The Sheila Variations

And then, in the middle of the maelstrom ..

reminders that you are blessed. The reminders are everywhere.

So if I haven't thanked you personally , thank you to those in the last 24 hours who have been there for me.

Michael, for being the pestiest pushiest most annoying ex-boyfriend a girl could ever hope to have. You know I love it.

Carter, for your amazing comment to my old post about Magic Mountain, with an acknowledgement to Mitchell woven into it - meant a lot to me. I will make sure Mitchell reads it.

My cousin Mike, for randomly sending me a book he loved - that I received yesterday. "This will definitely get you reading again" said the note enclosed. Heart. My heart.

Catherine, for your email today. Words cannot express what it meant.

David, for putting up with me, and my damn emails, for putting up with me being retarded and me not knowing what to do. For wanting to be involved. For helping me more than you will ever know.

Eartha Kitt. For "Beale St. Blues". You helped get me through today.

My friend Beth, for calling me at 7 a.m. this morning (she knew I'd be up!) - and I answered and she then proceeded to pretend that she was calling from "the Animal Rescue League" and that "we've had a complaint about the treatment of your animal ..."

John Garfield

You ask why?

Boy rocks the house, that's why.

His debut in Four Daughters is one of those moments in American cinema - a sea-change - a new kind of acting coming to the forefront ... the full fruition of it being Marlon Brando in Streetcar in 1951 - but Four Daughters was in 1938. He is shockingly modern. He would fit in to any movie today, about the crumply rugged unshaven anti-hero. John Garfield strolls into that movie, unselfconscious, without any of that old-school gesture-y vaudeville style (not to knock it - it's just different) - and he is an emissary from the future. He is what will come. He's not even the lead, and the movie doesn't quite recover from his absence. (My review of this terribly under-rated and very difficult to find film here.)

UPDATE: Found the clip of his entrance to Four Daughters on Youtube. Exciting! Added the clip below. Tell me this guy isn't a movie star. He's an unknown when he enters, an unknown actor, but he sure as hell doesn't act like one. He's a star.

If you ever see that it's on anywhere, I highly recommend it, if for Garfield's debut alone. I go into his career in that link as well, something I'm very familiar with, due to my long-standing passion about the Group Theatre (an ensemble company in the 30s, which produced, oh, you know, lightweights like Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone, to name a few).

Garfield, hounded by the HUAC, was harassed into an early grave, something that I mourn, even though - you know - it has nothing to do with me - because I don't believe he had "the" role yet. The one we all would remember, the thing that would make him immortal. He had been good in things - he's usually good - he was the only good thing in Gentleman's Agreement (well, besides Dean Stockwell, of course, who strolls away with every scene ... acting poor stiff Gregory Peck off the screen), he was smoldering and terrific in Postman Always Rings Twice. The role would come. I totally believe it would have come.

Let's not forget that he was first choice to play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway (he turned the part down). Clifford Odets wrote many roles just for "Julie", and it's just one of those terribly sad what-ifs in Hollywood.

He was so good. A palpably masculine and strong leading man, unselfconsciously sexy - no preening - and - very important, I think - a certain ethnic stamp on him which gives him a different kind of authenticity in the world of golden boy leading men in which he operated. He seems like New York. You can tell he is local. So many stars seem to come from nowhere. They have indeterminate accents - they have worked hard to get rid of their local ones, Southern, New York, Midwest, whatever - to flatten it out into that mid-Atlantic cadence favored by news anchors everywhere. John Garfield could never be from anywhere other than New York. He still has the stink of the street on him. You can feel the rattle of the subway, the taste of the corned beef sandwich, the glitz, the gleam, the filth ... and to have all of that in 1938 is no small thing. It came naturally to him.

Four Daughters is most interesting to watch because it is the new acting style up against the old. Two totally different worlds. Now I am not a Method acting snot. I couldn't care less about how you get there, and there is much in the old-school style that is wonderful and precious. There is nothing like a scene played immaculately and perfectly by Ronald Coleman. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, basically. He's exquisite. But John Garfield has a mess about him. He smokes, and even his cigarettes look hand-rolled. He lets long pauses happen between lines, he smirks and sneers ... and everyone is off-balance just by being in his presence. That "style" of acting is so in vogue now that it is hard to remember what a revolution it really was, and in Four Daughters you can see the whole thing - side by side with the old-school. The daughters are all wonderful, the other characters ... nobody's a stinker, it's not like Garfield is the only "good" thing in it.

But he is definitely something new, make no mistake.

Some photos below.

I love him, and I am basically bummed at what won't be and what will never be. He was terrific.

Rest in peace, Maurice Jarre

Academy-Award winning composer Maurice Jarre died this past weekend at the age of 82. NY Times obit here. A nice tribute here.

Known mainly for his collaboration with David Lean, and - oh yeah - some of the greatest scores of all time from that collaboration (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, to name only a couple) - he worked for decades, being nominated for an Oscar nine times. He had fruitful collaborations with other directors, Peter Weir included (he scored Fearless, Witness, Year of Living Dangerously - and has said that Weir gave him the opportunity, with Witness, to do an entirely electronic score, something brand new for Jarre - and Jarre, always up for the challenge, tackled it with a relish. He was that kind of collaborator, and the eerie terrifying quality of the music in Witness adds so much to the feel of that film). You only need to hear just a couple bars of his most famous scores to have your head fill with images, and feelings, and associations - which is just extraordinary, because so much of music in movies is, well, forgettable. Jarre created true themes. And he was able to, at least with Lean's stuff, enhance what was already there, deepen it, make it work on an almost subconscious level. The epic film needs a composer like Jarre, who does not, through his music, just tell us what we already see. He makes it personal. And yet he also elevates. It's majestic, what he does. (Clip of Lawrence of Arabia below).

In 2007, I received a review copy of a DVD entitled Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean. The movie shows, in its entirety, a 1992 tribute concert given in honor of David Lean who had passed away a couple of months prior. The evening was made up of themes from four of Maurice Jarre's collaborations with David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter and Passage to India), and Jarre himself was conductor (the screenshot at the top of this post is from that concert). Jarre was visibly moved at some points during the concert, his friend and greatest collaborator had just passed, and the feeling of power and grief and appreciation in that concert hall is palpable. It's also great to hear that music live, with a full orchestra.

There is a terrific interview with Maurice Jarre included in the DVD, where he talks about his career and about his working relationship with Lean.

Here is my review of Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean.

My favorite anecdotes shared by Maurice Jarre are included in the review. (And I must reiterate what I said in my review: "You have to give me the missing monkeys with your music" is one of the best things said by a director to anyone, ever.)

Maurice Jarre will be sorely missed.

At least we still have those sweeping scores.

Pop in Lawrence of Arabia tonight, or Dr. Zhivago, or any one of the many, many, many MANY films he scored, in honor of a brilliant man, one of the greatest composers the industry has ever known. His music is in us - those notes, and the associations they bring.

Rest in peace.

Leaf shadows ....

.... Santa Fe.

"It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History could we tell it right."-- Thomas Carlyle

Whether he got the French Revolution "right" is, of course, up for debate. After all, he wasn't actually there. But Thomas Carlyle's great (and difficult) and frenzied history of the French Revolution is a highwater-mark in histories, and it took me three years, off and on, to finish the thing - I can take his turgid over-heated prose only in very small doses - but boy, am I glad I read it. Being interested in writers of the late 19th century and early 20th, Thomas Carlyle's name comes up all the time. In letters, journals, essays - he is referenced casually, with an understanding that the audience will be familiar with him, will have read him. His star has fallen in the last century, and you could no longer make assumptions about your readers' frames of reference - but it is a giant work, a work that stands alone for many reasons. He wrote it as though he was there. He describes the moles, the blushes, the bad teeth of the people he sees. He paints Robespierre vividly, as though he himself were standing in the crowd watching him go by. Carlyle immersed himself in the first-person documents of the French Revolution, and then, of course, let his imagination run away with him. It is a deeply moral work. A philosophical work. And you need to lie down after reading one or two paragraphs, just to get a BREAK. Dude needs to freakin' CHILLAX.

Here he is on the storming of the Bastille:

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted 'Peruke-maker with two fiery torches' is for burning 'the saltpetres of the Arsenal;'--had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be de Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay's sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Reole the 'gigantic haberdasher' another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

There isn't one paragraph that doesn't read like that. It is a massive book.

I was extremely interested to read this generous article about Thomas Carlyle in The Humanities, overflowing with awesome anecdotes - a really good description of the man, his influences, his journey as a writer, and how the book came to be.

There is a famous story that he leant a copy of the manuscript (his only copy) to his good friend John Stuart Mill - and while in Mill's care, the manuscript was burnt. Accidentally, of course. But my God, can you imagine?

It's not exactly the same as Mikhail Bulgakov destroying his OWN manuscript of Master and Margarita (too dangerous to have that crap around in 1930s Russia) and then had to re-write the book from memory (which, frankly, gives me goosebumps to just think about) ... because John Stuart Mill (or his married girlfriend, one of the two) accidentally burnt it. Now, these two men were dear friends. Sounds like it wasn't easy for Carlyle to be friends with anyone. Imagine the agony of John Stuart Mill (I absolutely CRINGE thinking about it), and imagine the agony of Carlyle. First of all, your book is lost. Second of all, you don't want to end the relationship over such a thing - the friendship was precious - but how does one go on? The friendship never really did bounce back, although John Stuart Mill was instrumental in getting the thing published, as well as giving it rave reviews.

Carlyle had to start from scratch and re-write the book. Just looking at the fever-pitched prose of the Bastille excerpt above makes one realize just how difficult it is to re-create something like that. So much of the book reads like that - as though you are in the midst of the mob - it is immediate, emotional ... But bless Carlyle, he did what he had to do, and re-wrote the damn thing.

That's the bare bones of the story that I know - a rather famous "what if" moment in the literary world, especially for Thomas Carlyle who never stopped dreaming about that lost book and how perfect it was - and the article I link to above goes into it in detail.

But there's much more there. I love to discover that Carlyle loved Washington Irving! Never would have guessed that! How charming! When Irving died, Carlyle mourned him, even though they had never met. He wrote: “It was a dream of mine that we two should be friends!” I find that very touching.

I also very much liked, in the article, the comparison between Carlyle and Gibbon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and how Gibbon obviously is the monument for most historians, but Carlyle was up to something very different. The article shows the first paragraph of Decline and Fall and then shows the first paragraph of The French Revolution, and it pretty much speaks for itself.

Carlyle wrote in a letter to his brother:

Here, as in so many other respects, I am alone: without models, without limits (this is a great want); and must—just do the best I can.

It is a marvelous article. Highly recommended.

Not to mention Thomas Carlyle's majestic challenging achievement The French Revolution: A History - which I definitely consider a must-read. (You know, if you have about three years of your life to spare.)

Early Carl Dreyer

A moving and eloquent review of some of Carl Dreyer's early films, screened recently at BAM, by one of my partners in Skyward-crime, Dan Callahan.

I've only seen La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (my thoughts here), and I am very eager to see more.

Thanks, Dan.

I was in a silent movie today

I was walking in Battery Park just for the hell of it and the wind was ferocious. I had thought it would be nice to take a walk on such a beautiful day. Instead, if anyone had been filming me they would have seen:

-- me literally plowing into the wind, my body bent forward horizontally, my arms stretched out in front of me like Frankenstein
-- me being blown backwards a couple of times
-- me staggering to a nearby bench, clutching at it with my arms, to at least get a grip on it so I wouldn't fly up into the atmosphere
-- my hair literally OUT. OF. CONTROL. Speaking of Frankenstein, can we talk about his bride for a minute?
-- me trying to get up again to go walking and being blown backwards three steps
-- me making the foolhardy choice to take some of my writing out of my bag to give it a onceover as I sat on the bench
-- the pages naturally whipped out of my hands and went e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. It wasn't as bad as Michael Douglas at the end of Wonder Boys but it was close.
-- Thanks to an elderly gentleman crouched on a nearby bench, a hot chick with pointy boots struggling by on the path and a small 10 year old boy zipping by on roller blades, all of my pages were retrieved
-- We all were screaming as all of this was going on. I can see the dialogue cards interjected into the action. "Did we get all of it?" "Hey look - there's another page!" "Hey, you - grab that paper!" All of us racing around in speeded-up fashion. Thank you, kind strangers.

The only thing missing was a twirly-mustachioed bow-tied hottie who would appear out of nowhere, unruffled by the wind, offer me his arm while making lovey-dovey eyes at me, before whisking me off out of the wind to our nuptial bliss.

It was nuts.

At the junk shop on Houston Street

Sunset time, golden light, long shadows. Everything becomes magical at that hour.

You also know you're at an O'Malley event (and you know that you are me) when ...

... things get so emotionally intense in the middle of it, and you get so over-stimulated, that you have to step out of the action for a minute, go upstairs, and lie down for ten minutes.

You also know you're at an O'Malley event when your cousin Kathleen notices what is going on with you, and, without saying a word, subtly takes care of you for the rest of the afternoon.

You also know you're at an O'Malley event when ...

... right before the throngs all showed up - at exactly the same moment - and room is being made in the oven for yet another quiche, and you all wonder how it is going fit, and will it be ready on time, your Aunt Katy turns to you and says flatly, "Everything is about to swing out of control now."

You also know you're at an O'Malley event when ...

... a couple of people at the baby shower (myself included) bought baby products emblazoned with the Red Sox logo.

You know you're at an O'Malley event when ...

... one of the coffee urns at the house is somehow lacking a cord, and after discussing sending someone to Radio Shack or Benny's to pick up another one, someone says, "Why don't we call church? You know they have one."

You know. "The Catholic Church". It's in the yellow pages.

And naturally, one of us "calls church", talks to the priest - a well-known family friend, who of course says, "Yes, we have a cord you can borrow ... come on up ..."

So one of us drives up to the rectory, knocks on the door, and there is the priest holding a coffee urn cord for us to borrow for the massive baby shower about to unfold at the house. "We'll bring it back at the 8 o'clock mass. Okay?" "Okay."

You can leave your small village in County Mayo, and live elsewhere, and yes, my ancestors did so, but on some level, you bring it with you.

Just call church. You know they've got a ton of coffee urns up there.

"The Cold Reader"; dir. Jeff Levine, starring Ben Marley

Cold reading refers to a set of techniques used by professional manipulators to get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has some sort of special ability that allows him to "mysteriously" know things about the subject. Cold reading goes beyond the usual tools of manipulation: suggestion and flattery. In cold reading, salespersons, hypnotists, advertising pros, faith healers, con men, and some therapists bank on their subject's inclination to find more meaning in a situation than there actually is.

-- from The Skeptic's Dictionary

When I was in college, I knew a guy very well whom I now see was a sociopath. He was crazy good-looking, disarmingly so, and when he turned that charm onto you, you found yourself flattered, softened, it was as though you were the only person in the world. He talked emotionally, going right to the heart of things, in a way that could be off-putting at first, but eventually irresistible, even to a prickly chestnut like myself. He'd come up to my side at a party and smile at me, eyeing me kindly, seeing right through me, and make a comment about my body language, and how the way I was crossing my arms told him such-and-such about my emotional state. Now, I was friends with this guy, so on some level I gave him permission to get that close, to 'see' me, to know me. It was only later, years later, that his vicious side was revealed, that it became clear how he was more than willing to use all that he knew about me as an attack against me. When he felt threatened or trapped, he went for the jugular, in a way that left you defenseless. But when he was in a good place, everyone fell in love with him. He didn't know how NOT to be close to people. He bonded intensely with the gas station attendant, the costume-shop assistant, the teenager behind the deli counter. I would watch him flirt, indiscriminately, with men, women ... and I would watch them all fall like ninepins. It was hard to resist. Especially if you were in a vulnerable state, as I often was then, a restless insecure virgin, looking for a way to break out. We never dated, nothing like that, but we were friends. I finally realized how addicted HE was to closeness, to getting people to "tell him things", to reveal themselves. But what did he get out of it? What hunger did it feed in him? That remains unclear. Obviously he was very damaged, but his surface was so perfect, so gorgeous, that the damage never showed. All you knew was that this archangel was paying attention to you, and you found yourself telling him your deepest thoughts.

Jeff Levine's 11-minute film called The Cold Reader, starring Ben Marley, from 2008, is about a guy like that. Only he has turned his sociopathic tendencies, his desire for a mirror everywhere he looks, into a profession. He has set himself up as a medium, a channeler, a guy who can communicate with "the departed". He's a con man. This dude couldn't talk to the dead if he leapt into an open grave. He's in it for the secrets people tell him, he's in it for how his clients give over to him, submit. It turns him on. It's a chilling glimpse (yet also very funny) of a calculating conniving personality, and yet, over the 11 minutes we spend in the presence of this man, we are sucked in, too. Seduced. He turns that focus on his two elderly clients, and you watch them melt. That makes him feel powerful, jazzed, and even though everything he says to them is bullshit, because they are already credulous (they made the appointment, didn't they?) they fall for it, but not just "it", not just the information he tells them about their dead loved ones, but for him. That's the con. That's the sociopath at work. It's all about HIM. He chooses his clothes, his shoes, carefully, to create the impression he knows will be a slam-dunk. And so when they look at him, openly, nervously, with submission, he knows who he is. Without that reflection, he'd be lost.

How does a film show all of this in only 11 minutes?

Well, first of all, you start with a kickass script, taut as hell, nothing extraneous. Jeff Levine has done that, with his screenplay. It is based on a short story by Matthew Simmons, and Levine took the source material, already very strong, and fleshed out what was a nice character study into something laser-sharp, precise, dramatic, even poetic.

The story is a straightforward first-person narrative, with the lead guy telling us what he is going to do in his con, and how he does what he does. He's a magician, telling us how he pulled the rabbit out of the hat.

Not everyone is a strong skeptic, with critical mind intact, especially not those who are vulnerable, who need an answer, who need comfort in their grief, who are the most susceptible. Anyone who is a recruiter for a cult of any kind understands this. And the Ben Marley character knows it too, as do all con men. The interesting and insightful element in the script here is the sexual rush this guy gets from the openness with which his clients come to him. It is feeding some need in him, some bottomless pit of need. In the short story, he has sexual impulses during sessions towards his clients, especially when one of them offers up information to him: He wants to nuzzle her, stick his tongue down her throat, hold her close. He doesn't act on these impulses, but they are there. It is his version of intimacy.

In the film, Levine has a couple of fantasy sequences, where Marley lays his head in the lap of one of the women, where romantic music plays, and they slow dance, cheek to cheek. Not so much a sexual thing, but tender. You can see where the guy is coming from psychologically, drawn to the openness of the symbolic female, her giving nature, so different from his slick sleek male-ness. Of course he glances up at the camera at one point, sprawled on his knees laying his head on the couch, lost in the fantasy, and says to us, "Who doesn't want to re-attach to the nipple?" It's a chilly moment of self-knowledge, and self-awareness. You can't put anything over on this guy. You could not make an observation to him about being "drawn to the openness of the female". He would have contempt for such theories. You can't tell him anything. He knows exactly what he is doing.

One of the best things about the screenplay is that we are not outside of the action, we are not left out in the cold by an omniscient eye. We are invited in, by him - the unnamed lead (played by Ben Marley). He talks directly to the camera, telling us his thought process, how he does what he does, and while he doesn't really explain why, where this need for connection comes from, I can make a guess. The funny thing is that the character talks about "tells", which any poker player will understand immediately (he alludes to this in the script). People "tell" you things, with body language, unconscious, and if you have a good eye, you can see the whole story. It reminds me of Christopher Walken's moment in True Romance with Dennis Hopper, which needs no introduction:

There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guy's got seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen... but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell. Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin', but you're tellin me everything. I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won't walk away from.

I love that a woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen. Isn't that the truth? If you're a man, and you're chatting up a woman, and the vibe is good, and she says, "I'm really not into getting involved right now ..." all while touching her face and lips randomly, or twirling a strand of her hair around her finger, and you believe the words and miss the body language? Then you're an idiot, sorry. And if you are a woman, and you are not aware of the signals you are putting out, by touching your lips and twirling your hair, then you need to grow up and be responsible for the firefly-flashes you are emitting, sorry. It's the courtship dance, body language is key. That's the fun of it.

So this "cold reader", played beautifully by Ben Marley, knows the seventeen (or twenty) pantomimes by heart, and it is his life's blood. I could say to my friend in college, while feeling terribly awkward at a party, but trying to hide it, crossing my arms in front of my body, "No, really - I'm having a blast!", and he would gesture at the body language, which belied the words, and I have to say, there was a relief and a humor in such moments. You could be truthful, you would be safe in this man's hands, it would be okay to admit what was really going on. It is frightening to look back at this, to realize how much I let him know me, and see my weaknesses. Because make no mistake, he will use those weaknesses against me. He is just waiting for the right moment.

I love how the film captures how much he is getting out of the nonverbal clues given to him by the two women who come to him, vulnerable, that day. This is not casual for him. He is not just a cool con man, oh no, he gets something out of this. Again, like my friend in college, it is not clear what exactly, or where the damage comes from, why he is so soulless ... looking to others for validation, existence.

The script, with its mix of real-time action and interior monologue spoken directly to us, manages to capture all of that, simply, with humor and precision, and it's a joy to watch.

What Levine does is find the variety in the device he has set up. A cleancut guy, in a scarily-pressed shirt, talks directly to us, telling us what he is about to do, his technique, and he tells it with a relish. Here's the con. Here is how it will go.

He's not gearing up, or getting himself into the correct emotional state. This guy doesn't need prep time. This is his obsession, his reason for living. It is the only time he knows he is alive.

What I also liked was the disparity between the public persona (Marley with the clients), and the private persona - who was, albeit, public in a way since he is talking to us. But he is alone. When he is with his clients, he is cool, smooth, he offers wine, he is a gracious host, he is immaculately dressed and confident. And when the film cuts, intermittently, to him alone, telling us, "See what I just did in that moment? Do you see how I just bullshitted my way out of that moment?" - he's always doing some man-boy-esque activity, a completely different energy than the confident gentleman he shows to the clients. He's lying on the couch reading the racing times, he's juggling, he's building things out of his kitchen appliances, he's eating a truly awful sandwich (the worst sandwich I've ever seen, all processed cheese slices, and bright yellow mustard - it also freaked me out that he didn't just pick up the cheese slices with his fingers, he used a fork ... I don't know, that freaked me out - like he's afraid of his own germs), drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching television. He dances with himself, mamba-ing about in a self-pleased circle. We get these glimpses of who this guy is when no one else is around, and then we cut back to the smooth operator sitting on the leather couch, pretending he is listening to a dead mother talking from the afterworld. None of those man-boy activities are in the short story. They have been invented by Levine, and perhaps Marley had a hand in them, too, and damn, they just work. They add to the uneasiness inherent in the whole situation, because you can see, so clearly, what a bullshit artist the guy is. You get worried for the two ladies sitting opposite him on the couch. Like: do you have any idea who this guy really is?

Levine shows his strength as a director in, not only his filming of this story, which is wonderful and varied, but in his adaptation. The sections of the original story that give away the guy's secrets, the tricks of his trade, could have been done in voiceover, but that would have been a deadly choice. Instead, Levine shows us the private life of this creep: eating, television, boredom, building a frightening contraption out of his kitchen appliances which at first I thought was some clinical gynecological instrument (shows you where my mind goes) and now I know is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (I'll get to that later, and how perfect an image it is, how much it "fits" with the larger themes of primal need and hunger.) There are layers going on in this film, and it really benefits from repeated viewings.

Of course that is a T-Rex, it is so obvious to me now. He has created a dinosaur out of his damn salad tongs and corkscrew, in his spare time, waiting for his real life to begin when his clients show up.

But again, I think a strength of Levine's work here, as well as Ben Marley's acting, is that my mind would go gynecological when I looked at that thing. In other words, that I would spend my first two viewings wondering what nightmarish speculum this guy was concocting in between channeling sessions. That's part of the subtext, I got it loud and clear.

Even if it wasn't a T-Rex, a speculum would make sense, and I'm stickin' to my story.

All I need to see is Ben Marley, blissed out, eyes falling shut in mid-sentence, confessing to us how much he loves how "open" his clients are to him, and what a "turn on" it is for him, to know that something sexual is going on with this guy.

While I'm on the topic of seeing this guy by himself in his apartment (or condo, whatever it is), I want to take a moment to sing the praises of Paul Greenstein, who was the Production Designer for The Cold Reader. It's a one-set movie, all interior, and that space is perfectly rendered and imagined. The Ben Marley character talks about how much he loves "tells", when a client tells him something without saying a word. Well, his condo tells me everything I need to know, and he never says a word. It is all browns and creams, with two big leather couches which reflect the light in an alienating way. You couldn't cuddle on those couches. They squeak when you move your butt on them. They're sleek, cold. Against one wall is an ostentatious liquor cabinet, which draws your eye, no matter how much you want to look away. There's a samurai sword on the wall. If some dude was courting me, and his apartment looked like that, warning bells would go off in my head. It wouldn't be a dealbreaker, like being rude to a waiter is a dealbreaker for me (I walked out on a date once when he was a dick to the waiter - basically got up, said, "Sorry ... I'm done ..." and walked out. It took me about 15 minutes to decide to get up and go, but I finally thought Life is too short, and that behavior is a #1 dealbreaker. I'm done. Nothing can repair what just happened. What's done cannot be undone. I will never respect you again. Buh-bye), but I would definitely take note of the coldness in the decor, and be on alert for what that would mean. There are no family photographs anywhere, there is nothing that says this guy is connected to ANYTHING.

There's a big television pointed right at the sleek dining room table, and beside that there is a tall cabinet filled with stainless steel bowls and kitchen appliances. It all gleams in, again, an alienating way. They all seem completely unused, out-of-the-box new, untouched. Would this dude ever use one of those mixing bowls? I think not. Not judging from that atrocious sandwich he was making. Every detail of the production design is perfect. Everything you see adds to the story that Levine wants to tell. There are things that are not explained, which I also love: it takes a really good director to allow room for mystery. For example, Homeboy has three umbrellas in a stand by the door. Why three? Yes, there are three people in the scene, but the two ladies didn't enter carrying umbrellas. All three are his. Another example: He's got a big wall unit with books and vases and things on it. He has a turntable, old-school, with a bunch of vinyl records. The main record I can see is a Roger Williams album. No, not Roger Williams, the troublemaking founder of my home state, Rhode Island, but the famous pianist. Okay, hm, so that's interesting. To me, that's the only really personal touch in this guy's decor. Everything else looks like he hired some interior decorator, told her: "I want it to be sleek, macho, and cold", let her go to town, and then basically wanders through the space, playing with all of these things that actually have serious functions. But the turntable? That's personal. Those records? They are beloved by our handsome sociopath. The books on the shelves (naturally, I had to scan the titles) are mostly hardcover, and they're Tom Clancy books, Stephen King books. These are not dog-eared paperbacks. There's something off about them. Like they're for show. But this guy didn't go the route of buying identical sets of books from world literature, stuff that looks nice with his decor. No, they are big mass market hardcovers that appear to be untouched.

I saw the film before I got my hands on the short story it was based on, and so I was quite gratified to read the following paragraph:

One bookshelf filled with contemporary novels, popular nonfiction, biographies, mountain-climbing stories, tragedies at sea. No Sylvia Brown, or Edgar Cayce. No Madame Blavatsky. No theosophy. No Manly P. Hall. No dusty leather bound volumes full of diagrams, and arcane discussions of the humors, or energy. I even have my latest Skeptical Inquirer on the table.

That's a lot of great information there, and Paul Greenstein completely followed the author's lead, by the books chosen to fill those shelves. I noticed the vibe and knew in my heart that it was deliberate, a deliberate choice. It's perfect. And again, that room and everything in it (what's with the creepy little toys you can see on the shelves behind him?) is full of "tells". This character has put together a space ("where I sleep and eat", he tells us, giving us a glimpse of what "home" means to this guy, with that primal need thing going on) that creates an impression on his clients. They walk in and feel perhaps intimidated by the decor, its perfection, its lack of warmth. But perhaps that is why they trust him, perhaps that is why they feel that he is the genuine article. He IS a charlatan, but his decor doesn't "tell" that. It tells the opposite. Very nice work.

In many ways, Marley's character here reminded me of Cary, played by Jason Patric in Neil Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, a performance that, frankly, scared the shit out of me when I first saw it. It reminded me so much of my friend in college. If you meet someone like Cary, the smartest thing to do is not engage, don't try to win, don't try to beat him at his game. He is a predator. Recognize that. Walk away. Or shoot him in the face. Those are your only choices. Now Marley doesn't come off quite as malevolent as the smooth slick ruthless Cary does. The Cold Reader takes a lighter view of people like him, we can see him as a manipulator, a conniver, there's something missing in this guy, there's a blankness at the heart of him. Lord help any woman who dates him. Because he, too, is a predator. Which is why it is so perfect that he constructs a makeshift T-Rex in his spare time, the ultimate predator.

At one point (and it's my second favorite moment in the film), Marley, after having a breakthrough with his clients, turns to the camera, almost confused, hand on his stomach, and says, "Huh. I'm still hungry."

He doesn't get why that should be. Wasn't he just "fed" by the clients totally succumbing to him? He should be satiated now. He should be lying under a tree on the savannah, licking his chops from the gazelle he just killed. But no. He's "still hungry". So he knows, then, that he's not done. And like an animal does not examine its motivations, does not wonder why he is still hungry ... and just goes about procuring food as quickly as possible, Ben Marley here knows what he must do. He suggests they come back "for another session ... I have a really good feeling about this." Part of the beauty of such a hunger, and part of the beauty of being a successful con man, is that you can prolong the hunger, knowing you will be able to feed yourself again. Part of joy is the delayed gratification of it, like with sex, or looking forward to a big meal. This is the environment in which he thrives.

The two women who come to him, played by Joyce Greenleaf and Dianne Turley Travis are nervous in his presence, hesitant at first, one more skeptical than the other, but their need to hear from their dead mother overrides their critical thinking.

At one point, the cold reader goofs up. He's been guessing all along, as he informs us cockily, saying things to the women like, "October. What's the connection to October?" Now, naturally, if you are faced with a question like that, and you scan back over your life, you're going to find SOME connection to October. But in the moment of contacting your dead mother, it seems like a miracle that your mother's sister, your Aunt Judith, was born in October. And so trust begins to grow between the cold reader and the clients.

It's almost too easy, isn't it?

The cold reader is not interested in having it be too easy. "Saying it out loud would have been showing off," he tells us, lounging on his couch. The pleasure for him, the rush, comes in having the CLIENTS do all the work for him. He's probably a horrible lay, with that attitude.

But at one point, he over-reaches. He hits on something that does not resonate at all with the two women. The energy shifts, dramatically. He has guessed at some factoid, and they both shake their head "No" at him, and he can see ... he can see that he has lost them.

What's great about what The Cold Reader does is it allows for him to basically flip out in the face of doubt (which feels like abandonment to him). We get to see what happens when he gets it wrong. He sits on the couch, rubbing his temples, as though trying to "see" clearly into the afterlife, but we get quick cuts to him pacing around his condo like a madman, hair messy, dark circles under his eyes, five o'clock shadow on his face. He twitches, tries to laugh it off, but he looks like a wolf caught in a trap, panicked and desperate. The music, which up until this point has been kind of dreamy and romantic, goes off the rails. Finally, Marley just crouches down against the wall, staring right at us, in a total panic. Hands over his mouth. What a fun and nervy representation of what happens to these narcissistic types when their needs aren't met. Everything falls apart. It's a house of cards. There is no SELF within to express itself, to comfort itself. Everything comes from the outside, from the reflection. As long as you are dominant, then that's fine. But when the world does not cooperate in giving you what you need, what happens then? Clearly, you lose your shit, and curl up into a fetal position.

This episode is not in the short story, and I find it to be a very creative and cinematic fleshing out, not just of the actual events being depicted, but of the character's psychology, which is quite fragile, pressed shirts and slick shoes notwithstanding. It's riveting to watch him pace around, throwing glances at us, the viewer, as though now he feels caught, busted. He's not embarrassed by being a con man, as long as he's successful at it. He brags to us about his technique, he loves the mechanics of what he is able to do, how much he is able to see. But in the moment of his downfall, he can barely look at us anymore. He totally unravels.

