Thursday, 1 July -- Provincetown, Day Two

1) “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes,” blah blah blah. With thunderstorms in the forecast, it seemed clear that the beach would not be possible . . . and yet the weather could be deceptively clear.

2) Breakfast al fresco at Liz’s Café — formerly Tippy Toppy of beloved memory — where the parking lot has been commandeered for outdoor seating. Excellent coffee and a smoked salmon and cream cheese omelette.

3) Having missed my usual Wednesday column because of traveling, I knew I would have to spend the morning writing and publishing a column. But I really had to wrestle it to the ground before I felt comfortable publishing, and even then it was too wordy.

4) After that, with a wee bitty of a headache, I knew I needed a change of scene. So I ankled down Bradford Street to a place I’d never really visited in Provincetown: the cemetery.

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4a) Walking from Bradford to the cemetery, down — oh, I don’t remember the street names, Alden, Standish? — reinforced for me that I really know only a very small part of P’town (even after 25 years) and ought to get out a bit more. What I know is mostly Comical Street from the P’town Inn to the PAAM, the crescent formed by Pleasant and Franklin, and Herring Cove.

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5) Well, what a contrast from Forest Hills! Windswept, almost no tree cover but the occasional cypress or something, and yesterday bleached and blasted by the heat. Many tall rectangular slabs of white marble from the 19th century were flush with the ground — either through misadventure or malevolence — and indeed I noted that this cemetery included quite a few modest ground-level markers. From a distance it made the place look even emptier.

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6) All the Provincetown communities were there: the Yankees (mostly 19th-century), the Portuguese fishing community, the artists, and the gay/lesbian community. For the first time I felt I was seeing the graves of non-celebrity same-sex couples — beautiful, poignant, and ordinary. For several of them, it appeared that one member of the couple was still living. One stone included the date of their first date and the day of their marriage.

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7) One child’s grave from a century or more before had been decorated with beads and a plastic flamingo. Dahlings, when my time comes, I don’t want you bringing plastic to my grave! Bring whiskey, champagne, and the good crystal, and have yourself a little party. And if security or anybody gives you a hard time, tell ‘em I’m gonna come back and haunt ‘em. And I will.

8) But it was hot. I had to adjourn to Ben and Jerry’s for a hot fudge sundae. And then, home.

8a) Mercy goodness people, if you’re in a hurry, take Bradford.

9) I spent the afternoon crunching some numbers (again, the weather), and then figured out how to work my new airpods all by myself without asking anyone. 😇

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10) After cocktails, during which I was introduced to Rick and Morty 😱, the household dined in. Since I’d done none of the cooking, I happily washed up. This time this meant witnessing a debate about how to clean a cast-iron skillet, after which I was handed a tiny piece of chain mail. “And what is this? A fetishkini?” I asked. Turns out there is such a thing as a chainmail dishcloth!

10a) The secret ingredient is violet syrup. But . . . to what?

11) So as if discovering a new, unexpected use for chain mail didn’t blow my mind enough, we then switched on the new movie version of In the Heights. Deeply moving on more levels than I expected, and able to go places the stage version couldn’t because movies are magic in a different way. See it.

Sunday Morning, 27 June -- 🐜😱

1) Sometimes things don’t go according to plan. I brought my coffee and notebook out to the back porch, expecting to write al fresco on this cool gray morning in a space made private with the bamboo blinds I got last year. Wiping off the little desk I thought little of noticing a couple microscopically tiny pale bugs. Imagine my horror when I glanced to my left and discovered the bamboo blind alive with hundreds and hundreds of them!

1a) AIGH! followed swifty by EECCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHH!

2) The only possible reaction was to roll up the blinds, retreat inside immediately, strip, and shower. And then bring my coffee and notebook into the study.

3) An internet search reveals how to clean mold off a bamboo blind, which is helpful, but doesn’t mention bugs. I am hoping these are just mealy bugs or bamboo mites or just plain old ants and not actual termites (God help me). They are definitely not bamboo beetles at least.

3a) The nice pest control man is already scheduled July 9 for the quarterly visit, and the remedies suggested (for mold) are household things like baking soda and white vinegar, but still . . . I think I’m gonna have to toss those blinds out.

