1. I've been checking Facebook frequently to see if anyone posted pictures from Saturday's celebration of Joe Cronin's life in Eugene. So far, I've seen one photo and it touched me. In it were Sparky Roberts and Patrick Torelle with the extraordinary LCC theater program/Student Productions Association alum, Lisa Marie Malovoz. Lisa Marie, I'm almost positive, was the stage manager of our 2005 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was a student of mine at LCC. She has had a superb career in the theater. Currently, she is Director of Production at Fox Theater in Atlanta. Seeing Sparky, Patrick, and Lisa Marie together so many years after Lisa made her stellar contributions to LCC's theater life and reading her words of appreciation for Sparky and Patrick moved me and filled me with joy.
2. After watching director Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy on Saturday, today I watched his next film, My Own Private Idaho. I experienced it as a movie about longing, longing for love, friendship, companionship, and family. Part of what I enjoyed about this movie is that it's so far out of the mainstream of movies in the USA. Most of its characters are gay, many hustling for money by selling sexual favors. It is also, in several episodes, a loose reimagining of both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV, and it's also a road movie and we travel with the two main characters, played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, to Seattle, Portland, unnamed places in Idaho, and to Rome and somewhere in the Italian countryside.
As this movie roams between these different locales and as it takes us into an old Portland hotel where a bunch of young people along with an older man named Bob are squatting, it's a fair question to ask what holds this roaming, seemingly fragmented movie together?
Feeling holds it together. Emotion. The pain of loneliness, the desire for connection, the everlasting hope to find what has been lost, the irreparable suffering of broken families.
I first saw this movie as a home rental some time after its theatrical release in 1991.
I wasn't ready for it. I remember feeling indifferent as I viewed it around thirty years ago.
Something shifted in me over the last thirty years and, today, I was moved and intrigued by this movie and am certain that some of its scenes and striking images will stay with me for the rest of my life.
I had a similar experience watching Midnight Cowboy.
3. I made some white rice with sesame oil and sliced green onions and filled the bottom of two flat bowls with the rice. I baked two salmon filets, seasoned with za'atar, salt, pepper, and smokey red pepper flakes. I topped the fish with sesame seeds. Once the fish was cooked, I spread humus on top of my filet and set the fish on top of the rice. Accompanied by a green salad left over from yesterday, this was a fun and delicious meal.
By the way, Debbie cut up about half of her filet, passed on the hummus, and turned her green salad into a salmon salad.
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