tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72189853269218589432024-02-19T00:53:00.596-05:00Café MuscatoA vague and jumbled set of fantods, mairzie-doats, and farthingales from someone who ought to know better. Now open all night!Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.comBlogger2708125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-24517747550555428182019-01-21T17:26:00.000-05:002019-01-21T18:54:58.339-05:00Here and Back Again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Well, I'm going back to work, albeit not (unless I'm feeling particularly antic in the morning) in my Maidenform; the Powers That Be tell us they've somehow, miraculously, found some money to pay us, albeit for a single pay period, and in the form of a paycheck that we will, all things willing and the creek don't rise, receive sometime next month. Yee-haw.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I can't say I've really minded the furlough all that much, the uncertainty aside. Really just a preview of retirement, and being a champion putterer I can easily fill the days with things useful and less so. If anything, all this nonsense has helped dispel any lingering regret I might have felt about closing this chapter of my life. As it is, I can't wait.<br />
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Although I may have to, as it now seems possible I'll have to push off the date a tad. We've now been assured that we'll get paid, some day, for all this time, but some who understand the bureaucracy better than I are telling me I may want to stay on board until that point, as it's quite possible that if things don't reopen before my appointed date, there would be no way to reimburse me as I'd no longer be on payroll. It's always something, isn't it?<br />
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But my problems are nothing next to others', so in the morning I'll pull together something resembling office wear and trot back. It will be interesting, if nothing else, to see how my colleagues have been spending their time, and while it's clear our work load will be exiguous (as we have no budget and no ability to plan), it will make for a change, and the office is close to the gym, so I'll get to spend some more time in the rigorous company of Kevin My Trainer. He's introducing me to dead-lifting at the moment, and I feel terribly butch indeed.<br />
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Getting out of the house will also, I hope, tear me from obsessively trying to follow the news, as goodness knows none of it is good. I wake every morning hoping that today is at last the day that Something Happens, and while lots of things do, it's never the one (or several) that put us more firmly on the road to getting past this current unpleasantness. I have hope, in measured and tempered ways, but I am running out of patience.<br />
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And anything, it seems, that isn't political is just sad. Losing Carol Channing last week was a genuine blow, and while it's hard to feel that that passing of a 97-year-old woman is a shock, it still feels like some sort of minor shift in things as we've known them. It also reminds me of how many other near and actual centenarians one treasures and, consequently, fears for. I did find a marvelous, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTQ2frKmAp8" target="_blank">full-length performance</a> by Miss C. in her greatest role to help console me, and while the recording quality is middling at best, it does give one a sense of what all the shouting was about. Purposely or otherwise, the identifying information provided is incorrect, and the production dates to twenty years later than the uploader indicates; it's a version of the last iteration she brought to Broadway and which I saw (and reveled in) back in my Manhattan days. Wonderful woman indeed...<br />
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And how's by y'all? I'm jealous of anyone, today, in warmer climes, and hope that those of you stuck in arctic weather (as are we) are staying cozy. I have a white lasagna in the oven and Yorkie snoring on the sofa next to me, so I really can't complain (although, if so allowed, I will, at length).Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-10664396961298045752019-01-13T13:17:00.001-05:002019-01-13T13:17:36.822-05:00The Snow is Snowing...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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...And The Mister, the dog, and I are weathering the storm rather nicely. For once the Experts Meteorological if anything underestimated the extent of colorful weather in store for us, so our decision to treat this Sunday as a sort of belated holiday turns out to have been an extremely sensible one. Yay, us.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>We didn't manage to cook our usual Thanksgiving/Christmas meal this year—apathetic for the former holiday, and too engaged with houseguests for the latter (I do adore My Dear Sister, her wife, and their dog, but their four-night stay at Out Little Condo was definitely... all-consuming). So when this morning I awoke to the scene above (well, five floors down), I had a pang of smugness knowing that there was a turkey in the future, not to mention the inevitable <a href="https://expatriato.blogspot.com/2014/11/of-costumes-climate-and-corn.html" target="_blank">corn pudding</a>, port wine salad, and other fixings, not least among them a nice bottle of our favorite festive tipple, an Australian sparkling shiraz.<br />
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I will have to report in on the turkey, however, as it seems that in purchasing the only whole one available in our usually well-stocked local supermarket, I seem to have bought some kind of frozen, pre-cooked FrankenBird. We're apparently meant to keep it in its bag and pop it into the oven, still frozen, for three hours or so. The Mister, whose technique for brining and preparing a turkey is baroque in the extreme, is highly dubious, but if worst comes to worst I suppose we can turn the result into a series of casseroles.<br />
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The supermarket was, in its (weak) defense, a madhouse yesterday given the impending baddish weather. Our Nation's Capital is notable for many things, and high among them this time of year is the level of mounting hysteria displaying by its populace at the least sign of wintriness. Egged on by the radio, television, and newspapers, the locals rise to ever-greater heights of nonsense (to those of us raised up north on the bank of a vast, dark lake of ice), and never more so than in "preparing."<br />
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What, I wonder, are people going to do with the heaping piles of frozen vegetables, loaves of bread, gallons of milk, and reams of toilet paper they were desperately acquiring on a fine, clear Saturday afternoon? Answer, as the dear Provincial Lady was wont to observe, comes there none.<br />
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In furlough news, well, things remain annoying. My Viennese jaunt is off, and if it goes on a few days more, my next class will also be cancelled, leaving me almost entirely without projects to complete before I go into full retirement-prep mode in early March. There is something in this nebulous, uncertain state that makes any form of useful concentration nearly impossible, but I have at least significantly upped my gym time (much needed) and maxed out on cooking. With today's feast over, we're going to have to spend much of this week eating not cooking at all, as the fridge is as stuffed as I suspect we be by about 6:45 this evening.<br />
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Beyond being a snowy Sunday, it's one that I think must have attached to it a certain powerful juju, as it's the birthday of a nice little group of stellar favorites, including our dear Kay Francis, the Café's patron saint; the indomitable Sophie Tucker; terpsichorean goddess Gwen Verdon; and two of the '70s great crazy-pansy uncles, both Charles Nelson Reilly <i>and</i> Rip Taylor.<br />
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To see us out, why we don't we pop in on Ed Sullivan and enjoy a little late-period Soph? She's got a useful message for us as we totter into 2019, I think...<br />
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Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-72871796340166562802019-01-02T17:14:00.002-05:002019-01-02T17:16:51.394-05:00Involuntary Vacation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So one thing I've been thinking about as I come back to this curious form of public writing is the question of truthtelling. With retirement approaching, I've realized that the need to be quite so enigmatic as to the details of life is less; current events have provided a perfect opportunity to start that process.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>So here goes: I'm a fed. And, at the moment, I'm furloughed.<br />
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Yes, <i>carissimi</i>, it's true: dear old Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International was, truth to tell, a bit of a ruse. Most of the finer (and, if apropos, funnier) details of my employment have been quite true, but I've encountered them while in service, not to corporate mammon, but to the American taxpayer. For the moment I'm going to avoid anything more specific*, but I will say that it was all quite aboveboard and, on the whole, I'm pretty proud of my twenty years in public service.<br />
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But my goodness the last couple of years have made that a lot more trying, and the last couple of weeks never more so.<br />
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And now that the holidays are in the rear-view mirror, I'm finding myself uncharacteristically at loose ends. There's something about this kind of limbo that isn't conducive to getting things done, and I'm particularly peeved because I've got some rather amusing travel scheduled, but it's looking more and more likely that the classes I'd be teaching won't come off. I will be genuinely sad to miss one last go at a stay in <i>Alte Wien</i>, not least because the last time I was there I was still (although I didn't know it at the time) a bit of an invalid, and it would have been glorious to be able, when not hard at work, to do as much walking as I'd like.<br />
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So I'm puttering around the house and putting off taking down the Christmas tree (which we usually leave up through Orthodox Christmas anyway, in deference to Egyptian traditions) and generally not doing much of any use except keeping the dog blissfully happy. And now the museums have all closed as well, so there's not much to do were I to stir myself to some activity anyway.<br />
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But the real question, I think, is: how is it possible that I've never heard of a Tony Curtis picture featuring Stritchy—and directed by Blake Edwards, to boot? It's either a hidden gem or a real stinker, and I have a feeling I know on which end of that spectrum it falls...<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">*And I'll ask that you, mes amis, do the same in comments or elsewhere; I'd like to keep the Café off the radar, Google-wise, for at least a few more months.</span></i>Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-19530251622261504372018-12-31T14:43:00.001-05:002019-01-03T08:33:55.612-05:00Muddling Through<div style="text-align: center;">
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Well, to steal a phrase from Miss <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRONr5v5rA4">Deven Green</a>, hello there.
