LOST SPARROW

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Look what a spooky welcome to the flat would've greeted our guests, if we'd had our party. *sniff* Wooooooooooo!

America goes nuts for Halloween. As long ago as our trip to New Hampshire - which was a good three weeks ago - the country has been buying into Halloween-mania like it was Christmas.

Most front yards have for weeks greeted visitors with ghouls hanging from trees, cobwebs strewn everywhere, pumpkins lining the path and tombstones all over the place.

Of course in Georgetown, you get a slightly higher class of scary decor and I've seem some front gardens there looking like they've been dressed by professional art directors. I was particularly sad to see the front of one house being decorated by a Hispanic maid, because surely most of the fun of decorating is for kids to do it with their parents.

Anyway, as we all by now know, our big Halloween party didn't happen tonight. In fact, I was a bit embarrassed, because it seems like such a big event over here, that to've bagsied the date in so many people's diaries, only to cancel with a week's notice, I worry we've wrecked people's night. However, it seems most of our guests had second parties to go to anyway, so that's a relief.

I had a really nice long chat on the phone with my friend Kate today and also finally got round to watching 'This Is England', which has been winking at me from the top of the DVD player for weeks, having been sent by NetFlix, taunting me to watch something a bit more challenging than 'Studio 60'.

We got sent it a bit by mistake, because I hadn't arranged our NetFlix queue quick enough, and have never quite been in the mood to watch a gritty film about life on a council estate in Britain in the 80s.

However, I'm so pleased I watched - it's really terrific. The little boy who loses his father in the Falklands and falls in with a gang of skinheads, in search of belonging and identity, is as brilliant as I remember all the reviews said when it was first released. And I always like stories that show touching loyalty and a softness in groups of people you'd expect to be mean and hard. I definitely enjoyed it more than the last Shane Meadows film I saw - 'Once Upon A Time In The Midlands' - and probably more than 'TwentyFourSeven', but it's been ages since I saw that.

This evening we saw another film that I very much enjoyed, called 'Lost Sparrow'. It's a documentary made by a chap called Chris, who's friends with Brewster, about his family. Turns out Max didn't have to work late tonight at all (but he does have to work tomorrow, so I guess it's good we cancelled the party), so we went round to Alison and Emily's for a private screening of the film, with Chris, Brewster and Alison and Emily's friend Katie.

The film is quite extraordinary. It's made up of seemingly endless super8 video footage and photographs from Chris's childhood as one of four blonde-haired, blue-eyed upper middle class children whose parents adopted four Native Americans, three of whom were related - two brothers and their sister. From the outside, they look like a very happy, affluent family.

The spine of the documentary is Chris overseeing the exhumation of the bodies of his two adopted brothers, who died on a train track when they were little, having run away from home for no apparent reason. Chris drives their bodies from upstate New York back to Montana, so that they may receive a Crow Indian burial and return to the land of their ancestors.

The film tries to establish what happened to the two little boys and, through interviews with his family and relatives of the boys, it transpires that Chris's father was sexually abusing one of the two adopted little girls, that her brothers found out and then ran away from the apparently happy family home, to get help back in Montana. They were thought to've been sleeping on the railroad tracks when they were killed, only a day after disappearing.

The interviews with Chris's father - who's initially utterly defiant that he did anything wrong, then breaks down during the making of the film and faces up for the first time to what he did and the implications of it - and his mother, who seems lovely and is a compelling interviewee, but claims to know nothing, are so well done and woven into the film. His mother at one point describes being married to Chris's father as 'living at the end of a loaded shotgun', which I thought was an amazing phrase for an unscripted interview.

Chris also speaks to the daughter who was abused and it's so sad - she's an alcoholic who's only ever been in abusive relationships since leaving home and currently has a broken leg because her boyfriend beat her so she wouldn't leave him. She's written off by Chris's father as a mad person who drinks too much, but is heartbreakingly lucid about her experience and the effect it's had on her life.

I found the film very interesting, both in terms of the subject matter - they were one of the last white families allowed to adopt Native American children and there's interesting material in there about the Crow Indian community and the issues of adoption - and the way the whole thing was put together. I think Chris builds tension terrifically well - you don't know what the film is really about from the beginning, then slowly, through throwaway comments and half-references in soundbites from interviewees, this air of menace starts developing, until the full horror of what's gone on in this family unfolds and you watch the fallout as it happened.

