Three Beautiful Things 09-29-2022: New Laptop, Diane's Awesome Pasta Sauce!, Debbie's Students Have Some Fun

 1. I was much more comfortable working in a Windows environment with my photographs than I have been in the Mac environment and decided to buy a new HP laptop and try to get back to working with images again. My new computer arrived today and I am now learning some of the ins and outs of Windows 11 and I have some other self-education planned in the near future as far as photo storage and editing. For the first time in months, I got my Nikon out -- this is a good sign! 

2. Wow! That pasta sauce Diane brought for Debbie and me on Wednesday is awesome. I warmed it up, fixed a pot of linguine (thank you Diane), and we loved our dinner. I loved the contrast between Diane's sauce and what I make frequently and I'd like to learn how to made her style to add another option to what I do. 

Over the years, Debbie and I have come to really enjoy Marcella Hazen's tomato sauce. The foundation of the sauce is tomatoes, butter, and an onion cut in half. 

Diane's sauce is thicker than Marcella Hazen's and more complex. It's a meat sauce and I wondered if, in addition to tomatoes, Diane also used tomato sauce and/or tomato paste. It was deliciously sweet to me -- often pasta sauce includes some sugar -- I'll have to ask Diane if her sauce did. It was also deliciously seasoned. 

I'll find out how she makes her sauce and add I'll try to make a similar one some time. 

I loved this sauce on its own, but especially enjoyed that it was different from what I usually do and that it stimulated not only my taste buds, but my imagination. 

3. Debbie tries out fun ideas with her students, including working with painters, I think one a month. September has been Claude Monet month and her students painted pictures of lilies in class (they will hang in a hallway at the school for a while) and today her students each wrote Claude Monet a letter. The students were into it. I'm not sure what they wrote, although Debbie mentioned at least one student asked Monet how his wife was doing. (Sweet!) 

I thought, how ingenious. The children worked on their writing, expanded their imaginations, got outside of themselves and thought about what to say to another person, and, I would think, improved their ability to communicate. 

Debbie was tired when she got home and didn't have a lot to say, but she told me about this part of her day as we enjoyed our dinner, and she relaxed with some wine, watched more episodes of The Wire, and retired to bed fairly early. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-28-2022: Diane's Generosity and Stuffed Acorn Squash, I'm Booked in Eugene, Understanding a Teacher's Challenges

 1.  Debbie had mentioned to me that Diane had made pasta sauce, had some left over, and was going to share it with us. Even knowing this, I got all motivated (restless) to use up leftover stuffing from the stuffed peppers I made a while back for family dinner. I wanted to use it to stuff baked acorn squash.

So, I went ahead and thawed out and warmed up the stuffing and halved two acorn squashes, drizzled each half with olive oil, and baked them. After a half an hour, I removed them, stuffed them, and put them back in the oven for about 15-20 minutes.

My thinking was that if we wanted to have pasta tonight, the squash would be good tomorrow and Debbie's lunch would be ready.

Diane brought the pasta sauce and some linguine to cook, and some Parmesan/Romano cheese! 

Debbie, Diane, and I had great conversation and we couldn't thank Diane enough. 

What generosity that Diane wanted to share this food with us! 

We were about to cook the linguine when, on the spur of the moment, we decided to eat the squash I'd just prepared -- Oh! My! That pepper stuffing worked superbly with the acorn squash -- and we'll enjoy the meal Diane brought us on Thursday evening. 

2. Jeff and I are going to Portland from Eugene on Nov. 2 for a benefit concert featuring jam bands from the WOW Hall days back in the 1990s. Today, I decided to book a tiny house in southeast Eugene for five nights, starting November 1. My next step is to contact friends in Eugene and see if and when we can get together. It will be about five jam-packed days and evenings and I'm stoked.

3. When Debbie arrives home after her school day ends, she's tired. I always assume she's not much in the mood to talk, but wants to sit, enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail, have some time with Gibbs, and relax. I'll ask her kind of a general question, just to check it, like, "Things go okay today?" and, so far, every day her answer has been "yes". 

Later on, we'll talk some more. Debbie learns more about her students every day. In teaching, the way I see it, what we learn from day to day that really matters about our students is not so much their levels of knowledge and skill development, but what's going on with them in their day to day lives. This was crucial for me to learn when I taught at LCC and it's equally, if not more, important for Debbie as she gets acquainted with her third graders.

Then, this challenge presents itself: agencies overseeing public education issue standards for what students should be learning at whatever grade they are in. It's the standardizing aspect of public (or, I should say, classroom) education. There are any number of reasons why federal entities, state entities, and local school districts establish these standards.

At the same time, though, children (or, in my case, community college students) are not standardized.

The challenge is how to simultaneously help students as individuals while meeting established grade level objectives or standards, often while using standardized (or canned) programs in reading or math that the school or the district has purchased or subscribed to.

Debbie never gives up on facing this basic challenge. She wants to help her students meet the standardized objectives and she wants to work with each student as an individual (a challenge itself since she's working with about twenty-five of them).

So we talk about these challenges, keeping our discussions as constructive as possible, and we did some of that talking tonight. 

Even though I have over thirty years of teaching experience, I don't have a lot to offer to these conversations. The demands elementary school teachers face are of a nature and of a difficulty that I never faced working with college students. 

Debbie has a lot to say and she knows what she's doing. I also think, already, in her new teaching job, that what she does as a teacher is working. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-27-2022: I Was Profiled in *The Whitworthian*, Tonight's *Poetry Break*, Learning from Imogen Sara Smith

1. It's become a Whitworth week for me and I'm all for it!  After my robust email exchange with Deborah on Monday, this evening Krissy C. sent me an article she found online from the Whitworth student newspaper, The Whitworthian. It profiled me! I worked at Whitworth as a Chaplain's Assistant the school year after I graduated (1976-77) and then taught as a part-time instructor the following year (1977-78) and the paper decided to do a story on me being an alum who worked at the college. I'd 100% forgotten about this story and it was fun to read it again and remember that first semester of my four million year career as an English instructor.

2. Well, lo and behold, Krissy sent me that article after tonight's Poetry Break, hosted by Bill Davie. Coincidentally, Bill Davie was a student in the Writing I course I taught that fall of 1977 and I enjoyed the intersection of Krissy sending me the story, Krissy having been in the virtual audience this evening for Bill's Poetry Break, and that Bill had been in the first college English class I ever taught.

I arrived late at tonight's reading -- Debbie had had a meeting at school and we didn't eat until close to seven o'clock, so I was preoccupied with fixing dinner, dining, and yakkin' a bit with Debbie.

I enjoyed the part of the program I got to hear. It was especially interesting to hear where Bill has been going with his "Old Manhood" poems and to hear Bill read Jack Kerouac's poem in twelve choruses,  "Desolation Blues". 

3. I swear, if Imogen Sara Smith was the presenter on a Criterion video discussing The Three Stooges in Orbit, she'd make the movie come alive with fascinating insights and background. Tonight, I listened to her presentation on Leave Her to Heaven for the second time. I'll watch the movie on Wednesday or Thursday. Later, I listened to her insightful and adoring presentation on the acting career of Myra Loy and I immediately wanted to watch every Myrna Loy movie ever made. 

Imogen Sara Smith has been my favorite discovery of the year. Listening to her tonight once again invigorated me and further expanded my knowledge and understanding of classic Hollywood movies. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-26-2022: Barley Casserole, Listening While Cooking, I Hear from Deborah and Rita

 1. In our lower cabinet, featuring two circular rotating trays, day after day after day I see we have a container of long unused barley. Today I decided to cook Debbie and me a casserole built around barley.

So, I got out the Dutch oven and melted a slab of butter. I chopped up an onion and cooked it in the butter for about seven minutes and then added chopped celery to the onions and cooked them together for another seven to eight minutes. To this mixture, I added a cup of uncooked barley and stirred it until butter covered the barley. I folded eight ounces of chopped mushrooms and a chopped green pepper into this mixture and added a can of drained black beans and seasoned the casserole with cumin, salt, and pepper. 

I poured just over two cups of chicken stock over the barley, vegetables, and beans and brought it to a boil.

I had preheated the oven at 350 degrees. I put the lid on the Dutch oven and baked the casserole covered for half an hour and then uncovered for fifteen minutes. 

That's it. The casserole was ready when Debbie arrived home from work. 

I also chopped up some cucumber, tomatoes, and Walla Walla sweet onion. Debbie dressed them with vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper.

We enjoyed a hearty dinner with plenty left over for Debbie's lunch on Tuesday.

2. While I cooked dinner, I put Godfather, Part II on my laptop and played the sound over my wireless speaker. The sweep of this movie stuns me, even after multiple viewings -- or, today, a partial listening. 

3. Today, lifelong friend and fellow Whitworth alum, Deborah, called my attention to an article that appeared in the online edition of The New Yorker. It focused on now retired Whitworth professor, Kathy Lee. For years, Prof. Lee kept it to herself while working at Whitworth that she's gay, but late in her career decided to let her sexual identity be known at Whitworth. The article tells her story and it tells the larger story of how member colleges and universities of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities do or do not confront the reality of L.G.Q.B.T. students, faculty, and staff at their institutions, and how these students, faculty, and staff are affected by the institutions' practices, and how their differing stances affect hiring, especially of faculty. 

You can read the article, here. 

Reading this article and exchanging emails with Deborah brought a lot of my memories and feelings to the surface, memories and feelings related to students who trusted me with their stories at Whitworth, the University of Oregon, and Lane Community College and feelings I have about those stories and the institutional systems that make life so difficult for L.G.Q.B.T. people, especially in Christian colleges and universities or in the church. 