As should probably be pretty obvious by now, I have a great affection for Ben Marley and his acting. I want to see more of him. He's terrific. He was terrific when he was a teenager, and he's terrific now. One of the things I love the most about his performance here is how much fun he seems to be having. He gets a kick out of acting, or seems to, anyway. It's fun to watch someone who is in that zone, who seems unconcerned with making an impression, or showing off, or making it about himself. I wrote about that in my piece on Apollo 13, but it was there in Skyward as well. He's a natural. There's a humility in his acting, which is an odd paradox, but would make sense to any actor you talk to. Yes, you have the desire to do this thing where you are the center of attention. So there's that. But then you also have the desire to fit into the larger story, and not pull unwarranted attention to yourself, or your acting. Marley always has that humility in him, even when, like here, he is playing a cocky confident unselfconscious attention-whore. It's a cliche, but it's true: I had an acting teacher say once, when someone was struggling with "how" to do a scene: "Just do what the character does." Now obviously, it's not always that simple, especially if you don't have talent. Some people can never "just do what the character does". But in everything I have seen Ben Marley do (and I haven't seen it all), that's what I get. He knows how to "just do what the character does". It's a beautiful thing. It is an oft-unsung talent in the industry today - which seems to reward the bells and whistles of acting (accents, limps, costumes, playing a drug addict with mental problems, or a mental case with drug problems, whatever) as opposed to what I would call "essence" acting. Something simpler and more grounded. Essence acting cannot be faked. It is not put on from the outside. It is the uncanny ability that some actors have to let us into their heads, their hearts, just by standing there in front of the camera. You can get a tutor to learn a Cockney accent, but you can't get a tutor for that other kind of acting. Spencer Tracy was an "essence" actor. Gena Rowlands is an "essence" actress. Mickey Rourke is an "essence" actor. Jeff Bridges, Kurt Russell. No surprise that these people are all my favorites. They still transform, they are not the same person picture to picture ... but the work itself is invisible. They do not want you to notice it. Their egos, while obviously involved in the endeavor (anyone who wants to be an actor has to have an ego), are submerged for the good of the project. Ben Marley has that in spades.

My favorite moment of his in the film can't be described, really, it's all in the timing - so funny - but I'll give it a shot. He's kneeling by the empty couch, obviously lost in the jazzed-up fantasy of how open his clients are to him, telling him all their secrets willingly. He's staring at the places on the now-empty couch where the two women were sitting, and he keeps staring. There's a long pause. He drags his eyes away finally, reluctantly, and glances at us. Intense. He is intense. He doesn't speak right away, and when he finally does, he says, with 100% sincerity, "I love this." Slowly, his eyes drag back up to the couch. It's like he misses the women now that they are gone. It's a truly funny moment, which loses a bit in the description, but my friend Allison and I burst out laughing when we saw it, and had to rewind it to watch it again. We see him as the operator, the smooth host, but in that moment, you can see that he is actually mad. Predator needs to be fed. But you never see the nuts and bolts of Marley's work. It is mysterious - and yet never opaque or muddy. It's not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious. It has the beautiful clarity of essence in it.

Jeff Levine has engineered a minor miracle with this short film, which feels much longer than it actually is. That is a compliment. I finished watching it, and my first thought was, "That was only 11 minutes long?" It's rich. Detailed. It has a great eye for nuance, it allows silence, it doesn't explain too much. At the center of it is a riveting character. You know he's a con man, but you want to keep seeing him. You want to keep watching him.

And what ultimately I am left with is the image of a handsome guy in a pressed shirt, dancing around his creepy apartment by himself, grinning at his own cleverness, lost in himself, glancing at us to see how impressed we are by him. The reflection he has received from the two women has been accurate, as far as he is concerned, and he now can fully see himself the way they saw him. He is powerful, insightful, sexy, and basically awesome. And so he is satiated ... but all the while the T-Rex he has built sits on the table in the background, reminding us that this cold reader will never be satisfied.

The Fawn and Alice, part 2

She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a LITTLE timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: "for I certainly won't go BACK," she thought to herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square.

"This must be the wood," she said thoughtfully to herself, "where things have no names. I wonder what'll become of MY name when I go in? I shouldn't like to lose it at all -- because they'd have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That's just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs -- 'ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF "DASH:'" HAD ON A BRASS COLLAR' -- just fancy calling everything you met 'Alice,' till one of them answered! Only they wouldn't answer at all, if they were wise."

She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the -- into WHAT?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the -- under the -- under THIS, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What DOES it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name -- why, to be sure it hasn't!"

She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. "Then it really HAS happened, after all! And how, who am I? I WILL remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!" But being determined didn't help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was,"L, I KNOW it begins with L!"

Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn't seem at all frightened. "Here then! Here then!" Alice said, as he held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again.

"What do you call yourself?" the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!

"I wish I knew!" thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, "Nothing, just now."

"Think again," it said: "that won't do."

Alice thought, but nothing came of it. "Please, would you tell me what YOU call yourself?" she said timidly. "I think that might help a little."

"I'll tell you, if you'll move a little further on," the Fawn said. "I can't remember here."

So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arms. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight, "and, dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away a full speed.

-- Alice Through the Looking Glass

The story, which I can't quite tell in its entirety yet, has something to do with the "swimming through the bees" post I wrote about Counting Crows, where I mis-identified the lyrics to that song, which means the world to me ... and how I just recently learned the REAL lyrics to that one particular line. But I will still think of my hand "swimming through the bees" with pleasure and little pricks of pain. It is what it means to me, ultimately, that matters ... and that is the beauty of music. And literature too, which is related, but which I can't really talk about yet.

It seems like my blog is personal, but I really don't reveal SHIT, which is important to keep in mind.

So, on March 10, I posted this. I know that people like Oliver (ha!!) are upset at the "insider" feel of the blog, but whatever, traffic is up, so I don't worry too much. Maybe the mystery is intriguing. Who knows. So I was going through something at that point, on that day in particular, where I felt like I needed to be Alice, coaxing the fawn into the glade. That was how I remembered that episode in the book, having not read it in years. I remembered it as Alice walking through a magical wood where animals are tame, and the fawn approaches her, and it is sweet and open to her, and she puts her arm around its neck, and they walk together, through the wood, not afraid of each other, or suspicious ... until they exit the wood, and the fawn realizes its species and what it is supposed to be afraid of ... and bolts in terror.

That was how I remembered it.

I felt like my role was to be Alice, coaxing a wild animal to trust me. Be very quiet, very still, calm ... no sudden moves ... The point was to project: I'm okay, I'm safe ... Tenniel's image was my guiding spirit for that week. I always look to literature to show me how to be. You can always find something in literature if you're lost. "Oh wait! I'm being like Dorothea Brooke right now! So you have to STOP THAT." "Uhm ... is he as weird as Mr. Rochester and how do I feel about that? And why is he wearing a dress?" "Harriet [the spy] writes that sometimes you have to lie. Well, allrighty then, here I go. Lying." I was so in danger of spinning up into the atmosphere on March 10, that I needed an image, something to tell me how to be. Yeah, I have arrested development. I don't know how to be. I need help. So that image, of Alice cradling a wild animal, spoke to me.

Needless to say, it was successful. Thanks, Lewis!

But now I see that my understanding may be upside down about all of this. Which wouldn't surprise me, because I am, actually, as dense as fog.

Yesterday was a crazy day where again I felt myself spinning up into the atmosphere, leaving a trail of wild sparks behind me. Nothing to latch onto, or hold me down. It was just experience - immediate - coming at me, in the moment ... something to be dealt with in the here and now, not some theoretical future. Again, I turned to literature. Not to mention my unbelievably patient friends and siblings who have been talking me off cliffs on sometimes a moment-to-moment basis.

I thought again of the fawn. Of Alice hugging the wild animal, and what a comforting image that was.

Well, a lot has happened since March 10. And yesterday, in the middle of my mania, I went back to Alice Through the Looking Glass, looking up the exact part of the book that I felt I needed. The magic wood part. I needed to read the whole thing.

Imagine my surprise (and delight ... and terror) that I had mis-remembered the whole thing. It's not that Alice finds herself in a magical wood where the animals are tame. No, because that would mean that Alice is still HERSELF, that would mean that she is the one with all the power, that it is solely up to HER to make the fawn trust her.

The actual episode in the book is subtler: It is not a wood where animals are not afraid of humans. It is wood where nothing has a name. Alice enters the wood and forgets the names for everything, including herself. She does not know who she is, what she is, she struggles to label things, but the labels will not come. Classifications and definitions fall away ... even as Alice struggles to hold onto them ... and in the middle of this, a shy fawn comes up to her. It wonders about her, she wonders about it. But neither of them have a word for their particular identities. They cannot say, "Hey, I'm a predator - ie: human being - therefore you should not trust me" because all of those "names" have melted away. The fawn doesn't know to be afraid, and Alice doesn't know to be a predator. They walk together, nameless, comforted, enjoying their time together, which is mostly wordless. They just walk together. Not too much chat about how weird it is that all names for things have vanished.

Once they exit the wood, the fawn realizes the position of danger it has put itself in, remembers the "names" for things - "fawn" "human girl" - and basically flips out, leaping away in terror and remembrance. This leaves Alice, who has the complacence of a natural predator, with sadness and regret. Why was the fawn afraid of her? She was just a little girl ... and wasn't it nice to walk, arm in arm (so to speak) with the fawn for a time?

I suppose I needed to mis-remember that particular episode the week of March 10th, and needed to see myself as the calm still center of power, drawing trust to me, through my own willpower and a certain kind of magic.

But now, in this new world I am in, that is not at all an adequate metaphor.

Alice forgets who she is too. Alice doesn't remember herself. They BOTH are lost.

During the events of yesterday (before I went back to the book), I suddenly had a revelation (based on my incorrect memory of the book - but no less correct or profound): I am no longer Alice. Now I am the fawn. We all need to be drawn out. We all need to be told that the coast is clear. First it was me doing the telling. Now it is me trying to do the hearing.

But what a miracle, what a GIFT, to go back to the book yesterday and realize that no, no, I had it all wrong. It's not a matter of power dynamics, of one person being Alice, the other person being the fawn ... and then switching places ... No. As potent as that image was for me (and, ultimately, helpful and beautiful) ... it's not as potent as the other, based on the real episode in the book: two creatures, with their long-dredge of past and engrained-in-stone species-classification, suddenly coming together in a magic quiet space, where they can walk together, quietly. And yeah, they connect, but the end of the wood is nigh, and what will happen then? Connecting requires a surrendering of all that you have known up until that point. Nobody even knows their own damn name in that environment.

Just fancy calling everything you met 'Alice,' till one of them answered!

Someday I will tell this story.

Bathing Suit parade

Seal Beach, California, July 14, 1918.

I am in love with this photo. Thanks, Library of Congress.

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." -- John Milton, Paradise Lost

I've posted pictures of her before. But in this week full of angels, I thought of her and want to post it again. I was barreling through the 42nd Street Subway Station at one o'clock in the morning, always a bleak prospect, when all you want to do is teleport yourself up and out into your bed, and skip the whole commute process.

And suddenly, standing in one of the corridors, I saw an angel.

Not only was she dressed like an angel, her general energy WAS angelic. It was not campy, or over-the-top, or ... it didn't appear to be "acted" or performed at all. She was inhabiting it, whatever was going on with her was coming from within, rather than put on. She did not speak. She did nothing but stand there, and if people came close, she would smile at them, really connecting ... really making eye contact ... and a small crowd had gathered around her. I was one of them. I asked her if I could take some pictures, and she smiled at me her assent. It wasn't a polite smile, a public smile ... it was warm, and connected. The whole thing was rather extraordinary, and I've never forgotten her.

Never seen her since, but I'm really glad I have the pics. I thought of her today.

Early morning

Times Square at 7:30 a.m.

It's my favorite time to be there. Still going, still flashing and undulating and blinking ... but it starts to feel like a post-Rapture kind of environment. Yes, there are people, but not to the degree that you see at mid-day or around 6:30 at night, which is really when you want to stay far away from Times Square.

I like it best at dawn.

How we talk to each other.

"I wish I had been more of a slut."
"I actually was a slut. It's not all it's cracked up to be."
"I know. The grass is always greener ... Still, I feel like I would have made a great slut."
"Yeah, I see what you mean."
"I have the soul of a slut."
"Totally. You really do."

Speaking of sluts, this post from Dooce made me laugh out loud. Women who love to fuck their husbands?? What will the world come to next? (The comments over there are almost as funny as the post, as all of these "husband-fucking sluts" come out of the woodwork to declare themselves.)

I'll be wearing ribbons down my back ... this summer ...

I'm not a craftsy person at all. It holds no interest for me, and never has - which is the main reason why I quit Girl Scouts (well, that and the whole "where are my freakin' wings?" debacle).

But I caught a glimpse of a wall of ribbons through a shop window, and I was completely captivated by the sight. In the same way that I literally get NERVOUS sometimes when I walk into an overflowing second-hand book store, I can imagine that a person really into arts and crafts could conceivably have a nervous breakdown looking at something like this.

So beautiful.

"Matthew, on the other hand, seemed comfortable in his own skin, and this introspective, clearly intelligent young man had much in common with the stoic, smart, curious little boy in the movie."

Jeremiah Kipp, whom I just met at the Psychotic night in Brooklyn, shares some thoughts about a young actor on a film Jeremiah is now producing, God's Land, directed by Preston Miller.

Read the whole thing. It's a beautiful piece of writing.

Happy birthday, Flannery O'Connor

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

-- Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was born today, in Savannah, Georgia in 1925.

I think she's one of our greatest American authors. Not just a great Southern writer, although she is that, one of the all-time best in that tradition - but one of the greatest American writers. No other country in the world could have produced a Flannery O'Connor. With all her darkness, madness, and terror, she is so OF this nation, her voice is quintessential American, in the same way that Fitzgerald's is, although the style is totally different. Mostly known for her short stories, although she did write a couple novels.

I also, personally, feel that her TITLES are beyond fantastic. She's not afraid to GO THERE in her titles. I don't know how else to describe it. Her titles are not "safe". They have a Biblical feel to them. The Violent Bear It Away. The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Everything That Rises Must Converge. I looooove her titles.

I didn't know that her first published efforts were actually cartoons, in her high school newspaper. She tried to get her cartoons published in The New Yorker - and that went nowhere, none of them were accepted - so she started to focus on writing. She applied to the Iowa Writer's Workshop - and got in. Once there, though, she was kind of on the outside of things - she hadn't read "the big authors" who were in vogue at the time. Her writing idols were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe - seen as 'old-fashioned', and perhaps too Gothic or melodramatic. Classic, sure, but way out of style in this new modern era of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, and Fitzgerald. So she wasn't really born "in the right time", if you think about it - but she turned that to her advantage. She didn't try to change her influences, or write like other people - and while she was at the workshop, her short stories pretty much blew everyone away. I love that her idols were Hawthorne and Poe - those dark dark writers, those masters of small-town pain and paranoia and religious persecution ... You can so feel it in her writing, although her style is very much her own. Her style is so distinctive that you could recognize a paragraph of her prose without knowing who wrote it. She's like Hemingway in that respect. So - she was a shy girl, the only one in the workshop with a Southern accent, whose writing was so good that she got a contract to write her first novel (Wise Blood - now that is one HELL of a first novel!!)

Here's the post I wrote about Wise Blood.

Right around this time, she got very very ill with lupus (that's why she has the crutches in the photo above). Her father had died from lupus. She was always tired, always dragging through her days - but she had good discipline, and kept up a writing schedule, despite her exhaustion.

She was a Catholic, and she wrote:

"I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything.

Here she describes a literary evening - an anecdote I find really moving, coming as I do from a family chock-full of nuns, where such things are discussed at the dinner table, basically:

"Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

A raw nerve, Flannery O'Connor had guts, man. True guts. She was one of those writers who were not easily understood at the time. If you read her stuff, and you try to think like a publisher in that era, you can see their point (short-sighted though their views are). Who was this crazy Gothic Southerner, who walked with a crutch, who didn't seem to line up with the style of the day?

There is a famous story about Flannery O'Connor, and as a writer - starting to deal with publishers and editors myself - the story takes my breath away. It stands alone in the annals of publishing anecdotes, and remains a touchstone for writers who perhaps are not understood by the powers-that-be, who can sense that what they are is NOT what the publisher is looking for. Now there is such a thing as constructive criticism, and you must be able to deal with people mucking about with your work. The constructive criticism I got from my agent about my manuscript was absolutely invaluable. She saved me from myself, a couple of times, and she also helped me strip away that which was extraneous, or lessening the impact I wanted. HOWEVER: if someone gives you criticism and it seems like they are actually trying to alter the INTENT of what you have done ... it is important to recognize that, and to say, gently but firmly, "Thanks for your comments, but what you are saying is not at all what I am TRYING to do ... so it is irrelevant."

In 1949, Flannery O'Connor was in correspondence with Rinehart Publishers, who were interested in publishing Wise Blood, her first novel. Flannery O'Connor did not have a name yet. She had nothing. She was completely anonymous. Now yes, Wise Blood was a tough sell, but so was Ulysses. It would take someone with courage to say, "Yes. I will publish this as it stands. It may sell only two copies, but to alter its form, to iron it out, would be WRONG." An editor at Rinehart had written to her, asking her to re-write the whole thing.

This was part of Flannery O'Connors response to that request:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Wow. Just wow.

It is hard to imagine I would have the cajones to write such a letter, but I remind myself of that letter in my darkest moments, when it seems I am not being understood, or that someone's response to my work is, basically, "Wouldn't it be great, though, if you wrote the next Twilight-level smash?" Yeah, it would be great, but that's not what I have written. You have completely not heard what I have done, you don't get it, you are in this to make a buck, and I must withdraw my manuscript completely from you, because you are actually dangerous to what I have already created. A couple years ago, I had a series of conversations with an agent at William Morris who was interested in representing me. I sent him a huge packet of my writing - essays, short stories, and a novella. He was lukewarm in response. He thought the writing was good, but it soon became clear, over our conversations, that he actually was not interested in representing ME, as I am now, but a "new hot novelist" that would make him a million bucks. I have nothing against making a million bucks, but it became clear that it was not a good fit - that what I had already created - and it was a LOT - I have a huge backlog of material - was not what he was looking for. So moving on now. To find an agent who wants to represent ME, and what I have already done. Not an easy choice, but I am convinced it was the right one.

But my God, look at O'Connor's confidence there, the belief she had in what she had done. And she was writing that letter, not from a position of being FLANNERY O'CONNOR (TM) ... but an unknown author, struggling to protect her creation.

Unbelievable. She is my idol, for that letter alone.

As a coda to that story, not surprisingly - Rinehart DIDN'T publish Wise Blood, but Harcourt Brace did. The book was not a success, but time has vindicated everyone involved. Wise Blood is now seen as one of the great American novels. It took a publisher with some ... well ... FAITH ... to publish it as it was, to not try to neaten her up, tone her down ... I am sure there were small corrections to be made, but they left her INTENT alone.

Wise Blood is shocking to read even NOW. Her writing reminds me of Diane Arbus' photographs. Her books are filled with grotesque characters - blinded crazy preachers, child brides, women with wooden legs, outcasts from society - But her tone is never sensational or sentimental. She's a cool cool character.

If you haven't read her stuff, I really can't recommend her highly enough. I came to her late - and it was really at the pressure of Maria, and my sister Jean, that made me finally give her a go. After reading the first two or three paragraphs of Wise Blood, I was hooked. I knew: Okay. I must now plow thru this entire book RIGHT NOW. She's that good.

Here's the beginning of that novel:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in this section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn't think so, too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn't reach the floor.

He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again. She turned to see what was back there but all she saw was a child peering around one of the sections and, farther up at the end of the car, the porter opening the closet where the sheets were kept.

"I guess you're going home," she said, turning back to him again. He didn't look, to her, much over twenty, but he had a stiff black broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it.

There's something really ... WRONG ... here. You can tell ... something is OFF with Hazel Motes ... but Flannery doesn't let us inside his head. It's all in what she doesn't say, and what she chooses to share with us. It's a fantastic opening scene.

Check her out if you haven't read any of her stuff - her short story collections are all well worth reading. She's an American classic.

Flannery O'Connor died at the age of 39.

Identikitsch

Keith gives his version of the Psychotic events from Sunday night, in Time Out New York, no less. It's always a bit alarming when something you wrote, off the cuff, to amuse only yourself, and those who were present ... shows up elsewhere. Thanks, Keith. When I diet, I diet ... and when I orgasm ...

Well, you know the rest.

Christmas, 1914

A book inscription that has rendered me completely stunned and quiet.

One of the best sites on the web and it's because of stuff like that. Unbelievable. I am still reverberating with it.

5 for the day: Ruth Gordon

A wonderfully written and insightful analysis of 5 of Ruth Gordon's roles, by Dan Callahan.

Excerpt:

Witch or free spirit, lunatic or sage, Gordon was great at keeping us all off guard; even when she was just phoning it in for her later movies (in one she supported Pia Zadora!), she was phoning it in from Mars, or some kingdom of her own.

Not to be missed.

Outside Taos

After basically infiltrating Dean Stockwell's life with my good friend Stevie, we headed back to Albuquerque, through an extraordinary landscape.

Here's just one glimpse.

How far we have come

I can't believe that Hope has only been in my life for less than a year. It doesn't seem possible. She is just such a huge part of my daily routine now, and a constant joy (even when, as last night, she keeps me up by deciding that 3 a.m. is the perfect time to attack a Netflix envelope that is tormenting her).

Here is the first picture I took of Hope. I had just taken her home from the adoption agency, she had howled the whole way home in her cage, and I had just let her out into my apartment. I showed her the litter box, I put out food, and Hope tiptoed around, quivering with awareness and adrenaline. Like: Is it okay now? Is everything okay? Is there a cage here? Are you going to put me back into that cage? Or ... is everything all right now?

Hope had been put into a box and left on the damn sidewalk outside the Petco in Union Square. The thought of that makes me see red, although I suppose it's better than throwing her into the East River with a weight tied to her collar, or just leaving her on the side of the West Side Highway. The jackass who "dropped her off" knew that the adoption people would HAVE to take her in ... and that happens a lot, I guess. It's nice, I guess - but it's also selfish - because it just assumes that there is a cage available for her, medical supplies, everything. It puts them in a bind.

Picturing loving little Hope crouched in a box on the sidewalk through a long night before some person came to unlock the Petco makes me want to cry. She must have been so scared. Thank God she wasn't mistaken for trash and thrown into the back of a garbage truck!!

So I took her home, and she tiptoed about, eating one flake of food, before moving on, to sniff at the litter box, to then jump up on the windowsill and check out her new surroundings.

In the first ten minutes of her investigation, she lay down on the floor (in a spot she still likes to hang out in) ... and I took her picture.

Picture #1 of Hope.

Skyward cleared for landing NOW.

I'm trying not to read too much into this, or turn it into a literary conceit or anything, but here are the facts: a copy of Skyward that I sent to someone in California has not yet arrived (I sent it on the 13th of March, so something is not right) - AND the copies of Skyward that Glenn in Texas made for me - have not arrived on my doorstep, although he chose 2-day priority mail and sent it mid-week last week.

It's making me crazy, since I made promises, and sent my copy out blithely into the universe ... only to find that it is not there yet.

And so, think of this, if you will: at this very moment, no less than 11 copies of Skyward are floating in the airspace over America, lost and unmoored, circling, banking, circling banking ...

I just want them all to LAND already and get their butts into the proper mailboxes.

Come on, Gilstrap, bring that plane in, just like Billie Dupree taught you. You can do it.

Snapshots from last night: Watching "Psychotic" starring Liz Taylor

Last night, a group of us gathered at Keith and Dan's in Brooklyn, to watch Liz Taylor, in what was the swan song of her career, in a movie that is called (depending on where you find it) Psychotic, The Driver's Seat or Identikit. Based on a Muriel Spark novella (which Dan informed us was not her best), it tells the story of a schizophrenic woman wandering around Europe, having various psychotic episodes, witnessing coup d'etats in foreign countries, having strange encounters with Andy Warhol, and being chased by Interpole. The movie has the weirdest mix of art-house pretension and camp. Not to mention the 100% over-the-top performance of Liz Taylor, at her zaftig best (and by "best" I mean WTF??). Her clothes alone would warrant her being committed into a mental institution. She is head to toe in crazy colors, stripes with flowers with bright yellow skirts. Her hair cannot be described but I'll give it a shot. Blue-black, it is teased within an inch of its life, and she is often seen from behind, and the width of her hair, I am not kidding, goes past her shoulders. She looks absolutely insane. Her makeup is out of control. There are a couple of moments when she is still breathtakingly beautiful, those eyes! - but what I was really taken with is that even in the midst of all that balderdash, Taylor is acting the SHIT out of this ridiculous part. Even when it's inappropriate, even when underplaying would have made her not seem so, well, batshit crazy. Yes, the character is crazy, but seriously, you have to experience how that manifests in Liz Taylor's hands to see what I am talking about.

Dan had warned me, "You will be forever changed after seeing this movie."

He's right, although I cannot yet name the transformation.

It's one of those movies where you can't believe what you are seeing, and your brain basically explodes from trying to understand.

Her line readings! She picks up a small knife in an airport shop, fingering the sharp blade, in a vaguely crazy manner, and then calls out, "How much?" It goes to show you how bizarre she read that line that we all burst out laughing in response.

Her best line, said in an angry throwaway manner to a leering gentleman with yellow teeth, "When I diet, I DIET. And when I orgasm, I orgasm. I never mix the two cultures."

We couldn't stop saying that line. As a matter of fact, that was the first thing I thought when I woke up this morning, pondering the ineffable truths in that line. Look, when I diet, I diet. And when I orgasm, I orgasm. No need to mix up the two cultures, mkay?

What the hell is Andy Warhol doing in that movie? He plays ... a diplomat? An attache with an embassy in a wartorn country? It's not clear. He and Liz have a strange encounter in an airport when he picks up a book she dropped to give it back to her. Intense vibes of ... sheer liquid bullshit ... pass between them. It is not clear what is happening but that it is very important to the both of them.

At one point, Liz, staring up at a ruin, says in a musing tone, "I sense a lack of absence."

We kept talking about that line. "What the hell is she talking about?" "What is a lack of absence?"

There were a couple of lines when I said, "Oh my God, these people are on so much drugs. That's the kind of thing a stoned person says that seems deep only when you're high."

"I feel homesick for my own loneliness," mourns Liz.

Of course you do.

Dan, in setting up the movie for us, told us that we all needed to have two glasses of wine before we started the movie. "We need to be LOOSE" he declared. Well, all righty then, pass the wine. Once we all were loose enough, we started watching.

Oh, and Dan, also, trying to describe where Liz was at this point in her life, said, "She is almost Rabelaisian."

I am still laughing about that line. ALMOST Rabelaisian? Not quite, but almost??

I love these people.

And you know what? She is. She is almost Rabelaisian. Her breasts are lethal weapons. Occasionally, she strokes them. I suppose at that moment she is NOT dieting, so she is then free to orgasm. That's my interpretation anyway.

The cinematographer of Psychotic, The Driver's Seat, Identikit was the Oscar-winning Vittorio Storaro, whose other jobs include, you know, The Conformist, Apocalypse Now, Reds ... and damn, this is a fine-looking movie. There's not one bad shot. It's all bells and whistles, yes, with a slowly moving camera, strange dreamspace scenes - backlit - You can tell (or I'm guessing) that Storaro was like, "This entire thing is completely bullshit - so I might as well have some fun." Each shot is a work of art. We all kept laughing about that. Saying, in the middle of some ridiculous scene, "Vittorio ... look at what he's doing here ..."

It's worth it to see - just to watch his work.

And if I'm making this sound like a terrible movie, I haven't done my job. It's not terrible. Yes, there is a trainwreck aspect to it ("How much??" barks Liz), but it's riveting, as all good trainwrecks could be. You cannot look away. Everyone in the damn thing is totally committed to the LUDICROUS project they are in. Not to mention Liz Taylor, who is behaving as though this is the greatest part she has ever been given. Every moment is over the top, every moment is full of twitches and sighs and bizarre behavior that makes no sense. There's a moment where a bomb goes off and a car blows up. Chaos ensues. People run, flee, scream. Liz, in teetery heels and hair so big that it puts her off balance, falls into the street, howling in fear. She writhes about, one of her legs kicking up behind her. She has huge hair, crazy sunglasses, her coat has long vertical stripes of every color known to man - colors that should never be put together in one garment - and she rolls around on the street, her head coming up, mouth wide open in a scream. It's an astonishingly embarrassing, funny, and crazy moment. The whole thing is bullshit - but here's the deal: There is something to be said for commitment to something that is bullshit. In a way, that is part of the actor's job, sad as it is. I've been in pieces of SHIT where I have begged friends not to come, warned them that our relationship will be OVER if they buy a ticket ... but hey, it's a living, and I'm up there, committing to the bullshit I am in. So to see Liz, writhing around, ridiculous, howling to the moon, makes me think: Okay. Now obviously this material is pretty bad (sorry, Miss Spark), but if you play such a moment realistically or subtly, or if you have in the back of your mind somewhere Wow, this is really embarrassing ... then you REALLY aren't doing your job. Liz Taylor acts the CRAP out of that moment, and yes, we all guffawed seeing her ... but there was something deeply disturbingly right about it too.

Liz Taylor still has the breathy English-accented energy of her heyday in the 1940s. She's from another world, another technique. And here she is, in 1974, still doing that, still acting in that old-school MGM way ... only it's in this psychedelic art-house (sort of) movie with a cameo by Andy Warhol. It is so weird to watch.

So yes, Dan, I am somewhat altered after seeing that movie. How could I not be?

Other funny snapshots from last night:

-- Keith, as I walked in, "So, how is your fiance?" A joke ... which can't quite be explained yet ... but I assure you it was hysterical.

-- After we watched the movie, somehow we all got to talking about movies that have basically a sound-effect as a title. Boom!. Phffft. ... tick ... tick ... tick ... Now that last one caused some hilarity. Keith went to the computer and reported back to us - "The title is: Ellipses, tick, ellipses, tick, ellipses, tick, ellipses." Dan said, "Whose bright idea was that." I was joking about including the ellipses at the start of the title when you talk about it. "So, what are you seeing tonight?" Me: Long pause. "Tick ..." Seriously, the title STARTS with a pause, so you had better include it.

-- This then led to an internet search of all the movie titles that include ellipses, everyone sitting around making guesses. "Does 'I, the Jury' have an ellipses in it?"

-- Oh and this was so funny, but I'm not sure if I can describe it. The group of us had broken up into different conversations. I was standing with Keith at the computer, looking at the poster for The Driver's Seat (the one at the top of this post) - and suddenly there was a pause in all of the conversations, and I could hear Judd say into the silence, to whomever he was talking to, "So it was one of Ron Howard's earliest directing jobs, and it starred Bette Davis ..." I am DYING. I had never met Judd before last night, but he had read my pieces on Skyward (part one and part two ) and wanted to talk to me about them, and there he was, at the party, filling in SOMEONE ELSE about Skyward. I am laughing out loud as I type this. I am determined to get this movie back into circulation. I really feel like it's working. I am creating buzz. It is now being discussed at a party in Brooklyn, because of me writing about it. It is one of my proudest moments of 2009.

-- Here are a couple of choice quotes from Jeremiah, as he watched the movie:
"Oh my God."
"Holy fucking shit."
"Oh no."
"I am so glad I am seeing this movie."
"I love this movie."
"Vittorio."
"Oh my God."

My sentiments exactly.

Manhattan montage

Night scenes.

"the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible..."

A gorgeous post.

I will say no more. Just go check it out.

Cafe Loup collage

On Thursday night, I got together with three good friends for dinner at Cafe Loup, an adorable restaurant on 13th Street, and talked our heads off for almost three hours.

Topics covered:

-- Apple products (and how Mobile Me in its web application continues to effing SUCK)
-- parent-teacher conferences
-- the people who emerge from your past via Facebook and how this can be awesome or horrifying (Like: "I didn't like that douchebag in high school. Why should I like him now?")
-- ex-boyfriends/ex-husbands/current boyfriends/current husbands
-- night sweats
-- Natasha Richardson
-- grief
-- returning food at a restaurant and the best way to go about it
-- online dating
-- Little House on the Prairie
-- our food (yummy)

We were ENGROSSED in each other. Completely unselfconscious in the hours-long round-table we were in.

Near the end of the night, a man approached our table. He was blurpy, black hair, pale skin, with a little backwards cap on his head. You know. Your basic nightmare. He came right up to our table, and I had a moment of thinking he was one of those people who somehow manage to infiltrate a restaurant and try to sell you used DVDs as you're having a nice meal. He was so purposeful, that we all stopped talking and looked up at him.

He said, in a Scottish accent, "Excuse me, ladies, sorry for intruding, but I just wanted to let you all know that you all are absolutely beautiful."

I can't explain the WAY he said it - just a straight-up compliment - that seriously disarmed us all. We were talking about night-sweats or something ridiculous like that, and suddenly, there he was. It could have been seriously cheesy, and I suppose it was - but there's a charm in cheesy moments as well. It's brave. Flirting requires a little bit of that energy. Nothing worse than someone flirting and ALSO trying to impress you with how cool he is. Please stop. Just admit that flirting is always a little bit goofy. He was goofy. We all just started laughing, and saying, "God! Thank you!"

He said, (and he was devastatingly charming in the way that only a blurpy Scot can be), "And now I have to go join my friends - all pudgy and drunk men - " with a tone of loss and disappointment. Who wants to hang out with a group of drunk men, even if they are your friends, when you could be sitting with a group of 4 women who are vigorously discussing ABC Afterschool Specials and Danny Bonaduce?