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<a name='more'></a>As you've no doubt noticed, I went, in the words of Mrs. Gallagher Levi, away from the lights of 14th Street* and into my personal whirl. And what a whirl it's been.<br />
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That's a bit of a stretch, actually; it's been a very quiet half-year, and now I'd like to end 2018 by apologizing for the vanishing act. Among my resolutions for 2019, I've decided, is to hang out here a little more. At this point, blogging is so wholly obsolescent as to be, in a boomerang kind of way, kind of neat, and if nothing else I miss the discipline of occasionally composing in more than 280 characters (I'm very busy on Twitter, in case you've missed that; it fills the time, but doesn't in the end wholly satisfy the writing bug).<br />
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In any case, here it is again, New Year's Eve, and once again I thought it might be a good idea to revisit Miss Garland and have her wish us all the best forever and always.<br />
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I suppose I should catch you up on the doings <i>chez nous</i>, such as they've been. Most of the news, on the whole, is good. The Mister has a new and rather swanky job with much improved hours, which means that I get to see him on at least part of the weekend and we get to go out and do amusing things on Sundays like normal people. I, too, have a new if temporary billet, and therein lies, I think the biggest news: I'm retiring.<br />
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Yes, after 20 years before the mast, it will be time to do something else. My time in Human Resources ended midsummer, and I've returned for my final few months to the training division I was in before that, once again spreading the gospel of strategic communication to moderately appreciative audiences at home and abroad. If nothing else, it snagged me my first-ever trip south of Miami a few weeks ago, to Panama. Startling, given all the places I <i>have</i> been, that I've never been in that part of the world at all, and from the little I saw outside a hotel conference room, it was perfectly pleasant. Warmer than Our Nation's Capital, that's certain.<br />
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The dog is well, too, and more importunate than ever. My Dear Sister spent Christmas with us, along with her wife and their dog, a small fluffy creature of enormous charm and no sense whatsoever, and it's made us think that perhaps, since we lost dear Koko, our Boudi might be a little lonesome. The Mister is making dark noises about visiting shelters in the new year. We shall see.<br />
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So one reason I thought it a good idea to re-enter, as it were, the arena, is because I've selfishly realized that one thing over the years that I've greatly valued about this battered old place is that it serves as a reminder, an online journal, of what I've been doing and thinking and been amused by. I thought, perhaps, it would be of interest to future-me if no one else to chart the course into whatever it is that will come next.<br />
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So watch this space. And please, my dears, do forgive my absence. Since I seem to be in a quote-y sort of mood, I'll invoke (Lord Lloyd Webber's) Miss Desmond and say: I've come home at last.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>* Fun fact: I actually lived on 14th Street, once upon a time, right at Seventh Avenue. A very nice flat it was, too, although not air-conditioned, which meant that I not only had to deal with the lights (and very bright they were) but the </i>sounds<i> of 14th Street. It's amazing I slept at all between 1991 and 1995. Perhaps I didn't...</i></span>Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-78064850253013205002018-06-06T09:08:00.000-04:002018-06-06T09:08:07.025-04:00Today's Sanity Check<div style="text-align: center;">
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This is how it's done.Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-18642525403415267212018-05-13T13:04:00.001-04:002018-05-13T13:09:22.039-04:00Redux 2018: M is for...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVOn6Z6yB6LTUYCYn9yqbm_2UiT0ZCvPtwB04y94OZ4iXqwCauVZ4df-vQongnccCWe6E1-F7XPZGQJuvJaVkCGShrhpM6-AxRBvkDLnLLGcxAwWtlSvNPzEnurR1uCHHFx6WTC7HRKp8/s1600-h/jungleshowgirl.jpg"><span style="color: black;"></span><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5334255645824510338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVOn6Z6yB6LTUYCYn9yqbm_2UiT0ZCvPtwB04y94OZ4iXqwCauVZ4df-vQongnccCWe6E1-F7XPZGQJuvJaVkCGShrhpM6-AxRBvkDLnLLGcxAwWtlSvNPzEnurR1uCHHFx6WTC7HRKp8/s400/jungleshowgirl.jpg" style="display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 394px;" /></a><br />
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M is for...<em> first appeared on May 10, 2009 and has become my Mother's Day tradition. Once, again, Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...<br /><br />This year the day brings a bit of a double punch, for it's also my birthday - 55! Imagine being so old. Mother Muscato always got the closest - being a rather flinty sort - she ever got to sentimental on the occasion, every six years, when Mother's Day and the anniversary of my first appearance happened to coincide. "My little Mother's Day present," she'd say, either earnestly or with a tinge of sarcasm, depending on her mood, my behavior, and, truth be told, exactly where we were in the afternoon's Old Fashioneds. I hope you all are enjoying the day and well in general; we are, for the most part, more of which, perhaps, anon.<br /><br />In any case, here it is again: a memory of my mother:</em><br />
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No, she's not my mother. Actually, we lost Mother Muscato almost ten years ago,* and I'm still getting over the surprise.</div>
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Despite all she went through in her last couple of years - a familiar litany of complaints for women of her generation, the harsh follow-ons from everything that had seemed so <em>au courant</em> when they were girls, principally smoking - despite all that, I truly believed, on some level, that she was simply too strong-minded to let anything else, even cancer, have its way.<br />
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Until the end, she was a paean to the virtues of denial, stoutly maintaining that of course she was fine. Everything was fine. We didn't think all that much about it; her total distaste for bad news of any kind was an ingrained fact of life. When I moved away from home, after a few surprises I learned to phone home now and then for a rundown with her of elderly family and friends; "Oh," she'd admit grudgingly, "didn't I tell you? Cousin Adele died six months ago. Oh, come on, it's not all that sad - she was <em>87</em>, for God's sake..."<br />
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I think, at the end, she must have thought a lot about just why she wasn't, in fact, a circus showgirl, or whatever it was that actually had been her dream a long ways back. I deeply suspect that where she ended up was pretty far from what she'd planned.<br />
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She married at the very tail end of the War and for more than half a century led a life that was was an almost entirely conventional blend of children, family, work, and church. In all that time, I don't think we ever, as you do, really thought all that much about her, if you know what I mean.<br />
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Until, of course, it was too late, which I didn't realize until we were clearing out her things. Having married into a family of packrats (just this side of Collyer-brother hoarding, really; Father Muscato had a warehouse he never told the Evil Stepmother about**), she went to the opposite extreme. Over time during her last couple years, she had pared her own possessions almost to nothing, easy enough to do when surrounded by her husband's and her children's plentiful detritus.<br />