I wasn't expecting to be faced with these feelings tonight, but I welcomed them, especially as Deborah and I exchanged emails and wished we could meet in person to talk about what we think and feel. That the systems at work at Whitworth and in churches are so entrenched in long held positions, doctrines, policies, and practices, well, it leaves me feeling little hope that these institutions will change much. But, it does uplift me when I can exchange emails with Deborah and I always know that my friends in the Westminster Study Group share my outlook, frustrations, and hopes -- and that we'll always talk openly about our thoughts and feelings. Likewise, I've had many superb experiences discussing these matters with fellow Episcopalians, many whose views I share and several who sees things differently. 

Later in the evening, I got a call from Rita who told me she'd had a heart attack and stent surgery.

All things considered, Rita sounded pretty good -- her mind is definitely sharp and she has a firm and realistic grasp of her condition. She has a project in mind having, in part, to do with writing assignments she and I used to give when we team taught and that she gave on her own. It's possible I'll be traveling to Oregon in about a month and our hope is to get together and see what Rita's got and, if nothing else, enjoy the memories of ways we used to have our students synthesize what our courses covered by giving them creative and sometimes outlandish writing assignments to complete. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-25-2022: Film Noir = Old Lewiston Grade, Perry Mason = Genius, Team USA Prevails

 1. At this point in time, whether I've heard of the movie or not, I am recording the Saturday night (repeated on Sunday morning) showing of the Turner Classic Movie program "Noir Alley". I definitely hadn't heard of this weekend's offering entitled, I Love Trouble (1948). It features Franchot Tone (I just saw him opposite Bette Davis in Dangerous) as a private detective who (as almost always happens in these noir movies) discovers that a missing person case he's agreed to pursue is a quagmire of exchanged identities, robbery, deceit, and murder and that it puts him in mortal danger. The plot has more twists and turns than the old Lewiston Grade and, having seen this movie once, I could never accurately summarize exactly what happens. 

But, that's how film noir can be. All the darkness, murkiness, and shadowy places correlate with the shadowy characters in this story and with the convoluted plot.

2. Coincidentally, before I went to bed, I watched an episode of Perry Mason that also featured two women who worked as dancers under the same name, a development which complicates a murder case and forces Perry Mason to use all of his shrewdness and reasoning to figure out. 

This episode gave me my second ride down the old Lewiston Grade!

3. I spent much of the day watching the Presidents Cup singles matches. I knew when the day started that it would be almost impossible for the International team to win this cup. While they had performed admirably on Saturday, they had fallen so far behind on Thursday and Friday that it would have taken a miracle for them to overtake the USA side today.

But, it was as if no one told the International side that their situation was almost hopeless.

They competed vigorously in each match today and I enjoyed the way the International players did all they could to make the USA's road to victory as difficult and challenging as possible.

The USA team was made up mostly of players either in the prime of their playing days or close to their prime and these players, in their mid to late twenties or early thirties, will enjoy this peak level of performance for several years.

The International team was made up mostly of players approaching their prime (one player, Adam Scott, is, I think, past his prime; Japan's Hidecki Matsuyama is probably in his prime ). I will be watching how these young players from South Korea, Colombia, Australia, Chile, Canada, and South Africa develop. It would be a blast if they mature into players who could go toe to toe with the USA and make this competition held every two years as competitive for four days as it was for the last two days this weekend. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-24-2022: Nancy's Retirement Party, Getting Stoked at The Lounge, I Love Great Golf -- No Matter Who Plays It

1.  Today was a much anticipated High Holy Day in Kellogg, Idaho! 

For months, Ed has been spearheading a multi-pronged effort to hold a surprised retirement party for Nancy at the Elks Club. By word of mouth and some savvy use of Facebook, the word got out and by 5 o'clock this afternoon a throng had gathered at the Elks and let out a rousing cry of SUPRISE when Nancy arrived. 

The ploy worked! 

Nancy had no idea what she was walking into and the party went into overdrive.

Nancy's son-in-law and daughter catered GarrenTeed BBQ and Harley and Mark mixed drinks and slung beer and wine. Ed and Nancy circulated around the room, talking to people at every table, smiling and laughing, shaking hands and hugging friends and children, savoring the joy of the occasion. 

Nancy's many years of managing the local Subway shop have been demanding and Nancy met every challenge with determination and persistence. I know from conversations and comments I've read online that Nancy was widely appreciated, especially by the store's regular customers and people who worked for her. 

I hope for Nancy retirement means rest, relief from fatigue, and a chance to spend time doing things she enjoys and to pursue new endeavors.

From my perspective, tonight's party was a superb occasion to launch her in that direction! 

2. I admit it.

I've been spending a lot of time at home over the last couple of weeks, watching movies, cooking, recovering from a mild cold -- I haven't been social at all.

That changed today and tonight and I loved it.

Debbie and I went uptown early, before the High Holy Day got under way at the Elks, and dropped in at the Inland Lounge.

We were enjoying drinking 7 and 7s and yakkin' with Cas when Mike and Ruth strolled into the Lounge and our already enjoyable session became way more fun.

I hadn't seen Ruth for several years and Debbie and Ruth hadn't met before, so we all got acquainted and fell into fun conversation, mostly about one of our favorite topics, our love for dogs and cats! 

I was pumped.

This great session at The Lounge vaulted me into more joy across the street at the Elks and I rode this crest of joy back across McKinley Ave by returning to The Lounge as Nancy's party wound down.

Before long Ruth and Mike returned. Ed and Nancy and three Subway friends came over, too.

Boisterous conversation ensued -- it was a blast talking about life in Virginia, living back east and visiting different historical and cultural spots back there, life in Spokane, and joining Ed and Mike to tell great tales about our fun times in New York City and the great people we met while in Manhattan back in 2017.

I could have downed more 7 and 7s, become jollier and jollier, and yakked with this post-party bunch all night long -- and might have if I were still a young man. But, our superb time together broke up at about 8:30 and I wisely cut myself off and went home.

I know I've written this about 1,000,000 times on this blog over the years, but here I go again: I really enjoy socializing with people thirty to forty years younger than I am. It was true again tonight. The young people at our table were smart, funny, engaged, engaging, fascinating, and full of life. They seemed to enjoy us oldsters and that, too, is fun and uplifting. 

So, to sum up, I could hardly have had a more invigorating way to bring my time of isolation, my time of enjoyable isolation, to an end.

3. Today was a fired up day for me long before Debbie and I headed up to The Lounge and to Nancy's retirement party.

The Presidents Cup also fired me up.

I'm not much of a partisan sports fan.

Even in a competition like the Presidents Cup, which features a team of USA golfers against a team of golfers from around the world, outside of Europe, when you'd think I'd be all about joining the galleries in North Carolina chanting, "USA! USA! USA!", I'm just not that partisan.

I like to watch close matches, great shotmaking, and exciting moments. I don't care whether the USA creates them or the International side does.

Today, it was the International side whose players ignited fireworks and this underdog squad prevailed. Two players in particular, Australia's Cam Davis and South Korea's Tom Kim, played electrifying golf and Kim further energized the tournament with his animated and unbridled fist pumps and cries of joy. 

Coming into Sunday, the USA will win the cup if they can win 4.5 points in singles matches. The International side needs to win 8.5 points. There are twelve points available on Sunday and they will be competed for intensely with fire. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-23-2022: Golfing Thrills and Chills, Potato Soup, Dark Side of Academic Ambition

1. When the result of a golf match, like today's President Cup, really isn't in question, why watch? I watch, not so much because there's suspense, but because I'll see expert shot making and some scintillating moments. That's what happened today. I mean, there I was, at the end of a day pretty much dominated by the USA side, watching the final match between the teams of Max Homa/Billy Horschel (USA) and Taylor Pendrith/Corey Connors (International). 

Coming into the 17th hole, the match was tied and Max Homa buried a twelve (or was it seventeen?) foot putt, putting the USA ahead by a hole. On the 18th hole, Taylor Pendrith sank a putt from over fifteen feet to register a birdie for him and his teammate. Max Homa faced, for the second hole in a row, a birdie putt of about twelve feet. If he misses it, the match ends up tied; if he makes it, the USA wins the last match of the session.

Here's what's cool: because this was the last match of the day, all the players from both teams and their spouses and both team captains and their assistants were at the side of the green watching to see if the USA would pick up a full point or split that point with the International team.

As Max Homa put it later, speaking of his teammates, he faced this putt "with the ten best players in the world watching". Yeah, that's hyperbole, but that's how it felt to Homa -- and it's not exaggerating to say that given the situation and given who was watching, it was a pressure packed putt for Homa.

And he sank it.

I got chills, goosebumps, came out of my chair, the works. 

What a blast!

2. I chopped up onion, celery, potatoes, and a yam, put the pieces in a bowl and added some salt, pepper, and flour. I tossed them. 

I melted about a third of a cup of butter in the Dutch oven.

I added the potato mixture, covered the mixture with water, and brought the water to a boil. I then added a mixture of milk and half and half. 

I turned the heat down way low and let the potato mixture cook until everything was tender.

In about 40 minutes or so, like magic, a pot of potato soup was ready for dinner.

While the soup simmered, I chopped up red onion, cucumber, and garden fresh tomatoes and left them undressed. Debbie added an oil and vinegar combination to these vegetables when she arrived home. 

3. I ended my day in bed with Copper and Luna and watched another episode of Inspector Lewis. It was a whopper featuring a circle of academic professionals whose greed for money, accomplishment, and fame led them to practice fraud and commit murder. Lewis and Hathaway got to the bottom of it, exposing the dark side of academic ambition. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-22-2022: Day 1 at The Presidents Cup, Curry for Dinner, Robbie Lewis Untangles a Doozy

1. When the Presidents Cup was last held in 2019, I didn't watch it all, but what I did watch was electrifying. Over the years, the USA has dominated this competition, but, in 2019, the International team was strong and the match was tight, with the USA coming from behind on Sunday to secure a 16-14 win. 

