…than a beautiful day in October.
Author: Jinx
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Michael is out tonight, filling in for Terry Gelenter at a film screening — Bringing up Baby, which we both watched over the weekend and disliked. Katherine Hepburn, usually so forceful and interesting, plays one of those chattering flitterbigibbits men adore and women usually just want to smack.
This is the first reference to a film event that I would spend twenty years programming, managing, etc. Mechanics’ Institute’s CinemaLit. Terrence Gelenter was its founder. Almost three years after this diary entry, I would be hired as an assistant and CinemaLit coordinator for MI’s Events Department. A few years after that, Michael would take over as curator from Terrence, who followed a lifelong dream by moving to Paris (where he still lives.) Michael would be curator there for about a decade.
BRINGING UP BABY is the only Depression-era screwball comedy I have seen that I dislike.
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It seemed the issue would never get in. Jackie kept calling from Spilman’s with bad news. The truck would leave Sacramento at 2:00. The truck would leave Sacramento at 5:30. The truck would leave Sacramento even later than that… Much of the day was spent waiting in paralyzing boredom. I divided my time between writing, filing photos and reading, left to pick up Tim at his office and bring him in at about 5:30. Other guests began to arrive: Joan Gaustad, Russ and an older pal of his, Dave Nee and his boyfriend, Carolyn, Dave Clarke, Shelly’s Paul, Trevin’s good-looking younger brother… We had nothing to do but sit around talking. The issue did not actually arrive until we were all digging into the enchiladas Shelly had made.
That was unusually late. Most of the time the issue got there in the afternoon, well before guests began to arrive. I suspect it was delayed because we’d had to do so many last-minute changes in the wake of Heinlein’s death.
I never met “Jackie at Spilman’s.” She was just the name invoked by Shelly or Charlie on collating day when estimating the arrival of all the bagged issues.
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Once, many years ago, I had the terrible experience of hopping on a plane for a flight and discovering I had no books, no magazines, nothing to read. How this happened, I don’t know, but it happened. This was in the era before movies were widely available during flights and after the time when stewardesses could offer you magazines along with snacks and sodas.
“This is so sad,” Michael said when glanced over and saw me picking through anything I could find in the seat back pocket.
My father had a similar experience, told me about once rushing to make a long flight and grabbing the first paperback he saw in the airport convenience store. He was forced to read an entire Danielle Steele novel. “My God,” was all he would say about it afterwards, shaking his head.
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Crouching on the floor beside me as I type is a black square monster of a television that was delivered yesterday. It’s a Magnavox Widescreen TV which Michael’s parents won in some drawing and have no use for, so they shipped it to us. Where this behemoth is going to live isn’t certain. The only other place would be the old dresser in the bedroom, and Michael isn’t confident it could bear that kind of weight. We’re going to have to move a shelf out of the entertainment center to fit in the screen. Michael has that annoyed look he gets whenever he receives an unwanted gift from his parents. I suspect all will be forgiven once he watches his first baseball game on it.
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Cleaned out the issue and set up a permanent dummy on a floppy. Shelly paid a visit to Nellie this week and her hair is now a lovely, luminous auburn.
Collating tomorrow.
Nellie was the hairdresser Shelly and I shared, a wizard at coloring my hair whitish blue, Shelly’s golden-red.
“Cleaning out the issue” had, just a year or two before, involved pulling cut paper off of large paste-up boards, then wiping them down with alcohol to remove the wax. In 1988, I believe it involved just clearing out the Pagemaker file. DTP was so new to us that there might very well have been no “dummy” yet, no blank template of the issue saved onto the computer. It might not have even been an option. The Pagemaker file might have been too large and buggy to save something like that onto that 80s era computer in the middle office, or at least, not without causing it to crash while using other programs like Wordstar or Dbase.
A “floppy” was exactly that. Not the hard little squares popularized by Macs, but a large, black, bendable square of soft plastic. I believe we still have some of those in a closet here, Michael’s old backup files. He was still using them into the late ’90s.
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…isn’t over yet.
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The tickle started on Thursday, the hoarseness on Friday, and the worst of it was yesterday. I decided on our standard panacea for colds — fresh air and the incomparable chicken-ginger porridge at Aux Delice on Polk.
It was a sunny day, every bar, cafe, and restuarant spilled noise and drinkers out onto the sidewalk and were dotted with bored dogs tied to parking meters. I saw a pug, a golden retriever with the soft-furred look of a not-quite-grown puppy, a Wiemeriner mix (with a waterbowl next to it and a sad expression) and a giant that looked like it had some Irish Wolfhound in the mix. Mother would never have made it all the way down that sidewalk. She would stop to pet every dog and ask its owner about it.
Polk Street is still lined with crowded bars and tethered dogs on pretty days, but Aux Delice and its wonderful ginger chicken porridge, crunchy with slivers of fresh ginger that could build a fire in your throat, is gone. It closed last year after fifty years. I will have to make my own ginger-rice porridge.
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We drove for flat marshy miles, arriving in Napa at dusk. Dad had his AAA book open and wanted a 3-diamond hotel, but Napa was packed. We finally pulled into a fairly ritzy place and Dad, who seemed slightly desperate, went in to beg. He returned looking sheepish. There were no rooms with beds available, but they could give us a couple of parlors of $300 a night suites with rollaway beds for $45 a night.
After some uneasy discussion in the car, we went in to see them. The room Tim and I would share was very nice but small, with the usual parlor furnishings, a table and armchairs, sofa, bathroom, and TV set. A rollaway was pushed against one wall. I walked out on the balcony. Through leaves I could see a swimming pool where people were gathered, swimmers talking. That and the scent of cooking shrimp made me think of the old Monroe Country Club. We decided to see what Mom and Dad’s room was like and as we stepped into the hall we encountered a man pushing another rollway. He told us we didn’t need a second one because our sofa pulled out into a bed.
After some drinks in Mom and Dad’s room (wine over ice) we settled on a place called The Penguin for dinner. It was, of course, packed. We waited for an hour in the bar, sitting in a booth behind a row of noisy drunks, men and women who looked like executives out with their secretaries. When we finally got a table, we only had two menus between the four of us. The table on one side of us held the drunks from the bar. On the other side was an equally drunk older couple who smoked and farted the whole time, laughing at the farts. Our waitress, a harried woman in a tuxedo, did her best, but it took us two more hours to get our food — which was quite good.
Back at the hotel, Tim and I discovered the rollaway bed was too lumpy for sleeping, and the TV would show us only a porno flick we were supposed to pay $6.50 to watch. We slept together on the sofa rollout, sharing a pillow.
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Daily writing promptWhat are the most important things needed to live a good life?
…too heavy with possible meanings. Does “good” mean happy? Useful? Important? Does “life” mean your span of days, or how you spend those days, or how you are remembered, or what you have loved or hated or what you have changed, what you have made better or worse?
I don’t know. Sometimes that is the only correct answer.
Pam Troy 