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There were a few pieces of jewelry (charm bracelet, string of pearls, her mother's garnet set and her grandmother's jet mourning brooch...), a drawer full of neatly filed records (bills, taxes, mortgage) - and almost nothing else. She seems to have disposed of several generations worth of papers from her side of the family, from her great-grandparents' civil war letters to the correspondence her mother's mother had carried on with any number of interesting people she had met on long-distance freighter cruises (Great-grandmother Muscato shared a passion for penal reform with one, the gentleman who wrote <em>20,000 Years in Sing Sing</em>; they had gotten to be chums somewhere between Shanghai and Juneau, and their letters had been numerous and voluble), and almost every scrap related to herself (this in a house that contained every Christmas card received since the Truman administration).<br />
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Except: in one dresser drawer, an unmarked envelope, large and faded yellow. In it were three or four magazines, story monthlies from the early 40s. There wasn't much to link them - they included a romance anthology, a "true confessions" format, and a Western, I believe. It was only as we passed them around, my siblings and I, that we noticed that each carried a story by an author whose name was an amalgam of our mother's mother's and her grandmother's maiden names.<br />
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We showed them to our father (already, although we didn't yet know it, trying to decide whether to wait until after the funeral to announce his engagement - but <em>that's</em> another story), and he said offhandedly that oh, yes, your mother had always wanted to be a writer. Those must be hers.<br />
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So maybe she didn't want to be a circus showgirl; maybe she dreamed of being Katherine Anne Porter or Taylor Caldwell or her favorite author, Mazo de la Roche. And on Mother's Day, each year, I sit a moment and wonder what else it is we don't know about the sharp-tongued, irritable, meanly funny suburban matron who raised us and, if nothing else, helped ensure we all got the hell out of Dodge even if she hadn't.<br />
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The stories? Never read them. My sister got hold of the envelope, and she's her mother's daughter.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">* 18 years, this year. Doesn't seem possible.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">** Just realized that this year (2016) I have to move that to the past tense. Time in its flight...</span></i></div>
Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-8375304662473878092018-04-16T15:42:00.002-04:002018-04-16T15:42:44.510-04:00Birthday Girl: Trouble Proof<div style="text-align: center;">
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Our very dear TJB has reminded me that today is Dusty's birthday. Here puts a wistful, almost anesthetized, and very, very effective spin on a song I don't otherwise associate with her.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Oh, and a little hello from hiatus-land. Things are jogging along well enough <i>chez nous</i>, and I hope the same for all of you. More soon, I think...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-27586333362144650042018-03-18T17:23:00.005-04:002018-03-18T17:23:38.545-04:00Au Reservoir<div style="text-align: center;">
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Carissimi, the Café is going on a little break.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>What with one thing and another, I'm feeling a little fragile, and at least until I have this and that sorted out, things will be quiet (even quieter than usual!) around here. Now, don't worry: we're well, and healthy enough, and there's no Great Looming Issue. It's just that the state of the world has me down, and this has proved a late, ungenerous, and hesitant spring, and in general I'm too glum to be much good company.<br />
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If you're Twitter-inclined, I do hang out there now and then, and I will be checking in here from time to time, if only because I depend so very much on my Blog Roll (and what a lovely, old-fashioned concept that seems, no? Practically Edwardian) over there on the right for diversion and enlightenment.</div>
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I don't mean to be gone for good, and I trust you'll behave yourselves in the meantime. Sooner or later something will amuse or amaze me enough to want to share it, and here I'll be.</div>
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Au revoir, my dears, and thank you more than you can know for all these years of fun.</div>
Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-43884386107151445332018-03-04T12:23:00.001-05:002018-03-04T12:23:20.459-05:00You'd Better Shop Around...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOWIOi5VBKd_B8XkxASElEkWYIz76z73npFj_OoJyqO7ZsCN7jqhhlt0r2h6-Ypzc-TvSi44z0hzGzMlN1Y7Wov3ZAm-fEGb5ZotkwIRn1F04fgSqTRJc5cg4zGky7hNoW2m4N8NIgCBGL/s1600/chateau+thombeau+mugs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="480" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOWIOi5VBKd_B8XkxASElEkWYIz76z73npFj_OoJyqO7ZsCN7jqhhlt0r2h6-Ypzc-TvSi44z0hzGzMlN1Y7Wov3ZAm-fEGb5ZotkwIRn1F04fgSqTRJc5cg4zGky7hNoW2m4N8NIgCBGL/s400/chateau+thombeau+mugs.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
...And the award for <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/chateauthombeau?ref=artist_title_name" target="_blank">Most Enchanting New Products</a> goes to...<br />
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<a name='more'></a>...Our own dear Thombeau! Yes, the master of Fabulon, the MC of the always diverting (if occasionally terrifying) <a href="http://redundantvarietyhour.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Redundant Variety Hour</a>, and always one of our favorite peripatetic bloggers is now the proprietor of his very own online retail establishment - and it's pretty much everything you'd expect.<br />
<br />
Seen above is my very own first haul from the latest incarnation of the <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/chateauthombeau?ref=artist_title_name" target="_blank">Chateau Thombeau</a>. What was once a rigorously curated and always entrancing blog is now, partnership with a firm called RedBubble, an equally meticulously selected and extremely enticing line of goodies ranging from mugs to cushions to clothing (to tote bags to greeting cards to...). <br />
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One would expect nothing less than marvels when it comes to the images our host selects, but the good news is that the production firm, if these mugs are anything to go by, does a fine job in turning his dreams into reality. Bottom line: they dishwash a treat.<br />
<br />
Thombeau is regularly adding new lines - his new Belles are especially tempting - and if I weren't currently involved in some major downsizing (the Mister and I are involved, at the moment, in a pitched battle over how many sofa cushions two middle-aged men really need - and I'm losing), there would be a parade of the attractively patterned boxes you see above making their way to our door. Even so, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be able to resist a <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/chateauthombeau/works/30619123-belle-3?c=858122-belles&p=tote-bag&ref=work_collections_grid" target="_blank">Belle # 3 tote bag</a>...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-3917276489368735762018-02-25T14:43:00.004-05:002018-02-26T08:02:47.190-05:00Living in the Moment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDljg40ttyJu4zXuA7uqIaQ0HAWSIxX5jERIJvKo4lV-PbD6M6U28bDtBlJDq2k0TcmGY-W2Bxz0A1KgXVxyUPG3raJ0XruVjcjAzCwsu6rVk03xBq4z89xQT7pj9rLTt1qBHn568BCxlm/s1600/joanfilming.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="657" data-original-width="824" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDljg40ttyJu4zXuA7uqIaQ0HAWSIxX5jERIJvKo4lV-PbD6M6U28bDtBlJDq2k0TcmGY-W2Bxz0A1KgXVxyUPG3raJ0XruVjcjAzCwsu6rVk03xBq4z89xQT7pj9rLTt1qBHn568BCxlm/s400/joanfilming.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
