But the wolves came and went and we're still standing

There had better be some tin somewhere in the composition of a modern smartphone, because one of the two major activities of our anniversary was procuring a replacement for spatch's extremely dead former phone before I leave town for three nights at the end of this week. The other, however, felt like a true celebration, especially when graced by Rob joyously emerging from Berman's with their one bottle of GrandTen Distilling's Medford Rum which they had special-ordered months ago for a customer who never came to collect it. I had not been medically able to eat from restaurants since the summer. We got dinner from Mameleh's.

( The house don't fall when the bones are good. )

Because much of the parking has evaporated from Kendall Square, we had to stash the car with extreme illegality in order to collect our order, but successfully brought home an impressively salami-laden egg sandwich for Rob and for me a bagel equally freighted with paprika-fringed sable such as I had not eaten since 2019 and brisket-spilling knishes which we baked for a second course and blintzes which we accidentally exploded while sautéeing and ate with apricot jam while watching Stuart Heisler's The Glass Key (1942), which may have been adapted from a respectably hardboiled novel by Dashiell Hammett, but the weird psychosexual energies warping around Alan Ladd could power a city for a Platonic year, if the city were Tanith Lee's Paradys. For lagniappe, an uncredited Dane Clark gets tossed through a plate-glass window. ("A very brief cameo!") Rob made his infamous hot buttered rum, which Autolycus had to be discouraged from investigating. I can still drink very little, but can report that New England rum taken straight really does taste like blackstrap whisky, i.e. where has it been my entire life. We speculated on cocktails to be made with Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray. Each year is different and each is real.

Reenact a movie scene and read old music magazines

The rental car in which rushthatspeaks and I will be road-tripping for the b'nei mitzvah of my godchild marks my first experience driving a vehicle with a start-stop system and it makes me feel I have stalled out at every stop sign, red light, and lull in traffic.

Packing for a trip reminds me that I used to keep a backpack stocked for traveling, because once it was not such a rare occurrence. I have been out of state three times in as many years and two were day trips. The exception, not coincidentally, also involved my godchild's family.

Rich, Young and Pretty (1951) could have been much more designed to annoy me personally, but I still resent that the eleven-minute, half-montage recapitulation of the ill-fated romance of Wendell Corey and Danielle Darrieux may be the closest thing to romantic comedy he left on film. As an American ex-serviceman starstruck with a Parisian cabaret singer, he is genuinely cute as he sits in on the rehearsal she invited him to after the whirlwind of showing him the town, glancing shyly up at her and self-consciously around at her castmates as if uncertain how much of the performance she is seriously addressing to him—there's danger in your eyes, chéri, but I don't care—and how much is fourth-wall teasing, but then he just lets her look into his face so softly as she finishes the song as if she means it after all—just tell me when and where, my heart will meet you there—that it's as odd and prim a dodge for them not to kiss by its close as for the script to avoid entirely the present-day question of whether he's ever gotten over being loved and left by her. The film which wraps around this flashback is otherwise composed of idiot balls, which it juggles until it suddenly gives up and throws them all at the audience; it is indeed heteronormative as balls and Wendell Corey should have sued his mustache. In the small and impeccably officious part of a maître d', at least, it does contain Hans Conried.