I’ve removed a post from this past Monday that — put as charitably as possible — briefly explored whether mild incidental fiction on blogs is worth getting one’s knickers in a kink.  What prompted the post has had a nice resolution.

In celebration, I offer a still from the ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love’ number from ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ (1953).  Jane Russell growling the lines “I like big muscles / And red corpuscles / I like a beautiful hunk of man!” has been etched in my memory for exactly sixty years now.  I first saw ‘GPB’ on the big screen when I was six, and knew something was up during this number, arguably the most homo-erotic [innocently?] sequence to come out of Fifties Hollywood.

Never seen ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’?  Turn in your membership card.  Now.

Here’s a YouTube video my [best] friend who lives in Potomac MD sent me this morning.  The person in the ad agency who decided Nimoy should do the Hobbit song needs a million bonus for knowing what nudges an ad into the hall of fame.

It’s Sunday, what about a church-themed post.

Whereas I cannot describe myself as a religious person, I am a superstitious one.  Is ‘superstitious’ not ‘religious’ after a fashion?  I leave it to you.  I was raised Presbyterian, but I was not a willing churchgoer.  My parents were active in the church, and my dad — a handsome man, complete with a quiet charisma — always made me proud when the odd announcement fell to him as part of a service.  Otherwise, I was routinely bored almost to distraction, Sunday after Sunday, year after year.

Alas, fate is cruel: dozens of hymns from those days took up residence in my head.  But!  I have in my time put them to good use.  Though I don’t like to drive late at night anymore, in years gone by I kept myself awake at the wheel — alone, mind you — by singing show tunes interspersed with hymns.  Yes…  However, the real showstopper is the night I wandered into singing the songs in Fudd-speak, where L’s and R’s are replaced with W’s.  Many hymns, as it turns out, are cornucopias of Elmer Fudd fodder.

I offer ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, written one hundred years ago this very year, I just discovered via the Internet, by a gentleman named George Bennard.

As written:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross / The emblem of suff’ring and shame / And I love that old cross where the dearest and best / For a world of lost sinners was slain.  /  So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross / Till my trophies at last I lay down / I will cling to the old rugged cross / And exchange it some day for a crown.

Fudded:

On a hiww faw away stood an owd wugged cwoss / The embwem of suff’wing and shame / And I wove that owd cwoss whewe the deawist and best / Fow a wowwd of wost sinnews was swain.  /  So I’ww chewish the owd wugged cwoss / Till my twophies at wast I way down /  I wiww cwing to the owd wugged cwoss / And exchange it some day fow a cwown.

If I get enough requests, I’ll post a YouTube video performance.  If anything is to be considered once-in-a-lifetime, this has to be it.

Bugs and Elmer from ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ / © (c) & TM 2003 Cartoon Network

… but, it might help to fully appreciate the last sentence in this paragraph, lifted from Manohla Dargis’ NYT review of ‘Oblivion’, the new Tom Cruise sci-fi movie.

“Its story primarily unfolds in 2077, long after a cataclysmic war between earthlings and extraterrestrials. Nuked to all but radioactive ash, the Earth has been rendered nearly uninhabitable, and its remaining people have fled to a galactic shelter. The only ones left on the planet appear to be Jack Harper (Mr. Cruise) and his companion, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who live in a cantilevered aerie above the clouds that brings to mind a “Jetsons” sky pad. His job is to repair drones that patrol the facilities that extract resources for the surviving populace and that are under attack from the aliens, or Scavs, as in scavengers. She monitors him back at their place, waving her hands over a tabletop computer, while in full makeup and rocking some fabulous end-of-days-to-night dresses and heels.”

‘Fabulous end-of-days-to-night dresses and heels’?  I’m sorry, that’s just poetry.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  (Click to enlarge)

I’d love to see this new play ‘The Nance’, starring Nathan Lane at the Lyceum Theatre in New York.  Why?  Well, for one thing: Nathan Lane.  And that set!

I’m crazy about a busy set.

Stephen and I contribute monthly to a half dozen organizations including Prevent Child Abuse, Planned Parenthood, ASPCA, HRC, Lambda Legal, and SPLC.  Along with Prevent Child Abuse, the one I somehow feel the most committed to is the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Last evening our friend Roger and I drove to Atlanta to attend a lecture staged at The Temple, the synagogue made ‘famous’ for having been bombed by the KKK in 1958 for having voiced publicly its support for the Civil Rights movement.  Beautiful building, capacity crowd in attendance.

The current President of SPLC, Richard Cohen spoke first, followed by remarks by SPLC founder Morris Dees.  The review of past accomplishments, the history part, was not even remotely rote.  The statistics part of the evening was unfortunately not surprising: There are a lot of crazy people in the U.S.  What was unexpected to me was a fearless emphasis toward the end of the lecture on LGBT issues and bullying.  I’m too old to be able to completely shed my surprise at people’s open respect and value of our lives.

