1. Bill, Bridgit, Diane, and I jumped onto ZOOM this morning. Both Bridgit and Diane are either about to face or are in the midst of medical treatment and that was a central focus of our yakkin'. Bridgit was recently evaluated at her workplace and her hard work garnered her stellar reviews and evaluations. She hired on as a supervisor in a broken department and has, with months of diligence, focus, intelligence, and humaneness, resurrected it and was evaluated most positively for it. Bill didn't sing at a recent open mic, but he read poetry, an outgrowth of his Tuesday night Poetry Break, available live on Facebook.
2. Debbie was curious today about how the play, Arsenic and Old Lace, was made into a movie and so she rented it. If you know the play and watch the movie, you'll realize very quickly that the movie version is based on the play. It's not a film version of the play as performed on stage. This movie was made during the heyday of the screwball comedy and Cary Grant plays the screwball hero to the hilt. As the psycho Jonathan Brewster, Raymond Massey cuts a chilling, cold-blooded figure, focused, intimidating, and remarkably quiet. Peter Lorre plays Dr. Einstein perfectly and it's hard to imagine anyone playing the aunts, Abby and Martha, any better than Josephine Hall and Jean Adair.
WARNING! I AM GOING TO GIVE AWAY THE ENDING OF BOTH THE PLAY AND THE MOVIE.
The movie is much more committed to the screwball tradition than to the original play. The original play concludes ghoulishly with the aunts killing one more lonely old man (or in the Sixth Street production, a woman), making the farce even darker than it had been and, again, teetering on the edge of tragedy.
The movie has a bright ending. The newlyweds head off to honeymoon at Niagara Falls and the movie ends on a high comic note, not a dark one, with one last unsettling murder committed by the two homicidal Christian spinsters.
3. When our HelloFresh box came last week, we got three meals -- not sure why. What that meant for us, though, was dinner time rolled around today and we had another bag of ingredients for me to turn into a meal.
A while back, HelloFresh introduced me to the slow, steady process of making risotto. I got to do it again today. This particular risotto dish included roasted zucchini and grape tomatoes along with sautéed garlic, shallot, and sun dried tomatoes.
I stood over the risotto cooking for about 25 minutes, stirring the rice and adding half cups of water one at a time until the rice soaked up the liquid. The payoff was splendid. This risotto dish was creamy, full of delicious vegetable flavor, and accented with Parmesan cheese.
It's slow food.
My favorite kind.
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