Man has his priorities straight.

His energy reminded me of what it's like to be in Ireland, where you can't sit at a table in a public place, as a woman, without some blurpy man strolling over and striking up a conversation. Sometimes it's annoying, but I always feel grateful that the man gave it a shot. Go you.

It made our night. He went off to join his friends, and we all toasted him as he left.

Literary Conceit, part 478

One of the problems when your life is a literary conceit ...

... is that you maintain faith in the happy ending.

Even with all evidence to the contrary, even with a terrible track record years-long, when things line up perfectly (aka literary conceit) it seems apparent that things should "work out".

This is not only insane, but an incorrect assumption about literature.

"Literary" does not = happy ending. Ever read Anna Karenina? Yeah, that book has one HELL of a happy ending, don't it?

The fact that things line up doesn't mean shit. It just means that things line up. It takes a certain sort of brain to perceive patterns, themes, and I have always had that kind of brain. My perpetual heartbreak comes from trying to turn the patterns into something meaningful. Or at least something I can grasp.

Sometimes the themes are so loud that they often seem to be screaming at me to pay attention. I have learned my lesson through years of practice. I take note of the literary conceit, tip my hat to it, acknowledging, "Yes, yes, hon, I see you, I see you, thank you very much," and then I do my best to pass on by.

Who my cousin Kerry is

Last night, at 12:30 in the morning, I emailed her asking her for help. Not emotional help, although I probably could have used that too. No, I was looking for a specific object ... that I need to get ASAP ... and I didn't know where to start, and maybe she could help? It was in her, shall we say, zone of interests ... I thought she might have some tips.

I figured I'd hear back from her this morning.

I sat at my desk last night (having trouble sleeping these days), doing some writing, listening to music - and 5 minutes after I sent the email, my blackberry buzzed. (I have so many gadgets now to charge that my apartment looks like Mission Control at times.) Anyway, I heard the buzz of my blackberry off in my bag somewhere, so I checked my email online - and there was Kerry. Emailing me back.

One line:

"I'm on it. Will get you details in the morning."

I laughed out loud. I love her.

But obviously Kerry, just across the Hudson, couldn't wait until morning (of course she couldn't!), and had begun her search at that moment. Because my blackberry started going INSANE, buzzing repeatedly with Kerry's incoming emails for the next 45 seconds. It was like all hell broke loose. My mailbox slowly filled with Kerry's emails - links from ebay and Amazon and other sellers - "how bout this?" "or this?" "or maybe try this" "hey this is really cute". I literally could not keep up with the emails. It was almost scary. I felt like Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar crying out in fear, "There are too many of you!!"

The funniest thing though was that my blackberry was buzzing like a maniac in my bag. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. It was as though a certain Hitachi product in my drawer had spontaneously switched itself to On mode, and was calling to me, insistently, from the darkness. Hey! Look at me! I'm over here! Wanna come out and play? Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.

"How bout this?" "This is cute - try this!" "Maybe you need this?" "Look at THIS that I found!"

By email 3, I was giggling. By email 20 I was howling.

And mission accomplished, found what I was looking for.

I love you, Kerry.

"Maybe this time, I'll be lucky. Maybe this time he'll stay."

My piece on Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway is up at House Next Door.

One of the best live performances I have ever seen.

Happy place.

Sometimes a song comes along at just the right moment, huh? This song came along yesterday.

"Beautiful Dream" - by Everclear

I had a dream I was living by the ocean
I had a dream I was living in the sun
I wake up sad because I'm living in darkness
I know I'm not alone
I know I'm not the only one

I had a dream that I had no depression
I had a dream I had a smile on my face
I wake up hungry so I feed my obsession
I know I gotta leave
I know I gotta run away

Far away
Where the faces all look happy and I know it's a dream
A beautiful dream
I want to lose myself in the sunshine where I can be free
Yeah I just wanna be free
Free in a beautiful dream
Yeah but it's a beautiful dream

I had a dream I was living by the ocean
I had a dream I was living for the day
I wake up sad in a perpetual emotion
I know I gotta leave here
I know I gotta run away

Far away
Where the faces all look happy and I know it's a dream
A beautiful dream
I want to lose myself in myself where I can be free
I just wanna be free
Free in a beautiful dream
Yeah a beautiful dream
Free inside a beautiful dream
Free in a beautiful dream

I have officially lost it

I was talking with Joe about Oliver (of course), and we were laughing at how we're partners-in-crime in this obsession. It's so enjoyable to talk to another obsessive.

And so, in line with that, Ron Moody has suddenly been on my mind (because yeah, that's normal.)

I have been thinking about Ron Moody. Ron Moody was huge in my childhood. Not as huge as John Denver or Lance Kerwin, it is true, but it was close. Of course he has a credit list from here to Woonsocket, but to me, he's always just Fagin, that's it. I can't see him as anything else.

Since I have been thinking about Ron Moody, I remembered yet another highwater-mark in my obviously deprived childhood (where I spent most of my time hovering over the TV Guide looking for re-runs of Orphan Train and Skyward). It was a Christmas movie starring Benji.

You know. Benji.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember Benji. Benji was huge. He was no Rin Tin Tin, it is true, he was no Lassie, but he was close.

And in 1978, Benji - with some of the cast members of the original hugely successful Benji movie (which my parents had taken us to) - had his very own Christmas movie. As a matter of fact, what are the odds, the movie is called Benji's Very Own Christmas Story. All I remember about it is this:

Benji and his sidekicks travel to a magical icy land where Kris Kringle is real. And ...

That's where my brain stops.

I do remember there was a cast of thousands, as well as musical numbers, and Ron freakin' Moody played Kris Kringle. I was only a tomboy pipsqueak when the Christmas movie came out, but I was already deep into Oliver obsession at that point, and could recite to you Ron Moody's resume, if asked. Sadly, no one ever asked. I'm still waiting.

But it was so much fun for me as a kid to see this actor, whom I only knew from one part, live it up in this other part, and I remember there was one giant production number, with Kris Kringle skipping through his ... village? workshop? torture chamber of death? "It puts the Benji in the basket?" I have no idea ... with crowds of people thronging behind him and they are all singing about ... Christmas? Wrapping paper? Scandinavian coke-whores? ... no idea ... but I LOVED the number as a child, and, true to form, huddled up against the television screen with a tape recorder, so I could capture it.

I clearly should have been in an institution.

I suppose I could look at it in a positive way. VCRs were far in our family's future. I was way ahead of the curve.

And so, yes, what of it, I used to turn on my tape recording of this number from BENJI'S VERY OWNCHRISTMAS STORY (for God's SAKE), and act it out in my room, pretending I was in the movie, or in the world of the movie at LEAST, or maybe that a role was added - for a small freckled tomboy of a SIDEKICK for Ron Moody ... and I would be so engrossed in all of this that I wouldn't hear my mother calling me to dinner.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about Ron Moody and Benji in years, until the last couple of days, and so a quick click on Amazon made me see that yes, unbelievably, Benji's Very Own Christmas Story is available on DVD (excuse me. And Skyward is not? That's bullshit, people. I'm dead serious), and you can purchase it for $5.99.

Naturally I bought it immediately.

I need to watch that big-ass musical number again and try to imagine my way back into my child-self and remember what the fuss was about.

It seems vitally important for some reason.

Freezing sunrise

Jersey shore.

I admit I did have a moment when I took the picture below the jump, where I was literally hanging on to the side of a building to keep myself from blowing away, struggling with my giant Dunkin Donuts, spilling it all over my hand in a gust of wind, wrestling with my camera against the gales, and also enduring just how damn COLD it was ... where I thought:

Huh. Sheila. Maybe this idea of yours ... capturing the sunrise over the ocean ... kind of sucks? Ya ever think of that?

Your warm crumpled bed is just over there, across the street in the inn, waiting for you ... wanna go back there? Maybe?

Still. Love this effing picture.

My favorite kind of weather

Boulevard East in the rain, wind whipping American flag up and over the lamppost, Manhattan on the other side.

Reunited

Opening couple of paragraphs of a certain book I just received in the mail.

It had rained every day since Grandma arrived in London. Every single day. Not the nice fat sort of rain that makes gentle plopping noises on your rainhat, or umbrella if you happened to have one, which Grandma hadn't as she'd left it on the overnight bus from Yorkshire, but the nasty thin sort of rain that runs down your nose and the tops of your Wellington boots and makes your hair stick out all over the place, especially if it's curly, which Grandma's was.

In fact it was the sort of weather you wouldn't turn a dog out in, if you liked dogs that is, which Grandma didn't anyway.

Grandma sighed deeply as she gazed out of the window. "Just think," she said gloomily, "if I hadn't done my ankle in at the Over 60's do, I would be visiting strange new places on the Cook's Coach and Paddle Boat Mystery Tour, instead of sitting here staring at this awful rain."

She handed a curler to Mother, who was trying to set Grandma's hair, which Father said stuck up like steel wool after Mother had cleaned the inside of the oven with it.

"And if daft Betty from the shop hadn't shoved half a box of soap flakes all over the dance floor, I wouldn't have slipped in the first place."

"Or if she'd kept you off the vicar's homemade wine," Father murmured.

Grandma ignored him.

If you've followed along on my site, you will recognize - from a few of the plot points - what book this is.

I have not read it since I was probably 10 years old, but I remembered that opening paragraph almost word for word. I used to love to read it out loud because obviously I understood it but there was enough about it that was different from my own life ("soap flakes", "vicar") that made it seem delightfully British, and I adored that. I have been looking through the book at the illustrations and most of them I remember well. Illustrations by Laurence Hutchins. Very funny caricaturish drawings - almost like Doonesbury.

Who knows why I get separation anxiety when I realize I do not have a certain book from my childhood in my possession, but I do, and thanks to Amazon, I can get these books for a penny a pop. It's brill. It's hardcover too - with the same cover I remember as a kid. Even better.

Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascainn, baby!

Really, what more can one say.

Actually, here was one of the other quotes from the night. At one point I turned to Jen and said, totally enthusiastically, with no self-hatred whatsoever, "GOD, I just LOVE it when I don't act like myself! It is so awesome!"

Joe Hurley's Irish Rock Revue last night was a fantastic show. It was a five-hour-long extravaganza. "Come on, Eileen" was played to roaring success, which gives you some idea of the feel of the event. Not to mention "Raglan Road" which brought me to tears.

I need to Google the cast of thousands who performed although I am familiar with some of them (especially the writers - Colum McCann!) but for now, some photos.

Thanks, Joe, for being a warm and wonderful MC. Great night. A perfect St. Patty's Day fest. Meaning no:

-- amateur messy drunks
-- green beer
-- flashing shamrock antennae
-- people who seem to feel that being "Irish" means "acting like a complete douchebag on Bleecker Street"

It wasn't a precious event or twee in any way, but it wasn't "cool" either, which was one of the best things about it. Try to remain "cool" when "Come on Eileen" is being played. I dare you. The place went nuts. There were Irish fiddlers (one girl in particular was really fantastic, with a shiny green ribbon in her hair, she made me cry), and people flew in from Ireland, from Chicago, from elsewhere - just to perform one song. Really moving. Also, I know I'm in the right place when raffle tickets are sold and the prizes are a year-long subscription to The Irish Echo and signed copies of McCann's latest novel. It's also clear I am in the right place when Joe Hurley, as MC, interspersed the entire evening with quotes from Oscar Wilde. I mean, honestly. I love these people. To paraphrase Anne Sexton, they are my kind.

Some of the photos below are blurry - I was experimenting with how much I could get away with, using no flash. The results are iffy, but I think a lot of them do capture the FEEL of the night.

"Enter a chorus of lepers."

A biography that I am drooling to read (eventually, when I get back up on the reading horse for real): Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, a dual biography of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. I'm so excited!

While the review in the WP is a bit annoying (Oh, so short chapters = good book? Hm.) - it also captures the reviewer's excitement about the entire book ("the most completely delicious, the most civilized and the most wickedly entertaining work of nonfiction anyone could ask for"), and I find it infectious. I also enjoy the bit about the chorus of lepers.

I can't wait to read it.

I know a bit about Henry Irving and Ellen Terry - they come up all the time in any theatrical-history reading you're going to do, but I have also read her marvelous memoir. I wrote a giant post about Ellen Terry - you might find it interesting. She appears to have been one of those women - powerful, yet somehow light-hearted still, fun - that captures the imagination of men everywhere. People were obsessed with her. Oscar Wilde of course (you can read some of the lyrics he wrote in homage to her in that Ellen Terry post) - and the painter Watts (who immortalized her time and time again - he also married her) - George Bernard Shaw - royalty - the list goes on and on. But she, although wonderful at her job, a chameleon really, was not an imperious kind of person. She must have been something else on stage, boy, but in person, it sounds like she was fun, vivacious, and emotionally available. Not a drip.

Henry Irving is an interesting case as well. I have heard the stories about him from his contemporaries, who left records of his meticulous process and hard work - but I am excited to learn a little bit more about this giant of the stage, whose name is nearly totally forgotten today.

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about Henry Irving, which brings tears to my eyes, no matter how many times I read it.

Ellen Terry writes:

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg ... he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train - always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute - and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me - with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well."

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"

Glorious. Can't wait to read Holroyd's book. What a find!

Henry Irving (if you go read the excerpt I posted from Terry's book, you can really see how in-depth she goes about his brilliance as an actor, his process)

Painting of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Abelard and Heloise - by Henrietta Rae

The great Ellen Terry

I ask again. Where is my time machine to go see these two perform together?

Are you aware that I am legendary?

I had a feeling I was, but now it has been confirmed.

The fact that he pulled THAT quote out to be the title has made me laugh for a good 20 minutes. In fact, I laugh every time I look at it.

My parents would be so proud! Drunk daughter looking for the bathroom. And she mentions it in a book review! Good times!

Pick up a copy of Sixty Sonnets today. Wonderful book.

Reminder: Joe Hurley's Irish Rock Revue tonight!

I know the poster says March 14th - but there's a show tonight - March 17th as well. I know for a fact there are still tix available.

Show at La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street. Doors open at 6 p.m.

Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.

Joe Hurley has been hosting the Irish Rock Revue (with a cast of thousands) in New York for years now, and this coming year will be the 10th annual event.

I've seen Joe Hurley perform (at the Losers Lounge Queen Tribute, where he rocked the house with "Fat Bottomed Girls" as though he were to the Freddie-Mercury-born) and I've also had the pleasure of singing a medley of songs with him from Oliver in the middle of the day outside a Wall Street Bar on Bloomsday in 2002. Impromptu. One of my favorite New York memories.

His voice is a mix of Tom Waits and, well, Ron Moody, of course. Mixed in with a little Joe Strummer. Boy is a force of nature. Not to be missed.

His band, The Gents, have been together for years now - an emotional and jagged mixture of punk and Irish traditional music (and yeah, with a little "oom pah pah" mixed in there - Joe Hurley is obsessed with the musical Oliver, and why shouldn't he be, I ask you?) - and you can keep up to date with all of their shenanigans at their website.

Proceeds of the Irish Rock Revue go to a couple of good causes (Gilda's Club and the Humane Society), and it looks to be a couple of massive parties. He has guest artists come and sing, people from Broadway, Irish novelists who live in town, poets, performance artists ... I can't wait!

I'll be there, screaming "Oom PAH PAH" from my seat like the nerd that I am.

It's St. Patrick's Day but I don't really care about that. With my name, why would I give a shite about St. Patrick's Day? Seems a bit redundant, don't you think?

DETAILS

Date: March 17, 2009
Where: La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street.
Time: Doors open at 6 p.m.

Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.

Here's Joe, from last year's Irish Rock Revue. And more photos here.

Cheers. Beannacht. Erin go bra-less.

Sláinte .

Is it a sign?

Every day, I turn left to come down my street, park the car, and go inside my apartment. And every day, I am struck by the giant letters painted on my street.

I try not to take them personally.

I try not to see them as Metaphor.

They are, after all, describing a LITERAL situation ... but sometimes I look at the painted letters, and think, "Good Lord, is there no hope? None at all?"

Maybe I should move.

I don't like living on a street that taunts me. You're just a STREET. What do YOU know?

Synchronicity

Today, the NY Daily news launched a "Where Are They Now?" slideshow about the cast of The Godfather.

Lots of interesting things there, but I am most interested in slide 16.

Life is very strange.

(This is not news to me, by the way. I know who he is, and count his performance in Faces as an all-time favorite - it's just the timing that strikes me as strange. But then again, everything has been strange in the last two, three months.)

Thanks to Scott for the heads up.

Ernest Hilbert: "Sixty Sonnets"

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours ...

-- William Wordsworth, "Scorn Not the Sonnet"

Believe me, Billy, I do not scorn the sonnet.

I have been a sonnet fan since I first discovered poetry in high school. There was something about the "rules" aspect of sonnets that I, in my OCD propensities, found comforting. Oh, you just have 8 lines first - and the rhyme scheme is abbaabba, easy - then you have 6 lines, and you can rhyme it cdcdcd, or a number of other schemes, and if you just follow the rules, you have a sonnet, right? Right, Sheila, right.

I share all of this basically to say that the sonnet, to me, was always the most interesting of poetry forms, and there was something in it - the strictness of it - that seemed to set poets (good ones, anyway) free. Some of my favorite poems of all time are sonnets: John Milton's "On his Blindness", first and foremost, "Ozymandias", by Shelley, too many to count by Shakespeare, and I also have a soft spot for Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets.

The sonnet is perhaps seen as old-fashioned now, but I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't think "old-fashioned" is necessarily an epithet. It's wonderful to see what contemporary people can do with the old forms, and it is that which keeps something alive, fresh, tangible - as opposed to something in a dusty museum case.

Ernest Hilbert, well-known poet, and beloved editor of a poetry newsletter called E-verse Radio which I have been receiving since the late 1990s, has come out with his breathtaking first collection of poetry, called Sixty Sonnets, a collection I just read over the last four or five days.

Some of the poems made me laugh out loud. Some made me cringe in recognition - even down to the place-names. Astor Bar. Ouch! Bellevue! Ouch! The world he describes is one I have inhabited. And some brought tears to my eyes.

Here is what I think is special and remarkable about Hilbert's work: His vocabulary can be daunting, as can his various frames of reference. You wonder if there is anything this man doesn't know. You, as the reader, must be prepared to leap from ancient Greece to the East Village in one or two lines, and you had better be familiar with the Oresteia as well as Metallica ... otherwise you will be lost. But none of this comes off as too-clever, or coy. It is truly an expression of who Hilbert is, the breadth and depth of his curiosity and interests, and how his mind works. It is a quicksilver mind, generous and open and humorous and also somehow conservative, in its way, as well - with a respect for all that has passed, the voices that chorus around him, the history of literature. Even with the giants of the past, like Auden and Eliot, Hilbert can say, in one of the sonnets in the collection:

So thank God for gin, whiskey, and lager,
Publisher's parties. Let the critics rail.
Too much chat of gyres, grails, gods, Rose, or Rood
Will leave a young man questing for the door.

Another thing that has struck me about his poetry, since I first started reading it back in the late 90s, is how often it includes some kind of genuine sucker-punch. I can't tell you how many times I end up in sudden tears, reading his stuff. I get lulled into a rhythm, I am taken with the imagery (Hilbert's images are often arresting), and maybe one image reminds me of Moby Dick, so I think a little bit about that, another image makes me remember some bacchanalian night I had once at Astor Bar when I tripped down the steps in my sandals and couldn't find the bathroom ... and then, in the last stanza, he rips my heart out. I don't know how he does it, but it happens repeatedly.

If I had to analyze it (and apologies, I know how to review movies - but I feel a bit out of my depth here) I would say that what Hilbert pulls off here is what James Joyce pulls off in the astonishing last four paragraphs of The Dead. That's what it feels like: the consciousness going from microscopic to macroscopic, moving from detail to universality - and there is pain and loss and grief in the transfer, because it is in those moments that we become aware of our mortality. But, very important: there's not only loss being expressed. And that's one of the things I think is sometimes missing in the understanding of what Joyce does in those last four paragraphs, and I think is essential to understanding Hilbert's work, too: ultimately, it's about love. It's not a love that is cozy, or domestic. It's a love that is rather searing, almost unbearable, hopeless, really, because it comes out of acute self-awareness. Just like Gabriel, at the end of The Dead, has his tragic realization of how connected he is to all of mankind (even "the shades"), and this realization only comes about because he is face to face, for the first time, with how little he knows about his wife, so does Hilbert, after dragging us through the boozy alleys of New York, making us drink more pints than we want to, showing us the loneliness and noise that can infiltrate your head at 3 a.m., step back, at the end, and almost shake his head, humorously, about how much he loves it all.

My love, we know the universe must bend
Until it ends, entropy will labor
Until all is cold and flat, that stars close
Across icy gulfs, suns crash.

-- from Hilbert's sonnet "Love Poem"

It's the "My love" there that sets Hilbert apart from many of his contemporaries, who perhaps remain a bit cooler, aloof, embodying the too-cool-for-you energy of the day.

Hilbert's is a true voice, distinct, individual (and, full disclosure, I know Ernie, so I know what he sounds like - but that's not what I am referring to here), with something to tell us, something he needs to share, and maybe feels he should hold off on divulging, but by the end of each sonnet, he can't help it, and out it all comes. You just need to sit back and get out of the damn way.

Before long
I will try to remember what happened.
Memory is just a haunting of ghosts,
And the night is crushed below like eggshell.

-- from Hilbert's sonnet "Corned Beef Hash and Two Eggs Over Easy, Coffee"

Another thing great about this collection is the humor in it, the characters who emerge: the dude who falls off bar stools ("One second he's there, then he's gone from view"), the lonely single girl, looking back on her collection of dolls as a young girl ("Donny who pines for his lost Marie"), and many more. I love these people. I love the specificity in which they are drawn, how Hilbert tells us just one or two things about them, and, in a flash, an entire human being erects itself before our very eyes. It is my favorite kind of writing. Spare, elegant, and yet not at all afraid of the "ba-dum-ching" ending, or the absurd details that make up life sometimes.

Adam Kirsch, author of The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry is excerpted in a blurb at the beginning of Sixty Sonnets, and he writes:

Hilbert has an appetite for life equal to his taste in literature: a rare combination in an age of dissociated sensibility.

This, to me, expresses that "sucker punch" thing I described earlier, because Hilbert's stuff is the opposite of "dissociated", and perhaps I am used to the "dissociation" of our current crop of writers, and that is not my thing, it is not what I respond to, although I often can appreciate the cleverness of the devices. Hilbert comes from a classical background, his knowledge of poetry is encyclopedic, huge, and often that kind of knowledge comes off as either precocious or tiresome insider-information (if you look at, say, the earliest poems of Sylvia Plath, where she basically wants to show the reader how smart she is, and how much she knows about, well, everything). But in these sonnets, Hilbert incorporates it all, leaving out nothing, letting the Golden Fleece sit beside Suzanne Vega, and I just feel happy to be going along for the ride.

He raises a pint, not only to his crazy friends sitting at the Astor Bar with him, or suffering through their hangovers at a local diner the next morning, but to all of the poets who have gone before, Hilbert's emotional and intellectual history.

According to Wordsworth, Shakespeare "unlocked his heart" with the "key" of the sonnet.

So, too, has Ernie Hilbert.

Read more about Hilbert and Sixty Sonnets. You can also listen to Hilbert read some of his work here. Hilbert's bio here.

Purchase Sixty Sonnets here.

Me in my bikini

Yeah. I know I'm hot.

I have posted that picture before, because it never is not funny to me. The way the bikini is basically cutting off my circulation, and the cruel humor of putting a girl baby in a bikini in the first place - like what, exactly, is the point of that? It can only be comedy. Yes, I was a creature of comedy for my parents. Also, I don't look too thrilled, do I, even though I am surrounded by floating toys. I look at all of them like, "Nah, I'm just not feelin' it right now ..."

The best part of this is the last time I was home visiting Mum, I was sitting in the study at my parents' house, on the computer. My mother walked into the room, holding a tiny washing basin, grey plastic. She held it up to me, as though I should recognize it.

"Look." she said.

"What is that?"

She said, "You sat in this, wearing a bikini."

It was so small that I couldn't believe it - and I also didn't think I had ever seen it before. It still exists? Gotta love my parents. They know how to keep things, and use them, throughout generations. Why throw out a small washing basin just because it had its heyday in the late 60s?

I kept staring at it, mesmerized. Once upon a time I was small enough to sit in that damn thing??

Beware, yo

It's the Ides of March, yo. Watch your back and all that.

Here's the moment in Shakespeare's play where Caesar gets the warning from the soothsayer. And ignores it. Because wouldn't we all ignore a warning from a nutjob in the street? Especially when we are surrounded by "flourishes".

Seriously, boys. Stop with the constant "flourishes". GIVE ME A MOMENT TO THINK.

SCENE II. A public place

Flourish.

Enter CAESAR; ANTONY, CALPURNIA, PORTIA, DECIUS BRUTUS, CICERO, BRUTUS, CASSIUS, and CASCA; a great crowd following, among them a SOOTHSAYER

CAESAR
Calpurnia!

CASCA
Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.

CAESAR
Calpurnia!

CALPURNIA
Here, my lord.

CAESAR
Stand you directly in Antonius' way,
When he doth run his course. Antonius!

ANTONY
Caesar, my lord?

CAESAR
Forget not, in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.

ANTONY
I shall remember:
When Caesar says 'do this,' it is perform'd.

CAESAR
Set on; and leave no ceremony out.

Flourish

SOOTHSAYER
Caesar!

CAESAR
Ha! who calls?

CASCA
Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!

CAESAR
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry 'Caesar!' Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
What man is that?

BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.

CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.

CAESAR
What say'st thou to me now? speak once again.

SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

A psychic told me in 1998 that I would meet my future husband the next year, and he would be blonde. Bitch lied. So I don't blame Caesar for writing The Soothsayer off as a dreamer.

The conspiracy scene, I think, is my favorite in the play. Act II Scene 1. It's chilling. The casualness of it, the resolve.

The conspirators go to visit Brutus at his house, and they stand in the orchard, and decide to do the deed on the morrow.

Here's a fun exercise - read it out loud and notice how often Shakespeare uses the letter "s" in the scene, or an "s" sound. There's an "s" sound in almost every sentence. So when you hear the language - just the sound of it, never mind what it is that they're actually saying - sounds like a hissing chorus of whispers. It has a conspiratorial feel to it - again, not just in what they are saying - but in the sound of the language itself. The theme of the scene is in the language itself. Ssssssssss .... gives an impression of a crowd of men whispering "psst" or - hissing - the hissing 'psst" whisper of conspiracy. Brilliant.

Re-enter LUCIUS.
LUCIUS.
Sir, 'tis your brother Cassius at the
door,
Who doth desire to see you.

BRUTUS.
Is he alone?

LUCIUS.
No, sir, there are more with him.

BRUTUS. Do you know them?

LUCIUS.
No, sir; their hats are pluck'd about
their ears,
And half their faces buried in their cloaks,
That by no means I may discover them
By any mark of favour.

BRUTUS. Let 'em enter.

[Exit LUCIUS.

They are the faction. O conspiracy!
Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by
night,
When evils are most free? O! then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, con-
spiracy;
Hide it in smiles and affability:
For if thou path, thy native semblance on,
Not Erebus itself were dim enough
To hide thee from prevention.

Enter the Conspirators, CASSIUS, CASCA,
DECIUS,CINNA, METELLUS CIMBER,
and TREBONIUS.

CASSIUS.
I think we are too bold upon your rest:
Good morrow, Brutus; do we trouble you?

BRUTUS.
I have been up this hour, awake all
night.
Know I these men that come along with you?

CASSIUS.
Yes, every man of them; and no man
here
But honours you; and every one doth wish
You had but that opinion of yourself
Which every noble Roman bears of you.
This is Trebonius.

BRUTUS.
He is welcome hither.

CASSIUS.
This, Decius Brutus.

BRUTUS. He is welcome too.

CASSIUS.
This, Casca; this, Cinna;
And this, Metellus Cimber.

BRUTUS.
They are all welcome.
What watchful cares do interpose themselves
Betwixt your eyes and night?

CASSIUS.
Shall I entreat a word?

[BRUTUS and CASSIUS whisper.

DECIUS.
Here lies the east: doth not the day
break here?

CASCA.
No.

CINNA.
O! pardon, sir, it doth; and yon grey
lines
That fret the clouds are messengers of day.

CASCA.
You shall confess that you are both
deceiv'd.
Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises;
Which is a great way growing on the south,
Weighing the youthful season of the year.
Some two months hence up higher toward the
north
He first presents his fire; and the high east
Stands, as the Capitol, directly here.

BRUTUS.
Give me your hands all over, one by
one.

CASSIUS.
And let us swear our resolution.

And so, in honor of the Ides of March, here's the "moment before" - the poor ignored SOOTHSAYER comes back into the picture:

Act II, scene iv. The sense of foreboding grows. Portia can feel the wrongness in the air.

PORTIA
Come hither, fellow: which way hast thou been?

SOOTHSAYER
At mine own house, good lady.

PORTIA
What is't o'clock?

SOOTHSAYER
About the ninth hour, lady.

PORTIA
Is Caesar yet gone to the Capitol?

SOOTHSAYER
Madam, not yet: I go to take my stand,
To see him pass on to the Capitol.

PORTIA
Thou hast some suit to Caesar, hast thou not?

SOOTHSAYER
That I have, lady: if it will please Caesar
To be so good to Caesar as to hear me,
I shall beseech him to befriend himself.

PORTIA
Why, know'st thou any harm's intended towards him?

SOOTHSAYER
None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance.
Good morrow to you. Here the street is narrow:
The throng that follows Caesar at the heels,
Of senators, of praetors, common suitors,
Will crowd a feeble man almost to death:
I'll get me to a place more void, and there
Speak to great Caesar as he comes along.

Exit

PORTIA
I must go in. Ay me, how weak a thing
The heart of woman is! O Brutus,
The heavens speed thee in thine enterprise!
Sure, the boy heard me: Brutus hath a suit
That Caesar will not grant. O, I grow faint.
Run, Lucius, and commend me to my lord;
Say I am merry: come to me again,
And bring me word what he doth say to thee.

Snapshots

-- Hope, after she finishes her Fancy Feast, drags the famous banana-toy over and places it in the bowl. I have no idea why she does it and it makes me laugh, although it is making the banana very grimy. It's like the feline equivalent of putting your napkin in your plate when you're done eating.

-- Allison introduced me to a show on Animal Planet called "Jockeys" which I am now addicted to. Because I don't have television, this presents a problem. But great show. An ongoing series, following 5 or 6 jockeys. A whole world I knew nothing about.

-- I had my first mammogram this week, and found myself near tears as I approached the radiology place. I felt very alone and nervous, and my boobs were about to be squashed into a machine, and maybe it would hurt, and what if the results were bad, and I had no idea what to expect. The X-ray technician (I will never forget you, lady) knew it was my first time and walked me through it, and she couldn't have been nicer. The entire time she was smushing my boobs this-a way and that-a way, she was talking on about how much she loved Diana (as in Princess Diana) and how she was the "people's princess" and what a shame what had happened, and also Diana looked Irish, didn't I think so? She had red cheeks, and fair skin, and she seemed like a very nice person, and it was all just so sad what had happened. I am not saying that X-ray technician babbled on like this on purpose, to keep me focused and relaxed, but I am not discounting the possibility. I was very thankful. She also said to me, before we went in the room, "Is there any possibility - any at all - that you are pregnant." I fired back, "Not even the tiniest chance." "Good." I was out of there in an hour, boobs a bit sore, but no worse for wear. Thank you, kindly, X-ray technician lady.

-- I went to a party this week at Babeland (Google it at your own risk), and at one point I was walking around the store, with my arms full of potential purchases. As you can imagine, if you already know what Babeland is, I looked ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than everyone else at the party. A photographer came up to me (obviously an event photographer - boy had major hardware around his neck) and said, "Can I take your picture?" I said, "Where is the picture going to go?" He said, rather snotty, "Honey, it's gonna go everywhere." Don't call me 'honey'. I may have wild red hair and be wearing big black boots and lugging around an armful of lascivious paraphernalia, but I am actually a Victorian-era Gibson Girl at heart and you have to earn the right to call me "honey", mkay? Preferably after we are engaged. I said, "Then absolutely No, you cannot take my picture." He said, "Everyone else is fine with having their picture taken." I decided to try to take the edge off of our exchange, and joked with him, "Yes, but they aren't as FAMOUS as I am. I am EXTREMELY famous and I cannot risk being seen holding all of this stuff. It would put me in a very compromising position." He was blank. He didn't get it. I said, kidding with him, "Don't you know who I am??" He backed away from me in fear and also loathing ... because some people loathe that which they cannot understand ... and stayed far away from me for the rest of the night. Oh well, you can't win 'em all. Some people think I am very funny.