Send the Southern Poverty Law Center some money.

I invite you to visit, or revisit, as the case may be, a post from 2009, only the forth post on this blog, as a matter of fact.  It is entitled Alternate Endings, and relates the story of how I met the couple mentioned in the previous post.

During their international travels, we would receive tchotchkes artifacts from time to time.  The Incan treasure pictured here features a llama, a conquistador, and an Inca indian.  Everyone looks very happy, don’t you think?

A week ago our friends Bruce and Betsy were up from Miami to celebrate their wedding anniversary on the 21st, which in most years would have been the Spring Equinox.  In a year’s time, they will be moving to a nearby rural community and building a house on 20 lovely acres.  They insist that they’re actually going to do this, but after living in Madrid, Santiago, and Miami over a span of 30-odd years, I fear for the isolation shock in this retirement relocation.  This visit, they were only passing through on their way to points west, but we did manage to have lunch, Stephen joining us late, having gotten stuck with a client.

One subject at lunch was ‘seemingly innocuous remarks that strike home’.  I managed two examples: first, my older brother saying (once upon a time) that I had ‘lived my life in a fantasy world’.  As I recall, he looked a little embarrassed after the words left his lips, because I think he realized that I recognized that the subtext of this short editorial was ‘underachievement’.  Fantasy or not, things have gone rather well for me, I think: swell partner of 36 years (April 1st), we’re healthy, debt-free, and I get two checks a month for — as our friend Michael likes to put it — sitting around the house all day ‘touching myself’.  I don’t know what that last part means.

My other ‘innocuous remark’ example came from my mother.  In 1971, she had been invited to meet for lunch by her prospective daughter-in-law’s aunt and uncle, who were stopping over in Atlanta.  On the day, I ferried mum to the appointed restaurant, made myself scarce for a couple of hours, then returned to collect and drive her back home.  That drive home of forty miles offered a chance for reverie, and at some point without preface, gazing out at the passing landscape, my mother murmured, “I wonder what their bedroom conversation will be.”  Never possessing high self-esteem, she had not been looking forward to this lunch, as this couple were Old Philadelphia with no experience to speak of with quaint Southern Folk.  Her misgivings were in the end all for naught, as she and the formidable aunt corresponded for years and became close friends.

I suppose when couples meet someone, the ‘post-mortem’ is inevitable, but I don’t really care for the idea.  That is, of course, unless it involves people meeting me, in which case I want them to go home, straight to the boudoir, and wax poetic.

We spent this past weekend in Atlanta, a party Friday night, Saint Patty’s Day parade (lots of firemen) and a wedding Saturday, the Atlanta Marathon on Sunday.  I would love to live in Atlanta, but I would love to live in Atlanta with loads of money.  A wonderful city is more wonderful with a wonderful bunch of money.  While I do not mean to be unkind, if you want to argue ‘money can’t buy you happiness’, please go sit in the corner wearing the pointy cap.

Whenever Stephen and I travel by car, there is always ugliness.  I was once practically Ninja at defensive driving, now I’m so tentative as to be dangerous.  My friend Smitty has a theory about this — that if you inadvertently step outside the bubble and glimpse and grok the insanity of hurtling down the highway in a tin can, you never recover.  I am also, according to Stephen, a very poor copilot.  Ugliness.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that I am certifiably directionally dyslexic.  I’m now almost positive that I’m also equally spatially dyslexic, or spatially Aspergerish, or whatever.  The trip ‘there’ gives me no clues to the trip back; the terrain is all visually new to me on the return.  On the positive side, scenically I get two-for-one.  Otherwise, I need a very big bag of breadcrumbs.

All of this could be solved with a chauffeur.  Maybe two chauffeurs.  And money.

A couple of things, what brought the first to mind this morning, je n’ai aucune idée.

Dick Cheney reemerged for the umpteenth time last week.  The fact that this thimble-dicked crone is hellbent on showcasing his remorselessness again and again is the only fascinating thing about him left.  Of his recent television interview, someone commented that his heart transplant was a ‘wasted heart’.  Enough about the Dick.

The other thought actually did have a prompt.  The upholstered chair I’m sitting in has gotten a kind of nice wear on the arms, which reminded me of an article I read following Jackie Onassis’s death.  It pointed out that her Manhattan apartment would have been a disappointment for those who might have expected haute design, as it was in fact furnished with worn, old money sofas and chairs.  From there, I remembered another magazine article that led off with the most amazing summation of the marriage of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, an event that caused such a rumpus when it occurred.  The writer opined that if Jackie and Ari fought every day they were together, they’d be the happiest couple in the world, because she got the sanctuary his vast wealth provided, and he got “the world’s ultimate bauble”.

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”  Referring to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis as a ‘bauble’?  Pure genius.

Referring to former Vice-President Cheney as a ‘thimble-dicked crone’?  Also not bad.