Things have changed since 2019. Another golf tour has since emerged, the LIV (never referred to by name by the Golf Channel -- always called "the rival league"). Players who joined the rival league are not eligible to play in the Presidents Cup. This development weakened the International team more than the USA with the absence of Cameron Smith, Abraham Ancer, Joaquin Niemann, Mark Leishman -- and possibly others. 

That the International team was weakened more than the USA team was on full display today. 

The USA nearly swept the foursome matches, losing only one, and bolted to a 4-1 first day lead, demonstrating their superior talent and Presidents/Ryder Cup team play experience. 

2. With the weather cooling off, I figured it was a good time to cook some curry for dinner. I like the yellow curry and decided to load up the sauce with Yukon potatoes, yam chunks, onion, and shrimp. 

It worked.

3. I was going to cap my day by renting another Bette Davis movie, but changed my mind, realizing I was in the mood to watch another episode of Inspector Lewis. It was a doozy. Hathaway was on holiday to Kosovo. Lewis must work with a green assistant, DC Gray, recently promoted from uniformed officer, and there's been a corpse switch at the local funeral parlor. Out of this start to the episode a plot featuring any number of dead ends and hairpin turns develops. It was just what I wanted. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-21-2022: Buffalo Wings Are Back, Bette Davis is Astonishing, Lt. Columbo Learns About Wine

1. In the fall of 2014, we were living in Greenbelt, MD, Debbie was teaching at the French Immersion school there, and I was completely finished with teaching, having taught part-time for two school years after retiring in 2012.

In Greenbelt, I took charge of fixing our evening dinners. Yes, sometimes we ate out, especially at the now shuttered Old Line Bistro in Beltsville, but often I prepared our dinners and we ate at home.

I'm reassuming that role now that Debbie is teaching full time again. Ha!  I have some rust to shake off. 

Today, I went to Yoke's to pick up a few things and checked out the chicken counter. I was thrilled to find that Yoke's was carrying packages of chicken wingettes. 

Since moving to Kellogg, I haven't fixed Buffalo wings often. 

Once home, I looked back at my blog to remind myself how I'd prepared wings in the past and I looked up a recipe at the Frank's Hot Sauce website.

I melted a third of a cup of butter and added a half a cup of Frank's Hot Sauce to it. I had my sauce. 

Then I couldn't remember if, in the past, I fried the floured chicken pieces and then dipped them in the sauce or if I dipped them in the sauce before frying.

Well, I decided they'd taste good either way, so I floured them, dipped them in the butter and sauce, and then fried them it butter. 

It worked.

It also came back to me that I used to fry the pieces first and then dip them in sauce, put them in a bowl, and pour the excess sauce over them, and toss them. 

I'll do it that way next time.

My approach worked. Tonight's chicken wings were delicious. So were the roasted cauliflower, Yukon golds, and Walla Walla Sweet Onions I fixed to go with them. We had rice leftover from last night's dinner and I poured off some of the butter, chicken fat, and hot sauce still in the skillet from frying the wings, but kept a thin layer in the pan and warmed up the rice in the butter, fat, and sauce. 

That was a smart move.

Not only was our dinner satisfying, but, as is my habit now, I prepared enough food so that Debbie had plenty to pack in her lunch for Thursday.

2. Over on ZOOM, Diane, Bill, and I have talked several times about our dissatisfaction with Hollywood publicists and with publications that focus on the off-screen lives and sex appeal of actors.

I bring this up because, until recently, most of my experience with Bette Davis has been shaped by the stories that never seem to die about her alleged feud with Joan Crawford, her four marriages, her conflicts with Warner Brothers, and her penchant for unvarnished honesty about anything she talks about.

Lost in all of this attention to off-screen stuff is the fact that Bette Davis was a superb actor.

After watching her in Dead Ringer (1964), I decided to watch her in Dangerous (1935), knowing she won the Academy Award as Best Actress for her performance as the alcoholic, self-destructive, but infinitely talented actress, Joyce Heath.

Bette Davis astounded me in this role. Joyce Heath is character of many moods and they change in split seconds. She's brash, bitter, vulnerable, lustful, witty, reckless, worldly wise, naive, seductive, cold, off-putting, calculating, spontaneous, and immeasurably talented as an actress on the skids. 

Bette Davis plays these flash changes in personality brilliantly not only in her face, but with her great skill as a physical actor, integrating the movements of her body with the emotional demands of each moment in the movie. 

Dangerous is a wild melodrama replete with highly charged emotions throughout the story and packed with intense conflict between and within its lead characters. 

Bette Davis' Joyce Heath is at the center of the turmoil in this story and I cannot imagine any other actor playing this role so perfectly.

3. Under normal conditions, I would have been ready to call it a night when Dangerous came to an end.

For me, however, these are not normal times.

My sleep patterns are out of whack -- I'm off my usual early to bed, early to rise pattern.

Knowing I'd be up later than usual, I flipped on the next episode of the second season of Columbo.

It was a hoot.

Columbo investigates the death of an accomplished winery owner's half brother.

To get the job done, Columbo throws himself into a crash course to study the finer points of wine, its production, and its storage.

He's up against a formidable opponent. Donald Pleasance plays the wine connoisseur whose half brother appears to have died in a scuba diving accident. His character and Columbo develop a respectful rapport with each other that is fun to watch as Columbo methodically gets to the bottom of how the victim came to lose his life. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-20-2022: Debbie is Finding Her Way, Bette Davis' Magnetism, Walt Whitman on Aging

1. Debbie arrived home today a little earlier than usual and feeling good about how she and her students worked together in class today. Some positive things happened today that helped boost Debbie's confidence. I loved seeing Debbie walk in the house this afternoon looking satisfied, humble, but satisfied that she and her students had had a good day.

2. I enjoy going on jags watching certain movie genres, performers, and makers of movies. Right now, I'm trying to watch as many movies as possible photographed by James Wong Howe. I'm also wanting to watch as many of the British New Wave movies as I can. Today, I made my movie watching life a bit more impossible after watching Bette Davis play twin sisters in the murder thriller, Dead Ringer (1964). 

Now I want to watch more movies featuring Bette Davis. I'd like to watch All About Eve again and go back to the 1930s and watch Dangerous and Jezebel as well as her wicked performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. I don't really have a vocabulary to describe her acting style. I'd have to say it is, by contemporary standards, outmoded or old-fashioned -- and I enjoy it. Her vocal range, her elastic face, her sense of melodrama, and the attention her presence commands works for me -- it's hypnotic. In Dead Ringer, her magnetism is not glamorous. It's powerful, yes, treacherous, and I'd like to watch more of her movies and experience more of her force and intensity.

3. In tonight's Poetry Break, Bill featured some long poems, one on old age by Walt Whitman and a couple of apparently autobiographical poems by Dick Allen (RIP), a poet I had never heard of who was born about the same time I was. 

The Whitman poem is remarkable. It's entitled "Old Age" and it epitomizes Whitman's gift for copious exploration of truth. For Whitman, truth is told not by whittling an idea down to its essentials and expressing it in a compact way, but it's told by expansion, by exploring as many dimensions of an idea or an experience as possible, reveling in complexity and beauty. 

Whitman's poem, yes, explores the diminishment of powers we experience as we age. The eyes grow dim. Our energy runs down. Even our desire weakens. But, diminishment is not the whole story and Whitman also explores the beauty of aging, the way we slow down, see things more clearly, gain wisdom. 

Bill read this poem first and, in some ways, this poem was it for me tonight. 

My mind wandered. This particular Walt Whitman poem and many others took over my attention and I reveled in the beauty of his long copious lines, his fertile and benevolent imagination, his keep gifts of observation, and the undeniably American music of his poetry. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-19-2022: I Tested Negative, Solid All-Class Reunion Meeting, Snacks at Christy's

 1. Debbie returned to work today. Starting last night, my throat was sore and my chest was mildly congested. I didn't sleep very well. Today, I drank a lot of liquids, especially hot herbal tea, I napped, and paid attention to my throat, chest, and occasional cough. When Debbie returned home, she helped me take my first Covid test. It was negative. I've had go arounds much of my adult life with the mild symptoms I was feeling last night and today. I know what to do: eat more than usual, hydrate, and rest/nap. I'll keep doing that.

2. Our All-Class Reunion Committee met today at 6:30. It was impressive. Committee members got going on their tasks and the weekend's plans and activities are taking shape.

REMINDER: The dates for next summer's All-Class Reunion: July 21-23, 2023.

3. After the meeting, Paul, Christy, Carol, and I met in Christy's back yard for snacks and cocktails and a fire in Christy's fire pit. Christy made a vegetarian pizza using crescent rolls for a crust, Carol brought a crackers and dip, and I brought salami disks with cream cheese rolled inside them. There's a lot going on or coming up. Carol just returned from a trip to Lincoln City. Paul is starting rehearsals for a production in Wallace. Christy is preparing for a week away. I'll be going to Pendleton for a couple nights the first week of October. Paul's mother will be coming to Kellogg in early November. Debbie is getting back in the swing of her new job after a week away with Covid -- and she decided not to join us for snacks after the reunion meeting. She needed to go to bed. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-18-2022: Debbie Tests Negative, Movie Talk on ZOOM, I Watch an Obscure Film Noir Movie BONUS : A List of the Movies I've Watched at Vizio University

 1. Debbie went out to Pinehurst Elementary School this afternoon and worked on getting ready to return to work on Monday. Later in the evening, she gave herself a Covid test and it was negative. 

2. Bill, Diane, and I had a fun session on ZOOM this afternoon. We talked quite a bit about our experiences watching movies on television when we were young and how those memories have stuck with us. Bill and Diane, on their end of ZOOM, can show movie trailers or clips from movies and we looked at pieces of It Happened One Night, The President's Analyst, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Uninvited, and others. It was fun not only reminiscing, but talking a bit about how our experience watching movies was influenced by what happened when we were children. We experienced the magnetic power of movies and watching movies with other family members created bonds that lasted. 

