Dreamed of a grocery story with a gap in the floorboards covered by a rip in the carpet; "waking up" and checking the time, several times (it was between 7:00 and 11:00); checking the temperature outside our Sackville house.
Puitak and Gordon came over and we watched the Oscars show. Too bad they couldn't stay for dinner. [That year Chicago won the Best Picture Oscar.]
Dinner was takeout Chinese food. My fortune cookie said, "You have at your command the wisdom of the ages." Does that mean I'm no longer young?
Some snow this morning!
Returned to the Slingblade forum at new.mrcranky.com for the first time in months. I've also invited a couple of people from the drama course. We can tell Philm Phan [Cynthia from Toledo] and the others about our experiences.
"Not only stray dogs can be human"--The Last Letter
Got up at 8:58.
Dreamed of returning to North America from Europe with an American; driving to the US; walking through a basement-level shopping mall-spa near Niagara Falls; my junior high school in Sackville.
Saw Satyajit Ray's The Expedition. Another wonderful movie. [It's about a Brahmin taxi driver defying local authorities.]
Stayed for Frederick Wiseman's stunning The Last Letter, a film of Catherine Samie's one-woman show of a Holocaust victim's last letter to her son, from a chapter in Vasily Grossman's Russian novel Life and Fate. A really good Russian-to-French translation job.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Finished Jane Eyre and started reading My Losing Season, Pat Conroy's memoir of his senior year on the Citadel military academy's basketball team, where they lost a majority of their games but he found himself. (It's rare for me to spurn Emerson's advice and read a book that's less than a year old.)
Saw George Pal's The Time Machine at a Cinematheque matinee, for the second time. Rather a 1960 California idea of the future, which was interesting in itself.
Stayed for the Pather Panchali sequel Aparajito, in which Apu goes off to college in Calcutta. Very sad. Satyajit Ray was one of those directors who seem to get every detail right!
Donald (back from visiting India), John and Rae came over for dinner, which was chicken and vegetarian lasagna.
Sent Cynthia in Toledo an email telling her about the drama course and suggesting she invite some other students to come talk about it.
Dreamed of being in the front passenger seat of a car with back seat passengers, noticing there was no driver and moving to the driver's seat (I don't know how to drive); arriving at the Aulac junction near Sackville; a Vietnamese chain store located at Dien Bien Phu Street in every town!
Another headache. Maybe that's because it started to cool quickly in the morning, then got warm again. By 15:00 it was about 18 degrees.
Saw the Sopranos episode where Dr. Melfi got raped.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Went out to the Kingston Road karaoke place because there was no dance party. There was a power failure so I had to wait for a shuttle bus between St. George's and Pape stations, causing over half an hour's delay. And then, it turned out I'd taken the wrong bus and couldn't find the place and had to just go home! But I think I'll know where to find it next time. [I read a lot of Jane Eyre during the trip.]
"Valentine, could you go for a doctor?" "Certainly. Bring him in!"--Love Me Tonight
Got up at 8:49.
Dreamed of seeing (and being in) a longer "director's cut" of a Harry Potter movie, with a deleted scene where he goes to visit a Hannibal Lector-like prisoner who sneaks in and out of his cell.
We took out the big ladder and washed the upstairs windows on the outside.
It turns out that not enough people registered in the intermediate drama course. But Sue says if they don't restore the continuing education program in the Toronto schools, she'll find a new venue for the drama classes.
Baked raisin bread.
Had a dance lesson with Dawn, who suggested I imagine being in a suit of armour and introduced me to collection points.
Dinner was lamb stew.
Saw Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight. It was pretty fun. You'd be surprised how much off-colour humour they allowed in 1932 movies, before the Production Code clamped down in 1934.
"Wouldn't know how to wave his hands in the air if you pulled a gun on him"--New York Press on clubowner David Rabin, from an online list of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers
Dreamed of being in a social group like Mensa; meeting Robert Urich; a fellow-member (a middle-aged woman) taking me and a small group past the CNE horse show; meeting a Chinese man who was blackmailing the woman, and plunging a fountain pen into his eye; being photographed at the social group; while passing the horse show in shiny shoes, commenting that the shoes wouldn't be shiny for long!
Got up at 9:06.
Went shopping.
The parents went out to find new curtains. (Mother's doing spring cleaning.)
Dinner was pork chops.
The last acting class was a blast! We did things like create scenes like Hamlet seeing his father's ghost. My group got the idea of turning the lights off and on. The girl playing Hamlet recited a bit from Dante's Inferno. I played the ghost and my only lines were "Avenge!" and "Swear!" [I appeared silently when the lights were on, then spoke when they were off.]
