1) So sleepy yesterday evening, so I surprised myself by staying up until midnight reading Carol Wallace’s Our Kind of People, a novel of Old New York Gilded Age snobbery and (soon, I hope) social fluidity. I had to force myself to put the book down, and then had a terrible time getting to sleep. Now I feel heavy as a boulder in a muddy riverbank.
2) But not so unconscious that I can’t do basic math. I realized this morning that today would have been Gramma’s 120th birthday.
3) The recent rediscovery (by me) of Mae West’s Goin’ to Town of 1935 reminded me of the many wonderful movies I discovered as a boy on KHTV Houston Channel 39’s Eight O’Clock Movie. All the Shirley Temple movies, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (with subtitles, thank goodness), The Helen Morgan Story, all the Flash Gordon films. And so often next door at Granny and Grampa’s house.