I mentioned that I have watched nearly fifty movies since around the end of July (and little earlier) since working to teach myself more about movies at Vizio University. I made a list of those movies and if you'd like to see it, I'm going to include it at the end of this post.

3. Since I discovered that Turner Movie Classics is a channel on YouTube TV, I now record the Saturday night/Sunday morning show Noir Alley. Every week, film noir expert Eddie Muller introduces a film noir movie, the movie runs, and Muller provides comments after the movie ends. 

I enjoy Eddie Muller a lot for his manner and his expertise. This weekend's movie was, he told us, an obscure, rarely watched one featuring Anthony Quinn, Ann Bancroft, Farley Granger, and Peter Graves in a Brooklyn/Manhattan gangster story, The Naked Street. 

I enjoyed how this movie blended the domestic, family life of Phil Regal, the thug portrayed by Anthony Quinn, with his life as a ruthless crime boss. The character played by Ann Bancroft, Rosalie, is Phil's sister and she gets caught in the middle of Phil Regal's divided loyalties. Peter Graves plays a New York newspaper reporter who gets so involved in the story of Phil Regal that he's essentially an arm of the DA's office as well as a suitor, looking to become Rosalie's lover. 

I've read some reviews of this movie and not one reviewer expresses much enthusiasm for The Naked Street. I didn't feel nearly as critical of it as many critics did.  I accepted The Naked Street on its own terms as combination gangster movie and morality tale and made up my mind to enjoy watching it unfold and watching some terrific actors perform.

I had a lot of fun doing so. 

Here's the list of the movies I've watched at Vizio University:

Earlier this summer, I decided to immerse myself in the world of movies, most of them released fifty or more years ago. I’m keeping an ongoing list.

If you want more information about these movies, a quick trip to its page on imdb.com will fill you in on the year it was released, director, cast, and crew.

When We Were Kings

Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story

The King of Marvin Gardens

A Brief Encounter

Double Indemnity

Stagecoach

Red River

High Noon

The Harder They Fall

The Gunfighter

High Sierra

Movies Under the Influence

Laura

My Voyage to Italy

Out of the Past

Visions of Light

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Masters

Mildred Pierce

The Naked City

In a Lonely Place

Anatomy of a Murder

Witness for the Prosecution

The Set-Up

The Verdict

The Card

Blithe Spirit

Murder, She Said

Murder at the Gallop

Murder Most Foul

The Curious Case of Margaret Rutherford

Passport to Pimlico

The Smallest Show on Earth

The Inspector Calls

The Lavender Hill Mob

Sweet Smell of Success

Brighton Rock

63Up!

He Ran All the Way

Obsession

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Whipsaw

Manhattan Melodrama

The Happiest Days of Your Life

Murder, My Sweet

Bad Reputation 

Room at the Top

Whiskey Galore!

Crook’s Tour

Bad Day at Black Rock

Detour

Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen

Invasion from Mars

Hobson’s Choice

The Naked Street 

Three Beautiful Things 09-17-2022: Debbie Prepares to Return to Work, David Lean's Sweet Comedy *Hobson's Choice* (1954), The Reliability of *Perry Mason*

1. Debbie worked much of the day today preparing to return to work on Monday. The one lingering symptom of her Covid case is a cough. She coughed some in the hour or so after she came down from bed, but as the day progressed, she coughed much less and less. Early in the evening, Debbie went next door and enjoyed a great conversation with Christy over cocktails, another sign that she's improving. 

2. David Lean is probably most famous for epic movies he directed like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago. He also directed much beloved adaptation of two Charles Dickens novels, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. 

I'm more familiar with David Lean's smaller movies, having recently watched A Brief Encounter and Blithe Spirit, with plans to watch This Happy Breed before long.

Today, I turned to the reliable streaming service BFIPlayer Classics and clicked on David Lean's comic masterpiece, Hobson's Choice (1954).

I really can't get enough of British comedies, especially those made in the 1940s and 50s, and I was especially stoked to watch this movie because it features Charles Laughton. 

Not too long ago, I watched Laughton as an arrogant, highly skilled, blustering barrister in Witness for the Prosecution, my introduction to his skill at bringing bombastic characters to life with his nimble physical girth and his malleable face, what could be considered his ugliness -- he's definitely not a dashing and handsome leading man! 

As the widowed, alcoholic proprietor of a bootmaking shop, Laughton immediately establishes his character, Henry Hobson as a tempest of ill temper, insults, bombastic autocracy as the father of three adult daughters, and drunkenness. 

I immediately thought Laughton would dominate this movie, but he didn't. No, his oldest daughter, Maggie, played with firm resolve and tenderness by Brenda de Banzie is more than Laughton/Hopson's equal and is touchingly complimented by John Mills, who plays a humble bootmaker Will Mossop, the man Maggie is determined to marry, very much against her father's will.

Like many comedies, Hobson's Choice is a story of love and marriage for all three of Hobson's daughters and Henry Hobson serves the plot as a most formidable force looking to block his daughters from marrying the men they love.

While I clicked on this movie primarily to watch Charles Laughton at work, by the end of the movie I was swept away by the relationship that developed between the characters played by Brenda de Banzie and John Mills and savored how each of them revealed more and more dimensions of their characters as their growing affection for each other freed up their tenderness, intelligence, and courage.

3. Debbie turned the pot roast, vegetables, and braising liquid we at on Thursday into an awesome beef stew for dinner tonight. 

I made the eating the stew at least doubly enjoyable by watching three episodes of Perry Mason.

Recently I read Spencer Tracy described as the Rock of Gibraltar as an actor and tonight made me wonder if there was ever a more rock solid, Rock of Gibraltar series on television than Perry Mason.

Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake are unflappable as they calmly and steadily investigate each case that comes before Mason. In every instance, it looks like Hamilton Burger and the police have an airtight case against the character Perry Mason defends, but in one case after another, we learn that appearances can be deceiving, that things are not what they seem, and the Perry Mason team gets to the bottom of what really happened and the defendant is not guilty and the crime's real perpetrator is revealed in the court room.

Referring back to yesterday's post, there's not a doubt in my mind that watching Perry Mason as a kid helped me become a believer.  Not once did I think it was implausible that this calm, intelligent attorney and his team would win every case, nor did I ever think it was implausible that poor old Hamilton Burger would have the longest losing streak in the history of District Attorneys!

No. Just as I did tonight, I surrendered myself to the development of these stories, wondered how Perry Mason would get his client out of this pickle, and, without exception, felt the satisfaction that came with Perry Mason winning another case.

Now, did I think as I got older and paid more attention to what happens in courts in the USA that things would always turn out in actual courts the way they did on Perry Mason?

No way.

But knowing that court cases in the actual world rarely work out the way they did on Perry Mason never diminished my belief in what I saw transpire in every Perry Mason episode, never lessened my enjoyment of watching this show.

The same was true tonight. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-16-2022: Debbie's Better and I'm Tired, Interviews on Criterion, Rediscovering and Reflecting Upon *Invasion From Mars* (1953)

1. Debbie's improving. Her sore throat is gone.  So is any sign of a headache. Debbie worked on classroom preparation and organization much of the day, signifying that her energy is improving. She coughs occasionally and her cough has the sound of congestion, but her coughing is less frequent. The best news, from my perspective, is that she's sleeping well at night. 

I continued to sequester myself, much of the day, in the Vizio room. I was tired, not because I was ill, but I think the presence of Covid in the house has been wearing on me and I fell asleep frequently while watching things on television. In addition, I had a virtual meeting with my financial advisor and while, overall, things look okay, talking about, thinking about, and being offered alternatives about money also wears me out. Every single time. 

So, rather than go to the Elks for burgers, hang out at The Lounge, and go to Kellogg's Homecoming football game against St. Maries, I stayed home (well, I did leave once to go to Pinehurst to the liquor store at Debbie's request!).

(I'm writing this post late Saturday morning. I slept in today until almost 9:00 -- I don't remember the last time I slept in this long.)

2. As I've no doubt mentioned several times before, but it's vital to me, so here I go again, the Criterion Channel is valuable to me not only for its staggering variety of movies, but also for the interviews it collects.

I especially enjoy their ongoing series, Adventures in Moviegoing. It features interviews with directors, actors, and other people involved in the world of cinema. The interviewees reflect on their personal history with movies and how they came to love movies and then got involved in making them. Each subject also chooses a handful of movies they love or have been inspired by from the Criterion Collection and discuss each movie for under five minutes.

Okay.

Watching Detour sparked my curiosity about B movies. 

To my delight, I discovered that Roger Corman, one of cinema's most prolific creators of B movies was featured as a subject in Adventures of Movie Going. 

I listened to his interview and learned that he was a key figure over fifty years ago in getting international movies distributed in the USA. The three movies he singled out as important to him were all non-USA films: Cries and Whispers, Amarcord, Dersu Uzala, and The Tin Drum, movies from Sweden, Italy, Japan, and Germany.

Later, I watched interviews with Paul Feig and Mira Nair. 

Paul Feig discussed Rashomon, 8 1/2, Playtime, Stranger than Paradise, and Withnail and I, four movies wildly different from each other that Feig had fascinating reasons for selecting.

Mira Nair discussed The Music Room, 8 1/2, La Jetee, Battle of Algiers, An Angel at the Table, and Breaking the Waves.

I loved the twenty-four minute long interview with Mira Nair. She's full of vitality, voraciously intelligent, and full of deep love for the movies, particularly the visual beauty of cinema. I loved how she connected her study of photography to her practices as a film director and a movie lover. 

Until today, I was unaware of the movie Battle of Algiers and when I'm next in the mood for a demanding, documentary looking movie about political revolution, I will watch Battle of Algiers.

