiev” from “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which, I have never been able to hear since without having the opening montage from the series flash through my head – Potemkin’s baby carriage down the steps, the boy’s face from 400 Blows…

Last night, Katie went to a sleep-over birthday party, at which the mother decided at the spur of the moment to pile the girls in the car and take them to the outdoor ice-skating rink we have downtown now. Then they came back and watched vintage Twilight Zone episodes and ended up this morning being taught the Hustle by the mom, who told the girls that she and her eleven brothers and sisters used to regularly clear the living room floor to do the dance back in the day.

So you see, it’s tough, but it’s possible. What, you say? To raise kids in a healthy, open, interesting environment without shutting them off from the world. You have to be in control, though, and you have to be alert. But it can be done. In a way, we live (like everyone before us) in the worst of times, and in the best. There’s garbage out there, to be sure. But there’s also the world at our fingertips – and the best of that world, more accessible to us now than it has been at any time in the past. But everything comes with a price, I suppose, – everything’s available to us, so that means everything is available – and that’s the rub, as usual.