1. We have a vigorous rose bush growing near the fence between our back yard and Christy and Everett's. Paul came over today and trimmed it way back and we can see for miles and miles and miles and miles.
2. I've spent time recently reading and watching the movie, The Age of Innocence, prompting me to go back to the third episode of Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film and rewatch its treatment of the Gilded Age in New York City. The focus of this episode is on the great disparity between wealth and poverty in New York City in the latter decades of the 19th century. In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton doesn't write a single syllable about the poor in New York, but watching Ric Burns' film makes the division between the rich and the indigent agonizingly clear. Political corruption was tied directly to this disparity and Burns tell this story, too, with special emphasis on Tammany Hall and the rise and fall of "Boss" Tweed.
3. Debbie and I settled into a solid stretch of television watching this afternoon and on into the evening. We watched Chrisopher Foyle get to the bottom of another corrupt wartime money-making scheme in the Episode 1 of Season 4. It was another superb story.
Later, we lightened up our viewing. I put on an episode of What's My Line?. It was awesome, especially the unforgettable Stopette commercial featuring a mime dancer, through interpretive dance, expressing the efficacy of this (evidently) top of the line antiperspirant deodorant. Pure dada.
Then we watched an episode of Video Village. More dada. It's hard to say what in the program was the most surreal. I'll put my money on Monty Hall and the hostess, Eileen Barton, singing "The Village Bus Song" as they transported the contestants on a golf cart from the end of the Magic Mile back to the where their journey on the Video Village board had started.
If you'd like, you can watch this landmark episode. It was the 500th show of Video Village's run and it's available right here.
We ended our evening by diving into Ken Burns' multi-part documentary, The Roosevelts. We only made it through forty-five minutes of the opening episode due to sleepiness, but we both enjoyed what we saw and look forward to picking it up again.
For me, this episode brought me back to where my day of television viewing had begun. Both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were born during the period of time covered in the episode of New York I watched this morning. Although born into the same social stratum as the characters in The Age of Innocence and raised in a social world that viewed public service as beneath the station of the wealthy, I look forward to learning how the Roosevelts broke with the norms of their social class, entered the world of politics, and to what degree they confronted the dark realities and suffering of the Gilded Age and its aftermath and, later, the Great Depression.
Here's another limerick from Stu:
It's said that some drink when they're bored.
When quarantied not doubled it's FOURED!
So, it's wine, spirits, or beer,
Good thing outlets are near.
So essential rules won't be ignored.
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