1. The Sube turned eighteen years old in April. Today seemed like a good day to shampoo the "carpeting" on the floorboards and in the hatchback. We borrowed Christy's spot removing rug shampoo machine, Debbie vacuumed the "carpets", and I got the shampoo machine running and performed an initial cleaning. I will return on Thursday and give it a second go around. It'll never be perfectly clean, but this project is improving the old Sube's interior.
2. Shade began to crawl over the north side of our back yard. Our patio project isn't done yet, so Debbie and I sat in chairs in the shade and talked very positively about our near future. For these sessions, I enjoy taking out a small glass or a martini glass, pouring some gin over ice, and squeezing fresh citrus juice into the gin. Tonight I drank small pours of gin and lemon juice. Before long, Christy joined us. Riley had come over a bit earlier. I fixed Christy a vodka and lemonade. We yakked about all kinds of stuff, enjoyed the cooling air, and the peace of the fading day.
3. Christy had an online appointment and left to meet it. Debbie and I returned to a favorite topic of conversation: the awesomeness of the movie All the President's Men. Rather than bring the Vizio out of the Vizio room, Debbie suggested that I put the movie on my laptop. She would mess around online, we would continue drinking small portions of liquor (gin for me, bourbon for Debbie) mixed with fresh squeezed citrus juice, and I would watch and Debbie would listen to the movie -- again.
We love the screenplay of All the President's Men. It's tight, memorable, rhythmic, eloquent. Listening to it can be like putting on music, especially jazz or classical compositions.
Because I was watching the movie (again!), I got to marvel time and time again at Gordon Willis's cinematography. Willis is known as the Prince of Darkness because he was so skilled at filming in dark places -- you know this if you've seen his work in The Godfather movies or if you've watched Klute -- and in All the President's Men his work is brilliant as he photographs the burglars in the Watergate Complex, the conversations between Woodward and Deep Throat in the Roslyn, VA parking garage, Woodward winding his way through DC and on to Roslyn, switching taxi cabs, at night to meet Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein rousing Ben Bradlee out of bed and the three of them talking in front of Bradlee's house, and other dimly lit nighttime scenes. His photography is remarkable in the daylight, too. For my money, though, his work in the darkness of this movie's world is stunning and brilliantly metaphorical as the movie takes us into the dark reaches of the Nixon administration's corruption.
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