Perhaps the strangest thing is how Chris was able to put the film together and how he's happy for people to watch it now. He seems really detatched from it all, despite having lived through it, and Brewster says that he's never once let on that he had a troubled or even unconventional family, which is odd, as they're very close friends.

No charges were ever brought against Chris's dad, and he apparently now lives in Florida in a kind of self-imposed exile from society, just sitting in his condo watching the History Channel with the curtains shut. As satisfying as it is to know that he's not doing cartwheels and living the life of Riley, it did cross my mind that perhaps something should be done to establish whether his abuse of his daughter was a one-off, now it's come to light.

It was great to get Chris to ourselves after watching the film, and ask him questions both about the process of making it and his personal experience and opinions of the subject matter. It really made me want to be involved in documentaries again, even though I've never made anything like that, but having come over here hoping to think of an alternative career to TV, it gives me comfort to know that I still have some mileage left in telly yet.

You can see the 'Lost Sparrow' trailer here:

BUTTS, GUTS & GUNS

It would appear that Britain has gone crazy! I'm absolutely astonished by the uproar surrounding the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco and am really sad that Lesley Douglas felt she had to fall on her sword, because she totally turned Radio 2 around and is considered one of the best people working in radio at the moment.

I of course appreciate that the remarks Ross and Brand left on Andrew Sachs' voicemail were offensive and hurtful - I get that and am baffled as to why on earth they were ever broadcast, seeing as the show was a pre-record. The guys should've given Andrew Sachs a full apology in private and witheld the messages from the show, so as not to further embarrass the poor chap and that should've been the end of it.

But what annoys me the most is that only two complaints were lodged as the show went out. It was only after the Mail on Sunday had covered the story a week later that 60,000 complaints poured into the BBC, from people who would never in a month of Sundays listen to Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross.

And of course the BBC have done their usual thing of taking ages to decide how to respond to a public outcry, such that by the time they do come to react, they have to make a gigantic gesture, like suspending Ross and accepting Lesley Douglas' resignation, to make up for the delay in reacting.

Actually the bit about the complaints is only the second thing that annoys me the most - the first and most offensive thing about this whole business is the prominence it has been afforded by the British press. There's a freakin' civil war going on in the Congo, with thousands of people fleeing for their lives, and yet in The Guardian today, the whole top half of the front page was devoted to the BBC scandal, with the unrest in the Congo being relegated to a small section below the fold. I think it's a disgrace.

As you might imagine, it was also a hot topic of conversation at dinner tonight, as we gave a dinner party for some of the many BBC News people who've come over to cover the election. It was funny, to be surrounded by British people for the first time in ages, and the conversation was all in-jokes about people at BBC News and British-y things.

It was the first time I'd really spent any time with a good friend of Max's from his days in Analysis & Research, Giles. He's super-brainy and worked for Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004 and has written at least one book about politics and I always assumed he was kind of dry and boring, but he's a riot!

And he brought his lovely wife and their gorgeous baby, Maia with him, both of whom are lovely.

Making the brownies for dessert and stirring the pasta I made were both jolly tricky after putting myself through the gruelling 'butts, guts and guns' class at the gym this morning! Yup, I actually went to the gym.

The class was awesome, but I don't half ache now! As the title suggests, it works on toning your bottom, stomach muscles and arms, through a series of situps, pressups, squats, lifting dumbells, jogging round a track and sitting against a wall, as if you're sitting on a chair. Owwwwww. It was the perfect level of intensity - I always felt like I was just about to pass out, but never quite, and I felt really good for doing it.

The instructor is a little masochist called Carlos, who doesn't look dissimilar from Oddjob and could do just as much damage, I should imagine! But by putting his victims through endless exercise, rather than slicing off their heads with his evil hat.

B-BALL & BARACK

STRANGEST ENCOUNTER OF THE AFTERNOON: as I was walking along the distinctly residential and non-urban Columbia Road on my way to the drycleaners in the middle of this afternoon, a guy walked past me and muttered, "you want some ecstasy?". Dude's got to change his patch, if he wants any success, methinks!

I know the gym and I *will* be the closest of friends, but today my old nemesis - chores - got in the way. But it's been a beautifully sunny day, so it wasn't too much of a hardship to wander around, being housewifely in the sunshine.

I also carved another pumpkin this afternoon, as a surprise for Maxy. His name is Walt and he's a little slow...

