1. This afternoon, I pointed a tower floor fan at my Vizio room chair, sat down, and returned to watching My Dinner with Andre. It features two theater friends, Andre Gregory and Wallace (Wally) Shawn meeting for dinner at what the filmmakers would have us believe is the Cafe des Artistes in Lincoln Square, just off Central Park on 67th Street in Manhattan. (The movie was actually filmed on a set constructed in the then unoccupied Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia to look like the Cafe des Artiste.)
Andre and Wally haven't seen each other for about five years and Wally tells us, through a voice over playing while he makes his way by walking and taking the subway, that he's heard unusual stories about what Andre Gregory has been up to since last they saw each other and he's nervous about this meeting.
Indeed, Andre has a series of bizarre tales to tell and this makes up much of the movie's, what?, first hour. It's a masterfully shot fly on the wall movie. As viewers, we assume the role of the fly and we hear every word that Andre and Wally say as they eat their nearly two hour long dinner. Nothing else happens in the movie, aside from an occasional interruption when the waiter brings Andre and Wally their food, wine, and dessert.
This movie came out in the fall of 1981. I saw it some time after that, after my first wife and I separated, but I can't pinpoint if I saw it in Eugene in spring of 1982 or in Spokane after I'd started teaching at Whitworth in the fall of 1982. I know I'd seen it already when Dave V. and were roommates in the late fall and on into the winter of 1983-84 because we used to talk about our lives and ask ourselves, "What would Andre do?"
I am also all but certain that, until today, I had not watched this movie again in the 21st century. I know I'd seen it more than once, but my home viewings happened in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Oh! (I'm really writing for myself, now, but if you're reading this and want to stay with me, you are more than welcome!)
I just remembered!
In the spring of 1983 I started to write a one act play entitled, "It's Always November in Springfield". I long ago threw it away (a mistake), but I modeled the play after both The Zoo Story and My Dinner with Andre. It featured two guys sitting at a picnic table near the corner of 19th and Agate in Eugene, in front of what is now McMenamin's 19th Street Cafe and across the street from Tom's Market where Peter and Mark had purchased a six or twelve pack of Long Star beer and were drinking the beers and playing Jeopardy with each other and their Jeopardy answers and questions triggered conversations about different things in their lives -- quasi-philosophical ramblings and different stories.
So, I'd definitely seen My Dinner with Andre before I moved to Spokane in the late summer of 1983 and I resumed writing that play in during the spring semester of 1984 at Whitworth and presented two public readings of it on campus.
But, that little piece of theater I wrote is long gone now.
2. Remembering that I wrote that play helps me understand part of what I experienced today when I watched My Dinner with Andre. Thanks to my studies of 20th Century American Drama and of Shakespeare, when I saw My Dinner with Andre for the first time, my mind was full of existential questions about living authentically. Andre tells Wally that, as he sees it, by and large, people are living illusions, performing roles, acting out what's expected in those roles, and not really living.
He tells stories about things he did in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, in a remote area of Long Island, and elsewhere to strip himself of illusions and all that is inauthentic and to experience life without filters, without pretense, without performance.
His stories are bizarre and absorbing. Listening to Andre's reflections on his stories made me realize how foundational this movie was for me, not only as I studied American Drama, but, as I began to study some Carl Jung, listen to Joseph Campbell, reflect more and more on existentialist literature, essays, and theology, and, since Andre's stories took place mostly in the Green World, I realized today how much my understanding of literary comedy can be traced back to this dialogue between Wally and Andre.
This would be a substantial movie if it were simply an Andre Gregory monologue and, for about 50-60 minutes, it seems like this is what we, as viewers, are in for.
But, Wally pushes back. He calls Andre's ways of seeing things into questions, casting doubt especially on the idea that to be fully alive requires getting away from it all, the way Andre did, and subjecting oneself to weird experiences.
At first, nearly forty years ago, I remember thinking that Wally wasn't as bright as Andre and that the movie set up kind of a smart guy/ordinary guy dichotomy.
I didn't think that today at all.
Wally is intellectually well-equipped with a well-developed series of stories, arguments, and confessions to counter Andre -- I especially enjoy Wally's praise of his electric blanket and his desire for comfort -- and the movie becomes even more engrossing as Wally asserts his point of view and Andre has to take seriously things like the joy Wally feels when the coffee he made for himself the night before is ready for him to enjoy when he wakes up in the morning.
They exchange perspectives without being contentious. They lose track of time. The restaurant empties out. They realize it's time to leave. Wally has the last word -- the movie returns to a voice over of him talking while we watch him return home.
Maybe Wally is kind of like we, the viewers, are as this movie ends.
He, like us, wonders what he's just experienced. He's got a lot more to think about. He'll have long talks with his girlfriend, Debby. I'll have long talks with myself.
As the movie ended, as I let the dreamy sounds of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No.1" on the soundtrack carry me away, I wanted to go back and watch the whole movie again and take notes, try to pinpoint more exactly those moments in the movie that have had a lasting impact on how I see life and how I try to move through the world. I'd like to more precisely account for how this movie is a kind of touchstone in my life. I'm not sure I can do it, but on one of these hot summer days when I want to stay cool behind the sun blocking curtains of the Vizio room with a single fan further cooling me off, I might just undertake the slowest possible viewing of this movie and try to document how it influenced me in such a long lasting way when I was just shy of thirty years old.
3. Instead of rewinding My Dinner with Andre, I did something a lot better.
I gathered up a bottle of brandy, a bottle of white creme de menthe, the bowl of tahini-Parmesan pasta salad I made, some olives, bread and butter pickles, and pickled beets, and a birthday gift for Carol and headed next door where Christy hosted our family celebration of Carol's upcoming July 3rd birthday.
Christy made us each a wonderfully refreshing orange lemonade cocktail with an orange vodka foundation. I didn't want the influence of a lot of alcohol in my system, so I only drank one of these cocktails, but if I were a dedicated hedonist, I could have downed several glasses of this delicious drink.
Carol's birthday dinner featured all cold food. We started with nuts and the briny and pickled appetizers I brought. For the main course, Christy made a cucumber, pineapple, mint, and lime salad. I made the aforementioned pasta salad. As a tribute to Everett, Christy made his award winning shrimp dip served with Wheat Thins. We all agreed that while under the spell of the current heat dome, none of us were very hungry and that this lighter fare worked perfectly.
Christy made a Chocolate Mint Icebox Cake for dessert and we closed out the evening with stingers.
Molly joined us when she finished her shift at Radio Brewing where she now works as a server.
Paul made an already fun party even more so by turning the hit "I'm Henry the 8th" by Herman's Hermits into a song about Carol turning 58 and singing it to her. Then Carol and Paul sang an impromptu duet, performing "They Can't Take That Away From Me".
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