1. Having watched the entire first season of The Americans, I have a lot on my mind and different scenes keep replaying in my head. It's fun. The actor in The Americans who has made the strongest impression on me is Margo Martindale. She plays Phillip and Elizabeth's KGB handler, Claudia. I enjoyed her work plenty enough when she was playing the fascinating and complex Claudia straight up, including the brief and totally unexpected scene when she plays Ms. PacMan, but toward the end of season one, she assumes a couple of disguises, first as Clark's mother (Clark is one of Phillip's alter characters), and, then, later on, she disguises herself as an embarrassed, scatterbrained woman (Lori's aunt from apartment 3D) who has locked herself out of her nieces's place and needs to make a phone call. I won't say what she does once in the apartment, but it's a scene that will always live with me.
2. For breakfast, I'd made myself a delicious rice and shrimp egg scramble. I had some rice left over. Later in the day, I dumped it into that fish soup I made on Wednesday and the rice added texture and substance, making a soup I had already enjoyed taste even better.
3. Late in the evening, without thinking much about it, I put Farewell My Lovely on the television. I've never seen it, but, for some reason (and I was right), I thought it would be fun to watch Robert Mitchum at work, playing the hard-boiled P. I., Philip Marlowe. I didn't get far into the movie, but I was especially enchanted in what I did watch by the movie's atmosphere -- it's 1941 in L. A. --, especially David Shire's soundtrack, jazzy and orchestral, featuring existential sax and trombone solos answered by romantic sounding strings, meant, my guess is, to capture Philip Marlowe's solitude as a bachelor and detective and his softer than expected inward self.
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