I came upon this arresting image at some point this week, and I can't get it out of my mind. Somehow, it <i>explains</i> Joan Crawford to me in a way I'd never considered so clearly.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>She's filming <i>Humoresque</i>, and is at the moment in a clinch with her leading man, John Garfield. Director Jean Negulesco and crew look on. Presented as a "candid," the image probably took as much staging as any that actually ended up in the film. Even so, it catches something: the way that the star, in the actual process of filming, is - possibly for the only time in her long and often troubled life - utterly at home. In a moment of total artifice, she is totally fulfilled. What, after all, could be further away from a laundry in Kansas City than a glamorous balcony in Movie Manhattan? What could present fewer complications than a perfect lover who sticks to the script and goes away as soon as the director cries "Cut!"?<br />
<br />
The more I look at this image, the more Crawford's legendary tenacity in regard to her career makes sense. It suggests to me that she didn't see it, necessarily, in terms of how, say, <i>I Say What You Did</i> would be received. That's not why she kept at it, churning out anthology-series episodes and Castle pictures and, God help us, <i>Trog</i>. Maybe what she was after was the pure adrenaline rush of what we see here: all eyes trained on her, all the hot lights and the dangling mic and the fake backdrop creating what was for her a sensation, catnip for one so desperately insecure, of being not just at the center of the world, but, for this moment, entirely <i>safe</i>. Removed from the importuning children, the no-good suitors, the dark memories of her Dickensian childhood and hardscrabble existence (not quite right, somehow, to call it a girlhood). She was like - no, in this sense, she <i>was</i> - an addict. And nothing in what passes for real life could give her what even the worst of her professional experiences could. At least until the end; perhaps one reason she stopped after <i>Trog</i> was that she finally encountered rock bottom: a film set, the place that to her was the Holy of Holies, that offered no respite from age, decline, and what she, I think, came to fear worst, ridicule.<br />
<br />
Only four years separate that last moment on film from her very last moment in the spotlight, when, after a disastrous night out at the Rainbow Room, she decided more or less to disappear. Creating a self where there is no fundamental core is hard work, and for her it had at last gotten to be too great a struggle to be worth the effort.<br />
<br />
She must have wondered, more than once, if it had all been worth while. But all you have to do is see her here, in Garfield's arms and under the tender lights of Warner Bros, to know that, at that moment, she would not have traded places with any woman in the world. She was home, in make believe. And it made all the rest a sacrifice she had no choice but to make, and make again, and again. She was destroyed, I think, not by ambition, or by vanity, or even by her admittedly formidable ego. Her life was shaped by deprivation and rejection from its earliest days, and that leaves it mark on even the most beautiful, the most talented, the highest flyer. What drove her from the beginning in the end drove her, after a fashion, mad. When even being Joan Crawford can't make you secure in your sense of self, what else is left? <i>Trog</i>, and a closed apartment door on the Upper East Side.<br />
<br />
But we'll always have <i>Humoresque</i>...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-469774370223503672018-02-18T14:20:00.001-05:002018-02-18T14:21:06.206-05:00Tell Mary to Call Diane!<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
The fabulous Miss Dina Martina gives us her... unique... perspective on this most invented of all long weekends..<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm all for presidents (well, most of them, if you get my drift), but it's always sort of rankled that they took the coincidence that two of our greater ones had birthdays in the same general vicinity and crammed them together into a kind of Frankenstein celebration meant to generically celebrate all the presidents, great and small. And while we've had some greats, we've certainly had a couple whose worth to celebrate is distinctly questionable.<br />
<br />
But enough of that sort of thing. We're busy here at the Condo Muscato, as the Mister comes back from his little holiday in the sun quite late tonight, so I'm being Terribly Domestic, stocking away some lovely cooked things for the week, catching up on the laundry, and of course indulging a certain Yorkie's bottomless predilection for being admired and cossetted. It's been nice, I won't deny it, being on my own this week - lots of extra sleep, a marathon of reading, and a quick and enormously enjoyable binge of all of <i>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</i> (which actually is, quite so) - but I do like being half-a-couple, and it will be very pleasant indeed to have the old duffer around again. <i>And</i> we get to catch up on both Valentine's and himself's birthday, so there's that to look forward to.<br />
<br />
In any case, if you're stateside, I hope you're enjoying the prospect of an extra day off as much as I; and if not, you're likely at this point so baffled that the best I can do is simply recommend that you watch the video again and again until it makes its own internal kind of sense.<br />
<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-77837623358222029552018-02-14T05:55:00.002-05:002018-02-14T05:55:26.806-05:00Once More, With Feeling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
From all of us here at the Café (that is to say, the Yorkie, the Mister, and me), it's <a href="http://expatriato.blogspot.com/search/label/Miss%20Valentine" target="_blank">once again</a> my pleasure to wish each and every one of you a happy and enamored Karen Valentine's Day. May your celebrations be more successful than the ill-fated and utterly unremembered <i>Karen</i>...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-49216684168096380822018-02-11T16:00:00.002-05:002018-02-11T17:20:19.792-05:00Birthday Girl: The Pre-Teased Superstar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jEMsbkXMiiCyw988y0vnieMz9TQi2jzxUbYnaAWcS3PhIvaM7_SX3bDDyw41mKDVFLwaXaYZm5Ynrl8yFccpvu6MV0CB3207Al-LgMPvW7qRgZqGSZxocEF0nZDXK4w0pkI6Muq9SbDP/s1600/evag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="529" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jEMsbkXMiiCyw988y0vnieMz9TQi2jzxUbYnaAWcS3PhIvaM7_SX3bDDyw41mKDVFLwaXaYZm5Ynrl8yFccpvu6MV0CB3207Al-LgMPvW7qRgZqGSZxocEF0nZDXK4w0pkI6Muq9SbDP/s640/evag.jpg" width="514" /></a></div>
<br />
Well, it's deepest gray and pouring rain here in Our Nation's Capital, and I have to admit that my seasonal funk continues. If anything, though, were to drive away the clouds, I think it would be spending some time, as I've done this afternoon, in the very personable company of today's Birthday Girl.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>I rather think of Eva Gabor as the successful sister - of the three, she best straddled the line between genuine and ersatz fame, and while no one ever mistook her for Bernhardt, she had a very real comic talent and scads of charm (Magda had a great deal of the latter, and Zsa² could deploy a smidgen of the former and lots of the latter, but was clearly a great deal more of A Piece of Work than her baby sister). She also had a good head on her shoulders - I greatly enjoyed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ46v_EDolg" target="_blank">this interview</a>, from 1985, in which it's clear that she was more than a mere figurehead at the wig company that bore her name ("It happens to be number one in the world...," she coos). She's "pre-teased" up in the header, by the bye, for her own description of her product; I think it's apt, though, for she always gave one a great deal more sense than her sisters (especially the at-the-end-so-pitiable "princess") that she was entirely in on the joke.<br />
