Happy Birthday

Off the top of my head and without putting much thought into it at all (which is my way of saying that I could totally contradict this statement at any time in the future), I think I'd have to say that my three favorite movies of all time are Sixteen Candles, Shag: The Movie and Mystic Pizza. Do you know what two of those three movies have in common?

Annabeth Gish who turns 38 today. She was Caroline "Pudge" Carmichael in Shag and and Cat Arujo in Mystic Pizza. She was my favorite character in both movies and I'm sure that says something about me but I'm not really interested in figuring out what that might be. Happy birthday Pudge!

As long as we're on the subject of beloved actors, William H. Macy is 59 today. Macy once played an orderly who loses a drugged-up Allie before her surgery on Kate & Allie and then nearly a decade later he was Dr. David Morgenstern, Chief of Emergency Medicine on ER. He's also been in about a zillion movies including Fargo for which he received an Oscar nomination. But what will always be my favorite Macy moment came when he played Sam Donovan on Sports Night. In the "Cliff Gardner" episode he gives the network suits a speech about the man who invented television and his brother-in-law and it's a metaphor for how the suits are idiots and how they should leave the Sports Night folks alone and he says "I've looked over the notes you've been giving the last year or so, and I have to say, they exhibit an almost total lack of understanding of how to get the best from talented people." Then he tells them not to mess with Isaac and shows them to the door. It's completely awesome. Happy day to you sir.

(That picture is from Seabiscuit, not Sports Night, ER or Kate & Allie...just in case you were wondering.)