...Your Portrait of the Queen...

A little blast from the past the feels all too much like a moment torn from our own personal headlines at the moment...

I've only ever been aware of this song as a throwaway on Bette Midler's fabulous Live at Last double album, but it would seem to have a little life of its own that I never dreamed of.  In addition to being performed on record and (semi)live by its co-author (along with Midler and Bruce Roberts), Miss Carole Bayer Sager, it turns up on the YouTubes in two wholly unlikely incarnations:  The first allows you to imagine a musical sitcom starring Sally Field and Tim Conway (just exactly as good an idea as it sounds, as it turns out), while the second lets us know more or less what it would be like if the last reel of 2001: A Space Odyssey were reinterpreted as an early '80s television special for Miss Lynda Carter.

As for us, while it's been years since there have been funny cigarettes hereabouts, we are indeed packing up, among other things, rubber ducks, 61 (and more) cassettes, a few copies of (if not quick stacks of) Modern Screen, more than a few forks and spoons, at least one portrait each of several queens, and possibly even an alibi or two.  It's as if Midler, Bayer Sager, and Roberts had us in mind (except for the creepy perv parts, of course).

We've moved the food (and, not unimportantly, the drink), a few key breakables, a lamp, and our bedding, and tonight we camp at the new place.  Tomorrow we grapple in earnest with the movers, who among other little eccentricities have let us know that while they'll happily wrap up and, you know, move our most valued possessions, some loophole in insurance regulation means we have to remove everything from the walls for them. The problem, we've discovered, in an overcrowded small apartment, is that if you remove everything from the walls, there isn't any room remaining to deal with minor moving-related matters like opening up boxes or wrapping things up.  How they plan to deal with it is their problem, I suppose.  After all, next to us, they shouldn't have a care in the world - they're not the ones moving out today-ay-ay-ay...