She apparently didn’t intend to post a video about chopping up a pineapple – even though she previously posted one about a watermelon.
She had intended to do a video about horses.
She seems to have three different general categories for her videos: food, travel and horses.
Sometimes these overlap or she has other animals such as her dog or cat that get a bit part in these videos.
Problems at her apartment (yes, she says, she rents) forced her to change her plan and do a food video in place of a horse video, but not before she indulged in a rant against her landlord, who allegedly made a repair, but flooding still occurred.
She lives in the poor side of town, an area that you might get a glimpse of by watching the old TV show, “The Wire,” although she clearly has no fear of that urban nightmare, walking her dog through some of questionable landscape.
She claims she’s losing her mind because of the leak. She apparently took the landlord’s word on the repair until a series of thunderstorms sent more water surging into her apartment, and she had to get the towels out and stuff them under the downstairs windows. At the time of the video, forecasters forecast more rain, because she says is frustrating and depressing, and forced her to put off her riding instructions.
The visual format for her food videos differs slightly from the other categories, even though they sometimes start off similarly with a series of short shots of her talking.
This and the watermelon video were clearly strongly influenced in their visuals by some of the more cutting edge cooking shows, featuring a camera angle looking down at the cutting board (she pokes her head under it to grin at the camera before yanking out some expensive food cutting implement and getting to work, talking over the visuals as she slices the pineapple.)
She plays a bit of classical music as she works.
She uses a series of short takes to reduce the film time it actually takes to strip the skin of the fruit, complaining that she will have to take out the nobs, and saying for all that work, in the end, she’ll likely have only two pieces of fruit.
At some point, someone calls on the phone and she had to put her dog into the bedroom.
“It breaks my heart,” she said.
The process went well, and she noted that the fruit contains ingredients that help against depression.
In this video, she actually ate a bit of the end product, saying people like to see her consume what she is working with.
“The next time, we’ll do a horse video,” she promises as she signs off.
Even with the limited camera angles, this and other videos shows her little world, and those things she carried from the place where she used to live in the north – with a number of small additions made over the ten year period in between.
She clearly is comfortable in front of the camera, able to talk to her audience without the necessity of a script, having adopted an on-screen persona.
This is a warm and sometimes funny character, devoid of Chaplin’s sad character, clearly trying to present something hopeful and cheerful for her audience.
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