<br />
Decades before Letterman, she was an engaging Mystery Challenger on <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwd76OrEeoM&t=6s" target="_blank">What's My Line?</a></i>, and in between she was of course the chatelaine of a little farm just outside Hooterville, a town that to me has all the resonance of (and a great many yuks than) Yoknapatawpha. That's probably how I first encountered her, as a tot, and it was always great fun to have her turn up here and there, over the years. She left far too soon, and along with the rest of her brood, she's missed.<br />
<br />
We see her here, as you might have guessed, pictured by Hollywood's supreme master of what might called Glamour at Twilight, John Engstead. She's deploying the full arsenal of the trade she learned at her mother's knee: feathers to soften the line, makeup that flatters rather than calling attention to itself, hair that owes very little to nature, jewels to add sparkle, and an expression half alluring, half amused (one that's harder to carry off than one might imagine; just ask that star recently - and improbably - fêted at MoMA, Vera Hruba Ralston Yates; the best she could manage was something between annoyed and dyspeptic).<br />
<br />
So that's my Sunday - a little wallow in the shoals of Gaborabilia. Beats the weather, that's for sure. As for the rest of life, well, after a week of shirking, I'm heading back to the office tomorrow, and on top of that I'm batching it. As a birthday present, I sent Mr. Muscato packing out west to catch some sun and hang out with pals in the desert. It's actually rather nice to be home alone with the dog. It turns out that <i>Green Acres</i> is plentifully represented on YouTube, and I think my enjoyment of a few episodes would far outstrip his patience...<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-20518009938263570802018-02-03T09:34:00.002-05:002018-02-03T09:34:44.001-05:00Birthday Girl: The Miraculous Miss Mercer<div style="text-align: center;">
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As part of my ongoing cheer-up efforts - and in recognition of her 118th birthday - herewith a half-hour with Miss Mabel Mercer.</div>
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
I've mentioned it <a href="http://expatriato.blogspot.com/2012/03/that-combination-so-rare.html" target="_blank">before</a>, but I did get to hear her, and that memory carries me through the occasional blue moment. On a bitter cold February morning, it's nice to drift back to a TV studio back in the mid-'70s (and what could be more '70s than our host's lapels and medallion?) and spend a little time in an audience with the <i>Prima Donna Assoluta</i> of cabaret. Her "Folks Who Live on the Hill" - well, as the kids say, it gives me life.</div>
Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-43916073668597342372018-02-02T09:02:00.004-05:002018-02-02T09:02:46.626-05:00Medley Madness<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
It's hard to not to feel at least a <i>little</i> more cheerful in the presence of the divine Josephine, I find. Isn't she just too too <i>too</i>? If you're not grinning helplessly by the Big Finish, I'm not sure we can be friends...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-89900663251793228252018-01-31T13:57:00.000-05:002018-01-31T16:50:01.036-05:00Complaints Department (With Bonus New Drag Name)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7nYp139KztTupAG9G21_81I-oWQjU1IXU9x1yOrE8p-RMVsTgcVJGn-27-4lnLEREYSObsxWSk0MxpR59HgASdwC2ZLts9mijpi0-I2_KSKddcttFtfnTtDUUVnmRPWzx32WkjLocCIKu/s1600/helenwait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7nYp139KztTupAG9G21_81I-oWQjU1IXU9x1yOrE8p-RMVsTgcVJGn-27-4lnLEREYSObsxWSk0MxpR59HgASdwC2ZLts9mijpi0-I2_KSKddcttFtfnTtDUUVnmRPWzx32WkjLocCIKu/s1600/helenwait.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
So, O Best Beloveds, I won't lie to you: <i>la vie</i> is rather bleak <i>chez nous</i> at the moment. I'm in a slough.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>This is never my favorite time of year, but so far 2018 seems to have pulled out all the stops in reminding us just how awful the depths of winter can be. The cold and dark and damp always get me down, but right now there are more than enough non-climatic reasons to be dyspeptic. I thought it was bad enough the last time I put virtual pen to cyber paper, but really I had no idea...<br />
<br />
In no particular order, but with the kicker last:<br />
<br />
So I ended up traveling once more on Golden Handcuffs' orders out to San Francisco. That would normally be nothing but a plus (and when I'm less grumpy I'll recount, possibly, a highlight or two, principally involving our own <a href="https://mrpeenee.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Mr. Peenee</a>), except that about midway through the trip, I tripped, rolled down a hill in the rain, and sprained my ankle. Falling in general rattles me (at my increasing age, if nothing else, it so very much seems a harbinger of worse to come), but being injured while traveling, trying to work, staying in a hotel, and in the hilliest and one of the least gimp-friendly cities in America was little short of shattering.<br />
<br />
And then, just to one-up me, a day or two later Mr. Muscato goes and trips himself, ending up with what was first diagnosed as a fracture but which, on further inspection, turns out to be, as his orthopedist mournfully intoned, "a sprain just as bad as many fractures." So he's now encased in a vast and intimidating boot and to try and not walk for three weeks (I'm at least hobbling).<br />
<br />
But the Fates aren't finished with us yet, not by a long shot: on Sunday morning, around 4:00, Himself had what very may well have been some sort of cardiac episode, so that we got to spend the next eight hours in the emergency room. And then the better part of the time since then (the time that was not spent at the orthopedist, at least) with him having various tests (complicated by not being able to have a standard treadmill stress test, what with the boot and all). And now we're waiting for a read-out from the cardiologist, and as you might imagine, just a tad anxious. We know what the worst might mean, and even knowing how much better I've gotten since the worst, we're nervous.<br />
<br />
The absolute only consolation I've been able to glean over the past couple of days is that, if nothing else, obsession with one's personal miseries almost - almost - obviates the pall of horridness that hangs over Our Nation's Capital as our collective sociopolitical existence continues to implode.<br />
<br />
In short, I'm not all that cheerful, for which apologies. I suppose I should just go and tell Miss Helen Wait...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-74439634962354656262018-01-09T15:18:00.002-05:002018-04-18T13:22:11.662-04:00Of Flaring Pains and Old Flames...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
So 2018 has gotten off to rather a pesky start, <i>chez nous</i>...<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Among other things, we've had not one but <i>two </i>visits to the emergency room, which is easily two too many. They were, if nothing else, a study in contrasts, as one went smoothly and very creditably to Major Regional Health Center; the second made me long for the quiet efficiency of similar facilities I have experienced over the years in places like Ethiopia.<br />
