1. For much of the day, I continued to read The Woman in White. Much of what I read was narrated by Marian Holcombe through her journal. Her entries tremble with fear and repulsion as she observes and learns more about her half-sister Laura's new husband, Sir Percival Glyde and his longtime friend, Count Fasco. My already high regard for Collins as a story teller and a writer of sharp psychological insight grew. I trembled along with Marian Holcombe and shared in her repulsion.
2. To limit our trips to the grocery store, Debbie and I have been stocking up a bit on some canned goods, including about six cans of tuna fish. Late this afternoon, I started to imagine that a tuna salad would be tasty and so I drained a couple of cans, put the tuna in a salad bowl, and chopped up green onion, carrots, sweet peppers, and celery. I added capers and some brine and Debbie added cherry tomatoes and four cloves of pressed garlic. While Debbie dressed the tuna and vegetables with a peerless vinaigrette that she invented on the spot, I chopped a head of romaine lettuce.
Debbie figured over the last several months that the lettuce should be the last ingredient added to any tossed salad. So, once she had mixed up the tuna and vegetables with the vinaigrette she invented in the bottom of the bowl, I added in the lettuce and then Debbie mixed it all up. The result was two-fold: first, no vinaigrette went to the bottom of the bowl -- using her method, the dressing attaches to the lettuce and other ingredients far better than when we used to pour it over the salad as a last step; second, it resulted in the best tuna salad I've ever tasted.
I ate mine in a bowl and Debbie ate hers wrapped in a tortilla.
We loved our dinner.
3. Fixing and eating dinner with Debbie pulled me out of the Vizio room where I've been absorbed in reading The Woman in White for the last few days.
I don't remember why it was on, but a week or so ago, suddenly a thirty year retrospective featuring Mel Brooks and some cast members from Blazing Saddles came on and Debbie and I watched it. I'd never seen Blazing Saddles, although I was familiar with its most famous scenes and these scenes were played in the retrospective. Debbie wasn't sure if she'd ever watched it and she proclaimed that one of these evenings, we ought to put it on.
Tonight we did.
The movie flabbergasted me.
I haven't watched a lot of movies by Mel Brooks over the years. Tonight, I settled in my mind once and for all that Mel Brooks is an absurdist, relentless maker of farce, parodist, and a critic -- a social critic and a film and art critic.
In Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks attacks social issues and critiques movies and music with vulgarity, exaggeration, spoofs, racial epithets, anachronisms, broad physical scenes of farce, a hurricane of gags, puns, dirty jokes, parody songs, and cultural references to everything from Stephen Foster to Marlene Dietrich to Looney Tunes to movie musicals of the 1930s to Candygrams (to name a few). It's dizzying. It's relentless.
I'm not sure I have the language to express how much I enjoyed the last act of this movie when Mel Brooks demolishes any pretense that what we've been watching is anything but a movie. I'm going to write now as if everyone alive has seen Blazing Saddles, but if you haven't seen it and plan to, skip the next paragraphs.
Brooks plays, at the end of the movie, with the idea that there is a real Rock Ridge and a fake Rock Ridge -- the fake Rock Ridge is a movie set built overnight by Sheriff Bart's friends from the railroad crew. So, just as we have let ourselves be fooled that the "real" Rock Ridge exists, when it's actually just a fake town built on a Blazing Saddles sound stage, so the marauders gathered up to destroy Rock Ridge are fooled by the "fake" town. A fight breaks out in fake Rock Ridge between the townspeople and the marauders. The fighting spills out of the "fake" Rock Ridge, which is a sound stage within a sound stage, and into another Warner Brothers sound stage where a 1930s-style musical is being made and on into the nearby sound stage commissary (is it a "real" commissary?). If, by some miracle, we had forgotten over the previous eighty minutes or so that we were watching a movie, that experience is demolished at the end of Blazing Saddles by the collision of two make believe movies colliding with each other into a raucous pie fight scene reminiscent to me, at least, of the great mud slide fight scene in McLintock!.
It's brilliant. It's surreal. It's dada. Brooks' farce goes metaphysical, rendering the very act of accepting illusion as reality, which we all happily do when we watch movies, unstable and easily razed.
Over the last forty-six years since Blazing Saddles was made, I've seen the movie's most famous scenes replayed countless times -- so the campfire scene, the horse knockout gag, the repeated Hedley/Hedy Lamarr joke, and others were of no surprise to me.
But the chaos of the last act.
I had no clue that was coming.
It made the movie for me.
(Just for the record, after Blazing Saddles, we watched an early episode of The Rockford Files, the second half of a documentary examining the history of London that I had started a while back, and a documentary from nearly thirty years ago looking at the museums, memorials, and landmarks of Washington, D. C.)
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Have you ever thought this while alone?
As you watch how the craziness’s grown?
When all’s said and done,
Is “Outer Limits” the one?
Or crossed over into “The Twilight Zone”?
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