-- I am working on all kinds of projects and I can feel myself getting scattered. I took a 3-hour nap today and that is so not like me.

-- My sister Jean's pregnant belly is so big that apparently, her husband Pat walks into the room, and constantly sees Jean standing in front of the mirror, staring at herself. Much hilarity ensues. I can't wait to see her!

-- I went over to Allison's last night, and I had all this SHIT to tell her, and she said, "Okay, shoot. I am perfectly prepared to not talk for the next two hours, except to ask questions." I love her.

-- Ghost Town is a fantastic movie. A good old-fashioned comedy for ADULTS - like they used to make in the 30s and 40s (it is reminiscent of Cary Grant in Topper - an analogy I obviously am not the first one to make) - with three charming smart leads ... it's just a delight. I kept waiting for it go off the rails, and become schmaltzy or didactic, and miracle of miracles, it never did. Highly recommended.

-- And speaking of Ricki Gervais, he is going to be appearing on Sesame Street, and I'm sure many of you have already seen this, but below the jump is outtakes from the show - an interview Elmo did with Gervais. It is absolutely hysterical. I love the bit about the pajamas.

Allison's wisdom

[said in a hopeful encouraging voice] "He was either a drug addict, or he had a drinking problem, or maybe he drove drunk and killed or maimed someone. Something like that."

Flipping thru the channels: "I'm in the mood for murder."

"Yeah, let's watch this." [A Dateline special about a man who killed someone while, apparently, sleepwalking.] "It has everything I love - sleep problems, and lots of murder."

"I was very happy to receive your angry letter"

A wonderful post by the always-wonderful Self-Styled Siren about an actor I love - George Sanders.

Freezing cold ...

... in Riverside Park.

This picture makes me wish I lived on the Upper West Side again.

Walking in the city

Even at the grossest dingiest most bustling jackhammery intersection ... look up.

You never know what you will find up there, but sometimes you see something that makes you go all quiet and still inside, peaceful, like all the sound dissolves away. Sometimes, walking in the city, it's like the noise and the grime are actually coming from inside of you, so omnipresent is it. But then ...

a glimpse, proving otherwise.

This ballet studio is on the second floor of a grimy building on grimy 40th and 8th Avenue, one of the grossest corners in the city. It's just relentless, that corner. Once I discovered the studio though, I ALWAYS look up when I walk by there, to see the pretty and calm ballerinas at the barre.

A visitation

Since I first wrote about Skyward, many crazy things have happened, the main thing being Glenn from Texas emerging from the mist, telling me he taped not only Skyward but Skyward Christmas, and he could send them on to me if I liked.

We all know how that turned out.

There has been recent chatter on IMDB message boards about Skyward, as well as on my posts - with people leaving comments and emailing me directly, asking if I could send them a copy. One woman said she had been an extra in Skyward Christmas when she was in high school and could I send a copy?

Clearly there is a demand, powers-that-be, for this movie to be released. Are you listening?? I know for a FACT that you are.

Glenn had said to me that a while back an associate producer of Skyward had also contacted Glenn (they had had contact before) and asked for a copy of the movie, if possible, since he didn't own one. So - even people who worked on the film haven't even seen the damn thing. Glenn made copies for the associate producer, sent it on.

Glenn made copies for me, sent them on.

Glenn has a life, he has a career, a family - but suddenly it's like he's in some Skyward-DVD-production sweatshop, with me barking over my shoulder, "BURN 15 MORE DISCS AND MAKE IT SNAPPY."

Anyway, I got yet another request for Skyward last night - also from someone involved in the original picture, who hasn't seen it probably since its first release. I am a Luddite, in terms of technical stuff, so I emailed Glenn, asking ... uhm ... could he please make two more copies of the movies and send them on? I BEGGED him to let me pay him for at least shipping and handling!

This morning, here is the email I received from Glenn in response. He launches right into it, no preamble:

Last night while lying in bed I heard what I thought was a loud clap of thunder, and saw what I thought was a brilliant flash of lightning. Strangely, as the thunder faded the light didn't dissipate, it just kept growing in intensity to the point where the whole room was bathed in a beautiful white light. Being startled, I sat up and immediately began wondering why this bright light wasn't hurting my eyes!

Suddenly, while bathed in this illumination, a warm feeling came over me and there was a very strong 'love' presence permeating the room. I looked over at my wife and she was sound asleep; at that point, I began to wonder if I had died and was headed toward heaven! I wasn't scared in the least, it was as if this feeling was very familiar, something that I had maybe once experienced in a former time. It felt comfortable and nurturing.

Just as I started to relax in this feeling, there was a loud sound like a blast from a trumpet! All of a sudden I saw an image of a man coming toward me from where the light was emanating. As 'the man' moved toward me the feeling of love just intensified tremendously! I couldn't believe it!

Now standing there right in front of me was someone who looked like my childhood perception of Jesus - long hair, beard, flowing robes, and the most precious loving smile on his face.

At this point I mustered the courage to speak. With a shaking voice, I asked Jesus, "Am I dead?"

His smile intensified in a knowing way, then he replied, "No, my child."

I then felt very biblical and holy being in his presence, so I asked, "Well, then, what would my Lord have of me?" I was so nervous! Why would the king of the universe be visiting ME, of all people?

At this point, I will never forget the words he spoke unto me. "Glenn" he said, "I was wondering if you could get me a copy of Skyward?"

Oh! Is this what this is all about? Gee whiz! Now knowing that I had barter power with God, I asked, "Well, I'll have to think about it. What's in it for me?"

At that point he immediately disappeared and the room grew cold and black. Searing flames burst up from my bed and began scorching the flesh from my body........then......BAM!......I woke up! Wow, this was all just a dream - THANK GOODNESS!

At this point I immediately realized something important. Jesus once said, "Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me." The fact that I can give you Skyward is just like me giving Jesus Skyward! And since I certainly wouldn't ask Jesus to pay me for the privilege of helping him, then I cannot take money from you for in essence doing the same thing!

Besides, it is probably best that no money changes hands. My biggest fear is that one day you and your friends will all be having a wonderful Skyward reunion party, and I will be sitting in jail for copyright infringement!

One of the funniest emails ever. I was laughing so loud on the bus that I scared a small cowering man sitting next to me.

"This irresistible ... Paris original ... I'm wearing tonight ..."

I've posted this photo before and I want to share it again.

Because it is important to remember, that even when you become an adult, and you are trying to navigate adult relationships, and maybe even nab a husband like this poor character ... inside, you are still an anxious geeky teenager, yearning for acceptance.

It is not a comfortable truth, but it is a truth nonetheless.

Playing this part (Miss Krumholtz in How to Succeed in Business) was hilarious for me, because my God, she is so vulnerable. But also so brave. Putting on a brave smile over the SHRIEKING NEUROSES beneath.

In a humorous side note, my friend Mitchell played my boss. We had very little to do with each other onstage, but of course we made up a whole story that he was sexually harassing me on a daily basis, chasing me around the office, and while Miss Krumholtz was perhaps horrified, because she just wants a husband dammit, and she is a true lady, not a slut in any way - she also endured it because ... maybe it means that her boss 'likes' her?

No, Krummy, I don't think so.

But I don't want to shatter her dreams. I mean, look at her face.

Happy birthday to Ezra Jack Keats

One of my favorite children's book author - who is always, somehow, looped in my head to Sesame Street, the world being depicted in his classic tales (Peter's Chair, The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, A Letter to Amy) the same urban one as in Sesame Street, so different from the turf farm slash ocean view world of my upbringing. He made New York City, and Harlem, in particular, look like a big wonderland - with whimsical graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights and intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are, to this day, hypnotic - works of art.

Barry, my father's best friend, was friends with Ezra Jack Keats, so we grew up feeling a strange personal connection to the man who wrote the books we all loved.

Letter to Amy was my favorite. It tells the story of a little boy who is planning his birthday party, and everyone he has invited is a boy as well ... but ... but ... what about his friend Amy? She's a girl. But they are friends. How will that go over if a girl comes to his party? He writes a letter to her. It is a thundery rainy day. The illustrations are phenomenal. I love rainy days anyway, and I loved them as a little girl too - but the whole journey of that book, of grade school angst, and friendship - just really touched me.

Ezra Jack Keats is probably best known for The Snowy Day (and again - those illustrations!). The city shuts down in a snowstorm like that. I remember a couple years ago - maybe 5 or 6 years ago - when we had a massive snowstorm, I was struggling through Times Square, through literally mountainous drifts, trying to get to Port Authority so I could get home - and the roads were completely shut down, no cars anywhere, and people were cross-country-skiing down Broadway. Snowball fights broke out in the middle of 7th Avenue. Things get muffled by the snow, strangely quiet, and the stoplights keep going - red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow ... even no cars can approach. The illustrations in The Snowy Day completely invoke that world: the strange quiet that descends over a bustling metropolis when there are mounds of snow.

Happy birthday to an American classic.

Some choice illustrations below:

Diary Tuesday, Ben Marley edition

Okay, so I had a feeling that this existed somewhere. It just took a little bit of digging to find it.

My real journal, the more in-depth kind, that I have exposed to humorous and humiliating effect in my Diary Friday feature didn't start until I was in 9th grade. Before then, I did keep a journal - but (and I knew exactly what I was looking for, when I took to the boxes in my storage closet in my apartment) it was a tiny day-book, with a day for each date. By the time I was 14, no way could I cram in my thoughts on one stupid page - like: get out of my way, rules, if I want to write for 30 pages I will! But when I was 11, 12, I was still bound by convention.

So what I was looking for was a small orange book, and the entries are intermittent, as well as RIDICULOUS. Some just express generalized anxiety about quizzes and things - others describe how awesome the latest Seventeen magazine was. Others make me want to cry, reading them now, because they express blunt statements of self-loathing so sharp that you want to reach through the pages and tell that young girl to be a little bit more gentle with herself. It's baby fat, honey, it'll dissolve. Some entries make me sound actively bipolar. One day: I LOVE LIFE. Next day: I HATE LIFE. And I was always obedient to the requirements of the diary itself, keeping my entries short and sweet, to fit on the day in question. Balderdash.

So last night, I dug around a bit, and pulled out the diary from junior high.

I wondered.

I had a feeling what I was looking for in said diary would be there ... I almost remembered writing it... but I wondered if I was making it up? Like I just wanted it to be there?

But nope. At the end of November, right after I turned 12 years old, I suddenly burst forth in a frenzy in my little diary.

Here is the entry in question, and I will discuss my observations afterwards:

November

Diary, are you ready? This seems like I am being disloyal to Han, but I can't help it!! I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT BOY IN SKYWARD.

AHHHHHHHHHHH! I can't stop thinking about him!!! He's so cute!!!!!!!

I'll write more later!!!

What erudition.

What wit.

It goes to show you where I'm at these days that I clapped my hands in glee when I found the entry, scaring poor Hope. I KNEW I had written about it. It was a truly bizarre moment - a time-travel moment - the younger self reaching out to the older self ... the older self having, obviously, expressed what the younger self cannot ... I don't know. I rarely feel connected to my 12-year-old self. She seems like a gloomy illiterate foreigner to me. But in that moment, we were one.

That girl was me. And I remembered her.

It seriously just made me laugh!! Evidence! Like a hieroglyphic on a cave.

Observations:

1. "Diary are you ready?"

I was always WARNING my journal of what I was about to reveal. Already I had a judgmental voice in my head, the voice of people who told me I was "too much", so I always felt like I needed people (or, er, an inanimate object like my diary) to "sit down" for my "big news".

2. "disloyal to Han"

Han? Who is that? Did I have a boyfriend I am not recalling? No. "Han" refers to "Han Solo". I was afraid that my exploding crush on Ben Marley would somehow be "disloyal to Han". Not Harrison Ford, mind you, but Han. First name basis. Disloyal? Like Han Solo (A FICTIONAL CHARACTER) in a galaxy far far away is going to sense a "disturbance in the Force" the day after I watch Skyward. "Hmmm," he grumbles, "I think she's 'off me' now and onto someone else ... That Sheila. What a cheater."

3. The "AHHHHHHHH" spans 7 lines in the tiny book.

So there are a couple of lines that are only: "HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

4. The promise "I'll write more later!!!" was an empty one.

I never got back to it "later". Not another word about Skyward or that "cute boy" appear in the rest of the journal, or the following journal. I got it out of my system quickly, apparently.

But then I think: No. I most certainly DID "write more later", didn't I. It just took me almost 30 years to get to it.

Whatever else, I do keep my promises.

Early Raiders script conference: Not to be missed

Go here for information and download the transcript between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan, as they hashed out their ideas - and tried to nail down the character of this "Indiana Smith" archaeologist guy. I also love the analysis by Mystery Man.

Excerpt from transcript (S = Steven Spielberg, G = George Lucas):

S — It would be funny if, somewhere early in the movie he somehow implied that he was not afraid of snakes. Later you realize that that is one of his big fears.

G — Maybe it's better if you see early, maybe in the beginning that he's afraid: "Oh God, I hate those snakes." It should be slightly amusing that he hates snakes, and then he opens this up, "I can't go down in there. Why did there have to be snakes? Anything but snakes." You can play it for comedy…

And I love one of Mystery Man's screenwriting lessons:

No idea is a bad idea when you’re brainstorming.

Something definitely to keep in mind.

Go read the whole thing. Such fun. Wonderful, wonderful, to listen to those three guys bat their ideas around.

The fawn and Alice

"So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of Fawn."

-- Alice Through the Looking Glass

This is my guiding image for today. For reasons that shall perhaps one day become clear.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Books I have found, a book I still need to find

The invention of the Internet (thanks, Al Gore!) has changed my book-buying life. Once I figured out (and since I'm a Luddite it was relatively recently - my dad was way ahead of the curve on this one, as a book collector) that you could scan Amazon and other book sellers for out-of-print and hard-to-find books, through all of the used bookstores that also sell on Amazon ... well. My life has become a Trixie Belden novel, tracking down the books I once loved and ordering them. I'm a collector, too. I need to OWN these things. Which is why my bookshelf situation is so dire right now, but hey, some people collect cars, others collect shoes ... I collect books.

There are times when I'm bored and I'll suddenly start to think: "Okay, okay ... so what else ... what ELSE haven't I found ..." and I'll scan my memory as a child. Some pretty amazing books have emerged from my mind in this manner. Suddenly I'll remember - "Holy shit - Sarah and Katie - I LOVED that book!" With a couple of clicks through Amazon, and I find that SOMEONE is selling it. Amazing! Five days later, I have a battered paperback in my hand of a book I once adored, and barely remember.

Some of the books I have found:

Into the Dream - William Sleator (this is a good book - PERIOD)

The summer sleigh ride, - what is beautiful is that the copy I got here is an ex-library copy - and it is the exact same version that I remember reading as a kid. Hard cover, blue ... and the illustrations ... God, it just took me back. (excerpt here)

When the Sky is Like Lace - I wrote about my years-long search to find this book here. I was looking for the wrong title. But I was obsessed with finding it. Gorgeous illustrations. (excerpt here)

The mystery of Lonesome Manor - Another piece of good fortune - the copy I have is exactly the copy I remember as a kid. Hard cover, battered ... This book transported me, and I basically wanted to live in it, and have long blonde braids, and 11 brothers and sisters, and snowshoe home through the French Canadian night ... Marvelous mystery, great book. (excerpt here

Louly - by Carol Ryrie Brink. The only book of hers that you can still stroll into an actual store and find is Caddie Woodlawn, her most famous and beloved book. It's good, I loved Caddie Woodlawn, but it's nothing compared to Louly - the story of a group of kids in 1908, and the leader of the group is a girl named Louly ... who is on the cusp of being a teenager ... but not quite there yet. She wants to be an actress. I re-read this book a couple of years ago (once I finally tracked it down) and found it just as marvelous as I did when I was 11. (excerpt here)

Luvvy and the Girls. - by Natalie Savage Carlson. Who can say why some books seem to stand the test of time - like Caddie Woodlawn or Anne of Green Gables, and other books are forgotten. Luvvy and the Girls is almost completely forgotten (although I do get emails about it from time to time since I wrote about it) - and to me it feels like a classic. She's a marvelous writer - she really puts you there, she creates characters who live, breathe, behave in unexpected ways. The story of sisters at a boarding school ... It was one of my favorite books growing up, and it was one of those books that popped into my head over the last five years and I became determined to track it down. It's not in print now. It's completely forgotten. This does not reflect upon its merits as a book. Any young girl would be transported by this book. (excerpt here)

The aforementioned Sarah and Katie. - which I actually haven't re-read since I tracked it down, but I will, eventually. The story of two best friends, who have written a school play together, and suddenly there is a new girl in school, with long red hair, who has an air of glamour about her, and she gets the lead in the play co-written by Sarah and Katie - and somehow she starts to make trouble between the two long-standing friends. Sarah and Katie emerge as real girls - one more grumpy and impatient, one quiet and sweet but with real backbone ... and the prospect of this friendship breaking up is terrible. I don't remember much more of it, but I do remember the details: Sarah walks home to lunch every day from school (this amazed me as a young girl ... I didn't live close enough to home to do that) - and I remember that Katie had a long blonde braid, and I remember the culminating scene - which is the play being performed ... Anyway, I'll have to re-read it eventually. I took it out from the school library so much as a kid that the librarian probably just wanted to say to me, "Why don't you just take it for good?"

NOW.

There is one book I remember from my childhood, and I cannot remember the title, the author, or anything about it. I think there were illustrations, but I can't be sure. I believe, too, that I read other books by this same author. I can even see where it was at my local library, what shelf it was on ... but I can't remember, alphabetically, what that shelf was. I think it might have been early on in the alphabet ... like F or G ... but again, I can't be sure.

Maybe this will sound familiar to someone out there.

It tells the story of a wacky British family who all live in the same "townhouse" in London. There's a mother, father, some kids, and crazy relatives - all there together. When the book opens it is raining. Not such a big deal in England, but this rain just won't stop. It rains so much that the "townhouse" - with the entire wacky British family inside - lifts up from its foundation and floats off down the street. The "townhouse" ends up in the South Pacific ... and they have many adventures along the way, and I believe cannibals are involved at one point, as well as a desert island, and other craziness. I remember the book being very funny, with great characters - and the father being all proper and flustered, as his damn house floated away.

I have looked and looked for this book, but without a title or an author, I'm stuck. I have Googled crazy things like "children's book, British house, floating away ..." and come up with nada.

That's the main book I'd love to find right now.

Until another one comes up from out of the memory bank, and I focus on THAT.

I WILL find this book. I thought I would never find When the Sky is Like Lace, and the journey of remembering that book and finally owning that book was a years-long affair. I have patience. All of this may seem rather pathetic, but gimme a break. I only have a duck and five books, what more do you want from me.

But I do wonder if any of the voracious readers out there remember such a book.

For safekeeping:

Roger Chaffee was one of the original Apollo astronauts, but he was brought in later, not part of that first macho group, so many of the comments about him later from his colleagues were along the lines of, "Well, I didn't know him all that well, but he seemed like a nice guy ..." He had had no time in space when he was chosen for the first Apollo mission, and that brought a lot of grumbling -mainly from the PR machine surrounding the space program. Astronauts were not just pilots and engineers and geologists in training - but they were also celebrities, expected to make public appearances, and make NASA look good. There is one amusing (and yet awkward) scene in From the Earth to the Moon when Roger Chaffee is sent out to what looks like an Elks Club meeting, and he is their keynote speaker, and everyone present is like, "Who the hell is THAT? Has he ever been in space?" But Chaffee rolls with that punch, doesn't seem to take it personally, and does his best to promote NASA and the Apollo missions - he has the sense that what he is involved in is bigger than himself. Later, after Chaffee was killed, Frank Borman testified before Congress in the hearings investigating what went wrong. And Borman, like most of the other astronauts, prefaces his remarks with, "Roger Chaffee was new ... I didn't know him all that well ..." But the one anecdote he shares is eloquent, not just about Chaffee the man, but about the type of man involved in the space program. There was a meet-and-greet at an air force base, with the top brass and the press and all the bigwigs - but there were also a bunch of mechanics sitting in the back, the men responsible for actually building the machines that were going to to go to the moon. And Roger Chaffee went up to this group to thank them personally, to take time to chat with them, man to man, mechanic to mechanic, about what they all were working on. Borman says, "And Chaffee made them feel like they were the most important part of the space program."

The episode involving the fire on Apollo One that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee is one of the most wrenching of the entire mini-series. The first half involves the fire itself, and if you just imagine what those men went through, it is horrifying. To not be able to get out. And to die ... not up in the void of space, which might be awful but would at least have some heroism attached to it, not to mention being slightly expected and planned for ... but on the damn launch-pad, surrounded by the crew on the ground ... It was a horrible thing. Horrible for the men in that command module, of course (the episode posits what happened, and the feeling of claustrophobia is so intense you want to race through the flames yourself to rip the hatch open) - but also horrible for their families, not to mention the space program itself. It nearly derailed the whole thing.

The second half of the episode deals with the fallout, the sheer tragedy of it, and Congressional hearings, and the palpable feeling you get that these men are ALL making it up as they go along. In my opinion, this is David Andrews' finest hour in the entire mini-series, and he has many superb moments - but he is called in to testify before Congress, provide context, and he is beyond good. I watched it hunched over, holding my breath.

Over the last two months, since I first saw Skyward again (part one and two), I have obviously been re-acquainting myself with Ben Marley, an actor I adored as a youth, and whom I never thought of since. Until two months ago.

These have been dark dark times for me, and very often I do not know which end is up. My reading is nonexistent, I can no longer write (at least not the writing that I need to do), and I have no sense of time. I drift. I am thankful, in a way, that I am a very rigid personality, because there is something in me, something internal, that keeps me on track. I have no one else to help me, I have no backup. But I make my appointments, I meet my deadlines, and I trudge forward. With zero joy. But I trudge forward. There is much to be thankful for. My sister is having a baby in two months. Cashel climbed a rock wall a couple times and is going to Astro Camp this summer and is very excited. He is also working hard at his cello practice. He is having breakthroughs left and right in how he deals with the world. My other sister has just come out with her second album, which makes me want to cry every time I hear it, and is flourishing with her wonderful new boyfriend, whom I now think of as a member of our family. Lovely man. My brother is writing and composing and trying to stay healthy, not to mention stay on top of being a father and a good partner to Melody. And my mother. What can I say. She looks around at the world and does her best to see the good in it. Always. I don't know anyone like her.

I have a lot happening right now, obviously. What I share on the blog is what I choose to share (something that is lost on many, who think that my blog is my whole life.) Most of my life is off the blog. It has always been that way.

But into this disorientation (which is good and right - nothing wrong with it at all) - has come (out of the blue - thank you, Glenn in Texas) Skyward, which, yes, has been scorned by a couple of people who don't get it. I don't write for those who don't get it and I don't defend myself. I see no need, and I dislike my writing when it gets defensive. What has happened to me, through Skyward, is that I have remembered - and cherished - who I was on this planet before things started shifting, before time changed, elongated, shrunk. It was a moment in my life when I was still a little girl, but starting to cherish hopes that I kept secret from my parents. I was young enough to have no concept beyond my own innocence. All I had were inchoate dreams and yearnings. I have often asserted that this is the best part of us. And when we lose that part, or snicker at it, or talk down to it- we lose our humanity. The price is too high to pay.

This is how I operate. This is how I have always operated. I suppose it is the fantasist in me, the person who dislikes reality and would like to join a dreamspace pronto - and for good ... so yes, there is a part of all of this that acts as an Ejector Seat for me. But, as always, there is more to it than that. What a passion like this does is that it helps me - in the darkest bleakest of moments - to stay in touch with that that is still juicy, still alive, still hopeful ... the part of me that helps me keep going.

I have written before that, over the history of my life, I have had these "obsessions" repeatedly. They burn out like a fever. But they usually appear when I need them the most. 2002. Ewan McGregor, Moulin Rouge. It has to do with what Dr. Wilbur, in Sybil, says to Sybil when she plays her tapes of the altnernate personalities - playing Mozart, etc. "That's Vanessa ..." she says ... "and she has all your music for safekeeping." In 2002, I could not focus on my own life, because I was too far gone, I could not say to myself, as my own parent or doctor, "Oh ... I will need this for safekeeping ... DON'T LOSE THIS" because my mindset was too bad. If you have never been there, you could not understand. I could not turn my attention at all to what I had lost or what I wanted to keep, because, frankly, I was manic and suicidal for four months. It is a feeling I never ... ever ... wish to experience again. It was a maelstrom in the mind. All I could do was maintain my index card project and watch Moulin Rouge. Over ... and over ... and over ... and over ...

It is only now that I am out of that dreadful time that I can see that my subconscious, my soul, was putting things away "for safekeeping". That without Moulin Rouge, I would have been lost for good. Now, yes, there were practical things that happened that helped me eventually too - doctors and drugs and care from the medical profession ... but I had already started on that path. My soul reached out into the darkness and grasped onto Moulin Rouge and clung to it like a life raft.

To this day, I have a hard time seeing that movie.

It served its purpose.

After the big brou-haha with Oliver this past week, balking at my posts on the "poster boy", I got a comment that only served to show me that some people will never get the point of what I am doing here. (Or what, in general, a blog is. But that's another issue.) This gentleman, obviously thinking he was being supportive, wrote, "Please more posts like this - less 'gravitas' and more Square Pegs please!" He then left a little smiley emoticon. This person, just like Oliver, has missed the point, and his comment is just as ridiculous as the one left by the person who is affronted by my LACK of "seriousness".

Gravitas has its place here, just as does frivolity. I actually don't find "frivolity" to be a silly concept at all, or "light" - I find it to be one of our precious gifts as humans. An ability to be frivolous means we are still alive, and oh God, what dreadful bores are those humans with no sense or appreciation of frivolity. When I write a post such as this one, the person I have in mind as my Ideal Reader (because that's the only person I write to) ... reads, and takes it in, and not just thinks about what I have said, but thinks about their own lives ... their own journeys ... the things they want to hide away for safekeeping, and how they manage to do that. By cooking, or sewing, or pushing their kid on the swingset.

I am going where I, personally, need to go right now, and I am trying ... desperately ... through my writing ... to put things away for safekeeping. I can't lose anymore. I can't afford it.

As always, it is not an accident. It is not an accident that Glenn from Texas would have Googled Suzy Gilstrap of all things, in mid-December, just in time to see my post on that fine lady. It is not an accident that he taped those two silly television movies, and still has copies ... and was willing to send them on to me. It is not an accident that this obsession (I prefer to call it a "project") has come into my life at this particular time. I can feel that things are being stored away ... safely ... so that I can find them again if I should want them.

None of this has been an accident.

Ben Marley as Roger Chaffee, "From the Earth to the Moon"

What a nice face he has.

Is that ....? No, it couldn't be.

TWENTY PLUS YEARS AGO

He wasn't in the theatre department, but he was peripheral to it, somehow - perhaps he took a couple of acting classes, or worked in a scene shop, or dated someone in the department - I can't remember. He came to all the parties, he was one of us ... and yet NOT one of us ...

Because he wasn't 100% ensconced in the hothouse atmosphere of our department, he was kind of a rare commodity, and sightings of him thrilled us, and everybody LOVED him. We would get excited when we heard he was coming to a party. "Mark's coming? Oh, cool!" we would say to each other.

He had the easygoing funny energy of a boy who was always coming off an awesome game of ultimate Frisbie on the Quad. A real Rhode Island type.

He and I once played an impromptu chase game through the lobby of the theatre, and instead of saying "Go" to begin the chase, it was decided (by whom?) that one of us had to shout, "Cracker Barrel Cheese." So poor random students, who had nothing to do with the theatre, but were just cutting through the building on their way somewhere else, had to dodge the whizzing lunatics racing around columns shouting, "CRACKER BARREL CHEESE." at each other.

He was a peripheral person to the department, but very well-liked, and we all remember him fondly. "Hey member him? Wonder what happened to him?"

A COUPLE WEEKS AGO

I posted a bunch of pictures on Facebook from a Halloween party we had in college. I've posted some of the photos here repeatedly. Of course, all of my friends are on Facebook, so I put up all of these crazy pictures from the party, and tagged everyone. Hilarity ensued. Memory Lane blossomed forth. There is one photo from that party of Mark bobbing for apples. He was with a girl who appeared to be dressed as a woodland nymph. And he had some insane wig on. Mitchell, Jackie, other friends - were all commenting, "Where is he now? He was so great! Look at how adorable he is. I wonder what he's up to now!" There was one comments section in particular where we all just sat around (virtually), reminiscing about how much fun he was.

THREE DAYS AGO

I got into an elevator. There was a guy in it already. Nobody else was in the elevator but us.

He said to me, "So ... ya think it's getting warmer out today?"

I had just been looking out the window, and saw huge dripping icicles on the roof - so I said (and I immediately liked this guy - I like people who are nice, and the way he opened up conversation was nice), "I just saw some dripping icicles out the window - almost like it was raining!"

He said, "Wow! Okay!"

There was something about him ...

He radiated niceness, and I needed nice-ness that day - it was a rough one ... but there was something else ... The elevator ride wasn't long, we only had 7 floors together ... but I took one quick glance at him, then took another glance, and finally ...

I took the leap.

"Are you Mark [last name]?"

He gave me this weird excited look, almost like he was on the edge of something, like he wanted to say something too, and he said, "Yes."

By that point we had reached the lobby floor - I said, "I'm Sheila - from college!"

He said (and this was the best part), "The second you walked in the elevator, I took one look at you and thought ... Is that ....? No ... it couldn't be ..."

I said, "Just the way you were so nice when you asked me about the weather ... I thought to myself ... Is that ....?"

He said, "I had to talk to you - just to be sure ..."

At some point in the middle of this, we hugged, trying to get over how weird and wonderful it was ... that we had both recognized each other ("CRACKER BARREL CHEESE") and tiptoed around it for 5 floors before making the jump of faith.

We stood in the bustling hallway and talked for about half an hour, catching up, laughing, all that - and of course I had to fill him in on the whole love-fest he had missed out on on Facebook literally TWO WEEKS PRIOR. It's not like we all sit around and talk about Mark all day long. We probably haven't referenced his name in over 20 years. I haven't seen him since college. It was the scanning of those photos into Facebook, and the picture of him bobbing for apples - uploaded to Facebook two damn weeks before - that made us all stop and ponder: what happened to him?

Ask and ye shall receive.

Two weeks after saying, "Where is he? Can we find him??", I run into the damn guy in the elevator, after two decades of nothingness, and get the answers to all of my questions.

How does one catch the other one up on 20 years of life? We did not try. The connections, however, abound. Where I work right now - he works on the floor above me - and if I had X-ray vision, I could basically see thru the ceiling to where he sits. Truly bizarre. But I loved seeing him, and I was laughing - "Dude, this is so strange - we were all just crushing on you like two weeks ago on Facebook ... remembering you fondly, all that - so weird - "

He just kept laughing at the image of that.

He looks exactly the same to me. All it took was that closer glance. And I feel strangely gratified that I look enough like my college self that he would glance at me in the elevator and think: Is that ....? Could it be ....?

Yes. It is.

And I am still doubtful when David refers to my life as a "literary conceit".

"From the Earth to the Moon": HBO mini-series

In 1998, HBO launched its massive Tom Hanks creation, From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part miniseries detailing the entire space program in America, from its early days to the last moon-landing. The mini-series was highly decorated at the time, and it is not hard to see why. A massively ambitious project, it examines all the different aspects of the program - from the astronauts, to the "world outside", to the pressures from NASA, to the engineers who had to build these spacecraft, to the wives - and it does so, blessedly, with very little schmaltz. This is potentially tough material. It seems like a no-brainer, but the traps are everywhere. It could have been far too golden-hued or kitschy, or it could have left out the more petty parts (the clash of astronaut egos, the political pressures and ramifications, the very human emotions of greed and ambition) in favor of a more promotional flag-waving endeavor. It brings up (at least in this American viewer) a sense of national pride ("Look at what our guys did!), which should be just treated as a given, and not worked for, because otherwise the entire thing becomes a propaganda exercise. From the Earth to the Moon does not fall into that trap. It knows it has a great story - not just in the space program as a whole, but each different mission - and its challenges, its triumphs, its stop-gap solutions. By the end, you really get the sense of just how ambitious (and crazy) this project really was. The mini-series is smart to focus on the details of the space program, and let the emotions come as they will - not work for them.

It's telling that my favorite episode of the 12 is the one called Spider, which details the journey of Grumman Aircraft's building of the Lunar Module, which took eight years, and much improvisation. It is a slam-dunk of an episode, and mainly involves guys in glasses and white shirts and ties hovering over small nuts and bolts, and staring at their little space-craft models with serious eyes. But by the end of the episode, when that Lunar Module is being taken off to actually, you know, be USED, to land on the moon ... and the wonderful Matt Craven, who plays the head engineer, watches it go off, you really get the impact, the hours of manpower and the hundreds (thousands) of men involved in making such an accomplishment possible. It is truly moving. And the emotion is earned, not assumed. The astronauts, naturally, got all the glory. Perhaps with the doomed Apollo 13 mission, the engineers and Mission Control guys took center stage - it was them who figured out how to get those boys home ... but I very much liked that From the Earth to the Moon focused one of its episodes on the true NERDS of the space program, the guys who struggled and suffered and brainstormed, over a number of years, to make this thing happen. They were building something that had no precedent. There was nothing to work from. Nothing to look to as a model. Every step of the way had to be thought out, tested.