In fact, Mira Nair's enthusiasm for Battle of Algiers led me to watch another interview selection on the Criterion Channel featuring five directors, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Mira Nair, Oliver Stone, and Julian Schnabel all discussing Battle of Algiers. In some ways, the interviews made me wary about watching the brutality of certain passages in this movie, but I am sure I'll brace myself and watch it all the same for its complexity, stirring black and white cinematography, and its documentary film like realism. 

Listening to these directors moved me to think it's also about time for me to watch Z and Traffic.

3. Ever since I started posting on this blog about my own adventures in moviegoing(viewing), different people have said to me something along these lines, "I enjoy reading your Three Beautiful Things, Bill, but, I don't know, when you write about movies, you kind of lose me."

I get that. 

I love having this record of the movies I've been watching and how much they matter to me.

I accept wholeheartedly that's it's not what a lot of people are interested in.

So, if you are still with me as I write this third beautiful thing, I'm glad you are here.

I'm going to sort of pretend I'm being interviewed on Criterion's series Adventures in Moviegoing and write about how I think I can trace one approach I have to watching movies all the way back to when I was a third grader at Sunnyside Elementary School.

When I watch movies, I am a believer. 

I never have a voice in my head saying, "That's implausible" or "That could never happen" or "How does this movie expect me to believe THAT?"

To me, whatever is going on in the movie is happening in the world this movie has created and so I accept whatever occurs and believe in it.

How did I develop this stance toward movie going? 

I ask because it seems to me it's unusual. Frequently I hear or read people say about things that happen in movies comments like "such and such a scene ruined the movie for me because that could never happen!" or "I've been (fill in the blank -- a soldier, a pilot, a teacher, whatever) and I know what I saw in that movie doesn't happen and could never happen".

Today, I finally figured out the title of a movie I watched at home after school when I was in the third grade, a movie I remember being on tv more than once in the afternoon after school on one of the local Spokane channels. 

I figured out that the movie is Invasion from Mars (1953) and after a little searching on my SmartyPants TV, I discovered it's available on demand on Pluto TV.

Invasion from Mars was just the kind of movie I was looking for after watching Detour. 

It's low budget, had to have been quickly made, relies on primitive special effects, and has many minutes of stock footage of trains, military tanks and other equipment, of landscapes being blown up, and other stuff.

The movie also tells a wild story about a boy who sees a flying saucer disappear into a sand pit out behind his family's home and how different people then disappear into this sand pit and re-emerge as feelingless, destructive, almost zombie like beings who commit acts of destruction and then suddenly die.

Sound outlandish? Sound implausible? 

Maybe.

But when I was in the third grade, I accepted and believed in everything in that movie and it scared me and haunted my dreams.

Watching it about today, about 60 years later, I accepted and believed everything in the movie again -- but I doubt it'll give me nightmares. 

I've never lost that capacity to be fully drawn into a movie and believe everything that happens on the screen and respond to what I see with fear, joy, sadness, respect, wonder, perplexity, or whatever feeling the movie is inviting me to feel.

It's the foundation of my movie viewing experience.

Once upon a time, maybe thirty or forty years ago, as I was going to a lot of movies, especially in Eugene, I thought it would be fun to be a movie reviewer.

Before long, though, especially as I read more movie reviews and I listened more closely to reviewers like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on television, I realized I could never do it.

I'm too accepting. I'm a believer. I don't suspend disbelief because I never get to the point of disbelieving.

I'm not saying that my habits of surrendering to and believing in what I see in a movie began with Invasion from Mars, but watching that movie again today certainly helped bring into focus how long I've been watching movies with an attitude of belief, acceptance, and an almost unshakeable resolve to enjoy what I see. 

So, see, who could trust someone like me to review movies? After all, my mindset toward the makers of a movie as any movie under way is summed up this way: "You are going to have to work hard to disappoint me". Who would trust a movie reviewer who enjoys almost every movie he sees? (There are exceptions, but I prefer not mention them!)

My movie reviews would increase the number of complaining letters to the editor. That's mostly what they'd be good for! 

Three Beautiful Things 09-15-2022: Debbie's Cravings and I See Deni at Yoke's, Uplifting Afternoon in the Kitchen, In Search of B Movies

 1. Debbie, from my point of view, continues to tread water as she recovers from Covid. She's sleeping well at night, has an occasional and kind of phlegmy cough when she's up and sitting in the living room, and generally feels not great, but not awful. 

Covid has Debbie craving beef. On Wednesday we had a lentil, tomato, rice soup/stew with ground beef and today Debbie asked me to prepare a pot roast. 

Her request invigorated me. 

So, I went to Yoke's to buy Debbie some over the counter medicine and some Vitamin C and to buy a chuck roast and other groceries we needed for dinner and beyond.

I knew Denise Hill was visiting from Florida and, lo and behold, she was at Yoke's, helping Rose do some shopping. 

We had a superb visit near the produce area. We talked about a variety of things -- helping our parents as they get older, who Denise has visited on her trip, and other stuff -- and Denise made me very happy when she told me she plans to come to the All Class Reunion in July, 2023. 

We went our separate ways after yakkin' for a while, but met up again in front of the store as Deni was loading up groceries in the car and helping Rose get settled in the passenger seat. 

As I drove out of the Yoke's lot, it occurred to me that I don't remember a time in my nearly sixty-nine years when I didn't know Denise Hill. Our parents knew each other and were friends before we were born. In kindergarten, our school year ended with a pageant and Denise played the pageant's lead role as Mother Goose and I was her cat. Because Deni went to St. Rita's, Kellogg's Roman Catholic school, we weren't in school together until the ninth grade, but when it came time to graduate from KHS, Denice and I walked into the ceremony together and were seated side by side.

Great bridge. 

Lots of water.

2. I broke my time of sequestration in the Vizio room, not only by going to Yoke's, but by doing some helpful cooking.

First, I mixed up oatmeal, honey, maple syrup, walnuts, melted butter, cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla extract in a bowl, spread it over parchment paper on baking sheet, and put in the oven for a half an hour and now we have a supply of granola.

Then I took the chuck roast out of the packaging and generously seasoned it on both sides with salt, black pepper, cinnamon, finely chopped garlic, and oregano. I heated up olive oil in the Dutch oven and seared both sides of the roast for about five minutes.

I had already roughly chopped onion, Yukon golds, and carrots. I'd also mixed up two cups of beef Better Than Bullion. 

I removed the roast from the Dutch oven, put some bullion in it, and deglazed it. I returned the meat to the pot, surrounded it with potatoes and onions and on top of the meat I placed carrots, sliced mushrooms, and any potato and onion pieces that fit around the meat. I poured bullion over the meat and put the lid on the Dutch oven. 

I braised the roast and vegetables in the oven for a couple of hours at 300 degrees F and it came out perfect.

The vegetables were tender, not mushy. The meat was moist and packed with flavor. I put the vegetables in a bowl, cut the meat into slices, and left the braising liquid in the Dutch oven on the stove top. 

Debbie and I each made a puddle of the liquid in a bowl and added slices chuck roast and vegetable chunks.

Blasting the beef with cinnamon and oregano was not part of any recipe. 

I just thought it would work and I was absolutely right. For decades, while I loved cinnamon, I had a very narrow understanding of its possibilities as a seasoning. Thanks to venturing out a bit into the cuisine of the Middle East, I've become more adventurous with cinnamon. Tonight's dinner helped seal in my mind once and for all that I think cinnamon and beef is an awesome pairing and that black pepper and oregano compliment the cinnamon deliciously. 

Having it be cool enough to use the oven again and helping Debbie satisfy her Covid craving for beef uplifted me and I was ecstatic that this meal turned out to be so tasty.

3. Well, having busied myself with shopping, yakkin', and cooking, I didn't watch any fictional movies today.

I did, however, watch an interesting documentary exploring the life and work of Edgar G. Ulmer, the director of the B film noir movie I watched on Wednesday, Detour. I also watched a short documentary covering the ten year long project of restoring Detour from several degraded prints of the movie into the beautiful restored print I watched on the Criterion Channel. 

Edgar G. Ulmer was known as the "King of the Bs", that is, the king of making feature movies with little money and in a brief amount of time, movies that were the B picture playing alongside a more lavish A picture when movie houses presented double features. I guess you could say it was the cinema's version of 45 rpm records -- they always featured a hit song on the A side and a lesser known song on the B side. 

I'm not sure as I write this, how or where to find B movies of the 1930s and 1940s and beyond, but I'd sure like to. I think, but I'm not sure, that I saw a number of B movies on television when I was a kid when the local tv stations played movies in the afternoons during the week and on Saturdays. I know I saw some pretty cheap looking science fiction movies and, who knows?, maybe Detour got played and was interrupted by the tv station's host calling out Bingo numbers on cards we could get at the store or making calls to give away money to random people on a Dialing for Dollars break.

I'll start poking around and see if I can find B movies. Detour and this Edgar G. Ulmer documentary piqued my curiosity in a big way. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-14-2022: Debbie Stays Home, Madcap Spy Thriller Parody, Two Movies Examine Dark Places in America

1. Debbie will not return to work this week. She'll continue to rest and hope that the cough and mild congestion that have kicked in subside before long. 

I continue to feel fine.

2. I continue to think it's best for Debbie and me to be in separate rooms most of the time during the day while she recovers from Covid. 

If we had faced this situation, oh, fifteen years ago, I would be making regular trips to a video rental store and stocking up on movies to watch while in isolation.

It's a good thing I don't need a video store now -- I don't know of any in the Silver Valley!

The alternative is very good, though. With our handful of subscriptions to streaming services, not only do I have tons of movies to choose from, I can also venture into areas of movie viewing I've never explored before.

Not long ago, I watched the British film noir classic Obsession and the character I most enjoyed was the Scotland Yard superintendent, Finsbury, played by Naunton Wayne. I did some further reading about Naunton Wayne and learned that over the years, starting with Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), he paired up with Basil Radford to form a duo of cricket loving English gentlemen named Caldicott and Charters. I haven't watched this movie yet. 

