Three Beautiful Things 08/19/20: Medieval Mayhem, Corleone Saga, L-I-V-E Live! BONUS A Limerick by Stu

1. Billy Collins took the day off today. I spent nearly the whole day with ear buds jacked into my cell phone and listened to The Pillars of the Earth and its many acts of violence and depravity and the efforts of Tom Builder's family to survive, not only the mayhem, but their poverty and starvation.

2.  When the new programming we watched this evening ended, out of the blue, I turned on Godfather II. Debbie and I picked it up about an hour from the end and marveled at its superb movie making.

3. Even though by now it was about 11:15 or 11:30, I was enjoying the way the evening was cooling down and didn't feel a strong urge to go to bed.

In one of our Zoom talks a while back, Bill, Diane, Colette, and I reminisced joyfully about all the times we've seen the movie Harold and Maude. I know at one point, in about 1985, back when I used to keep track of such things, I'd seen this movie 30-40 times. I had it recorded on videotape, I used to have get togethers at my apartments in Spokane and Eugene to watch it with others, and I used to show it to students in a course I taught at Whitworth called The Family in American Drama.

When I flipped on Harold and Maude this morning, it had been several years since I'd seen it and I wondered how it would look to me 35-40 years after I was so in love with it as a youngster in my late 20s and early 30s.

To my delight, the movie was as fresh, funny, moving, odd, invigorating, and entertaining as ever.

Several times, both while watching Godfather II and Harold and Maude I just found it difficult to wrap my head around the fact that both movies are nearly fifty years old.

Maybe it's because I'm so familiar with them and can't see them as a person living in 2020, but both movies impressed me as never seeming old, both seemed as contemporary and alive to this moment in time has any recently made movie I've seen.

And, lastly, I'll just say that watching Harold and Maude brought back a storehouse of memories I thoroughly enjoyed. It was a movie around which I experienced countless times of fellowship and enjoyment with a wide variety of people over the years and those many times of togetherness played out in my mind tonight right alongside the movie.

It's National Lemonade Day and Stu pays tribute in a limerick:

One could let the world know with a bellow
Or could sip on a porch and stay mellow.
Sold by kids in a stand,
Never salty nor bland.
Today's for that drink that is yellow.