Unforeseen consequences of tiny choices had enormous impact. The velcro, for example, used throughout the command module, to stick pens to, to stick their feet onto ... a practical solution to the floating void of space the astronauts would have to be working in. The velcro was a practical solution, which - during the Apollo 1 fire, which ended the three astronauts' lives - ended up having dire consequences, due to its flammability under a higher oxygen level. But there were so many things like that that could not be avoided, no matter the brainpower focusing on each problem ... and the mini-series does not shy away from that reality. These guys were test pilots. They were used to taking their lives into their hands. They knew the risks. But it still didn't mean that they were cavalier when men were lost. It is a difficult and complex thought, and From the Earth to the Moon is tangible with that reality.

The series is filled with great acting, and one of the best aspects of it (and it is that way by design) is that it is not a star vehicle. We don't follow one man through the program. People come in and out. There are a couple of regulars. Nick Searcy (what a face, what a wonderful actor) plays Deke Slayton, an astronaut not allowed to fly due to a heart problem. That must have been a bitter pill for him to swallow, but he took his expertise and know-how to become the over-seer for each mission, handling the flight commands. He appears in nearly every episode. Then there are astronauts who start to grow in importance, as their mission comes nearer - Tony Goldwyn (who is marvelous) plays Neil Armstrong, and we see him briefly at the beginning, in the first episode, and he then subsides ... until it is his turn. Other actors (Tim Daly, Dave Foley, Cary Elwes, Mark Harmon) play other astronauts, who have their moment in the sun. All of them, naturally, want to be the first guy out. These are competitive gentlemen, and the mini-series really captures that Right Stuff "yeah, baby" relationship between all these guys. But we also have Lane Smith, in a fictional character, based on Walter Cronkite, who details the space program for us, over a number of episodes, interviewing the astronauts, and giving us essential details of how the whole thing works. He's wonderful. There are people (like Kevin Pollak and the marvelous James Rebhorn - he's my kind of actor) who take center stage for one episode alone, and then disappear. Stephen Root, another actor whom you would instantly recognize and exclaim, "Oh, it's that guy!", is fantastic here in a number of episodes. God, is he fun to watch. He gets the humor, the toughness, the steely-eyed focus ... Wonderful. But the list goes on and on. Ann Magnuson has a small cameo as the sweet nurse who works with the astronauts before each mission, and there's one shot of her, in her office, during a launch, clutching a rosary, eyes closed, lips moving in prayer. Every time we have seen her up to that point, she is taking blood from an astronaut's arm, or bantering with them - every time we have seen her she has been in her official position. But the mini-series takes the time and has the imagination to show her, by herself, praying for those guys she has come to know. It's a lovely touch, but the mini-series is full of subtle moments like that. It flat out would not work without them. Something like this, so grand in scope, so huge in ambition, needs - and needs desperately - to be grounded in reality and detail. From the Earth to the Moon is.

Ron Howard and Brian Glazer were producers on the project, and, in a really nice dovetail, have gotten as many of the actors from Apollo 13 as they possibly could. Not to play the same parts - but it's nice to see that those who played astronauts in Apollo 13 play astronauts here as well. Ron Howard's brother, so memorable in Apollo 13, plays another Mission Control guy. Some of the Mission Control guys in Apollo 13, who are also astronauts looking forward to their own missions (I love the one guy who says, "When I go up there, I'm bringin' my entire collection of Johnny Cash") - play astronauts in From the Earth to the Moon. Familiar faces. If you're an Apollo 13 nut like I am, you will recognize everyone. "Oh! That's the guy who helped build the filter!" It's down to that level of detail. And so it creates a real feeling of community and continuity. Even though these people are actors, because they have already inhabited that world so accurately in Apollo 13 - they bring with them the memories of that film, helping add to the sense of authenticity in From the Earth to the Moon. Nice choice.

Each mission has its own character and challenges. Tom Hanks, a space nut since he was a little kid, says in one of the DVD extras, that while we all know the name of Neil Armstrong - how many people are aware of just what went on during the mission known as Gemini 8? But there would be no Neil Armstrong on the moon if it hadn't been for the steps taken in Gemini 8 (and all the others) ... and by watching each mission unfold, you really get the sense of the teamwork and ingenuity involved. It was a nearly impossible task. Not to mention the fact that all eyes were on NASA. The gauntlet had been thrown down: "by the end of the decade" ... so the deadlines are unreasonable, the media-spotlight intense ... not to mention the fact that there were other national things to worry about at the time, like assassinations and war and civil unrest. Did we really care about getting to the moon when things were so bad on earth? Because this is a mini-series, it doesn't have the problem of focusing on just one of these things, which would make it all rather top-heavy and ponderous. There is one episode called "1968", which focuses on the events of that terrible year (not just in America, but around the world), and the sort of otherworldly old-school atmosphere of NASA, still moving along, still moving ahead ... but with attention being pulled off their objective. The mini-series format helps us glance upon these important things, but not dwell ... not stay there ... factor it into the mix, and move on.

The overall effect is that of a collage.

I watched it when it first came out. It felt like the entire country watched it. It was, that rarity nowadays, a television event.

I am now, naturally, watching it again, on my own time ... mainly because Ben Marley, who played astronaut John Young in Apollo 13, is here again, playing Roger Chaffee, one of the astronauts who died in the fire on the launch-pad in Apollo 1. And so my motives are not pure (or ARE pure, however you look at it) ... but it's been a lot of fun to watch the entire thing again, over the last two weeks. It's a mind-boggling accomplishment, as a whole. And I haven't even mentioned the stellar special effects, an undertaking deserving of its own documentary in and of itself. In the DVD extras, there is a "featurette", detailing the creation of all of the images, and it was fascinating. One of the things I really liked about it was that it had a mix of digital effects and actual footage. For example, one of the biggest sets was ever built - a replica of the moon surface - which was almost two acres large. The shots of the crew, walking around on the moon, placing big plaster-of-paris rocks, and basically shoveling moon-dust around, wearing plaid shorts and sweatshirts and tool belts, is hilarious - a beautiful incongruous moment of movie-making. How to make the effect of sunlight and shadow on the moon? We learn about that in the documentary. How to make the astronauts appear weightless? We learn how they did that, too. A giant undertaking, and I thought the special effects here were superb.

There are other actors I haven't even mentioned, ones that I would love to write more about. David Andrews, who plays Frank Borman, he of the ice-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, and basic awesomeness, is one of my favorite characters in the entire mini-series. He is a fantastic actor, never less than riveting, three-dimensional, powerful ... But he is just one of many.

I will, obviously, be writing more about this, but I wanted to just give my overall thoughts this morning.

Calling all New Yorkers: Joe Hurley's 10th annual Irish Rock Revue

There's are two shows this year - one on March 14th, and one on March 17th as well.

Both shows are being held at La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street.

Buy tickets for the March 14th show here.

Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.

Joe Hurley has been hosting the Irish Rock Revue (with a cast of thousands) in New York for years now, and this coming year will be the 10th annual event.

I've seen Joe Hurley perform (at the Losers Lounge Queen Tribute, where he rocked the house with "Fat Bottomed Girls" as though he were to the Freddie-Mercury-born) and I've also had the pleasure of singing a medley of songs with him from Oliver in the middle of the day outside a Wall Street Bar on Bloomsday in 2002. Impromptu. His voice is a mix of Tom Waits and, well, Ron Moody. Mixed in with a little Joe Strummer. Boy is a force of nature. Not to be missed.

His band, Rogue's March, have been together for years now - an emotional and jagged mixture of punk and Irish traditional music (and yeah, with a little "oom pah pah" mixed in there - Joe Hurley is obsessed with the musical Oliver, and why shouldn't he be, I ask you?) - and you can keep up to date with all of their shenanigans at their website. You know, concerts with the Chieftains and all that.

When I met Joe Hurley, I was sitting in a crowd of crazy Irish people on a sidewalk outside a bar in downtown New York, wearing an eyepatch (in honor of James Joyce), and I was shouting out lines from Molly Bloom's final monologue in Ulysses at the top of my lungs (and I wasn't the only one), and I was also drunk at 2 in the afternoon (and I wasn't the only one in that, either). The "Oliver" sing-along that began soon thereafter was spontaneous, and spearheaded by Hurley - but supported enthusiastically by myself. Other people took up the choruses, but we were the only two who knew the words to, well, everything. Oh, Betsy, if only you had been there. When I burst out in a low bass, all on my own, "Kniiiiives .... knives to grind ... aneeeeee knives to gri-ind ..." I thought Joe Hurley's head would explode. I got a high-five from him when I began "Where Is Love". I didn't even know him as "Joe Hurley (TM)" at that point - I had no idea who he was or his reputation - all I knew knew was: "Holy shit someone's as big a nerd as I am!"

It was only years later that I saw him onstage at the Bowery Ballroom, howling out "Fat-Bottomed Girls" as plump drag queens wearing flamingo-pink outfits bicycled around the stage throwing footballs back and forth, that I put it all together. But my response, from the balcony of Bowery Ballroom, was not, "Wow, that's a big star." My response was, "Oh my God! That's that Oliver nerd!!"

This past November, I got an email out of the blue from a Joe Hurley. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. I opened it, and there was a Mr. Hurley, saying, basically, that he remembered the chick in the eyepatch from 7 years ago ... who loved Oliver ... and he tracked me down to tell me his band, Rogue's March, was doing an Oliver tribute for his birthday at Joe's Pub, and would I like to come. Of course, he found me through my blog, this post in particular, not to mention asking everyone who was there that day if they knew me and could find me. November was the darkest month of all. I couldn't go to his show at Joe's Pub, but it did make me laugh to remember that long ago Bloomsday, sitting on a picnic table surrounded by the canyons of Wall Street, not even a year after September 11th, wearing an eyepatch, and singing "It's a fine fine life" with this crazy-haired perfect stranger who knew all the words. That took some ingenuity to track me down. We didn't even know each other's names!

Anyway, the Irish Rock Revue is now a New York tradition, and I'm finally going, thanks be to God.

It's being held on two nights this year: March 14, and March 17. Proceeds go to a couple of good causes (Gilda's Club and the Humane Society), and it looks to be a couple of massive parties. He has guest artists come and sing, people from Broadway, Irish novelists who live in town, poets, performance artists ... I can't wait!

Joe Hurley was just featured in the Irish Echo, there's a lot of great information about him there - but I also wanted to get the word out to my fellow New Yorkers (and New Jersey-ians and, I suppose, Connecticut-ians) about the Irish Rock Revue, because it's going to be a helluva show.

Again, buy tickets for either show here or here.

The willingness to be happy

From Joan Acocella's essay "Perfectly Frank", about Frank O'Hara (a man I have always wished that I had known)- included in the compilation Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints:

In the doomed-poet drama that has been retrospectively read into O'Hara's story, this poem ['A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island'] has been taken as a premonition of death. But to me the most remarkable thing about it is O'Hara's sense of blessedness, an emotion that surfaces again and again in his verse. Indeed, it is one of the things ("gay, glancing") held against him by those who feel that he was not a serious person. This, in turn, has led some of his defenders to overstress the sadness - presumably a warranty of seriousness - that can sometimes be detected in his poetry. The light tread of his lyrics, Geoff Ward says, "is only a step away from the grave." It is true that O'Hara had the Irish sense of life, but the note of grief would be far less persuasive if it were not accompanied, as it almost always is, by the keenest possible responsiveness to life's goodness. Even at his most depressed, when his romance with Vincent Warren is falling apart, O'Hara is witty. ("I walk in / sit down and / face the frigidaire" - presumably Vincent.) When, on the other hand, that relationship is going well, even bad things seem good to him: "Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion."

Boyfriends aside, he finds a thousand things to like. Ballet dancers fly through his verse. Taxi drivers tell him funny things. Zinka Milanov sings, the fountains splash. The city honks at him and he honks back. This willingness to be happy is one of the things for which O'Hara is most loved, and rightly so. It is a fundamental aspect of his moral life, and the motor of his poetry.

Here a couple of posts by my friend Ted about O'Hara, one of my favorite poets:

New York as muse

Because too much was never enough for him

For A., as promised

Here is the "missing footage" of Larry Simpson running his fingers through his hair in the "Square Pegs" episode 'It's Academical'.

Meeting up at the Strand

I got there about 20 minutes before my mother. I haven't been to the Strand in a while, and I always have to deal with about 5 or 10 minutes of jittery anxiety upon arrival, kind of like Hope being faced with a bowl of Fancy Feast and a bowl of dry food. What do I do first?? My brain will explode! It is the most satisfying of bookstores - a combination of good prices, helpful staff, amazing selection, and general atmosphere (no music blaring like at Barnes & Noble, a pet peeve of mine.) It's always an absolute madhouse so that's the only thing that might be negative about it, but that's part of the experience, too. My mother and I were walking around at one point and she said, "Isn't it so nice ... to see hundreds of people browsing through books?" It certainly is. And it just feels different than a big chain. It feels more serious. As well as MANIC. The prices can be so low that it catapults people, myself included, into a kind of mania. There is danger of going into a fugue state. Or something akin to Steve Martin in "The Jerk", grabbing every single thing that comes in his path. "I need THIS ... oh, and I need THIS ..." Need?? Hundreds of dollars later you stagger out with 30 books in 5 bags, and you have no idea what you have bought. I speak from personal experience!

Mum and Siobhan were coming in from Brooklyn, where they were visiting Cormac, Liam and Lydia's new glorious baby ... and Mum called me at about 5 pm, just as I was approaching The Strand, to say they would be there in about 20 minutes.

"Okay. I'll be back in the Entertainment Biography section."
"Of course you will."

I began to get heart palpitations as I made my way through the THRONGS around all the sales tables. And I kept getting diverted. "Oh, I need THIS ..." "Oh, look, I need THIS."

Mum and Siobhan arrived 20 minutes later, and I had my arms full of books, many of them over-sized. My arms were falling off. What was I thinking? Did I imagine that I would be air-lifted out of there? But I was in a fugue state, and the most expensive of the books in my arms was 12.95 - and it was an enormous book called "Forties Gals" - with profiles and pictures of all the big actresses of the 1940s, you know - all the dames I love. In a regular bookstore, that book might be 40 bucks. So, you know, I went a little crazy.

Siobhan had to work that night, so she left us - and Mum and I had a wonderful time, browsing and talking and sharing. I was pretty much done by the time they arrived. I had chosen:

1. Together Again - by the wonderful gossipy Garson Kanin - a book where he analyzes great movie couples - Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, et al

2. The aforementioned Forties Gals books which probably weighed 10 pounds by itself

3. Movie Poster - a huge coffee table book analyzing the development of the art of the movie poster. I am drooling.

4. My Mother's Keeper - the bitchy tell-all book about Bette Davis by her grumpy daughter. And yeah, this is the book that has the immortal words "My SNEAKERS were sticking to the TAR, shit!"

5. Harlow - by Irving Shulman. Salacious and terribly written, it is a great book. I read it in high school, and was so afraid of the story of Paul Bern and what happened to him that this book emitted a dark glow from the shelves, drawing me back to it again and again. Now I own it.

6. Baby, I Don't Care. Take a wild guess who this book is about.

7. A marvelous book called Antique Packaging. It has no text. It is an art book. Image after image of old sardine cans and match books and things like that - from days gone by. Gorgeous.

8. This last one I am particularly excited about. It is enormous (again) - I have hard little biceps just from carrying my books around yesterday - and it is called The Poster in History. Another huge art book, detailing the history of the poster - not just for movies but for propaganda purposes - various war efforts, or the ideological battle for Communism - I love that crap, as I have written before ... and some of these posters, even some with causes I not only don't agree with but vehemently oppose - are works of art. I can't wait to look through it. Maybe I'll do some scanning. What a shock.

Other books I had that I put back - not because I judged them as unworthy - but because basically I feared my arms would fall off:

-- a giant book of Richard Avedon photos
-- a giant book of photos of Steve McQueen
-- a massive compilation of all of the writings of Kenneth Tynan

I just couldn't carry them all.

Then Mum and I went upstairs to the art books section and had a great time browsing. They have whole sections called "Art Papers" - which are almost like huge bins of sheet music that you just have to flip through, hoping to find the nugget of gold in the bottom of the sieve. Mum spent a lot of time there, as I looked at the photography books, getting sucked in to all the great Life books of photos. Mum found some good things there ... one was a small monograph of the work of Gabriele Münter - someone I had never heard of, but we both oohed and ahed over her work. The monograph was falling apart, it had obviously been donated to the Strand (much of what you find in the Art Papers bins are things of that nature - programs to art shows at a gallery in Prague, stuff like that - very cool, but you need to have the patience to weed through). When we got back to my apartment, we looked Münter up on the Internet, and found out some fascinating details about her life. My God. She obviously is mainly known for saving the works of Kandinsky, hiding them in her basement from the Nazis (and a couple of the works only exist through photographs she took of them - astonishing) ... but she was quite an artist in her own right. Mum really enjoyed looking through them all. So that was one thing she bought.

She also bought another art book - with impressionists from England - only, of course, the main ones were from Ireland. England can claim them all they want, these folks are Irish. Irish art is a passion of the O'Malley clan - mainly because you just have to go along with my father's obsessions or you will be left out of the conversation at the dinner table ... but Mum, of course, as a painter, has a lot of interest in these people as well. She could glance at a page and say, "Oh, that's by ..." and list the name.

So we both were very happy with our purchases. Then we walked down the block (and yesterday was the first real spring day, so New Yorkers were basically going MAD wearing shorts and mini skirts and looping about the sidewalks in glee) to go have dinner at Siobhan's restaurant. We didn't really (of course) get to talk to Siobhan ... only briefly ... but it was an environment of care and nurturing, because the entire staff knows us, the owner knows us ... and it was like going to have dinner at the house of a family friend. Only we were at a bar/restaurant in the East Village. It was the right choice. Mum and I had a great meal, and lots of good talk ... and I am, of course, always excited to be able to host her, when she comes down.

It was a relief to get to the car (we took a cab) because, man, our books were dragging us down.

When we got back to my place, we promptly got into our pajamas, and sat around, looking through our books, sharing this or that image, talking about things like Kandinsky and Nureyev and Saul Bass ... until finally we started fading, and fell asleep.

A good spring day in New York.

"Square Pegs" - 'It's Academical' (or: the heartbreaking return of Larry Simpson, aka Ben Marley)

Here's part one!

PART TWO

We left off with our quiz-show team chosen three: Muffy, Larry Simpson, and Patty, and we can already see there are going to be competitive issues between Muffy and Patty for Larry's love and adoration.

It is already apparent that Larry is drawn to Patty, but it is also apparent that she becomes a blithering idiot in his presence ("girlf"), and may not be up to the task of competing for him. But you also know that Larry is a little bit afraid of Muffy (aren't we all), and Muffy is really no competition at all.

Who knows how it will work out!

Let's take a look!

Muffy, Larry and Patty sit squeezed together in a booth at the local hamburger joint. Lauren sits at the counter nearby, basically coaching Lauren through what to say, through vigorous hand gestures and pantomime. Larry busts Lauren on this a couple of times, glancing over and seeing her wild gesticulations, and he starts to crack up, before getting himself together. It's endearing.

Look at how they're all squeezed in there - obviously so they can all be in the same shot in close-up but I want to say, "Guys ... learn boundaries - no need to sit ON TOP of each other. Unless of course, you want to ... Just don't do it in an open grave, mkay?"

Naturally, Muffy is dominating here. She is turning all of her focus onto Larry, and she talks as though she is in a Barbara Cartland novel.

"We are from two totally different walks of life, Larry!" she exclaims passionately.

Larry says, trying to keep everything in a more practical vein, "But we're both high school students."

Muffy barrels on, sighing, "C'est la truth."

Poor Patty.

Poor Patty, how 'bout poor Larry! Larry squirms through all of this, but still - he has that tragically attractive quality of still trying to be nice, even though all he wants to do is say, "Muffy. Back off, lady."

He tries to divert the conversation to more of a group event. "How was your burger, Patty?" he asks.

Patty doesn't know what to say to that, because ... she doesn't have one thought in her brain in that minute, and has no idea how to conduct herself. She glances over at Lauren desperately, who mimes to her that she should say, "It was THE BEST burger I have EVER tasted." hahahaha Guys like girls who are enthusiastic, apparently. So Patty, desperately, does what Lauren tells her to do, and gushes, "It was THE BEST burger I have EVER tasted."

Larry is kind of taken aback by the overly passionate response. He's like, "Uhm ... wow ... I'm really happy for you ..." Then he glances at Lauren, sees the tailend of her giant pantomime, and then gets what's going on. He starts to laugh, trying to hide it. It's kind of unbearably sweet and I don't care who knows my feelings on that score.

I know I keep saying this, but look at Muffy in that last shot! It just cracks me up. She is so annoyed at the interruption and that she does not have Larry's undivided attention.

Muffy blows right over Patty's gushing over her hamburger and continues on her romantic pursuit, leaning in over Patty, and insisting, in a breathless voice, that working together - with their two giant brains - will be the greatest love story of all time. Larry is caught, trapped. All he wants to do is get the hell out of there.

Muffy has one of the funniest lines in the episode here. She confesses, emotionally, "Larry, you bring out a level of pep in me I never knew I had."

Finally, he extricates himself from Muffy's clutches, but not before she reaches out to wipe the corner of his damn mouth with her napkin. He basically ENDURES that, but he's twitching away from her at that point. He picks up the check and says, "I have to go - let me get this - " Muffy can't have this, she reaches out and snatches it from his hand, saying, "Heavens no - this will be a Pep Club expense ..." All generous and benevolent ... and he's visibly uncomfortable now, picking up his books - "Okay, okay," he says, getting up - "I'll see you guys later" and basically rushes off, free at last.

Muffy watches him go, desperately. Doesn't look at Patty but hands her the check, still staring off after Larry, saying, "Patty, I seem to be short on cash ... could you get this, please?" and she rushes off after him shrieking, "LARRY???!" Again with the comedic slam-dunk of Jami Gertz.

The second Muffy is gone, Lauren races over into the void, to commiserate with her friend about how things are going. Lauren gets an idea. "You can't be too smart, Patty. Boys don't like girls who are smart." Patty is baffled, "They don't?" Lauren then launches into a giant monologue about why this is so, and how there is historical precedent to prove her point. "Did you see A Star is Born on TV last night?" she says. "James Mason plays a movie star, but when his wife gets more successful then him, he becomes an alcoholic wreck."

Patty is a lamb lost in the woods, she obviously can't handle interactions with Larry on her own steam ("girlf"), so you can tell she is considering Lauren's advice.

And you just know that this will not go well.

But very few things DO go well when you are 14 and in love with a hot senior. With "vigorous chest hair" and forearms that make you want to kill yourself if you're not allowed to touch them on your own terms and for as long as you want, PRONTO.

Next scene shows a study session with Larry, Muffy and Patty in the library. Muffy has taken the reins of the entire thing. She has somehow gotten transcripts of all of the quiz shows in the past - "It is said," she declares, as though she is talking about some Egyptian creation myth, "that they don't repeat questions ... but they may be lying." She has written flash cards with all the questions on it, and she ostentatiously passes out copies to Larry and Patty. Larry, meanwhile, is treating this all kind of humorously, because there's really no polite way to fight Muffy's bossiness ... and Patty sits sweltering in silence, waiting for her big moment to "act dumb".

Please notice how Lauren is hunched in the background of the second shot. That makes me laugh!

Larry does his best to assert his own power here, and says, holding the flash cards, "Okay - why don't we try some American History questions?"

He looks at the flash card and reads, "List the five presidents, in order, after Hoover."

He ponders this as Patty tries to look stupid, even though she probably can figure out the answer. Patty hems and haws, saying, "God ... I feel so DUMB ... I should know this ... why don' I know this?? I'm so STUPID!"

Larry starts to give her weird looks. Huh? What the hell is going on?

Patty makes a wild guess at the answer, "Didn't some of them have beards?"

Larry is basically surrounded at the moment with women who are flat-out lunatics. He has nowhere to turn now.

Muffy barges into the void, exclaiming: "ROUGH TOTS EAT COOL JELLO."

Oh, Muffy. Please stop being so crazy.

Larry and Patty are stunned into silence by her gibberish. Larry says, "What?" Muffy explains, proudly, "Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson! Rough Tots Eat Cool Jello!" I mean, how do you respond when someone acts so crazy?

Patty forgets that she's supposed to be acting dumb, and says, bitchily, "Kennedy doesn't start with 'C'."

Muffy loses it. "Are you trying to imply something about my intelligence?"

Patty snaps, "That's infer."

Uh-oh. Patty is showing she's smart. She then crumbles back, saying to herself, "How did I know that?" She turns directly to Larry and says, "Normally, I don't know things like that."

Larry doesn't know who he is anymore. What the hell has happened to Patty?

Also, why is she abandoning him to her own brand of lunacy, leaving him alone and undefended against Muffy? It would be much better if it were two against one - the two smart NORMAL ones against the smart INSANE one.

Muffy is on a rampage. "You may get grades as good as mine, but I have an advantage because I will be faster on the buzzer. I grew up with a push-button phone."

Larry is no longer concentrating on the study session. He keeps looking over at Patty, confused. Muffy then sees a group of students working on a banner in the other corner of the library and she howls in anger, "Oh, they've spelled my name wrong on that banner!" and flounces off. (You can see the big banner in the background - with huge letters: M U F Y. hahahahahaha)

Now comes a killer scene, which is really rather unfair, because it raises expectations in the fluttery hearts of adolescent girls everywhere. He CARES about her. That's the message. Devastating!

The second Muffy leaves, Larry turns to Patty and says, "Are you feeling all right, Patty? You really blanked out on that Presidents question."

What I like about the script here is that Patty doesn't keep up the charade. It gives an opportunity for a moment of connection - which does happen from time to time in high school (I am thinking of one of the best books of high school life and emotion that I have ever read - Prep, by Curtis Settenfeld - my review here. Prep is an unbelievably accurate - wrenchingly so - evocation of the adolescent experience from the ground up. So much of it has to do with play-acting, pretending to be a certain kind of person - choosing a persona, or having one chosen for you, accurately or no ... and it's a wilderness of make-believe, but sometimes - rarely - a moment can crack through that facade, and you are TRULY seen. More often than not, such moments are devastating, rather than pleasing ... but boy, those are the moments you remember). So the script writers, instead of having Patty keep up the act (which just wouldn't have been as interesting, much more cliched) - they have her 'fess up.

It's like Larry Simpson, and his concern for her, disarms her completely. He can be trusted. You can tell him things. You can admit your silliness. He won't judge.

Patty looks at him, hesitating, and then comes clean. "Have you ever seen Star is Born?"

He replies, kind of joking, but sweet, "Are you drunk?"

Patty's braver now, she's back in the realm of truth, and she says, "A friend told me that you would like me better if I wasn't so smart."

Larry almost laughs at this and says, "I don't think you should listen to that friend anymore." (as Lauren hovers in the background, subliminal).

Patty is relieved. "Really?"

He's gentle, now, talking to her very seriously, like he's trying to give her advice about how to live. "Patty, why do you think I went out with a college girl? Because she's smart. I like smart girls."

Uh oh. See, when you make a connection like that (college girl = you, Patty) you build up someone's hopes! He doesn't just say, "I like smart girls" - he says: "I went out with someone BECAUSE she was smart" and in a crazy 14-year-old's brain, that will immediately equal, "I want to go out with YOU." Whether or not that is what you intended!

Also, you can tell that Larry is proud of the fact that he dated outside of his age-group. He's a little vain about it.

I like him better for this small flaw.

Patty says, "You do?"

Larry says, and it's strangely intimate the way he says it, like he's not talking in a generalized abstract way, but very specifically - about her - "Yeah. So you don't have to do all that with me. You're smart. I like that."

To quote my friend Mitchell, the Jew: "Sweet Jesus."

He makes sure she got the message, with a quiet insistent, "Okay?" She nods, happily. It's a heart-cracker. Then he says, gathering up his books, "Okay ... I'll see you later, okay?" And off he goes, the most romantic hero of our era.

The second he leaves, Lauren swoops over, wanting to hear everything. "Tell me everything that just happened."

Patty is sitting taller now, her shoulders straight, her face calm and peaceful. She says, "Larry doesn't like dumb girls. He likes smart girls."

Lauren takes this in, and, true to form, immediately adjusts. "Okay, then, you now need to be the smartest girl he has ever met. Start studying!"

She is oblivious to her contradictions. She goes whichever way she is needed. It's hysterical. Patty calls her on it. "You do realize that that is the exact opposite to the advice you gave me yesterday?"

Lauren shrugs. "If I can be flexible, so can you!"

Now we come to the big moment: the filming of 'It's Academical' in the school gym. Longfellow Tech (boooo) vs. Weemawee High. There are battling squads of rival cheerleaders, people with banners, TV crews setting up ... general pandemonium.

Vinnie, LaDonna and Jennifer stroll into the gym.

I just need to take a moment to say: Look at their clothes.

Shame. White-hot shame.

Vinnie is still trying to figure out a way that he can get seen on the dance show. He has heard that there is going to be a sequel to Saturday Night Fever and he wants to be in it. "It's going to be directed by Sylvester Stallone," he raves, "and you know he doesn't just go around doing sequels." Ha. Funny line. Jennifer is, as always contemptuous (her epitaph should say "Meh" - a phrase I despise on the face of it - it, to me, suggests everything that is wrong with social interactions in this internet age. Oh it must be so DIFFICULT for you to be so OVER everything, to be so BEYOND joy that all you can say to pretty much anything is "Meh". Boo. Boo on Meh.) Jennifer says, "Yeah, like I really want to, like, stand in line to see Sunday Night Fever." Poor Vinnie, dating such an unsupportive drip.

Meanwhile, Dan Vermilion is "backstage", putting his makeup on and straightening his beard, and he makes some bullshit comment to the assistant principal nearby about how, "yeah, we all do our own makeup ... DeNiro ... Hoffman ... Pacino ..." Hilarious!

Now we get our first glimpse of the rival team, and have to say it, they are an intimidating and snotty looking bunch. Their air of competition is far more frightening than Muffy's more anxious shriek-fest of "gimme gimme gimme". These are worthy foes. Don't underestimate them.

They make the Weemawee team look like little kids.

Nice to see that Larry has once again donned his washed-up-professor-of-18th-century-French-literature's blazer.

Very appropriate for the occasion, smartypants.

The show begins. Lauren is LIVING it from the audience, shooting her support and love up onto the stage out of her eyeballs in a blinding-white paralyzing glow.

The quiz show begins. At one point, it becomes apparent that something fishy is going on. Dan Vermilion doesn't even finish the question before the Longfellow Tech main beeyotch rings her buzzer and gives the right answer. They are obviously cheating! They knew the questions beforehand - it is so obvious! It gets so bad that Dan Vermilion says, at one point, "In 1678 --" BUZZ from Longfellow Tech. Vermilion says, "Yes?" and the main blonde beeyotch leans in and says, "The defenestration of Prague?" Which, I'm sorry, is just fucking funny. Vermilion shouts, "CORRECT!"

Not fair! Is that the only damn thing that happened in 1678?

Next question: "In 1253 --" BUZZ form Longfellow Tech. Vermilion says, "Yes?" Blonde leans into the mike: "Mongols sack Baghdad." "CORRECT."

The audience is starting to get unruly, the cheerleaders from Longfellow are leaping around, and there's an ugly mood to the proceedings. How will Weemawee compete with such egregious cheaters?

Sadly, though, we begin to see Larry's character flaw in a clearer light.

At one point, he leans over and whispers to the snotty blonde, "How do you know all the answers?"

She smirks. "It helps if you know the questions beforehand."

And instead of being turned off, you can see that this young man is, alas, turned on. All you need to do, apparently, to get in with Larry Simpson is be a haughty blonde saying, "The defenstration of Prague"! (note to self ...)

Uh-oh. Foreshadowing.

Meanwhile, the Weemawee team is having internal trouble. No matter who buzzes the buzzer (and it's usually Patty), Muffy cannot leave well enough alone - and she single-handedly ruins two answers in a row, due to butting in. One of the answers is to spell "Erebus". It's Patty's guess.

She says into the mike, "E - R - E ..."

And Muffy cannot wait, cannot sit back, and screams at the top of her lungs, "B - U - S!"

Dan Vermilion, so lax with the haughty cheaters from Longfellow, is a hardass with the Weemawee kids. "Hey - which one of you is answering?"

Muffy shrieks, "I am!"