<br />
And why, you may ask, were we there? Poor Mr. Muscato, you see, has started the year in significant discomfort with what have likely - although not yet definitively - turned out to be kidney stones. He has had to date two CT scans and several rounds of blood tests, and while most signs point that way (it's possible, it seems, to have smallish stones, experience most of the usual symptoms, and then not even feel them as they depart), not all do, and so at the end of the second round, the doctor discharging us blithely said something along the lines of "Follow up with your primary care doctor in a day or two." Easy for him to say; I've been ringing the blasted practice for the better part of two days now and can only reach a service - and this is the new practice to which we moved last summer because our old one was so hard to reach! Maddening.<br />
<br />
As was the second visit. The first went off tickety-boo - lovely people, appropriate levels of concern, prompt care; one could have asked for little more (aside from not being there at all in the first place). By contrast, visit number two started with annoyed expressions and one outright "Why are you back?" ("Because the pain has persisted, has increased, and you told us to come back if that happened, that's why.") and continued with two hours of waiting in "intermediate care" (a hallway en route to the treatment area proper, on chairs; we were okay, but I felt badly for the old man with a broken arm who waited nearly as long), followed by three hours more in a cubicle, waiting for attention and tests. That wouldn't have been too bad, I suppose, except that our neighbor was a literal raving maniac, and one brought from the local jail to boot, with six doughty officers guarding (and at time restraining) him. I have rarely - and remember that I spent several years working for and with major stars of the opera - heard screaming of such sustained volume and sheer profanity. Trying, and exhausting, and not just for us, I know, but for all involved.<br />
<br />
But at last he was scanned, and dosed, and is now a few days later more or less on the mend. With luck and the right phone call, perhaps our regular doctor will deign to see him sometime before the decade is out.<br />
<br />
So that's part of how the year started. One other odd little development has set me musing, although not for many of the reasons I would have thought. Do you by any chance remember <a href="http://expatriato.blogspot.com/2017/09/news-of-rialto.html" target="_blank">Michael</a>, my Great Lost Love? He came up last fall in a discussion of Miss Peters replacing Miss Midler as Mrs. Levi, because that's how what passes for my brain works. Well, in any case, it occurred to me after I wrote that post that it was the longest and most collectedly I'd thought about him - or really about Lost Love more generally - in a very long time.<br />
<br />
And then he turned up, just as the New Year turned. Go figure.<br />
<br />
Actually, he Facebook-requested me. I immediately messaged my old chum The Architectural Historian, who survived those tumultuous times with me (just as I did his, but really my lips are <i>sealed</i>. Don't ask about that hot Jamaican bodybuilder. Just don't): "What could it mean?"<br />
<br />
"Unless you accept, you'll never know," was his swift reply. He's rather wise, for an architectural historian.<br />
<br />
So I did; well, I did, after a day or two's further fretting, staring at the once-familiar face there on the screen where FB reminds you reproachfully of your undone tasks.<br />
<br />
But at last I did. And you know what happened? Not a thing.<br />
<br />
Oh, I got a better look at his, as they say, content, beyond that available publicly to the great unwashed, and it wasn't all that gripping. He has a nice-enough looking life - lots of photos jetting off for work to interesting places - but nothing all that interesting to say about them. Lots of quite glossy-looking friends - but nothing as amusing as a couple of mine, real and virtual. I'd forgotten the strain of solemnity that shaded, now and then, into pomposity, and I looked in vain for a trace or two of the self-deprecating wit that usually offset that tendency once upon a time. He seems like a very nice, rather humorless middle-aged man, better preserved than most, but one whose world is more or less what it was when last we met twenty-odd (and mine have really been very odd indeed) years ago.<br />
<br />
So now Michael and I are Facebook friends. I suppose he's mined me as I did him. I wonder what he thinks of it all - a sharp contrast to his clearly carefully curated presence - a shapeless jumble of terriers and casseroles and snaps from Cairo and links to things that make me laugh or that friends send (Miss Rheba is a big devotee of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxTNhD5jTyQ" target="_blank">Shrilling Chicken</a> in all his many forms). It's a far cry from life on the Upper West Side, but that's life. And even despite the trials of emergency rooms and putative kidney stones, it's really rather a good one at that.<br />
<br />
I don't even mind - well all that much - that when he takes those business trips he turns left on entering the aircraft rather than (as I do - thanks, Golden Handcuffs!) quite decisively right. But more of that anon, and quite soon, actually...<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-47797309472546584862018-01-08T15:09:00.001-05:002018-01-10T08:47:38.020-05:00Birthday Girl: The Dame<div style="text-align: center;">
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Insofar as a force of nature can have a birthday, Dame Shirley Bassey is doing so even as we speak - 81 going on eternal.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>This is, I admit, not the most subtle rendition of what is often a delicate blossom of a song, but then again subtlety, by and large, is not Dame Shirley's stock in trade. She goes for the big note and the sweeping gesture, and more often than not it works. What keeps her from wretched excess (and its debilitating twin, self parody) is that she is also at heart an artist, and one remarkably self aware to boot. I always enjoy watching what's she doing while she's making those vast and invariably crowd-thrilling sounds.<br />
<br />
Here, for example, she declaims the Comden-Green lyric as if it were "Goldfinger," pushing Styne's gentle tune out into the stratosphere. At the same time, though, what she's <i>being</i> (as opposed to singing) is a person who has more than an inkling of what it means when the party ends. Her expression at 3:25 - "it's all over" - stops time. She's gone from being a slightly tipsy good-time girl heading home to a woman dealing with a sudden glimpse of the abyss - albeit ("my FRIEND!") one who pulls it back together at the finish, at least one more great note in her.<br />
<br />
As I'm quite sure she still has today. It breaks my heart I've never seen her live...Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-49395689835531140612018-01-01T17:42:00.004-05:002018-01-01T17:53:56.182-05:00New Year's, Baby<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Just look at the red cheeks on that bellboy...<br />
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<a name='more'></a><i>Me </i>have a dirty mind - <i>you </i>have a dirty mind!<br />
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But I mean... some things you can just put down to changing times, but I really can't quite fathom that this wasn't always considered just a shade risqué.<br />
<br />