Tonight we went to our first basketball game, to watch the DC Wizards play the New Jersey Nets at the Verizon Centre, which is a gigantic venue in the middle of Chinatown.

We were meant to go with Jean and Joe, but Joe couldn't make it in the end, so Jean tried hawking his ticket to the touts outside, all of whom laughed in her face, when they saw where her seats were and, once we got inside, I understood why (see left). I think there were only two rows of seats behind us! And our noses were inches from bleeding...

In the spirit of eating healthily, which is something Max and I are trying to do, I pre-empted the universally greasy food options that the Verizon Centre would have to offer, by bringing with me a box of macrobiotic noodles. How very Gwyneth Paltrow! However, I hadn't counted on the bag search as I entered the venue and was promptly asked by a burly security man to throw the noodles away! I said that I wasn't planning to eat them inside, that I'd picked them up for my husband's packed lunch tomorrow and that I wasn't about to throw $5 worth of food in the bin.

I sense the security man had no more fight left in him, as we reached something of an impass and I eventually said I'd go and pick up my tickets and then go outside and scoff the noodles. He didn't seem to mind too much and, as much as I shouldn't have lied, I felt much better chowing down on macrobiotic goodness in our seats, than Jean and Maxy felt, sucking on succulent chicken nuggets and tasty burgers. Or at least that's what I told myself.

Turns out the Wizards are about as good at basketball as the Nationals are at baseball and we were so high up that we couldn't really engage with the game anyway, however lame it was. The gigantic players, who we were being told on the big screens were 7 feet high and stuff looked from our vantage point like ants, as did the teeny tiny cheerleaders, but they were fun to watch - I love cheerleaders.

I would've liked to've seen more of the game, even though the Wizards lost, but felt obliged to chat with Jean, seeing as she was flying solo, but that was nice enough, I guess.

We very much enjoyed watching Obama on the Daily Show when we got home. He's just so cool. Earlier tonight, he ran a half hour 'infomercial'(!) on the main networks, clearly laying out his policies through the stories of four American families. I feel a bit annoyed that the Obama campaign pleads for donations every day and then uses the money on something like this, which must've cost loads and is surely a bonus, if you can afford it, but it was pretty moving and certainly confirmed in my mind that an Obama win would be incredible for the country as well as the world.

As you might imagine, the streets are lined with volunteers trying to make sure as many people as possible are registered to vote. Obama's ahead in over 100 polls, but despite that, no Democrat seems able to really believe that it's in the bag.

PUMPKIN FUN

BIGGEST SHOCK OF THE WEEK: Yo-Yo Ma is a riot! He was on 'The Colbert Report' and really fun! Regardez:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Yo-Yo Ma Pt. 1
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

It's been really crummy weather the past couple of days - crazy cold and kind of dingy - so I've mostly stayed inside, glad that we caught autumn in Dumbarton Oaks Park at the weekend, before it dissolved into winter.

My SAD-infused funk meant that I didn't feel much like cooking last night, so we had tasty mexican/salvadorian at El Tamarindo, down the road, and would've watched the final disc of 'Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip', had I not messed up the order of our NetFlix queue.

Fortunately we were able to watch it tonight and it was great. I'm sad it's over - it's a really really underrated series and I thought Matthew Perry was particularly brilliant.

The series is by Aaron Sorkin, who created 'The West Wing' and stars Bradley Whitford (Josh from 'The West Wing') and Matthew Perry from 'Friends' as producer and head writer respectively of a 'Saturday Night Live'-type show.

It's very wordy and witty, as you'd expect from Sorkin, but it got panned by critics and everyone I know hates it, but we really really enjoyed it.

The last episode is a bit like the end of a fireworks display, when it looks like someone's just thrown a match into the box of remaining fireworks and everything goes off all at once. I guess Aaron Sorkin knew by then that the series had been cancelled, so tried to tie up all loose ends and gallop through all the plotlines he'd had up his sleeve.

We were meant to go to the Annual High Heel Drag Race tonight, which is where drag queens race down 17th St in front of thousands of onlookers. Cindy's friend Holly, who we met at baseball, invited us, and I liked the idea of collecting another DC experience, but you know what? It's really dark and rainy outside, so we stayed in and carved a pumpkin instead. Hey, the BBC may've scotched our party, but the flat will still look Halloweeny!

Maxy brought muscles...

...I added finesse...

...and look what we made!