Vermilion replies, "I'm sorry, then, your answer is incorrect. You just spelled 'BUS'."

hahahahahahaha

Another tragedy occurs when, as they had hoped, a question is repeated from a former show. The question is, "Please name all the US Presidents after Hoover." I am sure we can see which way this one is going. Muffy, ecstatic, manic, pounds her fist on the buzzer and hollers like an opera queen, "ROUGH TOTS EAT COOL JELLO!"

Vermilion replies, "Uh ... no ... that is not correct ... Longfellow?"

Naturally, haughty blonde coolly gives the answer like a Hitchcock heroine. "Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson."

Larry and Patty are not happy here. And rightly so. The game goes to Longfellow. All because of Muffy.

And that's that. The game breaks up, and Lauren races up to Patty to console her. Patty seems to be taking it okay, laughing with Lauren, saying, "Muffy! She just could not keep her hand off the buzzer!"

Lauren, still working it, says, "Now you and Larry have to go out and console each other."

"Really?"

"Yes! Defeat is so romantic!"

Of course it is, Lauren.

The crowd is mingling, and you can see Larry, in the background, see Patty, and come over to talk to her. He's pretty easygoing about the whole thing, too. I mean, you can't be too upset when you lost because your teammate is, frankly, a buzzer lunatic screaming "B-U-S" and "ROUGH TOTS EAT COOL JELLO" at the slightest provocation.

He says, laughing, "Well, at least it was fun, right?"

Patty gawks up at him, in love. "Yes, it was."

The moment trembles ... it is almost perfect ... if the stars align, and Mercury rises into Jupiter's orbit, and the sun moves behind a cloud ... something might happen next. Larry might ask her to go grab something to eat. Maybe take a walk and laugh about Muffy. Something ... They tremble on the abyss of possibility ...

I'm sorry, but he is just absolutely to die for here. I love men.

Lauren can feel the vibe between the two as well. She stands there, beaming upon it ... WILLING it to happen.

But then. Ruination.

The blonde from Longfellow sidles up to Larry, and says in an insinuating voice, "Larry, I would love to get your thoughts on the Treaty of Ghent."

Never have the words "Treaty of Ghent" sounded so salacious.

Larry gets the message. He says, taken aback, but drawn in at the same time, "Okay ... sure!"

She takes his arm in a proprietary manner and leads him away (again, shades of Eunice Burns. Is that Larry's fate? To be yoked to a dominating boss-lady? Perhaps! Although my very spirit balks at the thought! Maybe it's a phase!). He says, "Bye, Patty," in a kind heartbreaking tone ... and then off he goes, to (vigorous quote marks) "discuss the Treaty of Ghent". Yeah, in the back seat of his convertible. Or perhaps in an open grave.

Patty is deflated. Once again. Lauren, ever the optimist, gushes, "Look on the bright side! At least he's dating closer to his age group now!"

Cold comfort, indeed.

And now it is time to kiss Larry Simpson goodbye.

Wave goodbye, class! There he goes!

Orphan Train. The Novel. By me. Age 11. - Chapter 8

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Thank you for the push, Rachel, Amy, et al, to continue with the posting of my novelization of the TV movie Orphan Train, written by me at age 11. If you want to catch up on events, there are the first 7 chapters. Now we will move on to Chapter 8.

Chapter 8

2 days later Miss Sims was straightening out all of the clothes and things on the tables when a small boy with a little green hat on walked into the kitchen. He slowly approached Miss Sims.

He tugged on her dress and she turned. When she saw the little boy's anxious face she smiled.

"Hello, Mouse!" This nickname was given to him for the reasons that he was small, he didn't eat much and he supposedly had big ears.

"Liverpool's in trouble!" His absolute idol was Liverpool. His eyes filled with tears.

"He is? Oooh, I told him so. Mouse, don't you worry. I'll get him back." She stood up and wiped her hands on her dress.

"He's at the jail waitin' fur his sentence or whatever you say. I forget." Mouse looked at her with pleading eyes.

"Well, I'll go over there and get him now." Miss Sims picked up her small blue coat and put it on.

"Thank you, Miss Sims!" Mouse sat down on a bench to wait for Miss Sims to return with Liverpool.

**************************************************

Miss Sims sat down on the hard stone bench to wait for the two policemen to arrive with Liverpool.

When they did he was in handcuffs and looking very depressed.

"What do you want?" Liverpool growled.

"I want you to come out to the West with us. Honestly, Liverpool, I wish you would listen to what I say." Miss Sims hoped with all her might that Liverpool would wish to come.

"What happens to me if I don't come?"

"Either you come with me or you wait here for your sentence."

Liverpool rolled his eyes. "That ain't much of a choice."

Miss Sims shrugged. "Well, it's all you've got so you had better take advantage of it."

Liverpool sighed. "I'll go with you."

Miss Sims sighed with relief. "That's wonderful, Liverpool! Now, we'd better hurry. We're leaving in 2 hours for the train."

Liverpool was released from his handcuffs and Miss Sims stood up.

"Ma'am," one of the policemen informed her. "We will bring Liverpool to the station, for safety, you know."

"Oh, but I can take care of him," Miss Sims protested.

"We are well aware of that, but for the safety of you and the other children we will bring him to the station and make sure he doesn't get into mischief," the policeman said firmly.

"Oh, all right. I'm so glad you decided to come, Liverpool." Miss Sims flashed him a smile and walked out of the police station.

*****************************************************

She hurried back to the kitchen joyfully. Liverpool was going to come! She would try to civilize him. He seemed like a nice boy and if only he had better manners he also would be a likable boy.

She rushed in through the door. Mouse looked at her expectantly and she nodded with a smile.

J.P. had seen some dresses she liked but she had to pick boys clothes. She picked some grey knickers, a brown shirt and a tan jacket.

Miss Sims expected everyone to make a good appearance at each of the stops so they had to take baths.

J.P. was fearful about that. Everyone thought she was a boy and she couldn't take a bath in front of everyone because it would show she wasn't a boy. She looked around nervously and gathered up her clothes. She went into the bathroom and put her clothes down. She took off her cap and wet her hair down to make it look as if she had a bath.

You see, there was no bathtub in the bathroom so they had to take baths in a tin washtub out in the open. J.P. would have died of embarrassment.

She put her cap back on and walked out of the bathroom.

"Now, does everyone have the clothes they need?" Miss Sims called above the chatter of the children.

"Yes!" they cried in chorus.

"Good. Now --" she was interrupted by a great din outside the kitchen.

People were throwing eggs and other food at the kitchen! They were disgusted that anyone would want to take those "slum trash" anywhere!

But Miss Sims still held her ground. She didn't care what anyone said. They had gone this far to go on the journey and they would make it. Nothing could stop them now.

After my hibernation

March has heated up suddenly into a cornucopia of busy-ness. I'm not good at being socially busy, especially not now. I need a couple of days in between outings to recover. Trying to take it slow. But I am also taking my mother's lead here, brave woman that she is, and just saying Yes to invites, and working out the details later. I've had a couple of double-bookings - because my sense of time is all screwed up, and I have no idea what month it is, let alone what day. I keep thinking it's early January.

In the next weeks I have:

1. Joe Hurley's Irish Rock Revue - I have been wanting to go to this thing for years now. It's a famous New York event. Joe Hurley is ubiquitous in the Manhattan music scene, and he randomly contacted me last fall to invite me to a show he was doing at Joe's Pub. (The long funny story is here.) I applaud his ingenuity in finding me on the Internet after 7 years. He was basically searching for the "chick in the eyepatch who sang Oliver songs with me for two hours" ... and he found me. Brill. Can't wait.

2. Weekend brunch with my group of friends

3. A party at Babeland, the famous sex toy shop. Random. But I got an invite, and I'm going. If they let me, I'll take pictures!

4. My mother is coming down this weekend, staying with me tonight - and we're having brunch tomorrow with Siobhan and Ben. Looking forward to it.

5. Baby shower for my sister Jean - can't wait!

6. I also would like to go to some of the films being featured in the Jules Dassin tribute at the Film Forum, but thankfully - that goes into April, so March isn't TOO top-loaded. But the first film on the bill - Night and the City - with the awesome Mr. Richard Widmark (I LOVE that movie, but have never seen it on the big screen) - is the last weekend in March, which I already can't do because I won't be in town ... so it's all very confusing.

Oh, and also one more dental appointment (gearing up for it emotionally), a mammogram (yay), as well as a checkup for Hope.

There's more that I need to put in there, too, because I am long overdue for a catchup night with my dear Allison, wine and tapas with my friend Ted, and rumspringa with David. Not to mention the writing work I am doing and have to continue doing. Not to mention the Ben Marley posts I need to write. I am already feeling overwhelmed, like one party/event is enough for each week ... I am still recovering from the flu, too.

As long as I don't have things back-to-back, I should be fine.

Still not really reading, which is a very strange event in my life. I am almost done with the book of essays by Joan Acocella ... and I honestly don't know what I will pick up next. I'm on a 2 to 3 pages a day kick, which is so unlike me.

Fiction holds no interest. I'm not looking for suggestions, by the way - although thank you in advance if you provide some ... I'm just sharing the weirdness of not reading like I used to.

March has come in like a lion.

Irish music, vibrators, brunch, Richard Widmark and doctor appointments. I hope I can keep it all straight.

Dear Ben Marley:

... when you are in a movie called Bloody Birthday ...

... and you are playing a character named DUKE BENSON ...

... and you, in the first five minutes of the movie, are trying to cajole your high school girlfriend into having sex with you ...

... and you are doing all of this in a graveyard ...

... AT NIGHT ...

... it is probably best NOT to choose to jump into an open grave with said half-clad girlfriend, in order to get some privacy for your hot yet gently coerced teenage sex ...

... because ... I'm just saying ...

... when you are in a movie called Bloody Birthday, which begins with an ominous shot of a total eclipse, and the sound of three evil babies being born simultaneously ...

... it's probably best, Mr. Duke Benson, to not try to put your hand up your girlfriend's dress while lying in an open grave.

Because no good can come of that.

Just a little advice.

Love,

Sheila (who has obviously watched way more horror movies than this Duke Benson guy ever did, so she knows what to avoid, and makeout sessions in cemeteries involving open graves is #1 on the list).

Uh-oh.

Teenage sex never ends well in these movies. Word to the wise.

I myself did not have sex until I was out of my teens (geek), but even as an adolescent, I understood the rules of the game. Sex in open graves is a provocation to the forces of darkness stalking the planet. You are basically BEGGING to be murdered.

"Square Pegs" - 'It's Academical' (or: the heartbreaking return of Larry Simpson, aka Ben Marley)

PART ONE

This episode was near the end of the one fateful season of Square Pegs, and when I re-watched it last year, I had to laugh at how much I remembered. Even specific lines came back to me.

The other episode I remembered that well is the one called 'A Cafeteria Line', where gawky geeky Patty nabs the lead in the school play (opposite Vinnie), and there are all kinds of boundary issues (are their characters in love, or are they??), not to mention friendship issues (Patty starts to choose Vinnie over Lauren, and it doesn't go well) ... and then, at the end of the episode, Patty sings her big song ... and as a young teenager, I was strangely THRILLED about this - because my first Broadway show had been Annie, when I was 11 years old ... and who played Annie but Sarah Jessica Parker, who has a beautiful clear and strong voice ... so I was so psyched (as though I were her manager or something) that the powers-that-be at Square Pegs knew she could sing, and let her show her stuff on Square Pegs. Not to mention the fact that it was a song about wearing glasses - and I had worn glasses since I was 10, and hated them, so it all really spoke to me.

BUT. Back to 'It's Academical'. This heartbreaking episode witnesses the return of Larry Simpson, the hot senior from the pilot, played by Ben Marley. I like it when a show like this has a good memory and honors that memory, ie: having Ben Marley come back to play the same role. It doesn't always happen that way, and believe me, as a panting 14-year-old girl, I was relieved to see the same cutie-pie show up again. I gasped, as though I was Lauren on the track, when I first saw him in the episode. "It's him!!!"

You know. Boys like that were celebrities in school, and they wore their celebrity with ease. I am still vaguely in awe of people like that (call for Keith M.) Plenty of people let the power of their position go to their head, but those that didn't were rare and your interactions with them stayed with you for days. Square Pegs gets that.

In 'It's Academical', Weemawee High School has been chosen to compete in a local televised quiz show called 'It's Academical' (whose host is a funny bitter chain-smoking failed actor), and three students will be chosen out of the entire student body to represent Weemawee.

Who will be chosen?

Will romance bloom or falter?

Can anyone bear the suspense??

Let's get to it.

There's a pep rally at Weemawee (they seem to have a lot of those), and many announcements are made. What a bore. Isn't that what a loudspeaker going throughout the school is for? Muffy, naturally, is running the show, screaming, and honking a huge noise-maker to force everyone to quiet down. She seems to be having a prolonged manic episode. Principal Dingleman (you know, Dingleberry) is on vacation, so the assistant principal steps in to be "acting principal" for the week. He is an ex-hippy, and starts his speech to the class with some inappropriate anecdote about how the last time he was "in the principal's office" was in 1969 when "we had tied up the professor of the college ..." You can watch Muffy's face go slowly from manic support to horror and then anger, as she takes the mike back.

Jami Gertz is so over-the-top here, and I haven't exactly followed her career (Lisa? Want to fill us in?) but she's quite a comedienne. Her observations on ambition, nervousness and also her willingness to look like a complete ass are all right on the money. Great character. No wonder an entire generation who saw that show remembers the name "Muffy Tepperman".

She is all a-flutter as she takes back the mike and announces the big news that Weemawee has been chosen to compete on the local quiz show against a rival high school - Longfellow Tech. Muffy leads the gym in booing the rival. Based on grade point average, three students - "the smartest in the school" will be chosen to compete. And you can tell that Muffy assumes she will be one of them. As far as she is concerned, it is already a done deal.

Dan Vermilion (great name) is the host of the local TV show (as well as a bunch of other local shows) and is there to announce the big news. It's hysterical. He stands off to the side, in the gym, as Muffy babbles on, smoking and making bitter comments about how much he hates kids and let's get this thing over with. Finally, he runs up to the mike, soulless entity that he is, accepting the accolades of the demographic he despises. He is full of himself, once upon a time he had big dreams ... you know he probably played the lead in Camelot in college, and truly felt he was a rival to Richard Burton ... but now here he is, hosting local shows along the lines of "Community Auditions" (well known to anyone who lived in Rhode Island in the 70s. "Star of the DAY - who will it be? Your vote may hold the key! It's up to YOU - to tell us WHO - will be STAR of the day!") and hating his whole life. Very funny.

Look at Jami Gertz. hahahaha

As ridiculous as the character is, she is always alive, and responding, and doing absurd things in the background of every scene.

Vermilion's announcement sends the student body into a tizzy. Everyone wants to be on television. Lauren grabs Patty and tells her she HAS to be on the show. Not because it would be good for Patty to show her smarts, or to have something that will look good on a college application - but because fame, even local fame, is the quickest route to popularity. Patty is, of course, more reticent and shy. She knows she's smart, she has good grades, but she's not really a go-getter in that respect.

The goombah Vinnie has no interest on being on the quiz show (thank God, because he refers to the show as 'It's Academicalogical') but Dan Vermilion hosts another show - a dance show - and that's the one Vinnie wants to be on. He shouts from the crowd, and then - to Tracey Nelson's utter horror and LaDonna's mortification - he jumps up on his chair and starts gyrating, showing his stuff off, unprompted.

Standup comedian hopeful Marshall sees this as his big chance, too. The show is live, so why can't he somehow get on the show, have a couple of minutes to do a routine, a couple of knock-knock jokes, whatever. This is his moment. He cannot let it slip by. He knows his grades aren't good enough to get on the show, but that is irrelevant to Marshall. He will barge his way into the action somehow! Johnny Slash is very frightened by this prospect. As he is frightened of most everything.

The world is frightening to Johnny Slash. If only he could live in his music. It would be a totally different head. Totally.

Dan Vermilion will be back later in the week to announce the winners. See you all then, folks! Everyone files out of the gym, buzzing with anticipation.

Lauren, Patty, Marshall and Johnny go out for a burger at a local joint afterwards. Lauren is determined - "This has to happen, Patty!" - and Marshall is trying to figure out a way that he can get in on the action. He asks Johnny to "rehearse" with him, but it doesn't go well. He asks Johnny, "Okay, so you be Dan Vermilion ..." and Johnny replies, "Then who would HE be?" He is a very literal human being, and cannot make the leap of faith to pretend. Marshall says, "Ask me a question - any question!" Johnny says, "How are you?" Marshall says, "No, Johnny ... ask me a question from history." Johnny nods, like "Okay, I got it", and then asks, "How were you yesterday?"

Muffy barges over to the table and it immediately becomes apparent that she knows Patty is her main rival for this thing, so she starts to subtly (uhm, not really) throw her weight around, trying to intimidate and dominate. "It is obvious who will be chosen ..." Patty just isn't the competitive type. She doesn't claw back. Muffy towers above their table, long hair swinging back and forth, collar neatly turned down in a frighteningly correct fashion, and she is a sight to behold.

Meanwhile, at another table, Jennifer, Vinnie and LaDonna also talk about the quiz show. Vinnie is stuck on the dance show, and Jennifer says she would never want to be on the quiz show because "like, they ask you questions ... like, I've seen them, like, do it." LaDonna (whom I love more and more with each re-viewing) is determined that SHE will be on the show. She may not be a brainiac but "every week they ask SOME question about Otis Redding, and I am a graduate of the Soul-Train College of Musical Knowledge", and for that alone she should be on the show. I think she's got a point. Especially in light of what happens later.

No sign of Larry Simpson yet. Not even a mention. The suspense is killing me!

The school gathers again a couple of days later to hear the three chosen contestants. Seems like it would be much easier and more efficient to announce these things over the loudspeaker during Homeroom - that's the way we did things at OUR school - but at Weemawee, togetherness and artificial PEP trumps efficiency, apparently.

Dan Vermilion is there, once again, in white bucks, smoking a cigarette in the gym, being bitter and over-it, until it is time to run up onto the stage.

He makes a big deal out of announcing the winners.

"Our first contestant is .... MUFFY TEPPERMAN."

The applause is tepid, and actually makes you feel a little bit bad for Muffy, but then her over-reaction is so insane that you stop feeling bad for her. She acts as though she is the underdog winning the Academy Award. She races to the mike, screaming incoherently about how "shocked" she is, which is very funny because you know she's not shocked at all. Also, no need to give a thank-you speech, Muffy ... you haven't won the quiz show yet. But no matter. She screams and blusters and shrieks, as everyone stares on in disgust. Thank goodness her ego is so huge. She strolls through the contempt for her, head held high.

Dan Vermilion somehow gets the mike back from her, and goes to announce the second student. I just had to grab this screenshot, because in the moment of anticipation - please look at Jami Gertz's body language. Seriously, this is an actress who feels FREE. She holds nothing back. Look at her!

Now comes the big moment. Dan Vermilion calls out the second name: "Larry Simpson! Come on down!"

Finally! A glimpse!

Now, of course, Lauren and Patty freak out. He's a celebrity to them. Even the way they say his name ... they draw it out .. "Larry Simpson!" It's like "George Clooney" to them! Lauren is now out of her mind: Patty MUST be the third student chosen. Not only will she become popular, but she can also win over Larry Simpson's heart! They watch him walk down the aisle, agog - Lauren basically drooling over him, and Patty with something a bit more wistful. Patty says, "He probably doesn't even remember who I am" and Lauren gushes, "The last time you spoke, he kissed you and told you he was seeing someone else! Boys don't just forget moments like that!" I love how Lauren has an answer for everything, and that answer is always about empowering her friend, and building her up. That's so what I remember from high school, and even though it led us all down some pretty insane paths - that's what you do when you're friends, and you're 14 years old. You validate the other person's insanity. Lauren does this in spades. As far as she is concerned, Larry Simpson has been carrying a torch for Patty the entire school year. And by the end of listening to Lauren rant and rave, I start to believe it too. Even though I know it's insane!

Larry goes up and joins the others on the stage, running his hand through his hair as he did to devastating effect in the pilot. Lauren and Patty are out of their minds.

Then comes the big moment - when Dan Vermilion calls out the final name. It is, of course, Patty. Lauren flips - it is as though it is her victory as well - and Patty is shy and awkward, she doesn't want to walk up there in front of everyone - she gasps, "I hate aisles!"

But, bravely, off she goes.

Please look at Lauren here. It makes me want to hug all of my female friends.

Slowly, Patty walks up to the stage. Everyone is clapping, including Larry, who is obviously a nice person, not an "over it" kind of guy.

Look at Muffy's face, please.

And then, awful, Patty trips and falls onto the stage. Larry, naturally, is there immediately, helping her pick up her books and her ubiquitous lunchbox. He's sweet, looking right at her (in a way that would have slayed me as a teen and would still slay me now), and he somehow makes it all right that she just had this awkward moment. It's actually kind of funny, and he makes her smile about it.

Stop killing me, Ben Marley.

Thank you.

It's as though the whole world falls away. The sounds of the gym fade away, and they are the only two people on the planet. Again, Larry, be careful who you flirt with!! I myself am the same way. I'm a horrible flirt, because basically I mean business at all times. You flirt with me casually at your own risk. So, you gonna finish the job, or what? I'm not saying this is a good quality, and I often wish I COULD flirt and, more importantly, be flirted with, but I can't. If I like you, and you like me, and you engage with me in casual banter, then I assume you mean business, just like I do. I'm not talking about being "serious" or "love", I'm talking about something much more prosaic, like getting my phone number, or at least attacking me in the corner by the jukebox. Flirting qua flirting holds no interest for me at all. I'm HORRIBLE at it. I don't do small talk, and I would need to be paid in order to be coy. I don't play games. I said that to a guy once, actually - it was in Ireland, and the vibe had been floating between us all night, through talk and jokes, etc. I felt like if I gave him the opportunity to make his move, he would ... but flirting with no end in sight just isn't my bag. I liked him enough, even though I had just met him, and the energy was open enough (ah, the Irish male) that I said, "Don't flirt with me anymore unless you are prepared to finish what you started, mkay, sweetie?" I said it with humor, but, you know ... truth as well. And what happened? He pushed me up against the wall and attacked me. Life was beautiful. He had just been waiting for the right moment anyway to step into his rightful role as grabby aggressive he-man action figure, and I let him go for it. Ah, the crazy American girl. So I know of what I speak. I have gotten my heart broken because a guy flirted with me and had no intention of following through. Makes life tough in the singles scene, I'll tell you that. I pretty much just stay away now, because I obviously never learned the rules of the game, and it's way too late now.

Larry, in his quiet gentleness here with her, is opening a whole can of adolescent worms!

Next we see Patty and Lauren walking down the hall. Patty is nervous, and Lauren is ecstatic. Patty will now get to have one on one time with Larry, and isn't this miraculous??

Having a friend like Lauren is worth its weight in gold. Because she just goes with the flow. Whatever Patty is going through, she supports and builds her up. If Patty changes her mind about something, then somehow Lauren immediately finds a way to incorporate that, and change her sales pitch. She could sell snow to Eskimos.

Then comes a big moment. They see Larry at his locker in the empty hallway (with pictures of football players and tennis players taped up to the inside. Of course.) Lauren is ecstatic because there's no one around. Oh, the memories of being 14 and knowing you only had FIVE MINUTES to take your chance to talk to the GREEK GOD SENIOR you were currently in love with, because soon the bell would ring and the halls would be crowded and you would have lost your big moment ... to do ... what ... say "Hi?" and scurry on by? Well, frankly, yes.

Larry is oblivious to the teenage drama going on behind him, and finally Lauren gives Patty a shove in Larry's direction, and Patty (again) stumbles, and her lunch box goes flying across the hall, landing at Larry's feet.

Mortification central. But again, Larry, with the ease of the "higher life-form" (phrasing stolen from A., my partner in Ben Marley crime), makes it all seem all right, and actually comedic. He picks up the lunch box and jokes, "I think I recognize this!"

Teasing her about her fall earlier.

But Patty is in a whirlwind of hormones, and as we all know, when hormones are in a whirlwind, sometimes the subtleties of humor are lost on us. She grasps at straws, she stutters ... all as Lauren rolls her eyes in the background.

Larry, true to form, pretends that Patty is not in a tizzy about him. It is obvious she has a huge crush, and he's kind about it, not mentioning it or belittling her. He tries to keep the conversation going. Which actually just makes things worse ... because here he is, casually talking to her, as though they, you know, KNOW each other ... and that makes Patty's case of the nerves even more acute.

He says, with the air of one settling into the conversation (which is so important - then and now - if girls get the feeling that you are on your way somewhere, and you have one foot out the door ... well, you won't get much tail, that's all I'm saying. Or the tail you get will not be the tail you really want. Larry talks to her, leaning back up against the locker, his body language saying, "I got nowhere else to be!") - "So where have you been? I haven't seen you around lately?"

She stutters about being busy, and then, out of desperation, turns the conversation back on him - which leads to Ben Marley's most charming moment in the episode.

She has no idea what she is saying, there is no forethought, so she blurts out, "And how are you? How is your college girlf---" She stops herself, horrified. Was she just about to ask him about his "college girlfriend", the one who made their liaison not possible at the freshman dance? What is she, nuts?

But the funniest thing is that he says right back to her, "My college girlf?"

He doesn't scorn her for her ridiculous error, but he teases her ... which throws her into a tailspin.

"Girlf?" she gasps. "I didn't say 'girlf'!"

He starts to laugh, and it's to die for, because he tries to keep it together, and not laugh AT her, but he can't help it. I mean, GIRLF, for God's sake.

He says to her, persistent, adorable, "You said 'girlf'."

Poor Lauren watching all of this is in agony at how badly it is going.

Patty backtracks, "No, no, I didn't mean 'girlf' ..."

He, however, validates her interest, even through her denials, and says in a serious sexy way that would seriously be difficult to recover from if you were 14, "I think you were talking about my college girlfriend?" Patty is about to detach from the earth and fly up into the atmosphere, so he says, gently, "I'm not going out with her anymore. We broke up."

Oh dear. Why are you sharing this with her, Larry? Don't you know what it will do to her? Do you mean business or are you just flirting? INQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW.

Uhm, Lauren? Control yourself, please.

Patty loses her head when she hears he is no longer "going out with the college girlf" and exclaims happily, "You're not??" before correcting herself with, "I mean - God, that's awful - I'm so sorry ..."

Again, he is laughing and kind at her gaffes here, and basically you just want to kill yourself watching it. With lust.

Cause that's his JOB. That was Ben Marley's primary job here as an actor - to make the young female audience want to commit hari-kiri from the sheer power of their lust - but without making a big show of his sexiness or his appeal - and he does it. He doesn't skulk or behave in an overtly sexy manner - but he's, instead, nice, kind and easy with himself. Killer combo. Hari-kiri.

They're having a nice conversation. But alas, all good things must come to an end.

Muffy is approaching. She barges right into their duo, and takes over. She is obviously smitten with Ben Marley too (and who can blame her), but her approach is much more direct. She is sweepingly dramatic and overwhelmingly bossy. She begins to make demands, acting as though Patty, the third member of their team, is not standing right there. It is breathlessly contemptuous. But I gotta say, I feel for Muffy. I really do. I had a moment like that at one of my high school reunions, when I was having a conversation with, basically, the Muffy Tepperman of our high school class, and I suddenly saw, in a flash, how hard high school had been for HER, too. She was a cheerleader, a singer, she was always featured in pep rallies ... but life wasn't easy for HER either. Muffy is in love with Larry. And again, who can blame her. Yes, she is obnoxious, but we are not always at our best when we are in love.

Larry becomes visibly uncomfortable the second Muffy enters the conversation. She is "too much" for him, she stands too close, she is too insistent, and she has DEMANDS written all over her. You watch him try to disengage, you see him try to still be nice, but also put her off. He coughs, fidgets, looks down the hall ... this is all very nicely played by Ben Marley, because he is doing multiple things here. You can tell that he was enjoying the conversation with Patty, too ... and Muffy ruined something that was nice and pure. He tries to keep the lines of communication open with Patty, and include her, although Muffy explicitly lets it be known that she does NOT want Patty involved ... but all the time, he's still doing his best to be nice to be Muffy.

It's terrible.

Look at Muffy's face in that last screengrab. I want to say to her, "Muffy, darling! Save SOMETHING for a rainy day, sweetheart - don't give it all away!"

But we all have our journeys,

Ben Marley obviously senses that gleaming-eyed maniacal look of need, and he tries to wiggle out of it, but Muffy - as we all know - doesn't take No for an answer. She wants to get together after school and start studying for the show.

Larry is too nice to be like, "No, beeyotch, I want nothing to do with you ..." He says, all adorable hesitation and awkwardness, "Sure ... fine ..." Then dragging his eyes over to Patty, he says, "You want to come, too?"

Subtext being played: Please? Please come? Don't leave me alone with this wackjob.

Patty says, breathless, "Okay!"

Muffy does not like this, her main goal is to shut Patty out, so she grabs poor Larry by the arm, and drags him off, lecturing him about where they need to start first in their studying, and how important it all is ... (shades of Eunice Burns here ...)

Larry, in a devastating moment, (again, if you think like a 14 year old) throws a desperate glance over his shoulder back at Patty, as he is dragged away.

He wants to be with her, not Muffy! Muffy is way too much pressure - Patty is sweet ... but he cannot resist the bossy tug of Muffy's arm - at least he cannot do so without being overtly mean to Muffy, and that is just not his style. So off he goes.

Patty is left alone and dejected in the hallway, and Lauren races over to scold her for waiting too long to "say something" (say what? declare her undying love?). Patty knows she doesn't have a leg to stand on, she had handled the interaction badly ("girlf??" You know she will wince when she thinks about that later) ... but at least she now has the after-school meeting with Larry and Muffy to look forward to.

In the words of another tragic heroine, tomorrow's another day.

PART TWO TO COME ....

RIP Horton Foote

Great American playwright and Academy-Award winning screenwriter Horton Foote has died.

Ben Brantley writes, in his lovely appreciation of Foote's work, that

"[Foote] achieves his deepest effects by indirection and accretion of details, but the words are characteristic of his harsh sentimentality. He infused his characters with warm blood from his own, empathetic heart. But he also looked upon these same people with a cold and ruthless eye.

I think he loved all his characters — even the silly, mean and mercenary ones (of which there are many) — but he was too honest to let any of them off the hook. That means that each, on some level, was born to realize that to be alive is to be alone in the dark.

Brantley's article brought me to tears. Don't miss it.

Here are two posts I wrote about Foote:

One about his one-act play "The Old Beginning".

One about his one-act play (one of my favorites of his) "The Blind Date".

Ted has two tributes up:

Our tender sharp-eared cultural chronicler

Deep wells

Ted writes:

I am realizing that this book reminds me of the plays of Horton Foote, but particularly his The Habitation of Dragons so redolent is it of a single moment of tragedy in a family's life. Foote writes in an unfancy American idiom of the dramas that buffet ordinary folk in early 20th century small town Texas, rather than Ireland. His words aren't inherently dramatic, they just contain the simple moments of lives unadorned, but moment builds upon moment until his characters are moved on a mammoth current of action that, in the case of Habitation of Dragons, is heart-rending. Foote is best known for the screenplays of Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful. He has written for the American theater from its heyday in the 1950s and is, I believe, still writing. I have directed and acted in a couple of his plays. I consider them required reading.

Horton Foote was 92. He was still working, up till the time of his death. The lights of Broadway were dimmed last night in his honor.

His voice will be missed.

Revenge, part 2

I love the universe. She provides. Aside from my personal moment of revenge from this morning (which really isn't a huge deal, it was just a sweet moment of symmetry where I felt vaguely vindictive and satisfied, like a dictator or something) - a beautiful and funny and perfect thing just happened.

If you have been paying attention HERE, you know that a reader got upset at my focus on Ben Marley. You know, he didn't like the focus on "your junior high school friends about puppy love crushes." Okay, so THAT happened. Please let's not dwell on it. I'm already sick of it. What I want to focus on is the comment I JUST GOT on an old post I wrote. Literally, the comment came in 10 minutes ago from a person I have never heard from before, she probably got there through a Google search.

I have written at length (thank God Oliver wasn't around for that! His head would have exploded) about how much I loved a TV movie from my childhood called Orphan Train, with Jill Eikenberry who played a Victorian-era woman who took a group of street kids by train out West to find them homes. Based on a true story. I LOVED Orphan Train. I DIED for Orphan Train. I loved it so much that I basically, at age 11, wrote it all out in novel-form. Because it was before the days of a VCR in every house, and I just didn't know when I would ever see it again!

For a time there, I was posting "chapters" from my "novel" of Orphan Train (again, because it amuses me) - and please go to the post right now and see the comment I just received.

Sometimes you don't have to wait 7 years to settle the score.

Sometimes it only takes 10 minutes.

Thank you, Rachel!

Can we just take a moment to ponder ...

... the rip in the thigh of Ben Marley's jeans?

Member that look?