I had been looking, you see, for one of J.C. Leyendecker's <a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrB8poDuEpa4wwAGr.JzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBsZ29xY3ZzBHNlYwNzZWFyY2gEc2xrA2J1dHRvbg--;_ylc=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-?gprid=UA332IF4ToujLBw8j3WWjA&pvid=585AUDEwLjHH6wXRWg7atA.mMjYwMQAAAACeVZx8&p=j.c.+leyendecker+new+year%27s+baby&fr=mcafee&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&ei=UTF-8&n=60&x=wrt" target="_blank">New Year's infant illustrations</a>, and in among the roly-poly tots was this little gem. Now, I know nothing about the good people of Kuppenheimer's, but at some point in the process, whether in the PR department or Old Man Kuppenheimer himself. <i>somebody</i> had a little too much interest in uniforms and flushed complexions. Among other things.<br />
<br />
As the new year gets under steam, I hope your day has proved just as perky and spruce as this pair. If I didn't know better, I might suspect that they ended up with all our other old friends at the <a href="http://expatriato.blogspot.com/search?q=pensione+regina+vittoria" target="_blank">Pensione Regina Vittoria</a>...<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-70398704444538708582017-12-31T15:29:00.003-05:002017-12-31T15:30:19.052-05:00Fast Away...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Another one, already. Where, as the song says, has the time all gone to?<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Here's our New Year's Eve a few years ago, and I believe this year's will be much the same. We're having an early dinner at our favorite little local place and then home to see if we can make it 'til midnight. The years and decades of parties large and small - many of them hosted by Yours Truly - were great fun, but I can honestly say that I'll be just as happy sitting on my usual sofa with my usual Yorkie on my lap and my usual husband just opposite.<br />
<br />
This year, however, we will I must admit be enjoying, and gleefully so, a <i>very</i> swank bottle of bubbly, courtesy of a very dear and inconceivably thoughtful Gentle Reader. Would you believe that this marks the <i>second </i>time someone I've only ever met, as it were, cybernetically, through the Café has gone temporarily mad and sent me Champagne? One is terribly grateful of course, but it has started me musing, now and again, what might have transpired had I been expressing similar enthusiasm for, say, emerald bracelets all these years...<br />
<br />
In whatever way you're seeing in 2018 - which this year feels far more like shaking the dust of 2017 from our collective (and collectively disgusted) feet - I wish you joy. We need these little moments in between great events, quiet interstices that allow a deep breath and a few, fleeting seconds of calm before it all sets off again. A very happy new year, my darlings, and many more to all of us.Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-23976438946614844872017-12-26T09:37:00.003-05:002017-12-26T09:37:25.489-05:00Where the Music is Bright<div style="text-align: center;">
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I suppose one occasionally does miss things not watching (non-Arabic) television, so I'm grateful that the YouTube gods conjured up this lovely profile in my Recommendations this morning.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Petula Clark is a survivor, and as this lamentable old year limps to a close, it's nice to be reminded that there are still troupers out there, doing the work. She's in damn good voice for 85, too. I very much enjoyed her 2013 album <i>Lost in You</i>, which featured a slow and reflective <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI1La1ykLJ0" target="_blank">version of her greatest hit,</a> and now I'm inspired to seek out her new one.<br />
<br />
We had a quiet and generally pleasant Christmas. An evening in on the Eve, with some good sparkling red and a little of this that - crab legs, some good cheese, that kind of thing; then dinner last night at my brother's (proving one more time, as if proof were needed, that I'm married to a saint). Now the odd inter-holiday week, a few of us dutifully showing up at the office to do very little and wonder why we've bothered. It really is foolish, isn't it, that Boxing Day has never quite caught on on this side of the water?<br />
<br />
But one soldiers on. I'm planning to use the downtime to try and catch up on gym-going, which while not particularly festive is increasingly necessary given the amount of festivity that's been going on.Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-91031586809481564802017-12-24T19:01:00.000-05:002017-12-24T19:01:13.518-05:00Redux: Heavenly Peace<div style="text-align: center;">
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<i>Another year! How quickly they pass. This is a damp, gray Christmas Eve just outside Our Nation's Capital, but here at home it's warm and still. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
<a name='more'></a><i>The Mister is having an early evening nap, a happy terrier quite entirely sacked out on his lap; this afternoon, we ventured out to a favorite spot for a quiet late lunch of oysters and this and that. In a while we'll open a bottle of our Christmas Eve tradition, a good Australian sparkling red. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>As the years pass, I've found I enjoy this night-before-the-holiday almost more than the day itself - the sense of immanence, of something just beyond our grasp, a Mystery not quite yet Incarnate - as well as the ways in which memory spins its tales of all the years gone by. They feel close by this evening, those ghosts who gathered once around that long-gone table.</i><br />
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<i>* * *</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I first posted this on Christmas Eve of 2013. As fast away this old year passes, the old world I was raised in feels ever further away - as far away on this gray December evening as a snow-covered lawn all those years ago. Perhaps more even than usually, what the next year brings us, none of us yet can know. Still, I hope for a measure, just a measure, of that </i>himmlischer Ruh <i>for all of us.</i><br />
<br />
Another time the year goes 'round; another chance to revisit one of my earliest memories...<br />
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This, my dears, is the incomparable Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink; I presume you know the song.<br />
<br />
One side-effect of being raised, to one extent or another, by people at least two generations removed from me is that even (especially?) after all these years, I'm a decade or four out of synch in some ways from whatever it is that gets shoved under the too-general catchall rubric "pop culture." I was brought up on stories of Grandmother having seen the great Sarah Bernhardt on stage, on Grandfather cheerfully whistling "And the Band Played On" or "Wait 'Til the Sun Shines, Nellie" as he clipped his rosebushes, on Aunt Edna's firm conviction that Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy were the greatest authors in the English language (ah, Shakespeare aside, of course, and possibly Lord Tennyson). and on a general reverence for High Art that today would seem touching and naive.<br />
<br />
At Christmastime, that meant that even though it was the late 1960s, Motown Christmases, Brenda Lee, and the like got short shrift in the cluttered, overheated old brick houses I knew up on the shores of a cold Great Lake. No; Christmas music was something we made, on the valiant spinet that had seen 60 years of abuse at the hands of overeager nine-year-olds, or failing that, listened to, courtesy of a battered collection of albums that included nothing more daring than a carol or two by Ella Fitzgerald ("Such a lovely voice, when she's not singing that <i>nonsense</i>..."). The Longines Symphonette figured large, as did the Ray Coniff Singers.<br />
<br />