PHOTOS: DEVOS DO DC pt.4

Click HERE for random photos of our October

PLUCKY PIONEERS

Church was crazy this morning. First of all, during one of the lessons, a crazy man started wandering around, handing out scrawly fliers. No-one really knew what to do and my mind went straight to the shooting at a gay-friendly church in Tennessee a few months ago, but fortunately one of the vergers firmly guided the chap to the back of the church and the service carried on as normal.

I say as normal but during the Gospel, I looked over and saw someone doing a Sudoku!! I wonder where one draws the line between nice, open and permissive and making sure people behave in a way that is vaguely respectful.

I found the guy's fliers ripped up and scattered over a bush outside at the end of the service and couldn't make out what his point had been, but they definitely looked like the kinds of writings you see crazy people in films making and I don't think he was a fan of God.

After a nice chat with Mum, we made the most of the stunningly beautiful autumnal day by taking a walk through Dumbarton Oaks Park, where we saw the Easter egg berries the other day.

We got as much leaf-peeping in as we did up in New Hampshire, prompting us to wonder whether we needed to've bothered going all the way up there! The colours were amazing in the sunshine, with some trees having leaves on them that were green, yellow, orange and red.

This time we were very adventurous and decided to take a different path than last time and went off the beaten track, clambering over the undergrowth and parting bushes, convinced that we were in the middle of nowhere, only to emerge from a hedge into a beautifully manicured Georgetown playground!!

I can only imagine what the people there must've thought of these two people falling out of a bush and they can only imagine how disappointed I was that I didn't uncover some long-lost civilisation!

We wandered along lovely cobbled streets, covered with fallen autumnal leaves and had some food at the trusty Nathan's, before going to see 'Changeling' at the cinema.

The movie was ok, but not the masterpiece lots of Angelina-drunk reviewers would have you believe. She's really good and it looks lovely and once again Clint Eastwood has created an evocative score, but it was just a bit too relentless to be enjoyable.

Anne and her Dad, Don popped over after we got home, which was nice - it's felt like a really good DC day, like we're proper locals.

OUR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

While I've always thought I have a good face for radio, there's never been any doubt that Max has a face that any camera loves, to it was very fitting that he was on TV this afternoon! Observe:

The BBC World News did a little item on what the blogosphere is making of the extraordinary story about a McCain volunteer who claimed to've been attacked by an African American man who took exception to her McCain bumper sticker, beat her up and carved a 'B' into her cheek, to stand for Barack Obama.

The story is astonishing firstly because - even before the woman admitted she'd lied about the whole thing - you could tell it was made up, because the 'B' in her cheek was backwards, as if done in a mirror. And secondly, because the McCain campaign actively promoted this story and pushed quotes on the press, to ensure the 'attack' got coverage, in an attempt to discredit Obama supporters.

Anyways, back to Maxy. He was great! We both went along to the Bureau this afternoon, with Maxy all handsome in his suit, and he was interviewed by Jane Hill, who I've never thought was that good, but who seems very nice. I felt very proud, but worry that I may've corroded Maxy's professionalism by tagging along and taking photos like this, like a proud parent at a dance show.

It's been a crummy rainy day, so we spent the rest of the day indoors, despite an invite to dinner and a poker game at Anne's flat tonight.

We attempted to enjoy 'Marie Antoinette', which was on TV, but couldn't even make it through to the end of the film, because it was soooo boring. It looks so pretty and the soundtrack is cool, but there's no dialogue, and not in a cool Mary Pickford way, just in an extended-fashion-shoot way. So we bailed on that early and watched 'Waiting For Guffman', which is by the same people who did 'Spinal Tap' and 'Best In Show' and all those movies, and is meant to be a comedy classic. What I saw of it on either side of my impromptu nap was certainly pretty funny, but not a patch on Spinal Tap.

To complete the day of battening down the hatches against a dark and stormy sky, we got thai takeout and watched a chick flick - 'Catch & Release'. Much like 'Marie Antoinette', I had high hopes for it, as it stars Jennifer Garner, who's my hero (hang on, she's not in 'MA' - I just had high hopes for that, too), but it sucked as well.

Fortunately 'Mad Men's Jon Hamm presenting 'Saturday Night Live' afterwards more than made up for it. He is HILARIOUS!! So so funny, especially in 'Don Draper's Guide To Picking Up Women' and with his inexplicably excellent James Mason impression (I fear these links might not work in the UK - sorryyy). He's hot, too.