It's not the iconic timeless American-male look he was sporting in Skyward, and it's not as time-specific as the look he swaggered about in in The Fall Guy ... but still, a carefully-placed rip in the thigh of one's jeans is definitely located in a specific era.

I find it intriguing.

On multiple levels.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Revenge is best when it doesn't come immediately. If you work for an immediate result, ie: revenge, often it can come off as messy, or desperate, or like you are trying to win. Not a good impression.

But sometimes, if you wait long enough, revenge comes. And it is neat and perfect and you didn't have to work for it at all.

Sometimes the universe is generous like that.

It's important to pay attention to such moments. Don't revel too long, because that can make you petty and past-ridden and thirsting for more blood. You don't want to live there. A need for revenge has the potential to poison your life.

But you can certainly acknowledge that the score has been settled at last.

Before we get to Ben Marley in the Square Pegs episode "It's Academical",

let us glory once again in Muffy Tepperman's hair, her shirt, her little pin, her collar, and her expression.

"I'm going to ignore that, because, frankly, I don't get it."

I think hers is the most comedic performance in the entire show.

Two poems by Carl Dennis

I find him to be killer. Absolutely killer. The first one reminds me of what I was going through when I wrote this post - the post that generated, hands down, the meanest email I have ever received (guess the douche missed the point, huh?), and it makes me think, yet again, that that, at their best, is what poets can give us: words and context and imagery to contain and express our deepest longings and fears, or even just our experience of everyday life. I read a poem like that and think, "Yes ... yes ... God, I know that ..." Not that poetry should be all about reflecting YOU, and validating YOU ... that would be a very provincial poetry indeed, but once in a while you come across a poem that nails it, something that you spent about 1,000 words on your blog trying to describe ... and he does it in seven stanzas. With economy and heartbreaking precision.

In the Coffee Shop by Carl Dennis

The big smile the waitress gives you
May be a true expression of her opinion
Or may be her way to atone for glowering
A moment ago at a customer who slurped his coffee
Just the way her cynical second husband slurped his.

Think of the meager tip you left the taxi driver
After the trip from the airport, how it didn't express
Your judgment about his service but about the snow
That left you feeling the earth a tundra
Only the frugal few could hope to cross.

Maybe it's best to look for fairness
Not in any particular unbiased judgment
But in a history of mistakes that balance out,
To find an equivalent for the pooling of tips
Practiced by the staff of the coffee shop,
Adding them up and dividing, the same to each.

As for the chilly fish eye the busboy gave you
When told to clear the window table you wanted,
It may have been less a comment on you
Than on his parents, their dismissing the many favors
He does for them as skimpy installments
On a debt too massive to be paid off.

And what about favors you haven't earned?
The blonde who's passing the window now
Without so much as a glance in your direction
Might be trying to focus her mind on her performance
So you, or someone like you, will be pleased to watch
As she crosses the square in her leather snow boots
And tunic of red velvet, fur-trimmed.

What have you done for her that she should turn
The stones of the public buildings
Into a backdrop, a crosswalk into a stage floor,
A table in a no-frills coffee shop
Into a private box near the orchestra?

Yesterday she may have murmured against the fate
That keeps her stuck in the provinces.
But today she atones with her wish to please
As she dispenses with footlights and spotlights,
With a curtain call at the end, with encores.
No way to thank her but with attention
Now as she nears the steps of the courthouse
And begins her unhurried exit into the crowd.

The God Who Loves You by Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

This is for Mitchell

Because I enjoy making Mitchell cry.

"Only Angels Have Wings": a perfect scene.

It's already perfect on the page, but pair it with the subtle acting of Jean Arthur and Cary Grant (and Thomas Mitchell at the end there) ... makes this one of my favorite filmed scenes of all time.

The inflection can't be described or captured ... that's the magic of acting.

(Clips of the scene below the fold. Follow along.)

Watch how Thomas Mitchell fills up the line : "Uh huh" ... you can't "see it" on the page, you can't "see" how it should be said, but he makes it seem inevitable, perfect.

And his reading of the last line. She protests - like: "I hardly know the man!" and the way Jean Arthur says it shows she is truly protecting herself here, protesting against his implication that she is already some worried lovestruck female. And his reply is not just perfect in his delivery, but perfect on the page: "Sure, but you'll get over it." He appears to agree with her, saying "Sure", but then lets her know he doesn't buy it ... "but you'll get over it."

I just LOVE that line. She's busted ... but the way he says it makes it seem like it's all right. Which is perfect - because often in movies like this, the men gang up on the women. And while these men are, indeed, a gang - they all truly like Bonnie, and you can see that in her interactions with them later. Especially KID, but with others as well. They don't roll their eyes, like, God, what a pathetic little slut she is ... or whatever ... They can see how into their friend she is, and they've seen it all before - KID even tries to warn her off ... but they're kind to her. It's all there in that moment.

"I hardly know the man!" she protests.
"Sure, but you'll get over it...." replies The Kid. In a way that would certainly make ME feel comfortable going to him with my problems, later on, if I felt the need.

Same thing with one of Cary Grant's sexiest moments on screen - ever, in my opinion - the manner in which he says, "After your boat sails." It is primal. This man means business with that line. It's far more sexy than anything more overt, it's all in the implication. He'll get sleep after her boat sails ... no sleep until after she leaves. No wonder the script could get away with it ... "after your boat sails" is not a sexual line, but just watch how he says it. It's rough, his intent is clear in how he says it.

And the exchange that follows shows that she got his intent, too. Watch how these two actors play it. So wonderful.

Also, the fact that he is written to say, about the woman in his past and how she compares to Bonnie - that she was "just as nice and almost as smart" ... Okay, first: watch how Cary Grant plays it. Geoff Carter is written to be a swashbuckling cranky macho man, and he IS. But, there's a spot in his heart reserved for something soft, something female ... and yes, he sleeps around (there's that great scene where he sees a woman who looks vaguely familiar, and she obviously knows him well - and he embraces her, awkwardly, because he can't remember her name - and he says, taking a stab at it - "Mexico City?" and she shakes her head mournfully and says, "Puerto Rico." A few seconds later, she gives him a quick kiss, and the light dawns on his face and he says, "Now I remember! Puerto Rico!" Hysterical.) But anyway, he's got the floozies he hangs out with ... but the woman who "made him the way he is" he describes as "nice ... and smart" ... It's a killer line, and Grant delivers it in a killer manner, his face looking down at Bonnie, suddenly vulnerable, suddenly full of memories. Slam-dunk.

On the page, Bonnie can come across as simpering - but the way Jean Arthur plays it, with true confusion, because of her lust and growing fascination with this man - undercuts that, making her seem like a practical humorous woman who is, for real, falling in love (lust, pinwheels in her eyes) for the first time. She literally doesn't know what to do with herself. And instead of being sad or pathetic, it is funny and endearing.

His behavior - all the bottle-opening stuff and mixing drinks - is all written into the script ... interesting ... and some of it is a bit changed in the final version, but not much.

One of my favorite scenes of all time.

BONNIE: Well, goodbye Mister. It is too bad Barranca is so far from Brooklyn.

CARTER: What's your hurry? It is only a few minutes after twelve. Your boat doesn't leave until four o'clock.

CARTER reaches under bar, takes bottle and pours drinks.

CARTER: Here - say when.

BONNIE: When are you going to get some sleep?

CARTER: After your boat sails.

BONNIE: Aren't you just wasting your time?

CARTER: Well, there is a point that is open to argument.

BONNIE: That is what I am afraid of.

CARTER: What?

BONNIE: Those arguments.

CARTER: What's the matter with them?

BONNIE: Oh, they are too one-sided.

CARTER: Well, no hard feelings.

BONNIE: (picks up drink) Apology accepted.

CARTER: (picks up drink) How about taking along a little souvenir - why not? Help yourself. Hmm - you've got a good eye, Lady.

BONNIE: (picking up bracelet) Someone must have given you an awful beating once.

LONG SHOT. LILY and woman seated at table rise as BONNIE enters and puts watch on LILY's arm.

LILY: Oh, el reloj de Joe. Muchas gracias, Senorita, muchas gracias. Mira tia, el reloj de Joe.

AUNT: Si, si, muy bonito.

MED. SHOT CARTER
at bar.

AUNT'S VOICE: Vamos a casa, nina.

LILY'S VOICE: Muchas gracias.

MED. LONG SHOT.
BONNIE, LILY and AUNT by table walk to door as women exit. BONNIE turns.

LILY: El reloj de joe ... muchas gracias.

BONNIE: Come on now, you better go home.

AUNT. Buenas noches.

BONNIE: Goodnight.

MED. SHOT
CARTER at bar - turns and picks up glasses.

MED. LONG SHOT
CARTER at bar - walks to table as BONNIE enters, shakes her head, picks up purse, and starts back.

CARTER: You're a queer duck.

BONNIE: So are you.

CARTER: I can't make you out.

BONNIE: (turning to him) Same here. What was she like, anyway?

CARTER: Who?

BONNIE: That girl that made you act the way you do.

CARTER: A whole lot like you -- just as nice and almost as smart.

BONNIE: Chorus girl?

CARTER: Only by temperament.

BONNIE: Well, at least you're true to the type.

MED. LONG SHOT
BONNIE and CARTER by table - he sits.

CARTER: Let's sit down and make yourself comfortable.

BONNIE: Still carrying the torch for her, aren't you?

CARTER: Got a match?

BONNIE: Don't you ever have any?

MED. LONG SHOT
CARTER seated - back of Bonnie f.g. - she sits on edge of table.

CARTER. Don't believe in laying in a supply of anything.

BONNIE: Matches, marbles, money or women?

CARTER: That's right.

BONNIE: No looking ahead - no tomorrows - just today.

CARTER: That's right.

BONNIE: Is that why she gave you the air?

CARTER: Who?

BONNIE: That girl.

CARTER: Say, listen, I wouldn't ask any woman to -- Say, you can think up more questions. Here --

He hands her matches as she leans towards him.

BONNIE: What wouldn't you --

CARTER: (taking drink) What?

BONNIE: Ask anybody to do?

CARTER: Did you ever know a woman who didn't want to make plans? Map out everything - get it all set?

CARTER rises and reaches to bar left as CAMERA PANS - takes bottle then walks back to table - SIDE-ANGLE of the two.

CARTER: Oh, well, I don't blame them I guess. It is the only way they can operate - run a home and have kids.

BONNIE: I suppose you think that is a lot easier and less dangerous than flying!

CARTER: I don't know - I never tried it.

BONNIE: But didn't you ask her to?

CARTER: Who?

BONNIE: That girl.

CARTER: I told you I wouldn't ask any woman --

BONNIE: What if she were willing to?

CARTER: Yeah - that's what they all say.

CARTER walks left as CAMERA PANS to bar - then back to table.

CARTER: Women think they can take it, but they can't. The minute you get up in the air, they start calling the airport - and when you get down you find them waiting for you so scared they hate your insides.

BONNIE: What if she was the type that didn't scare so easily.

CARTER: (opening bottle) There's no such animal.

BONNIE: Why? How do you know?

CARTER: (pours drink and sits) Well, the girl I was telling you about came as close to it as anybody I ever met. But one night when I'd been lost in a fog - something like this - radio beam was out and I was glad to get my feet on the ground - what do you think my welcome-home speech was? She was hoping I'd crashed.

MED. CLOSE SHOT BONNIE.

BONNIE: What?

CARTER'S VOICE: Couldn't stand the gaff. Said she'd rather see me dead and have it over with. She told me if I wouldn't quit flying - it was all off.

BONNIE: You wouldn't, would you?

MED. SHOT
CARTER seated - back of BONNIE, seated on table, right f.g.

CARTER: I'm still flying.

BONNIE: I wonder what happened to her?

CARTER: Who? I don't know for sure. I heard she married another flyer. Well --

MED. LONG SHOT
CARTER seated - BONNIE seated on table - he rises and walks to her - side-angle.

CARTER: Now, is there anything else you'd like to know about me? Would you like to go over to my room? Got some letters from home. Pictures of my father and mother - pictures of me the first time I went up in the air -- pictures of my first crash.

BONNIE: Any pictures of you when you were a baby?

CLOSE SHOT CARTER
back of BONNIE f.g.

CARTER: I don't remember. Want to go and look?

CLOSE SHOT BONNIE
back of CARTER f.g.

BONNIE: (starting to rise) Sure.

LONG SHOT
CARTER by BONNIE - she rises from table as they start left - he stops her - they walk right to door back as CAMERA PANS

LONG SHOT
BONNIE and CARTER walk to door with backs to camera.

CARTER: Bonnie --

MED. SHOT
BONNIE and CARTER by door -- side-angle.

CARTER: Keep on the way we were going - just follow your nose and it will take you right to the boat.

BONNIE: Oh!

CARTER: I've got to stick around here.

BONNIE: Oh - so that's where we were going.

CARTER: (puts hands on her shoulders) Take care of your --

LONG SHOT
KID walks right as CAMERA PANS to CARTER and BONNIE at door b.g.

KID: Oh, Geoff!

CARTER'S VOICE: What?

KID: Tex just called from lookout - he says the Pass is clearing.

MED. SHOT.
CARTER and BONNIE by door.

CARTER: Yes -- did you wake Les up?

KID: No, because - well - Tex says it's nobody's picnic.

MED. LONG SHOT
CARTER and BONNIE at door - he puts out cigarette.

CARTER: Yeah - all right, wind up number seven and put some coffee in it.

MED. LONG SHOT KID

KID: I already did.

EXT. PORT.
LONG SHOT PLANE
warming up - travels towards Camera.

MED. LONG SHOT
BONNIE and CARTER by door - he kisses her and exits left f.g.

CARTER: So long, Bonnie- have a nice trip.

BONNIE: (she starts to follow) Hey, wait a minute --

INT. CAFE
LONG SHOT
CARTER walking to b.g.- BONNIE enters and follows to bar -

BONNIE: You going up yourself?

CARTER: Sure!

BONNIE: When will you be back?

MED. LONG SHOT
CARTER enters behind bar - back BONNIE right f.g. he pours water over head.

CARTER: Oh, it takes three hours each way. I won't be back until after your boat sails. I'll look you up in New York sometime.

BONNIE: What?

CARTER: What -- huh?

BONNIE: Did you say you'd look me up in New York sometime?

CARTER: Sure! I'll see you there --

BONNIE: When are you coming --

CARTER: What did you say.

BONNIE: When are you coming --

CARTER: Next week at two o'clock.

CARTER walks around bar as CAMERA PANS to her - they embrace.

CARTER: Hey, I like that saying goodbye - let's try it again, huh? So long, Bonnie --

CARTER exits through b.g. as BONNIE watches - as she turns KID enters - they start right b.g.

BONNIE: Say - things happen awful fast around here.

KID: Uh huh!

LONG SHOT plane
warming up - CARTER'S walking from f.g. to plane

MED. LONG SHOT CARTER
walks - examining it. As man gets out, he climbs - others working around exit as plane takes off LEFT.

MED. SHOT BONNIE and KID in doorway

BONNIE: Is it going to be dangerous?

KID: What do you want to do - put a net under him? Well, lady, you're really better off this way --

BONNIE: (turning to him) Yeah, I guess -- but look, I hardly know the man.

KID: Sure, but you'll get over it.

In one particular "Fall Guy" episode, Ben Marley ....

-- chain smokes (what? Ben Marley smoking?? It was hysterical. So enjoyable to watch! He pulls up to the curb, cigarette dangling. He strolls down the street, puffing away. He leans against the wall of his slick apartment, playing with his Zippo and lighting up. He smoked like he imagined himself Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.)

-- has big hair, almost teased. Tall, that's what his hair is: tall. Such a mid-80s look, I winced for him. No more beautiful feathered hair from the late 70s and 80s ... now we're into the Rick Springfield / Tears for Fears / name your poison - tall-hair-for-men era.

Example:

-- wears a white blazer with the collar turned up (I laughed out loud seeing that), jeans, and white sneakers - the Miami Vice look.

-- plays a kind of soulless materialist character, manipulative and conniving. He's also not immediately evil - he does have a childhood bond with his friend, but eventually we realize what a bad dude he is. Ben Marley? A bad dude? What country, friends, is this?? He did a good job, though. Has some nice moments. A good guest spot. I just can't think (in my vast experience of watching all of his roles - in the less than one month that I have been obsessed with him) of one time that he has played "bad". He's got this inherent humor and kindness and likeability to him, even in parts where all that stuff has to be totally subliminal, like Apollo 13. You just like that guy, even though we, the audience, are given no explicit details as to WHY. That's that "thing" that Ben Marley has.

So to see him smoking, and lounging around in his bachelor pad, bragging about his possessions, and being a douchebag with no soul was a total treat.

He also had a bragging line like, "Yeah. I have my music on CDs now." And we're all supposed to be impressed and in awe of his financial prowess.

Brill.

You know you've got it bad for Ben Marley when you huddle over your computer at 5:30 in the morning, watching THE FALL GUY on Youtube.

Happy place

Totally transportive. He's one of my favorites.

Movie cliches

This is a re-post.

Movie cliche #1:

A hot crowded New York sidewalk. There were jackhammers in the vicinity, as well as a shrieking ambulance, caught in traffic. I pushed my way through the crowd - and on the opposite sidewalk - suddenly saw him. Haven't seen him in years. I stopped still, in the middle of the sidewalk, as though struck by lightning. My immediate instinct was to quickly cross the street and avoid him. What?? I spent less than 24 hours, total, with that person. Why such a dramatic response? Can't explain it - but that's the way it's always been when I run into him. I stood stock-still - in the middle of the chaos - trying to decide what to do. And in that split second came

Movie Cliche #2

He saw me. He stopped stock-still as well. As though struck by lightning. He looked visibly excited and visibly uncomfortable. I could tell that he wanted to run away as well. But ... ack ... so awkward ... we've seen each other ... so now there is nothing to do but accept

Movie Cliche #3

my slow approach to him, across the chaotic street, surrounded by busy harassed commuters, raging homeless people, fashionistas on their cellphones who seem unperturbed by the heatwave ... Sirens blared. Jackhammers shattered the air. But if this were a movie - all the sound would have melted away. We met up on the corner. And then enacted

Movie Cliche #4

The awkward hug. The hug that other people cringe when they watch. There was no hostility, oh no, why would there be ... just ... thwarted feeling, embarrassment, and a sense that time was already slipping away so quickly that the encounter was almost over. He is so big. I had forgotten his bigness. Our hug was brief, and jittery with awkwardness. We barely know each other, truth be told. But on another level, we know all we need to know. Seriously. That's what's so weird about it. Then I opened my mouth and said

Movie Cliche #5

"I thought you were in Paris!"

We both had sunglasses on. He seemed incapable of putting together a sentence - which I suppose I could call

Movie Cliche #6

He's not just articulate - he's scarily articulate, and brilliant in a kind of daunting way. But in my presence - he has always become a bumbling idiot. He would blurt out inappropriate things, suddenly declare himself and then back off ... I haven't seen him since 2002. This dynamic is still going on. He said something like, "Yeah ... I'm back now ... just in New York for a couple of days ..." Then came

Movie Cliche #7

Awkward meaningless chit-chat, shimmering with sexual tension. It was ridiculous. I knew I was behaving like a cliche but I couldn't seem to stop it. We said stuff to each other like,

"So ... how are you?" I said "How are you?" probably 3 times. He was vague in his responses. I tried to get us to be specific. I asked about his book. He gave me a weird look, like: "How do you know about my book?" Then I said

Movie Cliche #8

"I remember everything."

Which suddenly catapulted us into a new landscape. We're always on the edge of that landscape. Honesty? Perhaps. We've never said what needed to be said - mainly because - the timing was flat out not right. So you have to watch what you say. But it's true. I remember everything. I didn't say it in a threatening stalker way. It's just the truth, and he knows it. I remember everything. He had told me all about his book a couple years ago and he let me read a couple chapters. How could he not remember? When I said "I remember everything" then came

Movie Cliche #9

The long potent pause. It was somehow delicious. I suddenly became calm and unruffled, and I watched him deteriorate into deeper awkwardness. This happened the last time I saw him, when it was even more inappropriate, when I frankly couldn't believe what I was seeing. Like: dude, are you just going to disintegrate, right now, in front of all these people, who are all here for you? Get yourself together! I waited it out. I didn't say anything. I guess I could have put him out of his misery - but it just didn't seem right. We're separate. He's got his journey I've got mine. Then I decided after what felt like 20 minutes of silence (I was unaware of the jackhammers or the sirens during this whole thing) to help him out, so I said

Movie Cliche #10

"I wish you nothing but success with it. Keep working. I loved what I read. You're wonderful." I then watched

Movie Cliches #11, 12 and 13

wash over his face. He wanted to kiss me. But he didn't. He said, slowly, "Sheila. Sheila." That was all he said. I said, "I know. I know. It's okay." He shook his head, wordlessly. I shook my head, wordlessly. We stood there. Wordless. He shook his head again. I nodded in response. This was all a conversation. Everything was completely clear to me. I knew what we were saying.

I felt like we could have just kept going in that manner, shaking head, nodding head, not saying anything ... so I initiated

Movie Cliche #14

I reached out and put my arms around him and hugged him. I tried to make it be normal and friendly. "It was so nice to see you," I said. And I meant it.

Meanwhile

Movie Cliche #15

was going on. He hugged me as though I were a liferaft. I was so sweaty and sticky that I was almost embarrassed that he would be like: Ew. You're a sweaty mess. But he was suddenly clutching on me. This has happened before with him. Any time I run into him, we jitter with awkward stilted conversation, and then, upon parting, he's suddenly clutching me and sniffing my hair like a gorilla. So then came

Movie Cliche #16

I extricated myself and said to him, kindly, and with warmth - I could feel myself emanating warmth: "You take care of yourself. SO good to see you." He nodded, inarticulate again. I backed away - wishing that I was a fashionista, wishing that I could float through a heatwave looking cool and glowing - instead of being a sweaty sticky-haired beast of the pasture. But he was looking at me as THOUGH I was a fashionista- which was distinctly strange.

Then came our final

Movie Cliche

He lifted his hand at me, with a grin. Sort of a sad weird grin. I lifted my hand back, and mouthed, "Bye" - then - had to do it, had to do it ...

I turned my back on him and I walked away.

And suddenly I could hear the sirens again. And the jackhammers. And the traffic. And the ragings of the homeless people. Back to life. Back to reality.

5 minutes later I wondered if I had dreamt the whole thing.

Hope's cute quotient ...

is off the charts here.

We've got:

1. Flat stretchy body

2. Paws curled over face

3. Whiskers poking out from below

4. White back paw falling off the bed in the abandon of sleep

I basically can't stand it.

Oh, dear

How did this happen?

It's a little bit embarrassing, and yet also totally awesome.

Look at the "related topics" tags. I am crying!! That just shows you what a joint effort can do!

Oh, and I noticed in the last couple of days a lot of people searching for "Ben Marley" on my site. I love that. To make it easier to find stuff, I moved his category up close to the top, over to the right. Easy access!

Real-life Skyward

My brother emailed me yesterday, and the subject line was "Uhm, skyward??"

I opened the email and saw the following:

Brendan wove in many jokes in that one-line email, including the joke about the douche who emailed me telling me it was "stupid" how I "anthropomorphized" my cat. I laughed out loud when I opened that email.

Go, pilots, of every stripe!!

The hope and promise of Skyward lives on!

Observations, no conclusions

1. My watch. So feminine, Sheila, so delicate!

2. My red cheeks

3. Mitchell's matching sweater set

4. The guy watching in the background

5. I appear to have nails, which is surprising to me

6. I look like my mother. Only intoxicated.

7. Mitchell's hair

8. I miss those earrings.

Okay, one conclusion:

We are madly in love with each other. Obviously.

Grooming graduates

... I love the seriousness here. Like, it is life or death that I fix the way her tassle is hanging.

Saying yes

Sunday was a pretty cold day, the storm clouds moving in. I was still sick (still am, but on the mend), so I spent the day inside in my pajamas, reading and cleaning and blogging and getting tax stuff ready, and hanging out with Hope. I also exchanged probably 30 emails with my cousin Mike. We were talking about other things (he made me laugh - we were talking about obsessions and he said something like, "You do realize that your friends and family all become obsessed with whatever you become obsessed with, because we basically have to. I'm still thinking about Patricia Neal having her stroke and her husband giving her tough love to make her recover!" hahahaha I had told him the whole Patricia Neal story while on a cell phone in the hallway at Brigham & Women's hospital in Boston - random - Oh, no, it wasn't random - Mike had sent me a box of books he had picked up, and one was Neal's autobiography - so I was ranting and raving in the hallway about her failed love with Gary Cooper and Roald Dahl's dickishness - but that was in September - so hysterical that he's still thinking about it) ... and out of the blue, Mike said, "Write something for me." He gave me a couple of parameters, and then said, "GO."

I've been sort of bored and aimless lately, due to my book being done and its being sent around now ... not much to do with it anymore ... just updates with ye olde agent and things like that ... but that book took up not only almost two years of my life, timewise, but 80 or 90, sometimes 100% of my brainspace. It was ALWAYS there. So to be done with it ... ? What the hell do I do with myself now? I need to start my second book obviously, but right now that is not possible. Anyway, I shared that with Mike - that I was feeling a little lost, without my big writing work ... and, true to form, he said, "Write a short scene for me. It has to have these elements -" (he listed a couple) "and it needs to be about ..." (gave me a couple of guidelines). "Do it now." he wrote. "Go."

I did. I started to write. Immediately. What a weird and fun challenge. Reminds me of acting class, or improv ... don't think or plan, just go.

It also reminds me of an awesome "challenge" I did on my blog once where I wrote down a list of random words and said, "Please somehow work all of these into a short story" - and look at the results!!! I am crying! Ricki outdid herself!! "She just wants to play mahjong." I am howling! And Mr. Bingley contributed too - but seriously go read them. It's beautiful because I gave the challenge, and immediately people across the country started scribbling away. And each piece written is so different, so specific - Bah. I just find it very funny, obviously, but also really touching. Look at people's creativity!!

So Mike's command came to me like that. It's funny, sometimes I can feel myself resist stuff like that. Saying "yes". Not for any particular reason, either - that's the insidious part of it. What would be the point of saying, "I can't ... I'm busy" to what should actually be a fun exercise? I'm not saying it's rational, and I'm not saying I LIVE in that state of saying no - but I can feel it come up in me from time to time. Mike's command to me on Sunday reminded me that it is good to practice spontanaeity - even though that may seem like a contradiction. Saying "yes" to things is a muscle, like anything else ... you need to keep it worked out. When I took a writing class at the 92nd Street Y, much of what we did at the beginning of each class were improvisational writing exercises, which were exhilarating and scary! The teacher would pass around an object - each person would look at it - and then she would say, "Write for 10 minutes." No other guidelines. The object was the launching-off point. It was so fun!! The things people came up with just blew me away - and frankly I was surprising myself! The acting training helps because hesitation and second-guessing is the death of good acting, so ... without worrying if I was doing it "right", I would have to just START. Great practice. The first day of class she passed around a teensy blue pen, about 2 inches long. Here's the piece I wrote, and it's funny, once I got started, I could have just kept going. It's not planned out or structured - but I was just inventing shit left and right with no second-guessing, and it was great great practice.

So that's what came up for me with Mike's sudden command. A rush of adrenaline, a teeny voice saying, "But ... but ... what do I write? HELP ME ...", a much BIGGER voice saying, "GO, just START" and so I did.

I ended up writing for three hours. I did very little editing, just kept going - it was fun to write dialogue, a script - and not worry about "he said" or "she lifted her eyes skyward in a morose manner" or whatever, other narrative elements ... just speech ... back, forth, back, forth ... I had no idea where I was going, or what I was doing, there was no plan - but within 2 seconds of thinking I had my opening line, and then I was off. Suddenly things started to happen spontaneously (it always sounds dumb when people talk about their creative process, but whatever, I've been writing about Ben Marley 24/7 for three weeks now, I'm obviously not worried about sounding dumb!) - suddenly she was drunk, how did that happen? - she was too drunk, way drunker than her partner ... it was getting embarrassing, she was talking too loud ... Uh oh ... what will happen next???

It was so damn fun. I sent it on to Mike, like : Here it is. First draft.

I was so jazzed up that despite my cold, and despite the fact that it was by then 8 o'clock at night, and FREEZING, I bundled up, put the iPod in the ear, and took a long brisk walk for about an hour and a half, Everclear blaring in my ears. I went and visited Alexander Hamilton, my dear dead boyfriend, I stalked along Boulevard East - which was empty because, duh, it was freezing, and walked and walked and walked. Sometimes tears streamed down my face, and other times I was in a movie of my own life, fantasizing and leaping on trampolines in the desert, and all those things I like to think about when I want to get away. It was awesome. I was freezing, yes, and perhaps it wasn't the smartest thing to do, while recoveering from a flu, but getting OUT and MOVING became a moral imperative, I was so wired, so ... well, I was going to say "manic" but that's a negative connotation. I just felt hyped, and happy, and also - satiated. It was beautiful.

Mike and I have been going back and forth about my little script, but what I am left with now is happiness and a sense of possibility. I created something in three hours. I know that may not seem like a revelation especially because - uhm - I create here on the blog CONSTANTLY - and there is no plan. I don't give myself an editorial calendar and say, "Monday I will focus on Suzanne Farrell, Tuesday will be strictly Ben Marley, with maybe a couple of scanned photos ..." I just do what I feel like doing. So yes, in a way, if I look at it - this blog is about "saying Yes" - every single day. It keeps me juiced, keeps me expressive - even in times when I am truly struggling, like now - but I realized, on Sunday, that these sorts of "here are the parameters - GO" exercises are really really good for me, and I need to do more of them.

Saying yes is a muscle. My leg muscles were burning after my long brisk walk - I've been lying in bed for four days, so my body was like, 'Uhm - what's happening - we're MOVING now? Is that what we're doing?' ... and my brain was burning too from the exercise of writing that script.

And you know what? I think it came out pretty good. I'm just saying.

Thank you, Mike. You're such a "yes" kind of guy, and that was really exhilarating for me. A harbinger of things to come.

I'm in a quandary

Where do I put my focus now?

We have:

1. Ben Marley in the Square Pegs episode "It's Academical"

2. Ben Marley as doomed astronaut Roger Chaffee in the 1998 HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon", where you actually get to see Ben Marley in freakin' astronaut garb

3. Ben Marley as Johnny Cash's lanky sweet teenage son in the TV movie "The Pride of Jesse Hallam" (another huge TV movie event that I remember vividly from my adolescence - but again, I didn't put it together!! Jesse Hallam came out AFTER Skyward ... but I don't remember having an "a-ha" moment that the adorable son who ran track and loved his daddy so much that you were basically afraid for his heart to get broken when his daddy inevitably disappointed him ... was also hot Ben Marley in a cowboy hat carrying Suzy Gilstrap into the truck!) He seems significantly younger in "Jesse Hallam" than he seemed in Skyward, where he was on the verge of manhood. So either "Jesse Hallam" was filmed before "Skyward" and it just came out later - or Ben Marley, as an actor, was able to adjust his energy suitably to play a younger-seeming boy. I'm going with the latter. Good actors can change themselves that way.

I feel like I'm shorting out looking at these choices. The fuses are blowing, circuits mis-firing, because I don't know which way to turn.

I wish I could clone myself. "Okay, Second Sheila, could you cover the HBO miniseries? Thanks. Third Sheila, take on Jesse Hallam, and make sure to investigate the timeline, when it was filmed as compared to Skyward, etc. And I'll get back to Square Pegs. We all clear? Good. Deadline is tomorrow, have your posts to me by 5. Thanks."

Hope's with her banana

All's right with the world.

Compilation of comments in re: Ben Marley

I have pulled out a lot of the comments from commenters on the posts I have written on Ben Marley, and as I kept going, the funnier and more awesome it got to read them all in one sitting. I am wiping tears of laughter off of my face. I feel so grateful, first of all, to those of you who have just leapt wholeheartedly on the bandwagon, sometimes far surpassing me in passion and insight. I can't tell you what it's meant to me in the last two months. People have lost their MINDS about Ben Marley, and putting all the comments in one place really hits that point home.

At first I labeled each quote below with the commenter who actually said it ... but then I realized that it's actually funnier reading if you don't know who said it, and you just let the love wash over you. At least that's how it's gone for me, as I read through these comments, with tears of laughter down my face.

These have been some of the funniest comments in the entire history of my blog. Not because it's a silly or a ridiculous topic - on the contrary. Ben Marley is a sweet, subtle, and under-rated actor, who had a huge impact on me as a lonely pre-adolescent, and it's been fun to basically sit around and appreciate him for a month and a half. Sometimes, when life is the roughest, when it's a struggle to even get through the day, it's good to just throw yourself into something (as my dear friend Ann Marie has put it: "propel yourself into the blazing star") - and not hold back, not worry about looking silly or "juvenile" or what other people think of you ... to not worry about anything, actually, except the reality of the present moment, which might include raving about an actor's feathered hair in the early 1980s and how hot he is and how if you had kissed a boy like that when you were 16, your whole life would be different.