Friday Evening, 25 June

1) The last two days I have had paralyzing moments of doubt and remorse about things from the past, both near and far, that can kind of be summed up with three quotations from my Bag of Old Sayings Mostly (But Not Always) from Golden Age Hollywood:

  • Queen Gertrude: “O Hamlet, speak no more:
    Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
    And there I see such black and grainéd spots
    As will not leave their tinct.”

  • From Camille, Robert Taylor as Armand: “I thought you didn’t like sad thoughts.”

    Greta Garbo as Marguerite (smiling): “I don’t, but they come sometimes.”

  • From Soapdish, Sally Field as Celeste: “I had my reasons. Maybe they were dumb reasons, but they were reasons. Hellllllllllllllllllllll, I’m not a genius. I’m just a working actress!”

2) Finalmente, I am close to finishing Field of Blood after months and months of false starts. Glad it was the only book I brought to the Cape last week. Then George IV: Inspiration of the Regency, which covers the “painted bag of maraschino’s” influence on fashion, military life, architecture, art, politics, ostentation, and of course fornication and adultery. And then I can really turn my attention to the new biography from Hugo Vickers, The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon — Duchess of Marlborough. Gladys (pronounced GLAY-dis) was one of those great beauties who would stop at nothing to retain her own beauty, including injecting paraffin into her forehead or something to retain her classic profile. Oops, didn’t work.

3) Sweeping open the parlor curtains this morning, I discovered that the big white hydrangea right outside the window is bursting into bloom. In that moment of surprise it looked like an arrested wave. The only other thing blooming the garden right now is a few random tiger lilies.

Monday Morning, 24 May -- Morning Meditations

Up early after heavy sleep — besides which the arborist is coming at 7:30 AM (!) to estimate the cost of removing a couple trees from the property line — and three quotes from this morning’s devotional have decided to move in with me — uncomfortably, which of course is the value of meditation:

1) From Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, number 197: “Never stumble over fools. A fool is someone who doesn’t recognize a fool, and, even more, someone who does, but doesn’t get rid of him [emphasis mine]. Fools are dangerous to deal with, even superficially, and do much harm if you confide in them. For a while they are held back by their own caution or that of others, but the delay serves only to deepen their foolishness. Someone who has no reputation can do only harm to yours . . . “

2) From Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: “No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and now are more important.”

3) From Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be: “Experience is the opposite of being creative.” Also, “If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.”

Thursday Afternoon, 22 April -- Books

During the pandemic it hasn’t been easy for me to get going with new books. In the past I did most of my reading on the subway or in restaurants, and who’s been going to either of those places?! The only three I can really remember at this point are Hello Goodbye Hello, a charming book about celebrities encountering celebrities; the biography of Jane Digby, Lady Ellenborough (the most scandalous adulteress of her generation), and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I’ve had a desultory time pretending I want to keep continuing with Field of Blood, about Congressional violence before the Civil War.

But in the last month of so I’ve been vacuuming my way through some new books:

Mink on Weekdays (Ermine on Sunday), by Felicia Lamport. Someone on Insta recommended this outrageous coming-of-age memoir from the 1920s. Felicia and her older sister live with their exceedingly wealthy parents in an atmosphere of Babylonian privilege where they are minded first by a German fraulein and then by a French governess. Their mother is really the main character; if Auntie Mame had been a Jewish mother, she would have been Felicia’s mother. Certainly they had a colorful upbringing! (Copies of this book for sale on the internet cost hundreds of dollars, so I was grateful the Athenaeum had it in their collection.)

The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era, by Gareth Russell. I’ve been reading about the Titanic these 44 years, as you know. This book concentrates on seven first-class passengers — the Countess of Rothes, Thomas Andrews (who designed the ship), Ida and Isidor Strauss, John Thayer and his son Jack, and Dorothy Gibson — and through them reaches out to a lot of different aspects of history: the rise of the Irish middle class, Belfast as a growing European city, anti-Semitism in the Confederacy, the decline of the landed nobility in England, mental health, and the growth of celebrity culture. Every page of it was worth it.

And the Band Played On: The Titanic Violinist and the Glovemaker: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Betrayal, by Christopher Ward. The author’s grandfather turns out to be the cutest violinist on the Titanic, Jock Hume, who went down with the ship and his bandmates. Jock left behind a pregnant fiancée, Mary Costin, and a feud with his impossible father Andrew, who had only a casual relationship with the truth. I’m still reading it — apparently a big court trial is key to the action — but this covers everything including the recovery of Jock’s body by the Mackay-Bennett and the history of the fiddle in Scotland.

