Finding Female Friends Over 50 Can Be Hard These Women Figured It Out
洛城年逾50歲女性自組聯誼社團友
By Rozette Rago

Dale Pollekoff, 71, moved to Los Angeles after a long career in graphic design in Washington, D.C. As a single woman with no children, she felt drawn to the city’s weather and the less conservative ideas of varied lifestyles. “I feel more like I can be me here,” she said.
71歲的黛爾·波勒科夫多年前結束了在華盛頓特區長期從事的平面設計工作，搬來洛杉磯。身為膝下無子的單身女性，她被這個城市的天氣和不那麼保守的多樣化生活方式所吸引。她說：「我覺得在這裡更可以做自己。」

But soon after her move in 2000, she ran into the challenge of meeting people to explore her new home with. “When you’re middle-aged, you make friends in your job,” Pollekoff said. “After that, it’s very, very hard.”
然而在2000年搬來後不久，她卻遇到了如何結交朋友並藉此探索這個新居住地的挑戰。波勒科夫說：「當你中年時，你在工作中結交朋友。在那之後，交朋友就非常非常難了。」

In 2015, after failed attempts to find a group focused on female friendships, Pollekoff decided to start her own group, called Finding Female Friends Past Fifty on Meetup, a site where people can make online groups to meet up in real life.
到了2015年，在試圖尋找一個女性交友團體卻失敗後，波勒科夫決定在Meetup上成立一個屬於自己的團體、名為「尋找年過50歲的女性朋友」，而Meetup是個讓人們設立線上團體，以便在現實生活中聚會的網站。

After just a couple of weeks, the group amassed around 200 members. And it just kept growing. Today, the group has more than 800 members.
僅僅過了幾周，這團體就聚集了約200名成員，而且還不斷成長。目前已超過800人。

“There were a lot of groups that were focused on a particular activity, and there were meetups that were generalized for those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, but there was nothing for older women,” Pollekoff said. “And I didn’t want men.”
波勒科夫說：「有很多針對特定活動的團體，也有些大體是讓20、30與40多歲的人參與的聚會，但對於年長女性而言卻什麼都沒有，而我又不想接觸男性。」

Many studies have concluded that friendships are vital to a person’s well-being, and this is especially true for older women. A study by the Industrial Psychiatry Journal published in Psychology showed a significant relationship between depression and loneliness in older people.
許多研究已得出結論，友誼對一個人的幸福至關重要，尤其是年長女性。工業精神病學期刊發表在《今日心理學》雜誌上的一篇研究報告顯示，老人的憂鬱症與孤獨顯著相關。

It suggested that “female friendships can be the key to happiness in older women, but they’re not often treated as such.” It’s not emphasized as much as exercising or eating well, but it’s just as important, according to the study.
這說明「女性友誼可能正是讓老年女性感到幸福的關鍵，卻往往沒有被如此看待」。這項研究指出，它不像運動或是吃得好那樣被強調，卻同等重要。

The first meetup Pollekoff organized was a happy hour event at a bar in Century City. Around 20 women showed up and, in her eyes, it was a huge success. “Everybody had a fabulous time and everybody got along,” she said.
波勒科夫辦的首次聚會是在世紀城一家酒吧舉辦歡樂時光活動，約有20名女性出現，而在她看來是極為成功。她說：「每個人都很開心，每個人都處得很好。」

The group’s most frequent activity? Art gallery visits. On a recent gloomy Sunday afternoon in December, the women gathered to go to an Ai Weiwei exhibit at the Marciano Art Foundation.
而該團體最常舉行的活動，就是參觀美術館。去年12月某個天氣陰沉的周日下午，這些婦女集合後，去馬西亞諾藝術基金會觀賞艾未未的展覽。

After a few hours at the museum, the women drove to a nearby Korean barbecue restaurant. Members introduced themselves to one another while waiting for their meals. They discussed their lives, the things that keep them busy, the choices of some to marry or stay single and to have children or not.
在博物館待了幾小時後，這些婦女開車去到附近一家韓式烤肉餐廳。成員們在等候上餐時相互自我介紹。她們討論了自己的生活，讓她們忙碌之事，以及一些人對於結婚還是單身以及是否要有孩子的選擇。

“You’re not looking over the horizon for the next best thing. So there’s no jealousy or competition. The struggle is over; you come to terms with who you are because there’s no alternative. Acceptance is all that’s left.” Pollekoff wrote in an email a few days after the meeting.
聚會幾天後，波勒科夫在一封電子郵件中寫道：「你不是在舉目尋找下一個最好的東西，所以不會去嫉妒或競爭。拚搏結束了，你坦然接受自己，因為你別無選擇。剩下的只有接受了。」

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/style/self-care/finding-female-friends-over-50-meetup.html

2019-01-27聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 陳韋廷

說文解字看新聞 陳韋廷

皆在促成人們在現實中互動或聚會的網站Meetup成立於2002年，該社交平台名稱的中文意思為「聚會」、「聯誼」，例如blogger meetup為 部落客聚會，而若將此字拆開則成為動詞片語meet up，具同樣意思片語還有get together，join up等等。

文中單字amass和gather均指「聚集」之意，但有所差別：前者強調大量聚集，常用於財富、資訊等事物，而後者則著重於圍繞於一個中心的集合。值得注意的是，gather還真有「推測、推斷」的意思。