I had seen Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford work as a pair not long ago as two bureaucrats in the movie Passport to Pimilico, but not as Caldicott and Charters.

Intrigued, I decided to look up some titles of movies featuring Caldicott and Charters.

Today, I watched a goofy spy thriller parody/comedy, Crook's Tour (1941). Put simply, Caldicott and Charters fall victim, unbeknownst to them, to a case of mistaken identity and suddenly find themselves embroiled in an international affair of espionage. Throughout it all, dashing from one country to another,  they maintain a charming sense of gentlemanly calm as they face one life-threatening situation after another with their primary concern being whether they will arrive back in England in time for crucial cricket matches. 

It's a preposterous, madcap, absurd movie, made all the more enjoyable because it doesn't pretend to be anything else.

3. After this movie ended, I took a short break and then went over to the Criterion Channel and watched Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955),  a serious movie that brings the traditional Western into the present and instills features of film noir into the Western. 

In some ways, Bad Day at Black Rock follows the structure of a traditional western. Spencer Tracy plays a stranger who comes into the isolated town of Black Rock and immediately comes under suspicion and threat by the self-protective, paranoid town people. They don't trust the arrival of an outsider.

But, this movie is not set in the Old West. It takes place soon after the end of WWII and confronts bigotry.

I'll leave it at that. 

I did a little reading about the movie after viewing it and one writer said that Spencer Tracy "was his usual Rock of Gibraltar self" in Bad Day at Black Rock.

No doubt. 

The supporting cast is solid, too: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, and Dean Jagger, along with Robert Ryan, fill this movie with menace, cowardice, violence, and a collective crisis of conscience. 

I had time and energy for one more movie. I scanned the noir offerings on the Criterion Channel and a movie that lasts barely an hour jumped out at me, not only because it's short, but because the descriptions of it helped me see that it's become a historically important movie in world of film noir.

It's a B movie, very low budget, shot in black and white in under two weeks.

I'd never heard of it, but I decided to give Detour (1945) a try.

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (soon I'll watch the documentary about him on the Criterion Channel), it is a dark movie in which he distills the elements of film noir into a highly concentrated form.

A New York piano player, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), decides he must reunite with the woman he loves. She's gone to Hollywood to seek a career as a singer. Al Roberts is broke. He hitch hikes across the USA and one guy who picks him changes Al Robert's life forever -- you'll have to see the movie to find out how. On the road, Al Roberts becomes entangled with a woman named Vera, at once the epitome of and a subversion of a film noir femme fatale. Unlike so many femme fatale characters, Vera is not glamorous. In fact, Ulmer went to some lengths to make her hair greasy, her appearance at once sexy and grimy, and Vera, played superbly by Ann Savage develops into the other force, along with the guy who picked him up earlier in the movie, that shapes a dark fate for Al Roberts that he cannot escape.

Detour is dark, fatalistic. Its characters are doomed. Its low budget production values enhance the story's tawdry inevitabilities. 

I can see why more modern filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich admire this movie so much for its unadorned, unblinking look into a dark region of life in the USA and the dark inward lives of these characters. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-13-2022: Debbie Keeps Resting, Holed Up (Gladly) in the Vizio Room, Pleasant Wallace Stevens Memories

1. With Covid in the house, Debbie and I welcome uneventful days. Debbie rested. Her appetite is good. She needs rest. Her other symptoms are mild. We stayed away from each other for another day. I holed up in the Vizio room and, if Debbie needed anything or wanted to send me an update, she texted me. 

As I have ever since Debbie tested positive, I felt fine today. 

2. I gave the Vizio a good workout today. I definitely went for variety! I started by flipping on the Joan Jett documentary, Bad Reputation (2018). I love Joan Jett and this movie inspired even more love in me. The last time the Westminster Basementeers Zoomed together, the subject of punk rock music came up for a little while and, as I watched Bad Repuation, I thought about how his movie would have helped our conversation. Bad Reputation not only places Joan Jett in the world of punk rock, it provides an insightful overview of what punk embodied, especially in Los Angeles. 

This afternoon, I returned to the Criterion Channel's collection of British New Wave movies and watched Room at the Top (1959), the movie many film historians credit for initiating this British burst of movies focused on the lives of working class characters, often shot in black and white, mostly filmed in industrial towns outside of London. In Room at the Top, Laurence Harvey plays Joe Lampton,  a small town working class character who had been a POW in World War II. He takes a city government job in a larger town and sets his mind to breaking free of his working class past and begins his efforts to ascend to what he hopes will be "room at the top" of the local social ladder. He sets out to seduce and marry the daughter of a local wealthy factory owner. He complicates his efforts by falling in love with and having an affair with a solicitor's wife, a woman ten years older than he is. Her name is Alice and she's played brilliantly by Simone Signoret who brings to life the many layers of Alice's frustrations, wisdom, longing, sensuality, intelligence, and suffering. While the movie is Joe's story, it's Simon Signoret's work that will stay with me and bring me back to watching this movie again. 

I continued to make the most of being holed up in the Vizio room by watching another Ealing Studio comedy, Whiskey Galore! (1949). These Ealing Studio comedies consistently pit ordinary people of the United Kingdom in some kind of conflict with their country's bureaucracy or with the efforts of some kind of law enforcement body to maintain order. This hilarious movie is no exception and tells the story of a plucky Scottish village whose whiskey supply has run dry. But, a cargo ship has a wreck just off this village's shore. The ship is carrying a generous supply of cases of whiskey. The movie then centers on the efforts of the citizenry to get the whiskey out of the wrecked ship, bring it back to land, and stay out of reach of the authorities who would arrest them for plundering the ship. 

I'll leave it at that, only to say that what ensues is a madcap and glorious exploration of a village's love of whiskey and highly entertaining story of their efforts to secure and keep possession of it. 

I wrapped up my Vizio room marathon by watching Requiem for the Big East (2014) an ESPN 30 for 30 episode I'd watched before, but I've been missing college basketball and decided to watch it again.

This documentary pumped me up. I loved, once again, hearing the story of how the Big East Conference came into being and how its birth coincided with the birth of ESPN. It was a blast seeing highlights of fiercely contested games from the 1980s and to remember what a superb roster of coaches worked in this new league: John Thompson, Jim Boeheim, Lou Carnesecca, Rollie Massimino, Tom Davis (not mentioned in the documentary), Rick Pitino, Bill Raftery, and, later, Jim Calhoun and P. J. Carlesimo. In the 1980s, the league featured some of the USA's very best collegiate players: Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullen, Duane Washington, among others. Two of my favorites back then weren't mentioned in the film, both from Boston College: Michael Adams and John Bagley. 

But, as this movie documents, by the end of the 2012-13 season, the original Big East dissolved. 

Conferences realigned. Money won the day and the original Big East Conference lost out.

The Catholic schools in the region, however, bonded together and created a new Big East Conference. It's the basketball conference I pay the closest attention to during the college basketball season. But, this documentary didn't cover the conference's reformation. 

It covered and served as a requiem for the demise of the original Big East.

3. One other event occurred in the Vizio room this evening. I tuned in to Facebook Live and watched tonight's installment of Bill Davie's *Poetry Break*. Bill read several poems organized under the umbrella of mindfulness. Bill didn't write as much as usual over the last week, so he didn't have any new poems to read from the "Old Manhood" series he's working on. I especially enjoyed hearing Bill read Wallace Steven's poem, "The Snow Man" and my mind wandered to another of my favorite Wallace Steven's poems, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". I remembered back to when I used to assign this poem in Intro to Poetry and discouraged any discussion of its "meaning" and focused entirely on its music, especially its vowel sounds, and tried to work with my students to see if the poem's impact might arise more fully out of the poem's sounds than out of the "meaning" of its words and lines. 

Its opening line always seems to be with me:

The houses are haunted. 

It's a great start to a poem about disillusionment -- especially the disillusionment of 10:00 p.m. 

 

Three Beautiful Things 09-12-2022: Debbie Rests, I Hole Up with a Farce, I Hole Up with Philip Marlowe

1. Debbie rested today, for the most part. She spent some time making lesson plans for her sub, but for the most part she took it easy. I'm not sure if her health improved today, but it didn't worsen. Diane helped us out a lot by bringing by a superb dinner. Debbie said the meal was so good that it made it worthwhile to have Covid! 

Around this house, when it comes to illness, we like stable. 

Things were stable today.

2. Debbie and I are avoiding much contact with one another. I spent almost every minute of the day in the Vizio room, unless I was in the bedroom, checking on Luna, who seems to be doing all right herself.

I decided to turn to Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford and the hilarious farce The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a sweet parody of boarding schools and British bureaucracy that centers on a British bureaucrat's blunder that results in the students and staff of a girls' school being sent to reside at a boys' school. One chaotic incident after another results and for about 90 minutes my focus was on the high brow absurdity of this story and how brilliantly it was filmed and performed. 

3. Later, I decided I wanted to watch a contrasting movie, and, boy howdy!, was Murder, My Sweet (1944) ever totally different from The Happiest Days of Your Life! Murder, My Sweet is an early film noir. It's a movie version of the Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely, and features Chandler's hard-boiled private investigator, Phillip Marlowe. The storyline is convoluted with double crosses, twists, turns, and lots of crime. I enjoyed Dick Powell playing Marlowe.  I thought both Anne Shirley and Claire Trevor were stylish, elegant, and intelligent in their roles. Trevor played the young wife of an elderly, wealthy man and Anne Shirley played her stepdaughter and both of them played and were played by Philip Marlowe. More than any film noir movie I've watched over the last several weeks, Murder, My Sweet included expressionistic, almost psychedelic passages, no doubt inspired by the German expressionists, making the movie all the more adventurous, not only in its story, but in how it was directed (by Edward Dmytryk) and filmed (Harry J. Wild). 