The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria, by Greg King and Penny Wilson. With all my fascination with the Titanic and (to a lesser degree) the Lusitania, I’d never read anything about the sinking of the Andrea Doria. This really took me into a sun-drenched world of 1950s glamor, but one that ended in such horror. The authors looked particularly at the passengers whose cabins were at the point of impact with the Stockholm. Just as interesting: the heroic efforts of the medical staff on board to evacuate the two (or three?) passengers traveling in the ship’s infirmary to seek medical care in the States.

Bloomsbury Stud: The Life of Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin, by Michael Bloch (researched by Susan Fox). To say that Tommy got around is an understatement. He seems to have slept with all the Bloomsbury Group except Virginia Woolf — and yet his most enduring work is the bust he sculpted of her. His wife said something about him needing everyone to worship him with their bodies. It’s sad that he died before the age of 40, and that more of his work hasn’t survived.

The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries: Fadeout, Death Claims, Troublemaker, The Man Everyone Was Afraid Of, and Skinflick, by Joseph Hansen. Back in college a friend introduced me to this excellent series focused on a gay Southern Californian detective of the late 1960s through the mid-’70s. Hansen’s ability to describe atmosphere just can’t be beat; everything feels like a gritty, sun-warped down-at-heels California that has probably been significantly upgraded by now. Plot twists abound, of course, but there’s a gay plot or subplot near the core of every murder (not the way you’d expect, either). And Dave’s personal life makes a significant part of the story. As a gay man, he knows the only reason the insurance company employs him is because his father is chairman of the board — even if he is the best detective in the business. At the beginning of Fadeout we learn that Dave’s lover of 20+ years has just died. By the end of the book he’s bonding with another man who’s long-time lover has also just been killed. And there is so much smoking and drinking going on! Portable bars in every office, too. The 1970s was a very different era.

Thursday Morning, 8 April

1) Yesterday, waiting outside the Pru on Boylston Street to get in line for my first vaccine jab, I witnessed an interesting little street ballet between an older man and a younger woman. The former, a cabbie, took vigorous exception that the latter seemed to be parking her car within the zone designated for cabs. There were many expansive arm gestures and much walking back and forth — and in the woman’s case, much tossing of a fountain-style pony tail. He was very upset with her, but after awhile she was having none of it and stalked off to the mall. Unfortunately she had to return to her car to get her bag, which somehow required her to open a passenger door and her trunk. She would not engage with the cabbie. After her final departure, he called out “I hope you like your ticket!” and stalked off toward the Hynes . . . probably to drop a dime on her with a cop detailing the vaccination site. He came back looking defeated.

1a) Yes, I did get my first jab yesterday. Grateful for that.

2) My New Year’s resolution to complete ye Myrie Kyndo Tydying Yp by Memorial Day weekend is decidedly over deadline, but I forge ahead. Do you know there are something like 100 drawers in my home? Unexpected treasures include a $50 gift card, a 1974 uncirculated Eisenhower silver dollar given to me by my godparents for my 12th birthday, two Nutcracker staff pins from the Pastel Prison, and a St. Jude medal someone gave me in the 1990s — among much else!

2a) But if I’m really going to have a yard sale in May, I need to hop to it.

3) The other thing is, I’m now just over one week into Dry April, an effort to reduce some girth before summer. This is inspired by several people from different parts of my life (who don’t know each other) who all did Dry January. As Karen Richards so memorably said in All About Eve, “Why, I said to myself, not?” What I find I miss most is the ritual of the five o’clock cocktail hour rather than the cocktail itself. But that, and a dramatic reduction in cheese consumption, sees me shedding pounds, and that makes me very happy.

3a) Since wine is called for in a couple recipes for this Saturday’s Dress Dinner challenge, I may toss back a glass with dinner on that one night.

Friday Morning, 26 March

1) Off to the dentist very early this morning to fix a broken filling. Waiting for the anesthetic to kick in, I shared the plot of Valley of the Dolls since we had been talking about painkillers. And a good thing, too, ‘cause they actually had to give me an extra shot after the drilling commenced, something I never remember experiencing before.

2) Bone marrow, cheesecloth, basil, rosemary, garlic, strawberry chamagne jam, carrots, soy sauce, and now I have everything I need for this weekend’s Dress Dinner Challenge menu.

