Friday night was the Shabbas for the Jewish Film Festival.

It’s always held at the house of wealthy patrons who live just two blocks away from H&C. With this in mind, I dressed for work in my usual black party garb and carried my nice black boots in a plastic bag, since I didn’t trust their heels to survive the long walk to Cow Hollow. I ended up staying late at H&C anyway, (with Addie shadowing me and occasionally threatening me with health benefits and paid vacations.) At 7:00 I walked to the address on the invitation Michael had handed me that morning.

Fancy even by Cow Hollow standards, the house is on a huge corner lot, a pale square of a mansion fronted by a gate and edged with rosebushes and fountains. Two darkhaired, exuqisitely dressed women arrived at the same time I did, one of them delicately pretty, the other round-faced and jovial. The three of us wandered around the garden, too intimidated to penetrate that wealthy facade. I was embarrassed by the plastic bag I carried holding my ratty black high-tops, and kept thinking of an expression I’d heard once about a bad poker hand. “Like a shiksa’s wardrobe. Nothing matches.” When I pointed out a strawberry growing on a bush near one of the paths, the round-faced woman picked it up and popped it in her mouth. Her apblomb made me feel better.

At last someone poked their head out and invited us in. We walked past a strange pair of life-sized fabric dolls set in the marbelly, white-walled foyer, at the base of a stairway blocked off with a white silk cord, as if we were in a museum. The dolls looked like an elderly lady in a flapper outfit and an elderly man with a moustache, dressed in a tuxedo and yamulke. They were placed as if they were greeting newcomers.

There were a few other guests adrift in airy, perfecctly decorated rooms, a bar covered with a crystal regiment of glasses filled with white wine, occasional islands of bread, crackers and brie, clear plastic cannisters filled with jelliebellies and gummy worms. The main room for the party was next to the open kitchen, with windows looking out onto a balcony with a view of the Bay. Overhead was a ridge that indicated where a movie screen could be lowered. Larry, who always handles the catering for the Shabbas came over to say hello, complimenting me on the fact tht my hair is no longer dyed a shade of red that changed with every hairdresser appointment.

I wasn’t conscious of the number of people streaming in until talking and holding a drink had become difficult. Michael arrived, but got snagged on some folks somwhere near the entrance.

There were the usual rites. The challa was passed around and everyone introduced themselves. We ate salmon and salad, and Michael talked with an Israeli filmmaker, Eitan Wetzler, who’d known Michael back in Chicago when they both worked for an Israeli bank and Michael had been a young executive, Eitan a security guard.

What I mainly remember about that night are those fabric dolls, which were familiar from previous shabbas’ but always surprised me.

Last Sunday was the final showing for the season of Cinema Club. I drove in with Michael. The movie was The Five Senses, an Atom Egyoanish Canadian film, well made and well-acted, complex, enjoyable. Attendance has gotten so high at Cinema Club it was hard to find a seat.

After the first feature we drove to Los Gatos for the second showing. Los Gatos is a pretty little town at the bse of the hills, with a chic, upscale main street that reminds me of Cow Hollow. We ate lunch at our usual place, The Willows. Aftewards, I went for a walk, stopping at a massive Borders bookstore and browsing in a couple of kitchen supply shops. All of those gift shops in Los Gatos and Cow Hollow look alike — bright, shiny faux-naif ceramics, fancy soaps cut into deliberately crude blocks, cookbooks that emphasize the pictures rather than the recipes… I enjoy looking at those things and, in the case of the soaps, picking them up and smelling them, but I have no desire to spend money on them.

Cinema Club was held one Sunday a month, with two showings, one in San Jose, the other in Los Gatos. The idea was to watch a film with no preconceptions — attendees were supposed to have no idea what was going to be shown, whether it was a foriegn film, (Like Wandafuru Raifu’s Afterlife) a documentary (Like Errol Morris’ Mr. Death) or an indie (Like Lance Young’s Bliss).

In reality, there were some members on the mailing list Michael would send a heads up to in order to forestall any angry walkouts. I suspect it was the reaction of some members to Mr. Death and an indie feature about necrophilia called Kissed that prompted this. One person stalked out of Mr. Death at the point where Fred Leuchter, a designer of electric chairs, describes in unadorned, unemotional detail the physical realities of executing a human being. The woman who left complained the film (which is in fact about Leuchter’s embrace of Holocaust revisionism) was obviously “anti-death penalty propaganda.” Another person angrily shouted during the Q&A that Kissed, a strangely restrained, unexploitative film based on a Barbara Gowdy short story, had been made “solely to make money!” I still have a hard time imagining whoever pitched it to the studio making the case that a film about necrophilia would bring in the big bucks.