Three Beautiful Things 09-11-2022: So Far It's Mild, Young Players in Tennis, Isolating with Movies

 1. I had planned to shop in Coeur d'Alene this afternoon for a few items at Costco and probably at Fred Meyer. Those plans changed. I took a late morning nap and when I woke up, Debbie informed me that she'd just tested positive for Covid. She's been fatigued, had a mild sore throat, and a mild headache so she decided to test herself. Debbie was hungry so I postponed my CdA trip and bought food and liquids at Yoke's, came home, and fixed Debbie a bowl of pasta with fresh cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil, and fresh grated Parmigiana Reggiano cheese. 

Thankfully, Debbie's symptoms remained mild through the day and evening. She combined rest and hydration with preparing lesson plans for the person who will sub for her while she's away from school. I'm not sure how long she'll be out. 

So far, I feel fine. 

I'll hole up mostly in the Vizio room until the Covid coast is clear and do what I can to be of help to Debbie. 

2. While I rustled up a bowl of pasta for Debbie, I also watched the men's championship match of tennis's U. S. Open. The world of men's tennis is experiencing a changing of the guard. Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, and, because he refuses Covid vaccination, Novak Djokovic are fading away -- Nadal was eliminated in this tournament in the fourth round, Federer didn't play (he is nursing injury and is forty-one years old), and Djokovic, as mentioned, didn't play. Now, keep in mind, Nadal won this year's Australian and French Opens and Djokovic won Wimbledon. When Djokovic is cleared to play again, unvaccinated, he will very likely continue to compete at a high level. But Nadal's physical health is fragile and Federer might be finished. 

So young players are ascending the world rankings.

Today's championship match featured Spain's nineteen year old shooting star, Carlos Alcaraz and Norway's twenty-three year old Casper Ruud, who was also a finalist in the 2022 French Open. 

I didn't give the match my full attention. I was busy cooking. But, in the second and third sets, I saw some stunning points. Both players are fast, covering a lot of the court to run down shots, and both are powerful and also capable of superb finesse shots. 

Alcaraz, though, was ultimately the superior player and, by winning this tournament, he became the youngest player ever to achieve a #1 world ranking. 

It's too early to tell if Alcaraz has a long and successful career ahead of him. It's always hard to tell if young players in any sport will sustain their success when they achieve it early. 

3.  I retired early this evening to the bedroom, mainly so that Debbie and I are maintaining distance from each other. I decided to watch an hour long murder mystery featuring Ian Richardson and Timothy Spall entitled "A Cotswold Death". I enjoy watching Ian Richardson play arrogant characters and he was in great form as the condescending, full of himself Inspector Arrowsmith. 

Not quite ready to go to sleep, I returned to the BFIPlayer Classic channel and decided to watch another British comedy, The Happiest Days of Your Life,  featuring Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim, another British actor I've taken a recent interest in, thanks to my recent viewing of An Inspector Calls.

I didn't last long watching this movie, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I crapped out and fell asleep. 

I'll return to it on Monday. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-10-2020: Debbie's Transition to a New Job, Delicious Lunch at GarrenTeed BBQ, Dilemma and Visual Beauty in *Manhattan Melodrama* (1934)

1. Teachers can't just flip a switch and, when facing a new group of students, just automatically do what they've always done in the past. Because this is true and because Debbie has started a new job in a school she's never taught full-time in before, she is, in many ways, starting from scratch as she gets started with this new school year. There's nothing wrong about the fact that Pinehurst Elementary School has next to nothing in common with Charlemagne, where Debbie taught in Eugene, or with Dora Kennedy, where Debbie taught in Greenbelt. Charlemagne and Dora Kennedy had little in common with each other. Because different schools in different parts of the USA are so different from one another, for Debbie it means all new work getting things going and she spent much of the day today -- and she'll do the same on Sunday -- working, figuring things out, performing administrative tasks required by the school administration, in short, making a transition from work she'd done over the past fourteen years to the work she will be doing in 2022-23. She's completely dedicated to her work and to these children. 

2. This afternoon, Debbie took a break and suggested we order take out from the GarrenTeed BBQ food truck, located at 110 N. Hill on the east side of the street near the intersection of Hill and Bunker here in Kellogg. 

GarrenTeed BBQ is set up to fill online orders, so Debbie jumped on the World Wide Web and ordered me a couple pieces of chicken with mild BBQ sauce and two sides, baked beans and GarrenTeed BBQ's own Fire Crack Mac and Cheese -- made with pepper jack cheese. Debbie ordered a brisket sandwich with Cole slaw. 

I knew I'd enjoy the sides, especially the creamy, spicy Mac and Cheese. I'm not crazy about BBQ, normally, so I didn't know what I'd think of my chicken.

Thanks to the sweetness of the mild BBQ sauce and seasoning and moistness of the chicken, I liked the meat a lot and would gladly and eagerly order this meal again. I couldn't eat the entire meal in one sitting and enjoyed having some leftover chicken later in the evening. 

Debbie also enjoyed her brisket sandwich and cole slaw and I'm thinking we'll be return customers, not only because we enjoyed this meal so much, but also because of the ease of ordering online and the fact that we live so close to the GarrenTeed BBQ Food Truck.

Want to take a peek at the menu? It's here. 

3. Not knowing just what to expect, today I watched the earliest of the movies available in the James Wong Howe collection over on the Criterion Channel. 

The movie is Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and features Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell. 

To my delight, this movie developed into a thoughtful exploration of justice, of a moral dilemma that arose pitting the demands of the letter of the law against the feelings associated with love and longtime friendship. 

It's not a remake of The Merchant of Venice, but the movie does explore questions of when must the law (and punishment) be strictly applied and when is it morally acceptable to set the law aside and act merciful, to relax the imposition of the law because of fellow feeling, of love for another.

I won't go into any more detail nor will I reveal what the characters involved in this dilemma decided to do. 

I'll just say that as the movie drew to a close, I felt I was back to my younger days, discussing the plays of Shakespeare again, trying to sort out questions that ultimately have no absolute answers.

In addition to the movie's philosophical stimulation, James Wong Howe's work as the Director of Photography of Manhattan Melodrama delighted me.

The movie presented him with a wide range of challenges. Several scenes in the movie portrayed not only crowds of people, but some of these crowded scenes were chaotic and Howe filmed these masterfully, both on land and in water, alternating between pictures taken from a distance as the chaos boiled and pictures taken close up, inviting us into the emotion of these chaotic scenes.

In addition, I thought his work filming the scenes at Sing Sing late in the movie was exquisite, especially the way he cast shadows of the prison bars over the characters involved, augmenting the sense of the characters being themselves imprisoned in lifelong relationship they cannot escape. He also created some masterful shots from behind the prison bars looking outward as the prison scenes concluded. 

In other words, I saw in this very early work of James Wong Howe's early evidence of the versatility that would come to mark his entire career and evidence of his sensitivity to the way his photographic images enhance the movie by integrating the visual images he creates with the emotional substance of the story the movie tells. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-09-2022: Luna's Showing Her Age, Debbie Completes Week One, James Wong Howe's Pictures in *Whipsaw*

1. Luna might not be eating quite as much as I'd like, but after a couple of days of me taking her food dish to her, she is going to the dish on her own and, overall, she seems to be doing better. I have never known, really, when Luna was born. The vet has made some estimates about how old she is. I often wonder if Luna is showing natural signs of aging. 

2. Debbie arrived home tonight tired and in good spirits after her first week with students at Pinehurst Elementary. We decided not to go out for pizza or burgers at the Elks. Instead, I hopped down to the Humdinger and we each had a burger and some fries on the patio. After we ate, Debbie went next door. Christy is deeply knowledgeable and vastly experienced as a teacher and she and Debbie have great conversations about working with children, especially in a public school setting. Christy has continued to stay engaged with public school education in her retirement and it's awesome that she and Debbie can hash things out together. 

3. I had started watching one of James Wong Howe's early outings as a cinematographer yesterday when I watched the first, oh, half an hour of the Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy movie, Whipsaw (1935). Today, I started the movie over again to make sure I had the first half hour down pat and enjoyed the way it blended a jewel (pearl) heist story with a romantic comedy. Most of all, though, I was interested in James Wong Howe's work as the Director of Photography. I was most impressed with his work in lowly lit scenes during a terrible nighttime rain storm, a storm that forced the Tracy and Loy characters to take refuge in a home where a woman was about to give birth. I was also impressed with how deftly Howe photographed a shoot out in a small town cafe. The action was fast in a claustrophobic space and Howe, along with the movie's editor, kept the action well-defined and full of suspense. 

I'm enjoying watching movie after movie of James Wong Howe working as each film's cinematographer and beginning to gain some understanding of how he earned such a stellar reputation for his work. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-08-2022: Cardboard Goes Away, Early Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts, *Columbo*: Checkmate! BONUS! A Limerick by Stu

1. I messaged Christy to find out when I might be able to borrow her pickup and take cardboard cluttering up the garage to the dump. It turned out Paul had the truck, he'd loaded up Christy's cardboard and other items, and he was going to the dump. Awesome. I texted Paul, found out he hadn't headed out yet, and he dropped by and now our garage is free of cardboard again. I like that! 

2. I've mentioned before that I was thrilled last week to see that on Sept. 1st Criterion Channel made a collection of movies from the British New Wave available -- these movies were made from 1959-63, featured working class characters and stories and dealt with the difficult realities of their lives, not shying away from once forbidden subjects like adultery, abortion, and social inequity. Often shot in black and white on location, frequently in industrial towns of the north of England, the directors of these movies often used the techniques of documentary film to enhance the realism of their work.

Over the years, I've watched several movies featuring Albert Finney when he was in his forties and older, but today I introduced myself to one of his earlier works, the British New Wave movie, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Finney played the role of Arthur Seaton, a hard drinking, immature, sexually promiscuous laborer at a bicycle factory whose affair with Brenda (no surname), a married woman, results in her pregnancy. 

