Little Chef

After another great week of RHD training I decided to take some time to watch another film from our Z-A collection. Today Pixar brings us another masterpiece, Ratatouille. This movie is just as great as other Pixar films. The animation is great and the story is wonderful and uplifting. The theme that anyone can cook can be really inspiring and this movie makes sure you want to make some delicious chow. 

It is funny how rewatching these films at different times helps you see things you did not see the last time. It seemed like everything in this film had some sort of connection to RHD training. Honestly! You should go through RHD training and then rewatch this movie and then get back to me. I swear you can here Remy talking about how anyone can be a hall director if they have enough heart! Or that you can trust people that are different from you even if you cannot communicate with a common language. Or that you can be brave and decide that you might believe things that are different from your family based on what you learn in College and that is ok!

The story is about a rat named Remy who turns Paris and its culinary world upside down while working with Linguini and his job in Gusteau's restaurant. Gusteau left his restaurant in his will to his sous chef and the plot continues from there. As you can imagine there is a bit of a problem when you think about a rat cooking in a famous Parisian restaurant, especially when none of the rats have French accents. 

Remy is often joined in the film by the ever smart and optimistic chef Gusteau's ghost to help him through some of the rough spots. You might see this as a stretch but I thought the ghost of Gusteau represented the ghosts of RHDs past. You know, guiding current RHDs through old files saved on the computer, training manuals, stories, etc. A little bit like a Christmas Carol but in a Disney Pixar/My Imagination kind of way. 

There are a couple scenes in the movie where Remy or others taste different food and it takes them on a taste explosion that is animated differently that conjures up that theory that a smell, taste or sound can take you back to a certain moment in time. With the large variety of things that happen at college and the times that those moments occur when a RHD is watching, it is hard to imagine that when you retire from this lifestyle you do not have flashbacks. For example, I find it hard to see a case of Milwaukee's Best without being taken back to a memorable time when I helped a student dispose of it because he was not 21 years old. There is also an odor that is associated with one of our residence halls, it takes me back to when I worked there and is still oddly comforting. Or the ring of the bowling alley phone that sounds too close to the duty radio ring that it can cause a pit in your stomach at the thought of what might be on the other end of that call. 

It would be easy for an RA to programming about cooking, healthy eating, or residence hall microwave gourmets while watching this film. If I were them I would take it one step further and program about things that will take them back to memories from before they were in school. This program should start a few weeks before it is scheduled to happen with a simple survey of your residents about their favorite childhood memories. Ask them to give you a couple and explain how you are thinking of working those things into your next Throwback Thursday bulletin board. But instead I would collect things that would smell, sound, or look like those memories for your residents. Maybe it is a game you can borrow from someone, a smell like Spaghetti-Os, or a picture of Lambeau Field. Then put all of those items in paper bags and one by one have your residents sniff, peek, or feel to guess what those items are in the bags. They can share with each other the memory and you can all have a great throwback to your childhoods together.