My daughter, the actress, dancer, and singer who has an actual theater degree from a four-year college, and I, her mentor, have also actually studied and earned money in Los Angeles where we both had a somewhat short career as actresses in commercials, (she was in Austin Powers for a glimpse), television, music videos (Madonna is my claim to fame), print, and voiceovers. Did we make a vast living? Not really; we didn’t stay around that long—but respectable? Yes. We, therefore, think we view a movie from a vastly different point of view than the general audience who surrounds us, noisily munching popcorn, talking aloud, and rattling cellophane wrappers, slurping expensive sodas.

Meryl Streep is not a favorite of mine. She exhibits much sameness to me in all her roles and I thought she was grossly miscast in Mamma Mia. Quite a few of my friends disagree with me and say they loved the movie. My summary of the movie was pretty much “ho-hum”. The only one I ever find rather amusing and talented is Christine Baranski (remember her marvelously, outrageously funny as Cybill Shepherd’s sidekick in the Cybill TV show a few years back) and she actually salvaged Mamma Mia for me at the last moment; and I loved her in La Cage Aux Faux; but back to Julia.

For once, I thought Meryl did an almost (not quite) outstanding job of replicating Julia’s larger than life clumsiness, exuberant mannerisms and most definitely; THE VOICE! The real life Julia cracked me up, especially the time on her early TV show when she was squeezing seeds from a tah-ma-to and promptly dropped it accidentally into the waste can below. Whoops! But that was just the charm of Julia; non-threatening to us neophytes.