Christmas Eve, however, meant one thing: the annual bringing out of a much older record player than the one built in to Grandmother's vast living-room console (with its oddly intriguing scratchy-fabric-screened speakers on the front). It generally lived in the little bedroom at the top of the stairs, the one with blue-flowered wallpaper and a high four-poster. On Christmas Eve the gramophone (an edition just this side the ones with looming fluted horns) was carried in state down the stairs, through the living room, and on to the marble-topped table in the dining-room window that on lesser occasions held Grandmother's second-best silver tea set. We would sit in respectful silence, full to bursting of the early dinner that usually consisted mostly of bread pudding and Christmas cookies (the quotidian doling-out in ones or twos suspended this one night), and Grandfather would bring from its resting-place in a thick yellowed envelope in the bottom left drawer of his desk The Record.<br />
<br />
"Madame Schumann-Heink."<br />
<br />
Those still nursing an after-dinner sherry or some other warming drink would raise their glasses, and he would slowly, carefully, place the disk on the faded felt turntable, wind the machine, lay the stylus with surgical precision - and we would listen.<br />
<br />
Mme. Schumann-Heink, you see, was the voice of Christmas. From 1926 to 1935, she sang "Silent Night" live on the radio to a rapt audience across the country and beyond. You can hear her final broadcast <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjgEM4zk6jA" target="_blank">here</a>, and while her voice is essentially by then a memory (she'd been singing, after all, since 1877, for decades hailed among the greats), even Wallace Beery, introducing her, sounds suitably cowed.<br />
<br />
Always, at the end, a little contented silence, broken only when one or another of the older ladies (some, perhaps, dabbing away a tear) would sigh, returning us to the cozy dining room, the table still in disarray, the candles burning low over the plates of cookies and the empty coffee cups. It was bedtime for me, and time for those so inclined to go off to church. One or two might remain behind, listening to the good people of Longines, or if everyone wanted to go, old Alice in the kitchen would stay and wait for their return, getting a leg up on all that would have to be done to get ready for Christmas breakfast (stockings and waffles) and so on to the glories of Christmas lunch, which generally revolved around a daunting standing rib roast of Neanderthal proportions, towering above the tiny new potatoes and pearl onions that clustered around its lower slopes.<br />
<br />
If I were a movie director, I would leave us there, around the lace-clothed table, and pull back, past the ice-cold glass at the tall front windows and out into the cold, black night. A little snow might be falling, onto the white-clapboard house with its generous front porch and gabled third-floor windows, light from the dining room and colors from the tree in the living room spilling out onto the white-linen lawn, and so out up into the starry darkness hanging over a neighborhood as neat and picturesque as any dreamed up by Paramount or MGM.<br />
<br />
But time moves on. All the old ladies have gone on with it, they and their mild-mannered, tweed-vested husbands, Uncles Russell and Paul and Edwin, the grandparents and old Alice in the kitchen too. The house is still there, but strangers sit in the dining room or have converted it to hold a giant television set; no one we know lives in that town anymore, so who can tell? The gramophone and the precious record, even the Ray Coniff albums, all are gone as well, swept away as thoroughly as cookie crumbs off a damask tablecloth.<br />
<br />
Even so, tonight I'll sit and listen one more time to Mme. Schumann-Heink. Moments of stillness, calm and bright, are too rare and should be gathered to us when they come, warmth against the cold, light against the darkness. <i>Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh... Schlaf, in himmlischer Ruh</i>.Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-76068981600855745922017-12-23T17:15:00.002-05:002017-12-23T17:15:56.443-05:00Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Christmas Eve She Lit the Candles....<div style="text-align: center;">
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Well, not technically a holiday number, I suppose, but it's candy-colored enough to pass for one, and it does remind us of the importance of fire safety whilst celebrating...<br />
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<a name='more'></a><i>Lady in the Dark</i> is a film more reviled than seen, I think, but based only on this clip it certainly looks intriguing enough. Edith Head's magnificent mink-and-sequins costume is just about the most famous thing about the picture, and one can certainly see why. If nothing else, it gives Ginger something to do, which does not appear to be something that either her director, Mitchell Leisen, or anyone involved in staging the number (Billy Daniels was dance director, while future costume designer Don Loper apparently worked directly with Ginger) bothered to do much about. Really, though, she's not bad, although she does lean on the double-entendres a little heavily. Still, Gertrude Lawrence feels very far away, and those clowns are unnerving...<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-87544374305900502672017-12-22T12:17:00.000-05:002017-12-22T12:17:04.858-05:00A Pain in the Ice<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
Two formidable ladies join forces, and the result is... curious.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Dame Julie and Miss Peg have a game go at this almost surreally stream-of-consciousness medley - a sort of crystalline distillation of a night out at a particularly genteel gay piano bar - and if nothing else they seem to be having a good enough time doing it. If Lee's recent biography, <i>Is That All There Is? </i>is to be believed, there might be more than a grain of truth in the quip thrown off so laboriously by Mr. Ustinov at the top of the clip - the diva was going through a phase in which she apparently believed that standing up caused her to gain weight, and so is a totally recumbent presence as The Sugar Plum Fairy. Beyond that, she was so displeased with something about the initial blocking of the number (she believed it emphasized her backside, somehow) that she withdrew in full collapse to a London hospital until changes were made. In the end, the filming recommenced to her satisfaction, but, as was not especially unusual by this point in her career, Lee is alternately glorious and appalling - but she has a great few lines on "Just in Time" that almost make up for the mawkish whole...<br />
<br />
Despite coming from the Dame's 1973 Christmas special, only a few notes have a holiday tinge, and that's perhaps for the best - Lee also performed the lugubrious Yuletime number featured <a href="http://expatriato.blogspot.com/2012/12/lady-sings-christmas-blues.html" target="_blank">herein</a> a few years ago, and a little of <i>that</i> goes a very long way.<br />
<br />
Should you care to, you may catch the whole spectacular <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTDJCUd5iQ" target="_blank">here</a>; it's a positive festival of awkward dialogue and forced holiday spirit.<br />
<br />
<br />Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218985326921858943.post-59326516799630643042017-12-19T08:27:00.000-05:002017-12-19T08:27:24.568-05:00Meanwhile, on Pennsylvania Avenue<iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" gesture="media" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x0fbrKp2RaQ?rel=0&showinfo=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
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Just so you don't think I've gone too soft-hearted about this whole Holiday season...<br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Courtesy of the ever-startling <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCinEYFFWToSye90na90V9pg" target="_blank">Deven Green</a>; if you've not yet been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RD86qq7bD8" target="_blank">Welcomed to Her Home</a>, well.. you're in for an experience.)</span></i>Muscatohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04657061324487851341noreply@blogger.com2