I was invited to celebrate my birthday with a viewing of a movie called “Saturday Night Fever”.

I saw the movie when I was 17 and thought that film was simply AWFUL, so I wisely passed on the invite.   As fate would have it I would be viewing this particular film a few days later. My friend who initially wanted to see the film had never seen it.  She thought it was supposed to be a comedy.  We invited  mutual friend who, to my surprise given her political leanings just loved it.  My second viewing of this cinematic abomination didn’t change my opinion much.  It’s still a really bad movie.  In all fairness though, I will say that the soundtrack is WAY better than the movie ever was.

A day or two later I was still reeling from the stress of watching such an insult to my psyche.  I was in dire need of an antidote, STRESS FREE Theater!  I thought nothing say stress free quite like a Julie Andrews movie.  So After 49 years, I figured it was high time for me to watch Mary Poppins.   The Disney classic was completely absent from my childhood, although I do remember leaping from the stonewall with a large red umbrella trying to fly (I must have seen a TV ad).   I also thought around that same time frame, that I wanted to be a nun so I could get one of those hats, (called a wimple) with the wings on them for the same reason.  In hindsight, it was only a matter of time before I became a birder, but I digress.

Anyway, I acquired a copy of Mary Poppins, and put it into the player, It was as corny and hokey as I had come to expect from a Stress free theater event.  However, there was this one part that bugs me.  As you’ve probably already have guessed,  What’s with the woman with the Birds?  I got a little irate because nobody bought any bird food from her to feed the birds…OK they were mostly pigeons, but is it any wonder that the general bird population would later decrease by 30 something percent?  Needless to say, I got rather fixated on the bird woman.

Sure, during a bout of insomnia I’ll likely find myself popping in the Mary Poppins video, but now I’ll be analyzing the bird woman scene to perhaps find some significance I most likely overlooked from my long overdue first viewing.