至於末段片語come to terms with在中文意為「接受或遭遇不好事物」，除此之外還有「達成協議、妥協」之意。另外，首段片語feel drawn to意指「被…吸引、對…著迷」，例如I feel myself drawn to this person.（我被這個人吸引了。）其中drawn可用attracted代替。

Mary Poppins: The Peculiar Challenge of Animating Her World
歡樂滿人間續集的特別挑戰
By Charles Solomon

“Mary Poppins” was the first film director Rob Marshall saw as a boy, so when Disney approached him about directing a sequel, the prospect was exciting – and intimidating.
電影「歡樂滿人間」是導演羅伯馬歇爾兒時所看的第一部電影，所以當迪士尼找上他執導續集時，這個可能性令人興奮，也令他備感壓力。

“It was daunting because the film means so much to me,” Marshall said in a recent interview. “But I felt, if anyone’s going to do a sequel, I would like it to be me, so I could protect the spirit of the first film.
馬歇爾在最近的一次訪問中說：「這挺嚇人，因為這部電影對我而言意義重大。但我覺得，如果要找個人來執導續集，我會希望那個人是我，如此我就可以保護原作的精神。

I asked myself what would I want to see in a sequel. I knew I’d want an animation/live-action sequence: It’s in the DNA of ‘Mary Poppins.’ And I felt it was vital to hold on to the classic hand-drawn animation from the first film.”
我自問想在續集看到什麼，我知道我想要一部動畫結合真人的續集，這存在於『歡樂滿人間』的DNA裡。此外我也覺得，要延續原作，堅持經典的手繪動畫至關重要。」

Although Marshall has won many awards for direction and choreography for feature films and television specials, he had never worked in animation. He built a team under the leadership of veteran Disney/Pixar writer Jim Capobianco. Working with a small group of artists in the Bay Area, Capobianco prepared preliminary storyboards for the sequence.
儘管馬歇爾曾以劇情長片和電視特輯贏得許多導演和舞蹈設計獎項，他從未做過動畫。他設立一個團隊，由迪士尼．皮克斯資深作家吉姆卡波畢安柯領導。卡波畢安柯和灣區的一小群藝術家合作，為續集準備了初步分鏡腳本。

He presented them to Marshall, writers David Magee and John DeLuca, composer Marc Shaiman and others in the Hyperion Bungalow, a relic of the 1930s Disney studio that had been moved to company’s Burbank headquarters. As everyone wanted to recapture the feeling of the original film, it felt right to begin planning the sequence using actual drawings rather than computer images.
他將分鏡腳本交給「海彼里安小屋」中的人，包括馬歇爾、作家大衛馬吉和約翰德盧卡、作曲家馬克夏曼及另一些人，這棟建築是複刻1930年代的迪士尼工作室，現已搬遷至該公司位於伯本克的總部。當每個人都想再次捕捉原作的感覺時，採用實際畫作而非電腦繪圖，對於開始規畫續集是正確之舉。

“We pulled together a storyboard – pinning sheets of paper onto corkboards, the old Disney way,” Capobianco said. “We met in the bungalow and pitched the boards using an umbrella as a pointer.
卡波畢安柯說：「我們合力架了個分鏡板－把紙張釘在軟木板上，老派迪士尼作法。我們在小屋開會，用雨傘當作雷射筆在板子上指來指去。

Rob would say, ‘I love that idea, but we need a little more time.’ Marc would get on the piano and rewrite the music; we’d redraw stuff and re-pin it. I felt as close as I could get to being with Walt and the Sherman Brothers making the original ‘Mary Poppins.’“
羅伯會說『我喜歡這個想法，不過我們需要再多一點點時間。』馬克會坐到鋼琴上重新譜曲，我們會重畫分鏡再釘上板子。我覺得我已盡可能的接近創造『歡樂滿人間』原作的華特和謝爾曼兄弟。」

Combining the media was a technique Walt Disney used when he first came to national prominence in the mid-1920s with his short “Alice” comedies, which placed a live-action little girl within an animated setting.
結合不同媒體是華特迪士尼曾使用的技術，那是1920年代中期，他因創作愛麗絲短篇喜劇而首度在全國嶄露頭角，片中在動畫場景內加入一個真人小女孩。

Although film technology has advanced enormously since then, the crew of the new film, “Mary Poppins Returns,” still faced problems integrating the media seamlessly.
雖然之後電影科技突飛猛進，新電影「愛．滿人間」的班底仍面臨如何無縫整合媒體的問題。

The animators strive to create convincing performances for their characters – who have to react to the live actors’ actions. For example, engineering a scene so an actor and an animated character touch requires almost microscopic precision: If anything is out of place, the drawn and live elements will seem to slide over each other, spoiling the illusion that they’re sharing a space.
動畫師努力為必須對真人行動作出反應的角色打造具說服力的演出，舉例來說，在精心規畫的一個場景中，一名演員和一個動畫角色彼此觸碰，這需要近乎顯微級的精確性：如果任何一項未到位，動畫和真人看起來會像是滑過彼此，毀了他們處於同一空間的幻覺。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/movies/mary-poppins-returns-animation.html

Video
http://nyt.ms/2GIVYuH

2019-01-27聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 莊蕙嘉