Friday, September 5, 2014

Three Beautiful Things 09/04/14: I'm Meatball Head, The Deke Gains Confidence, I Loved Joan Rivers

1.  Olivia invents another name for me every few days.  Today it was Meatball Head.  She's getting to know me so well.

2.  The Deke is teaching in a school where everything is very different from the situation she was in back in Eugene at Charlemagne.  Today when she arrived home, she was the most hopeful she's been yet, confident that she can be herself, do what she believes in, follow her lights and it will work with her students.  Her new situation has many challenges and the Deke is rising to them.  (It'll really help if the apartment in Greenbelt works out and she won't have to commute.)

3.  After about 1986 or so, I didn't pay much attention to Joan Rivers and so she is fixed in my memory on the Ed Sullivan show or on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show or on the Carol Burnett Show or in concerts up until about 1986.  She was my favorite.  I loved her.  I used to wish that when I tried to be funny with my friends that I could snap off funny remarks like Joan Rivers with her insight, timing, physicality, and her truth telling. (I never could.) Today I found out she died.  I immediately went to YouTube and found as many videos from twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago as I could and just reveled in them.  I loved her jokes, her hoarse voice, loved how she laughed at her own jokes, her remarkable physical energy, and her repeated phrases "Oh, grow up!" and, of course, "Let's talk".  How about this?  Johnny Carson interviewing Joan Rivers said, about men's regard for women, "Don't you think men enjoy intelligence more, when it really comes down to it?"  Joan Rivers: "Ah!  Please! Are we gonna go back to that?  Ah! Are you kidding?  No man has ever put his hand up a woman's dress looking for a library card..."

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