2a) Of this list, the cheesecloth is the most important item.

2b) Also, a surfeit of Easter candy, which was really unnecessary since Laura’s family sent me a beautiful Easter basket centerpiece from ye Byrdick’s.

3) It’s interesting to consider that I started this little personal blog four years ago this month at a particularly low point to have an alternative to sharing info I’d ordinarily post on ye Fycebykke. Now, I treat that platform more as a reluctant obligation — but not because of the friends I have there.

Friday, 12 March -- Alfred Hitchcock Day

For reasons unknown even to the internet, today is Alfred Hitchcock Day. Because you may not have seen these, here are some publicly available Hitchcock films that you should see, in random order.

REBECCA

Possibly one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, Rebecca is the dead first wife of dark and brooding Laurence Olivier. His second wife, mousy and insecure Joan Fontaine, becomes obsessed with Rebecca’s memory while the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers — Judith Anderson in her greatest and most sinister performance on film — works to undermine her mental health and her marriage. Add in George Sanders as Rebecca’s louche cousin, Gladys Cooper and Nigel Bruce as the in-laws, and delightfully awkward Reginald Denny as the estate manager once infatuated with Rebecca, and all you need to add is a sunken sailboat with a body in it . . .

JAMAICA INN

Significant as the film debut of Maureen O’Hara, she plays a spirited but bereaved Irish girl come to live with her aunt and uncle on the Cornish coast. Alas, she discovers her rough uncle is running a gang that plan shipwrecks and murder the crews to rob the cargo! Robert Newton (probably best remembered as Inspector Fix in Around the World in Eighty Days) tries to help her out, but what sort of game is he playing anyway? Emlyn Williams makes for a cocky shipwrecker with a chip on each shoulder, and I am especially fond of Marie Ney as the long-suffering Aunt Patience. Look also for my beloved Mabel Terry-Lewis (the Comtesse de Tournay in The Scarlet Pimpernel) as an aristocratic dinner guest near the start of the film.

But the honors really go to Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the local squire and magistrate, who wants only “to live spaciously, as a gentleman.”

NOTORIOUS

Ingrid Bergman — at her best in my view — starts out as the good-time-girl daughter of a Nazi war criminal. Cary Grant persuades her to start spying for the US government, which means moving to Rio de Janeiro and ingratiating herself with Claude Rains . . . who already has a crush on her. As I’m fond of saying, hilarity ensues, this time involving poison.

If you loved Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers, you’ll really love Madame Konstantin as Claude Rains’s Nazi mother. She smokes a cigarette in bed like a gun firing bullets into your heart. Louis Calhern appears as Cary Grant’s boss (I believe it was in his contract that no fewer than three references to his good looks remain in the finished film). But I was truly delighted to see Lenore Ulric, known only for her performance as Greta Garbo’s rival Olympe in Camille, show up as a party guest. Such enormous eyes, and her line “Young men have such short memories” speaks volumes.

SPELLBOUND

Ingrid Bergman again, this time as a cut-and-dried psychoanalyst at a sanitarium who falls in love with her new boss, Gregory Peck . . . even after he has a freakout. And this being Hitchcock, of course there’s a murder involved. Leo G. Carroll as Himself appears as the outgoing head of the sanitarium, but the best performance is from Michael Chekhov, the son of Anton Chekhov Himself, as Bergman’s peppery psychiatry professor from college. Seeing Bergman deal with a hotel drunk is priceless.

Medically, this film is laughable. Besides all the outdated notions about psychiatry, how on earth is this sanitarium run?! The doctors spend all their time together as a group (including at meals in the same dining room with patients) — and they have to be surgeons as well as psychiatrists! That said, this film is best known for its groundbreaking dream sequence designed by the surrealist Salvador Dalí — and it’s amazing.

THE PARADINE CASE

I just wrote about The Paradine Case recently here, so no need to repeat myself.

There are lots of other amazing Hitchcock movies, but these are the ones on my Yewtybbe list. Certainly you should check out The 39 Steps (though I find it exhausting), To Catch a Thief, Rope, Stage Fright, Rear Window, and Lifeboat. I’m probably leaving out one of your favorites. I’ll conclude by adding that I’ll never see The Birds again, and it’s a horrible movie to see on a date. Don’t ask me how I know.