I suppose it is silly. But boy, how much we lose in life when we decide to stop being silly.

In that vein, here are some of the comments. Love you all!!

None of these comments are by me. I wanted to focus on everyone out there who has "propelled themselves into the blazing star" with such commitment, making these dark months a little more bearable for me.

Some of these comments are by friends, family, people I've met, internet friends ... some are by people I have no connection with at all. Some are male, some are female. But look at the participation. It's a frenzy.

Enjoy.

"Ben's hair is just devastating. Devastating. I'm on the floor, writhing in a lifetime of longing for boys with hair JUST LIKE THAT. David Cassidy, it's all your fault."

"I am lost in Ben Marley's feathered bangs. LOST."

"This is Anson Williams's dream version of himself - chatty and sweet and HOT."

"im so in love with Ben Marley right now....it reminds me of my Scott Baio obsession of the late eighties."

"Thanks for the gift of... Ben Marley's thighs!"

"Potsie, damn, you did good. Ben, oh Ben, with your denim-clad thighs and your hairless cleavage and your mop of perfectly feathered brown hair and your sweetness, and dare I say it, with me in the chair and you walking up to me, uhm, with your groin at eye level - I AM Suzy Gilstrap, I am the little crippled girl who years to fly (and yearns to dig into his fly - blush). "You can't protect me forever, Daddy" - from flying and sex and incredibly hot guys and slow-dance wheelies and cantankerous ex-stunt pilots who flew in Thirty Seconds of Tokyo and endless bowls of chili. Here I go, skyward. Watch me fly."

"I had to stop reading the second part just at the point Ben Marley (OH DEAR LORD) lifts her into his truck, in order to race to the dentist. I spent the entire time in the chair thinking feverishly about his feathered hair and rolled-up sleeves."

"I am completely obsessed now: was he in Skyward Christmas? Did he wear the same blissful jeans? How could Slow-Dancing Gilstrap look so glum when his unrestrained chest was RIGHT IN HER FACE?"

"A few things...first of all, Ben marley is HOT. Of course he is ten times hotter because his character lives in the west, wears cowboy boots and drives a cool truck. Second of all, I'm dying to know what lip gloss lisa whelchel wore throughout the 80s. i've never seen anything so relentlessly shiny."

"Just think, the day before yesterday, I didn't know who he was. Now, his 1980 self is my life."

"In my mind, Ben Marley is forever living in 1980, wearing clothes so tight one expects him to bust out of them at any second, like an infinitely hotter Incredible Hulk. I am pleased to see him still in a v-neck though, playing to his strengths. Also, it's good there's a little bit of floppiness in his fringe, though not enough, obviously, having witnessed the (screencapped) glory of his former locks."

"I am so ridiculous. Oh Ben, I'll always love you!"

"I sound like a demented realtor doing a home inspection: "Nose: The same. Check. Eyes: Still entirely blissful. Check. Bicep: Still lean and muscular. Check. Skin: Apparent sun damage. Note: Did he not use sunscreen? Was the cowboy hat not enough protection? Too much staring skyward at Gilstrap? Investigate."

"I had an epiph as I read this -- Marley stood in for US, the audience -- that tight third participant, willing the craft down safely, quiet, integral"

"You know, I had coherent, meaningful thoughts on acting choices, ensemble casts etc. until you started posting the photographs. Now all I can do is quiver like a small terrier and paw at the screen. Oh, sweet Ben Marley, what have you reduced me to???"

"One aspect of this that is also heartwarming to me, and adds a layer of enjoyment to the film and his performance, is the personal side. He and Ron Howard worked on 'Skyward' when they were kids. Ron Howard then goes on to be one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. When 'Apollo 13' comes around, this guy who had been the FOCAL point of Howard's debut is now a role player. But one who is given a real stake in the story, a real chance to show his stuff."

"And let's not forget glimpses here and there of lithe, lilting, gentle Ben, a compact masculine bundle of excellent acting, never showy, never anything but in the moment, doing what needs to be done."

"I’d like to think Skyward is the reference point for Ron Howard’s entire career, and every film since then is revisiting themes he first covered there. 'Guys, from the moment of the shuttle explosion, I want all the control room actors to give off the same feeling as Ben Marley loading Suzy Gilstrap into his truck for the first time. Ben, talk us through it.' "

"I loved the way he radiated authority & power. There was no mistaking this was a very physical guy, not an inch of fat on him, very strong, very alpha. It was completely believable for him to be the one to walk straight into Gary’s room, take over, pack his things without hesitation or permission. Even when he opened the curtains to the simulator, he did it with huge amounts of suppressed energy. He was deliberate & definite, even when nodding his head. Moving the guard? The smoke ring? HEAVEN."

"I came home from work at about 1am yesterday and avidly read your blog on Apollo 13 like it was late breaking news. I had to stop to laugh at myself."

"I've become so invested in Ben Marley and The Sheila Variations Exposé thereof, that this feels like a simultaneously personal and universal victory, in the way the national team winning gold at the Olympics does. (I can't construct sentences I'm that excited). I feel like I should be waving a flag."

"I have so much contempt for "Skyward Christmas" right now, and I have NEVER SEEN IT!!! I want to bitch slap all of them- except Ben Marley of course. Actually, I think Ben needs to write an expose of his experience..."

"Thank God Ben was in there plugging away and being his jangly sexy self to relieve us of this maudlin, mawkish mess."

"Had the scriptwriters never met a teenage girl before? There is NO WAY that after a lifetime of being babied and feeling morose, upon landing herself a boyfriend of ASTOUNDING beauty and character – a boy whose every action is excruciatingly erotic – she would care more about Coop’s stupid problems and being wilful than spending every waking moment making the most of her teenage hormones. She would barely remember her own name, let alone her grandpa."

"Having Gilstrap basically behave as if Ben Marley is invisible or neutered is taking this to a place where suspending my disbelief cannot follow. She would be OUT OF HER MIND and continuously offering to fly him to any stupid bull he pleased."

"She looks like she's pleading with him there, or at least having a little meltdown. Can't blame her, even with those elbow patches. Wait, his shirt appears open to the navel! I completely understand now."

"I’m sure the actors in the foreground of Apollo 13 were doing excellent things, but I was so fixated on his reactions to the action, I don’t know for certain! I had to stop it a few times, because I kept missing visual information straining to find the polo shirt, like the sexiest Where’s Wally ever."

"My finest moment was when I was momentarily baffled by his voice; there was something off, I didn’t know what. Not until the tiny, sane bit of my brain that’s lashed itself to the mast in the midst of my Ben Marley perfect storm reminded me that the reason I didn’t recognise his voice was because I HAD ONLY SEEN HIM IN SCREENCAPS."

"My God, my heart is broken. No wonder people haven’t forgotten this show. It portrays the intense extremes and isn’t condescending. Reading this was genuinely painful. I could FEEL again that white-hot humiliation. I was wincing in recognition all the way through. His kindness, his gentleness, his eyes BROKE me – I would’ve been more in love with him than ever. In fact, I am right now. To cheer myself up, I’m going back to the shot of him walking to the dance. DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, thank you for it, Sheila. Hand in the hair, hand in the pocket – so perfect I squealed at the screen! Not to mention the gym shorts! The way he looks when he’s kneeling, holding the soccer ball! The sweat on his forehead! Is that hair on his chest when he’s in the yellow shirt? Oh damn you, Ben Marley, loving you is a rollercoaster!"

"Oh, GOD! Sweet, sweet Ben Marley. To be let down, gently, by him now is my goal in life."

"I've never been let down that gently. I think it would've changed my life too. The ease they exuded amazed me. Not to mention the hair on Ben Marley's chest. Just when I think he couldn't be more perfect!"

"I loved this post (and am now becoming one of the THOUSANDS of Ben Marley savants in this world) and this line in particular: Change of scene, change of cock."

"Admittedly, you could tell me you'd seen Ben Marley blowing his nose and I'd collapse like Lauren on the track. I suppose, if I'm to justify my existence outside of Bedlam, one could say that Ben Marley being wet, frantically doing anything and screaming makes the giant shark attack an inconsequential detail. Right? Right?"

"Ben Marley appears to have Shaun Cassidy’s hair. And the thighs of a bronzed statue."

"He’s a vigorous, healthy young animal, isn’t he? Boys like that amazed me in high school. All boundless energy, bright eyes and lean muscles, like young colts. I swear they were higher life forms. He just looks so capable, particularly his hands. He looks so natural on the catamaran. He’s certainly the first person I’d cling to were I attacked by a vengeful denizen of the deep. Those arms!"

"Look at him in the fuzzy jumper. Those cheekbones! Your episode description makes me nervous. I don't think I can take him letting me down again. I'm so vulnerable to him!"

"I'm drowning in that sweater."

"The performance is now." - Suzanne Farrell

Like most people, I have heard of Suzanne Farrell and knew she was a big deal in the world of ballet. Names like Gelsey Kirkland and Allegra Kent and Darci Kistler ... well, first of all ... aren't those all just great names? They SOUND like famous people. But their fame is enormous, and while I have never seen any of them perform, I am aware of their status. I'm just doing some ballet catch-up here! I just finished reading Joan Acocella's essay on Suzanne Farrell, in her book Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (post about the book here). Other essays I completed this long weekend of flu-recovery and regrouping (not to mention plotting and scheming and conniving like a teenager) were essays on Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, Frederick Ashton, and Lincoln Kerstein. FASCINATING. I know just enough about these people to make it even more interesting for me. Well, about Fosse I know a bit more ... but I was not aware of Jerome Robbins' actual journey of life, and the back and forth between Broadway and ballet, and how he did what he did, and the style he came up with ... Anyway, these essays are amazing to me and I highly recommend the book. I'm moving now into yet another more intellectual section - essays on Mencken, Dorothy Parker, M.F.K. Fisher, Saul Bellow ... I know a lot of these people only through their writing, so I am interested to hear Acocella's take, and the biographical details that she weaves into her essay in such a graceful manner. This book really came along at the right time for me. Her writing is easy, yet just challenging enough to keep me engaged. I can feel her personality in the writing. This book is the opposite of "dry".

Acocella's essay on Suzanne Farrell came out in The New Yorker in 2003, and was focused on the brand new Suzanne Farrell Ballet, a company run by Farrell, the former star-ballerina and muse of George Balanchine (one of the many muses, but perhaps the most important one?? Out of my league here ...)

In reviewing the latest offering from the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Acocella takes the opportunity to give us an entire retrospective of Farrell's life, and I am sure to ballet fans all of the details are well-known. Farrell and Balanchine were as talked about in the world of ballet as Brad and Angelina! Acocella really captures that time - and what it was like to be a ballet fan in New York City at that time, the excitement, the sense of involvement and personal ownership. My friend Ted, a native New Yorker, told me a little bit about it - because his mother is one of those huge ballet fans. So exciting!

But I was more interested in the character of Suzanne Farrell herself. A small obsessive personality, she, as a teenager, became the primary focus of Balanchine, who basically turned his entire ballet company into a vehicle for HER. He changed his style, he adjusted his taste, he had a vibrant "late period", which - in a man of his years and experience - is quite extraordinary. Farrell was not well-liked, although respected - there was a lot of envy of course, and she could be aloof and narrow (according to Acocella and the dancers who knew Farrell at the time.) Farrell was 16 when Balanchine plucked her from the barre and made her a prima ballerina. Resentment. But Farrell, like, I am sure, all ballerinas at that level, kept her nose to the grindstone, and didn't get distracted. I was most interested in that dynamic: the geek, the obsessive, the person who openly admitted doing "nothing" on her days off ... she had no interest in any life outside of ballet ... but then also the person who was, apparently, so fearless and so willing in rehearsals, that all Balanchine had to do was ASK and she would say "yes". She had no hesitation, no intellect getting in the way - just sheer physical trust. And so she grew ... she grew as an artist in an accelerated manner, and he grew with her ... and the entire company basically had to get out of the way. So on the one side, we have the prim nerd who does the crossword at home and reads her Bible every morning, and on the other side, we have the wild gyrating muse of the greatest man in ballet in the 20th century. Extraordinary. But I'll let Acocella take it from here. It's a marvelous piece, and I'm glad I got to know Farrell a bit better. One anecdote in particular (her directing another ballerina in her company) brought me to tears. It is just the kind of thing I like to hear: it's about the work.

From Acocella's essay on Farrell called "The Second Act"

Farrell was the most influential ballerina of the late twentieth century. Others before her had done what could be called modernist ballet dancing - lean and wild, as opposed to the plump and decorous nineteenth-century model - but Farrell, under Balanchine's tutelage, carried that project further than anyone else. What she performed was still classical ballet - she got out there with her hair in a bun and did glissade, assemble - but in her the classical style seemed to have sunk to the bones of the dancing. The flesh was something else, an awakened force. When she bent down into an arabesque penchee, you thought she would never stop. (She was the first dancer I ever saw touch her forehead to her knee in penchee.) When she executed a triple pirouette, and tilted as she did it, and then - without ever righting herself - plunged directly into the next jackknife or nosedive, you thought the walls were falling in. As Arlene Croce wrote, Farrell "made audiences sweat".

Here's the current-day anecdote that brought tears to my eyes:

A constant theme of her teaching is symbol-making. Susan Jaffe, formerly a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, told me about working with Farrell on Mozartiana for the 1995 season at the Kennedy Center. Balanchine made Mozartiana two years before his death, and many people believe that it is about his death. The music for the first section is Tchaikovsky's resetting of Mozart's Ave, Verum Corpus, a musical prayer, and as the curtain opens the lead woman (Farrell in the original), dressed in black, comes forward in bourree - the gliding-on-point step - meanwhile raising her arms very slowly. In learning the ballet, Jaffe was having trouble with the arms, so Farrell spoke to her. She told her that Balanchine had taken those arms from a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West Seventy-first Street, a few blocks from where he lived. Jaffe, who also lived near there, knew the statue, which is actually a rather ordinary marble Madonna, but with lovely arms, which she holds out to us softly, as if she were giving us something nice. No surprises here: death, prayer, Madonna, mercy. And maybe it was the memory of the statue which enabled Jaffe, when she finally performed Mozartiana, to use her arms as wonderfully as she did. I don't think so, though. "In that arm movement," Jaffe said to me later, "you bring your fingers together, and then open your arms. So this movement opens up into art and history - the neighborhood Balanchine lived in, and what he saw, and the history of the world." What Jaffe got from Farrell, it seems, was not so much a description as a suggestion, an idea: of something small, and one's own, opening out into something great, which then becomes one's own, too. With Farrell, Jaffe says, you work "from pictures in your mind, rather than 'Is this a good fifth position?'"

God, I find that so moving. Directors who use suggestion like that ... as opposed to something too literal, or corrective ... are my favorites, and always helped me feel totally free, like I could do this, I could do this on my own.

Obviously Jaffe's technique was fine. Farrell didn't need to work with her on that. She needed her to think about something, that would help her bring out the idea of the moment - and that is something that is very difficult to describe or pass on. Directors who can do that have a gift.

A couple more excerpts:

Farrell, as a dancer, had certain technical shortcomings - she wasn't a jumper, and she couldn't really do allegro (fast, small, fine-cut steps) - but no one in the world was more musical. Her connection to music seemed to be something acutely neurological. ("Even in rehearsal," she says, "when the pianist would start to play, I would get nervous, agitated.") As she sees it, music and dance are much the same thing. "There's sound in movement," she says, and space in sound. The dancer's job is to show - or make - the relation between the two: "There's a clarinet cadenza in Mozartiana that's very hard to count, but say you count it out, and it's thirteen counts. So you tell yourself, 'All right, I've got time for three pirouettes.' But what about the music's internal time? What if one note is louder, so it needs a bigger response from you, and that takes longer? What if the clarinettist doesn't have as much breath that night, so the music sort of fades in and out? You can't really dance to counts, or I couldn't. On any given night, at any given point, I didn't know if I was going to do three turns, or two, or four. You have to dance in the drama of the music, in that timing, at that moment."

And lastly:

[Balanchine] wanted big steps, steps that could fill that echoing stage [at the new theatre at Lincoln Center]. But he was certainly influenced by the fact that he now had, in Farrell, a young wildcat who was dying to do big steps. And so, in collaboration with her, he developed a new style. Farrell calls it "off-balance" dancing, and its off-balance qualities - the reckless tilts and lunges - were indeed the first thing one noticed about it, but it was also new in its utterly plastic musicality and, above all, in its scale. Farrell's movement came in bolts, in waves, in tearing trajectories. (Balanchine rarely sent her out onstage without an expert partner, one who could prevent her from hurling herself into the orchestra pit.) Even when her dancing was slow, it was wild: pooling, flooding. And she performed this way not just in Balanchine's new ballets but in his old ones as well. She changed the repertory, and, as other dancers emulated her, she changed the company. In time, she affected every American company. If, today, American ballet dancers are notably headlong - feat-doers, ear-kickers - that is due in part to Farrell. And if, when they are also profound, they are profound in a cool, exalted, unactory way, that, too, in large measure is Farrell speaking, or Farrell and Balanchine.

Some images below of this teenage phenom, who was so young at the time of her great triumphant debut, that Balanchine had to take her out to Dunkin Donuts afterwards to celebrate. Amazing.

It's good on a snowy Monday before sunrise ...

... to remind yourself of who you REALLY are. Don't let anyone take that away from you. Ever.

Coming up: the next Ben Marley-focused episode of "Square Pegs"

You know, the episode called "It's Academical".

The last four days have been insane, what with the flu, meetings run via blackberry, writing projects piling up, and my overwhelming malaise. But I haven't forgotten Ben Marley! How could I?

I remembered THIS episode even more than the pilot (and Jami Gertz really outdoes herself in this one). Larry Simpson was even more devastating here ... but his character, in this one, disappointed me in the end. He came off his pedestal with a cathartic crash. It was a crushing blow to a 14 year old viewer like myself. But I suppose we all must learn some hard lessons. Perfection often masks some deep insecurity, and Larry, despite the gaze he turns on Patty (and the good lesson he once again provides her in this episode), is obviously walking around with some entrenched psychological issues. Like, you pick the Treaty of Ghent geek-slut over a cutie-patootie in glasses and a kilt? Fine, Larry. You'll have to live with that choice.

More to come, when I'm not overwhelmed by other projects.

For those who haven't been around, I did a couple of posts on Jaws 2, where Ben Marley plays Patrick, one of the teenage boys stranded on his sailboat, and who, in a couple of instances of foresight and strength, saves the day, despite his tender years. Here are the Jaws 2 posts!

Carl Gottlieb's good idea

The making of Jaws 2

Ah, the happy doomed teens of Jaws 2

Sneak peek of the scene in the library, when Ben Marley turns all of his charm, understanding and also, let's not forget, practical nature - (a killer combo) onto Patty.

I'm truly trying not to be angry that Sarah Jessica Parker, in her role as Exec. Producer of SATC did not ask Ben Marley to appear in at least one episode as one of the many men-slash-dildos who strolled through that show. What a missed opportunity, lady!

iPod shuffle as I cleaned my apartment.

"Everybody Loves Me, Baby" - Don McLean. My whole childhood is in this song. I remember being disturbed, as a kid, by the blatant egotism of the song, it scared me. I was probably 5 years old. (It is important to remember that for my first "show and tell" in kindergarten I recited the whole of "American Pie". Other kids brought in their Barbies and GI Joes and hamsters. I stood up there, crowing out at the top of my lungs, "Do you believe in rock 'n roll, Can music save your mortal soul, And can you teach me how to dance real slow?") I remember hearing "Everybody Loves Me Baby" and asking my dad if he "was serious" and I remember my dad explaining it to me, and the concept of irony and sarcasm. It was a relief. At least he's not SERIOUS!

"Crumb By Crumb" - Rufus Wainwright

"All I Want for Christmas" - Mariah Carey. Well, chalk up another play for my #1 most played song on my entire iPod (by a HUGE margin). This song (as much as it would horrify him) will always make me think of Michael. I remember Mitchell basically yelling at Kate and me at breakfast in Chicago, saying, "IT'S A CHRISTMAS CLASSIC." Kate and I cowered in fear, saying, "No argument there, Mitchell ...." None, indeed.

"Rivers of Babylon" - Sinead O'Connor. Lighten up, hon.

"All Over the World" - ELO. Never gets old. A little bit too happy for me right now, but still. Never gets old.

"I Can See a Liar" - Oasis. I liked Oasis for about 2 seconds. I still like a lot of their sound but for me ... there's something lacking. It doesn't go into the mythic level. And with a sound like that, it really should. To me, Robbie Williams goes into the mythic level - similar sound, but he embodies something huge and campy and rock star-ish that Oasis doesn't come close to capturing. Again, that dude has one of the best voices in music (in my opinion - classic rock voice) ... but to me, it stays on the level of sound, and doesn't transcend. That being said, this is my favorite of their songs. (Props to Brendan for our conversation about Oasis - he helped me formulate this paragraph)

"Headache" - Liz Phair. Love her to death.

"A Mháire Bhruinneall" - Sarah McKeown. I like her.

"Conquest" - The White Stripes. This song makes me want to dry-hump someone on a couch. (Ibid.)

"My Hero" - Foo Fighters (live version. Speaking of Kurt Cobain ...) I actually like the live version better. It's raw.

"Love In An Elevator" - Aerosmith, florid central. "Livin' it up while I'm going' down"?? I mean, come on. Love them though.

"Some Unholy War" - Amy Winehouse. She's so fantastic.

"Let the River Run" - Alexandra Billings. Goosebumps. What a diva!!

"Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word" - Elton John. God, this song reminds me of college. And becoming friends with Mitchell.

"Close Every Door To Me" - from Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat - the big showstopping anthem! "Children of Israel are never a-lone ..." "If my life were important I / would ask will I live or die?" Stop being so self-pitying, Joseph. Oh, wait. That's the whole point of the story. Right.

"Nothin' Will Ever Change" - L.E.O. (the brilliant wonderful joint venture between Mike Viola, Bleu, Andy Sturmer - and others ... inspired by ELO - great stuff.)

Untitled Instrumental - from Wynona Carr's awesome rocking gospel album Dragnet for Jesus. This is raw honky-tonk God music that makes you want to get up and scream for the Lord. Either that or say, "Screw the Lord" and jitterbug in a juke dive until you fall down from exhaustion and too much hooch from a mason jar. Whatever. I love Wynona Carr.

"Say Yeah" - Pat McCurdy. No matter how many times I hear those opening chords, it still pierces an arrow in my heart.

"Rock and Roll Ruby" - Warren Smith. Hot.

"Tragic Kingdom" - No Doubt. God, I loved this album when it first came out.

"Photograph" - Weezer. I love Weezer.

"Make Them Hear You" - Brian Stokes Mitchell from the musical Ragtime. Weirdly, Ragtime is one of my "desert island albums". But boy does Mitchell milk it!! Humorous aside: My friend Kate saw the original Ragtime, and said that Audra McDonald was basically a "raw nerve" - Kate had no idea how she did 8 shows a week at that pitch of emotion. I asked, "And how was Brian Stokes Mitchell?" Kate said drily, "I felt like every time he came onstage, it suddenly became Jagtime."

"Outside Villanova" - Eric Hutchinson. Such a funny "morning after" song - thank you Siobhan for introducing me to him!

"The Bear, The Tiger, The Hamster and the Mole" - Lynne Wintersteller - uhm yeah, this is from the 30something-musical Closer Than Ever. Boy, can this chick sing - but I listened to this song one too many times circa 1990 and I really should just delete it.

"Somebody Bigger Than You and I" - Whitney Houston (featuring Bobby Brown) - from The Preacher's Wife soundtrack, one of my favorites. I miss you, Whitney. Come back. Although I think you mean "bigger than you and me".

"The Look" - Dean Martin. One of my favorites of his. Man is he smooth. And always with that little smile in his voice.

"We'll Do It All Again" - Bleu. His voice absolutely kills me. It soars. One of the most emotional voices out there.

"I'm Okay" - Pat McCurdy. The last time I saw Pat, I said, "You know, iPod shuffle is so ridiculous sometimes, because you come up every other song." He said, "How annoying." "Totally."

"That Thing You Do" - speaking of Mike Viola ...

"14th Street" - Rufus Wainwright. This song makes me cry. Not because it's sad, but because its so damn happy. At least the tune is. But with lines like: "Why'd you have to break all my heart? Couldn't you have saved just a little bit of it?" My sentiments exactly.

"Every Time You Say Goodbye" - Alison Krauss. Her voice to me is like a warm comforting blanket.

"I Can't Tell You Why" - The Eagles. I only have their live album of greatest hits. It's a great album.

"Double Happy" - Split Enz. This album - True Colours - is probably one of my favorites of all time. "Nobody Takes Me Seriously"??? Love it. Love the whole album.

"Hotel California" - Eagles (live) - hmmm. A strange confluence in the iPod shuffle ...

"Bad Day" - Daniel Powter. Wow, I forgot I had this song. Why did I buy it again?

"Creep" - Radiohead. An entire era of my life springs into my mind when I hear this song. Dancing to this song like a banshee at a party in Soho, with a guy I had just met, throwing ourselves around, screaming the lyrics into each other's faces. I made out with him later.

"Music For a Found Harmonium" - Patrick Street. This comes from a compilation album of Irish music I have called Green Linnet Twentieth Anniversary Collection. Lots of balderdash on there - Celtic New-Age stuff makes me yawn - but I like the real Irish stuff, with the bodhrans and crap like that. "Music for a Found Harmonium" is great.

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" - The Beatles. Hot.

"Chet Baker's Unsung Swansong" - David Wilcox. Killer lyrics, man.

My old addiction
Changed the wiring in my brain
So that when it turns the switches
Then I am not the same

So like the flowers toward the Sun
I will follow
Stretch myself out thin
Like there's a part of me that's already buried
That sends me out into this window

My old addiction
Is a flood upon the land
This tiny lifeboat
Can keep me dry
But my weight is all
That it can stand

So when I try to lean just a little
For just a splash to cool my face
Ahh that trickle
Turns out fickle
Fills my boat up
Five miles deep

My old addiction
Makes me crave only what is best
Like these just this morning song birds
Craving upward from the nest
These tiny birds outside my window
Take my hand to be their mom
These open mouths
Would trust and swallow
Anything that came along

Like my old addiction
Now the other side of Day
As the springtime
Of my life's time
Turn's the other way

If a swan can have a song
I think I know that tune
But the page is only scrawled
And I am gone this afternoon
But the page is only scrawled
And I am gone this afternoon

"It Hasn't Been Long Enough" - Eric Hutchinson. This might be my favorite track.

"Someone To Watch Over Me" - Julie Andrews. This song makes me cry. This is a killer version. The first section of it is completely a capella.

"Drivin' On" - The Breeders. There were a couple of years there when i didn't go a day without listening to their album Last Splash. I still love The Breeders.

"Higher Ground" - the kickass cover of the Stevie Wonder song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's one of those rare covers that is almost (almost) superior to the original. And of course it always reminds me of my favorite scene in Center Stage. HOT.

"Twilight" - ELO - from their album Time, which was the first album that was not a musical that I bought on my own. Brilliant album - I still think so.

"Let It Will Be" - Madonna - from Confessions on a Dance Floor which is a terrific album. One of my favorites of hers. I know she's an asshole, and I liked her better when she was a dirty girl from Detroit and not a fake-British-accented moron with a red string on her wrist. But I do love her music.

"Bye Bye Baby" - Marilyn Monroe. Words can't express my love for this song. You want to be in a nightclub wearing a tight strapless gown and gloves dancing with some GI on leave.

"J.A.R. (Jason Andrew Relva)" - Green Day. Just thrash your head around. That's the only thing to do to such a song.

"She Came In through the Bathroom Window" - The Beatles. Great makeout song.

"Dark Side of the Sun" - Tori Amos. I used to listen to her 24/7. Now I most explicitly must be in the mood for her. HOWEVER, her latest album has some tracks ("Big Wheel" in particular, and "Teenage Hustler") that I am always in the mood for. It's kind of thrilling. I've been a fan for years. I saw her in concert in Chicago before Little Earthquakes came out. I think it was being released the following month or something like that, so I was lucky - to see her in that small intimate venue - and she was UNBELIEVABLE. Raw. And funny, too.

".... Baby One More Time" - Fountains of Wayne doing a cover of the Britney Spears song. It is so brilliant to have a bunch of guys singing those lyrics - and I also love their comment on why they had covered it. "It's a great pop song. Whatever."

"Simon Zealotes" - from Jesus Christ Superstar ("Christ, you know I love you ...") Love it.

"20th Century Boy" - Placebo. LOVE THIS SONG.

"Longer" - Dan Fogelberg. I admit. I had to skip this one. Too sad. Way too sad for me on this day.

"New Religion" - Duran Duran. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

"Crimson and Clover" - Joan Jett. Never gets old.

"White Christmas" - Bing Crosby. From the Christmas mix Emily sent me. Kerry! You and your performance have taken over this musical in my mind forever, you Broadway Irish Colleen!

Dawn today.

A light snowfall. Heavy blue clouds.

Happy place

Forever and always. Just looking at this is satisfying to me.

In a sad note (but it's really my own fault, so don't feel too sorry for me): when my hard drive crashed in November, or whenever it was, I lost everything on my computer. Now I have a hard drive and all is well, but then I did not. Now, I actually don't keep that much on my hard drive - all my writing is saved on another server, and etc. - but in terms of other things, like iTunes and all my photos - I was, frankly, fucked. Oh well. Time to rebuild. I have done so. I'm back to normal.

BUT one of the things that was lost forever is my huge archive - of probably hundreds of screenshots from no less than 20 different movies - of men staring at themselves in the mirror. This is for that piece that I'll someday write, that I keep mentioning - my "man in the mirror" piece, about the sea change present in the depictions of men during the late 60s and 1970s in cinema and how suddenly every other movie had a man staring at himself in the mirror for a protracted amount of time. Some of the most indelible scenes in our cinematic history! And now we see such moments all the time. They are in vogue. But prior to 1970, men staring at themselves in the mirror was a rare occurrence in movies - and believe me, I searched and searched for the equivalent of a Taxi Driver moment in movies from the 30s, 40s, 50s ... I found some, SORT of, but not quite. (Not surprisingly, most of the best examples of mirror-moments I found involving men were from Orson Welles' movies - that famous shot in Citizen Kane and then of course he based the entire final climax of Lady From Shanghai in a "mirror maze". Of course Orson Welles would focus on self, and on its representation - either magnified or distorted. This is not quite on the level of Rocky staring at himself in the mirror of his cold-water flat for a long long long silent scene - but it's close.) Men looking at themselves in the mirror was a prosaic affair back in earlier movies, straighten the tie, quick glance, out the door. We expect women to look in the mirror, and when she glances at herself, we know exactly what she is doing. (I'm talking about movie language here, I'm talking about symbols). It may be frightened and anxious (Marlene Dietrich looking in the mirror in Witness for the Prosecution) but we still know that she is analyzing her mask, touching up her mask. But a man looking at himself in the mirror in a searching and direct way is not as easy to find ... and is, obviously, a more unsettling image, if just because we aren't sure what he's doing. It up-ends our expectations. It's not comfortable. It is unbearably private. Women can look in the mirror in public, in private, it doesn't matter ... (again, I'm not saying women DON'T look in the mirror with a searching glance the way men did in movies in the 70s - I'm only talking now about what is shown on screen, the symbols and images used to create movies. And since the 1970s, I can think of plenty of examples where women, too, stare at themselves in the mirror in a different way, as though trying to see their own hearts, or trying to understand themselves - Jennifer Jason Leigh has a big mirror-scene in Georgia which is similar to the one Sylvester Stallone has in Rocky - a silent tragic searching for the self) ... But in general, symbolically speaking, in the movies, women glance at themselves in the mirror in public, checking on lipstick, hat, hair ... nobody judges them for it or finds it odd. We know exactly what they are doing and why. It is expected. But a man doing that (as Gere does in Gigolo) is an interesting and startling image. Now, we see such things all the time in movies (there's a couple of moments in The Wrestler - as a matter of fact, Mickey Rourke, in his career, has MANY "mirror moments" - I can think of three or four offhand - makes sense, he is the most self-regarding of actors, the one most in the pit with himself). The movie 8 Mile opens with a "man in the mirror" moment. We come to expect such things, in movies that are about men, men dealing with themselves, their lives, their struggles. It's par for the course, and something that can be quite effective if used well: a man staring at himself (not necessarily preening, like Travolta is here) ... but considering himself. Maybe trying to see inside, a private moment. Or confused ... like: "who am I?" Or maybe, too, in a dreamspace - like Travolta is here, or Gere is in American Gigolo or DeNiro is in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

Anyway, I'm giving away all my ideas, but basically what I'm saying is, now I need to rebuild that archive. There were probably 200 images there, all told. The only ones that remain are the ones I already posted on my blog in various posts.

I miss them!

Boo.

I learned my lesson, but good.