sovay | Underwater is where she can finally breathe

Happy equinox! For the first day of autumn, I am bisexually visible and extremely tired.

I don't know if it was the tailoring of the vaccine or the preexisting stratum of the miserable cold, but this latest shot has flattened me: sweat-soaked fever, doubling cough, my shoulder hurting so much that I kept waking in the night from rolling onto it and a knot under my arm like it was rehearsing for another plague.

spatch came back from running errands in the afternoon rain and curled himself very carefully around me, Hestia-fashion. To cover the evening shift, Autolycus has wriggled himself so far beneath the blankets of the couch that I can go nowhere without the approval of my chocolate-furred doctor who shows no signs of shifting himself any time soon.

Smart Girls Don't Talk (1948) is a well-shot crime melodrama whose set-up is much more interesting than its play-out, but I like all of its actors even when the script throws them more curveballs of morality than sharp lines like "You sound like the third paragraph of a ten-cent mystery thriller!" Richard Rober makes a decent romantically wistful cop on the other side of the investigation from Bruce Bennett's classily crooked nightclub owner, with Virginia Mayo's bereaved and calculating socialite between them—since the action is vectored through her perspective, I suppose the triangle is unavoidable as part of the standard package of women's interest. Neither of the movies in which I have so far encountered Helen Westcott has had the sense to give her a part as real as her face. I've seen Tom D'Andrea as so many salt-of-the-earth working joes, a slightly thuggish right-hand fixer makes a nice change.

I can't make it to the BLO's Madama Butterfly, but this review makes me wish there had at least been a livecast.

This summer disappeared so fast and so badly into illness, I am feeling unusually unstuck in time.