Brenda is played brilliantly by Rachel Roberts, another actor whom I'd never seen as a young performer. Rachel Roberts made a lasting impression on me over forty years ago when I first saw Picnic at Hanging Rock. Roberts played the role of Mrs. Appleyard, the stern, foreboding headmistress of the movie's girls' private school. 

The scenes between Arthur and Brenda during the exciting days and nights of their affair are full of the intoxication of romance and sex on the sly. The tone changes once Brenda discovers she's pregnant and, in breaking the news to Arthur, confronts him with the realities she now faces that she's carrying their child. Rachel Roberts, having merrily played Brenda's enjoyment of her dalliance with the younger Arthur, turns bitter and resolute. Arthur is, in every way, unprepared to hear Brenda's unvarnished sizing up of their situation as she lays out to Arthur the stark contrast between what this pregnancy means for her, as a woman, as opposed to him as man who can simply walk away (or be turned away) from Brenda's life. I won't reveal how she (not they) decides to go forward with her pregnancy. 

Rachel Roberts' performance is superb, wide ranging, and complex. Albert Finney masterfully brings Arthur, a most deplorable character, to life in an equally superb and demanding performance.

3. Well, I almost watched the movie regarded as the first of the British New Wave, Room at the Top. It features Laurence Harvey. But, quite by accident, it turns out I did watch Laurence Harvey perform later in the evening. Debbie asked me, while she wound down after teaching all day, to play an episode of Columbo again (like I did last night). Well, surprise, surprise, I clicked on the 7th episode of Season 2 and who was the guest star/villain? None other than Laurence Harvey. He plays a psychologically tortured and homicidal chess master about to play a former world champion who has come out of retirement.

Now that I've seen Laurence Harvey match wits with Peter Falk, I look forward to watching Laurence Harvey, thirteen years younger, perform in the movie Room at the Top. 

A limerick by Stu: 

The live version of this can be scary. 

So, when traveling the woods please be wary. 

But, when instead it’s named “Ted”, 

Or “let me be”, Elvis said! 

You can snuggle right in and not “carey”! 

 National Teddy Bear Day.

Three Beautiful Things 09-07-2022: Helping Luna Eat, Meeting Debbie at The Beanery, *Columbo* in the Living Room

 1. Luna showed a little more interest in food today. I have worked out a successful way to give her a little pill fragment twice a day. Right now, it seems like if I feed her some food from my finger or if I carry her to her food bowl, she'll eat more (and better) than if I leave her to her own devices. Luna is alert and responsive, but she's just not terribly interested in food and I hope she'll go back to her former eating habits before too long. If not, I'll continue to coax her with more proactive approaches.

2. I got a call from Debbie around 4:45 or so. It reminded me of when we lived in Maryland (with one exception). When we lived in Greenbelt, we had one car and I picked up Debbie from school. Often we went straight to (the now closed) Old Line Bistro and relaxed with a beer or two and often enjoyed a bite to eat. Today, after work, with the Sube in tow, Debbie called from The Beanery and I vaulted into the Camry and joined her. She was in the midst of discussion about teaching with Deanne.  I ordered a pint of the classic Mirror Pond Ale, listened in a bit, and then yakked with Fitz. After a while, we were by ourselves. We ordered a plate of pork nachos, finished them off, and went home. I'm wondering if this might become a nearly regular thing -- The Beanery's cocktail area is open Wednesday-Friday and just might be our after school meet up spot on those days. 

3. I watched an episode of Columbo. It featured Leonard Nimoy as an egotistical homicidal heart surgeon. I watched on my laptop and played the audio over our wireless speaker. Columbo is such a well-written show that Debbie enjoyed this episode sort of like a radio drama -- on occasion, she asked me what was happening on the screen, but most of the time she just enjoyed the repartee between Lt. Columbo and other characters and followed the story without much problem. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-06-2022: Luna Visits the Vet, Debbie's First Day with Students, *Poetry Break* and the Radio Star

1. Luna has not been well. Over the weekend and on into Monday, she was not eating and I didn't see any evidence that she had used the litter box (nor had she done any business outside it). Luna paid the vet a visit this morning and he did blood work, analyzed her urine, tested her glucose, and x-rayed her. No UTI. No change in Luna's kidney function. No thyroid problems. No sign of diabetes having returned. In all these ways, Luna is fine. Dr. Cook wondered if Luna might have some stomach/intestinal disruption and he gave her a couple of injections and assigned me to buy some Pepcid and start giving her about 4 mg twice a day. 

Dr. Cook instructed me not to feed Luna overnight. She could drink water. 

I'm writing this blog post on Wednesday morning and Luna ate about half of her wet food. I purchased some Pepcid this morning, quartered some pills, and put a pill fragment in some wet food. Luna ate it off of my finger. I decided to see if she would eat the rest of the wet food in her bowl off of my finger. 

She did.

This might be how I feed Luna for a while if she's not motivated to eat from her dish.

2. Debbie arrived home from school. She met with her students for the first time today. Debbie looked unruffled. She didn't have a lot to say -- things chugged along well. Some procedural changes are under way at the school -- for example, the cafeteria is in a different place from last year -- and so right along with Debbie, the students are learning how things will run this year and where things are located. 

3. Tonight's Poetry Break was, as always, superb. I enjoyed hearing Bill read the Lorca poem, "Little Viennese Waltz" (twice!). Leonard Cohen adapted this poem into his song, "Take This Waltz" which made me think of going to the Eugene downtown Broadway Metro movie theater and watching Sarah Polley's family documentary, Stories We Tell. That movie invigorated me and inspired me to rent her earlier movie, Take This Waltz which features Leonard Cohen's song during a surreal passage in the movie. Then, Lorca and Cohen and Polley got me thinking about my favorite scene in Take This Waltz, featuring the movie's lovers on an amusement park ride while the soundtrack played The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" and, once again, as I always do when I hear or think of this song, the line "We can't rewind, we've gone too far" repeated itself in my mind and I thought of times in my life when I thought another person and I could dispense with what had happened between us and just start over or we could act like what transpired between us never happened, and in every case, starting over or just forgetting was impossible. 

We couldn't rewind. 

We'd gone too far. 

Three Beautiful Things 09-05-2022: Stuffed Peppers for the First Time, Light and Refreshing Family Dinner, *Columbo* Features Guest Stars!

 1. Debbie and I were the hosts for tonight's family dinner. Late last week, I decided I'd take charge of the menu. I haven't enjoyed heavier foods much this summer -- in fact, I've avoided them -- and I thought a dinner built around stuffed bell peppers would be light and delicious.

I had never prepared stuffed bell peppers. As I contemplated how I might cook them, I suddenly wondered if I might be able to make them in an at least a quasi-Greek or Mediterranean style. I grabbed my copy of The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook from America's Test Kitchen and, sure enough, I found a recipe for stuffed bell peppers that looked like something I could make.

I prepared a pot of jasmine rice and assembled the other ingredients: ground beef, finely chopped onion, minced garlic, minced fresh ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, oregano, diced tomatoes, currants, feta cheese, and slivered almonds. 

I began by cooking the finely chopped onion until it softened and adding the garlic, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, and cumin to the onions. The fragrance of those aromatics got excited in about half a minute. I added the ground beef to this mixture and cooked it until no longer pink.

In the meantime, I boiled a few quarts of salted water in the Dutch oven and put nine bell peppers in the water and let them cook for about five minutes, softening the peppers. I lifted each bell pepper out with tongs and placed them on paper towels to drain.

I also put three cups of cooked rice in a large bowl.

Once the ground beef was brown, I added the drained diced tomatoes, reserve juice from the tomatoes, and oregano, transferred this mixture to the bowl with the rice in it, added feta cheese, and the slivered almonds I had roasted, and folded it all together.

I then stuffed the peppers and put them in the oven at 350 degrees for a half an hour, turned off the oven, and kept them there until I served them.

I had a blast cooking this entree. 

It made my day.

2. Molly, Christy, Carol, Paul, Cleo, and, after a while, Riley came over to our patio around 5:30. Debbie made a refreshing lime vodka punch. Christy brought over a rolled lettuce appetizer combining cheeses, salami, lettuce, green onion, and dressing. In a little while, I put a stuffed pepper on each person's plate and we dug into Carol's grilled garden vegetables and Debbie's cabbage cucumber salad. 

To my delight, it was a light and flavorful dinner. The cabbage salad, grilled vegetables, and stuffed peppers worked together perfectly. 

We had all kinds of things to talk about ranging from the Wildcats' football schedule to Molly's use of an e-bike to some excellent movie talk. We learned about Paul serving an apprenticeship as a tow truck driver  and he told us some of his observations about flying to Eugene and back, via Oakland and San Jose. 

For dessert, Debbie had found frozen mango juice bars, adding to the dinner's emphasis on lightness and refreshing food.

3. After our dinner party broke up, Debbie went to bed fairly early because she'll be up and at 'em fairly early in the morning to go to work and have her first day of class with her new 3rd graders.

I decided to watch some more Columbo. 

I watched the second episode of Season 2. 

To my surprise and delight, the episode featured John Cassavetes. Peter Falk and Cassavetes were close friends and appeared in six movies together, several of them independent films directed by Cassavetes. So, knowing a little bit about their history, it was fun to see them together in this episode about a womanizing orchestra conductor played by Cassavetes.  

This episode featured other great guest actors: Blythe Danner, Myrna Loy, Pat Morita, and George Gaynes. 

I had no idea until Sunday that Columbo regularly featured a well-known actor as the episode's villain and that so many supporting roles were played by well-known actors. 

Just like when I cooked stuffed peppers, I'm having a blast watching these various actors pop up on Columbo. It's a joy to go back and watch these episodes since I missed them all when they came out starting about fifty years ago.