In terms of refreshments at Chez Siberia (we are not entertaining a crowd here; New Year’s Eve at our house consists of movies and lots and lots of food), we’ve got laid out: meatballs, artichoke dip, home make French bread, oven bbq chicken thighs, a fruit, veggie and cheese plate, and punch, with a Finger Lakes bubbly (we drink local) for the toast.

I recall how stunned I was as a teenager when I bought a used paperback copy of Fredrick Kohner’s novel Gidget with a photo of Sandra Dee on the cover. Though I had grown up with Gidget–my stepfather wrote the Gidget movies’ theme songs and incidental music, I had watched the TV show reruns as a little girl, we lived just minutes from the beach, and friends of mine surfed–I didn’t know that Gidget was (loosely) based on the adventures of the author’s daughter in the summer of 1956.

David Sirota has written a wonderful new book with an expansive Theory of Our Zeitgeist: that the toxic 1980s — as well as our current culture’s funhouse-mirror view of that warped decade — are still poisoning our country. His powerful argument will be familiar to Firepups: the adulation of Ronald Reagan, along with our renewed taxcut fetish, admiration of greed, and mainstreaming of militarism have ruined any chance of restoring balance to our nation’s income inequity and spoiled our planet’s chance for peace, harmony and (possibly) survival.

The supposed struggle between powerful know-it-all elitist critics and courageous corporate-sponsored common folk sure does sound familiar…

Gene Wilder — Pure Imagination. from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

So pull up a chair and tell me your movie picks, what’s in your Netflix queue?