Snapshots

— Shoeshine guy called out at a passerby, a middle-aged man with greying hair, “Young man! You are in a sorry situation, my friend!” I glanced at the man’s shoes, and saw that they were brown and horribly scuffed. It made me laugh. Excellent and very specific marketing technique by shoeshine guy. I also loved how he called him “young man”.

— I sat in the waiting room of my ob/gyn. She was running 45 minutes behind schedule. The place was packed. There were pregnant women – some alone, some with their husbands, the wait was so long that many people had their laptops out, there was a woman with a small baby boy toddling around the joint, there were single women on cell phones, and there was a woman in a full burkha reading Cosmo. I pulled out the book I am reading right now – Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. I am tearing through it. Something happens at one point in the book – a woman sleeps over another woman’s house – and they have just come from a costume party and the woman sleeping over arrives at the snooty breakfast table still in her costume, which is a Hawaiian costume … and the episode is so hilarious that I started laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face in an embarrassing manner and I had to get up and go walk around on the chilly sidewalk for 5 minutes or so, guffawing where the gynecologically-inclined crowd would not be disturbed by my random shrieks of laughter. The exact same thing happened to me when reading Waugh’s Scoop, only that time it was even worse because I was trapped on a bus, and my face had frozen into a comedy mask and I didn’t know what to do about it! I ADORE Vile Bodies (a movie was made of it – Bright Young Things). Not only is it funny but it is scary brilliant. Prophetic, really. As prophetic as Magic Mountain was of the cataclysm to come, only the veneer is not one of decay, but gaiety and laughter. This is, I think, my third Waugh this year. Love him to death.

— Facebook is kind of blowing me away right now. I can’t believe the people I am reuniting with.

— I am still working on putting my computer back together. I still need to re-install my iTunes library, which I am avoiding, due to, well, terror. The problem is that half of my songs did NOT come from iTunes, but from my old CD collection, and so the stupid program will not recognize them as MINE. Ridonk. I have to go to “music recovery” and blah blah blah, and hopefully it will be fine but I am avoiding it.

— I have also been reading the second volume of Tennessee Williams’ letters. Amazing. It goes up until 1953, after the failed production of Orpheus Descending: A Play in Three Acts and also probably his biggest box-office hit in the theatre – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The correspondence between him and Elia Kazan about the scripts and the problems therein have to be read to be believed. These men had TRUST, man, they TRUSTED each other. They could be brutally honest. I am blown away by it all. Kazan would push Williams in one direction, and Williams, a practical man, could be flexible but there came a point when no, he could not. And Kazan was, of course, not a conventional man … but when their tastes differ, boy, do the sparks fly. Their correspondence is my favorite in the whole book.

— Starting to watch Year of the Dragon now, with Mickey Rourke as a rumpled prematurely grey cop trying to battle the gangs in Chinatown. I saw it years ago and remember very little of it.