Then we did this dialogue from The Prodigal with banal lines like "I'm home," and "Do you want a drink?" First time my group did it in a bar, and I was a drunk who conked out in the middle, but was back up like a shot when hearing "Do you want a drink?" (The bartender did my lines then.) Sue admired the way I did it with my back to the audience. Second time I camped it up as Dracula. (When my wife offered me a drink, I reached for her neck.) The audience was in stitches both times.
Then we did silly circus acts. (I pretended to break out of a straitjacket.) Last of all we joined hands and performed a dance Sue had learned from a Russian period dance teacher.
Dreamed of talking about the movie Talk to Me with Moira; Donald meeting a brunette woman he'd known several years earlier, called J.J. Harper (actually an Indian killed by the Winnipeg police.) [Was I thinking of singer P.J. Harvey?]
Go up at 7:25.
Still mild. It rained a bit when I visited Dr. Hassan. (He wants to help improve my matchmaker.com letters.) [That didn't happen--all he could do was say what was wrong with them!]
Went to the Wychwood librarly and read Paddle-to-the-Sea. It's a classic!
Dinner was McDonald's.
In the proofreading class Shelley was discussing photo editing issues, with several examples.
Charles Taylor had an interesting article at Salon about how today's audiences watch old movies.
Dreamed of being Christopher Hitchens (?) and standing at the top of a three-storey watchtower near our Sackville house, where a white Rhodesian fired a gun at me; of being a character on an episode of The Sopranos who couldn't leave the country because I'd lied about a previous trip to cover up a crime, and started to explain my horoscope; of trying out a new shower with my clothes on; being told to redo an assignment because it was too brief. [That happened to me more than once in real life many years ago...]
Saw Two Daughters at the Cinematheque. Satyajit Ray was one of the great directors!
Stayed for Tod Browning and Lon Chaney's bizarre silent African revenge melodrama West of Zanzibar. Guy Maddin introduced it, saying about Cheney's movies, "Their cruelties are like a glass of cool water."
John and Rae came over for dinner, which was macaroni and cheese.
Dreamed of a neighbour's dispute near our cottage resulting from someone pulling a stake out of the ground; a French comic book (I was thinking about how hard they are to find in Toronto); a book of children's puzzles; an LP of Mary Poppins songs; a church pamphlet for children from the '60s.
Dinner was pork chops (which I fried).
Saw the silent movie Moulin Rouge, about a cabaret star whose daughter gets engaged to a young aristocrat who decides he prefers the mother. (It's part of a series inspired by Guy Maddin, who appeared in person before it started.) There's a problem for Dr. Phil!
On my way to the Cinematheque I took a detour to see a rather small antiwar demo.
Chapter 21 of Jane Eyre is really sad, about the fates of the cousins she grew up with, illustrated above. [One puts duty first, the other pleasure, and they're both lost souls in different ways. What's clever is the subtext: Jane has developed an attraction to Rochester and faces a choice of whether to put duty or pleasure first.]
Dreamed of travelling on a bus that was also a ship; arriving in New York City on the way to Canada; travelling on a plane; a guy I knew slightly in school called Craig Sears. [He got killed in a motorcycle accident at age 20 or so.]
Dinner was roast chicken.
Translated almost two pages of Wandering Youth in just a day. I'm over halfway through the second chapter.
The dance studio had a '70s night. Dawn, tall to begin with, had a big Pam Grier-type Afro. Cynthia and I did our salsa routine and it went over pretty well. The parents came to see it but didn't stay long. (They cased the neighbourhood in the afternoon.) Davis taught a group class in hustle. Arman did his Travolta line dance. I wore my dress pants and noticed they're getting looser.
Just five pages left before typing out the January entries of this diary.
Dreamed of Holland; doing a class exercise with a Toronto Star editorial clipping; a girl recalling when she saw Jurassic Park.
Baked multigrain bread.
Went shopping.
Saw the Sopranos episode where Christopher got made. Jackie Jr. is pretty hopeless, isn't he? I like the parallels between Jackie Jr., Christopher, Anthony Jr. and even Tony when he was young.
Dinner was salmon.
Another headache. Moira and I were going to go see Day for Night, but neither of us really felt like it. I was looking at the QPB book list and one of their books is about how to deal with headaches. We should get that.
Didn't feel like watching the news, what with the war. Instead we watched Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's really funny.
Dreamed of walking near the United church in my hometown Sackville; the movie Bay of Love and Sorrows; reading a letter to the editor that praised the coming Iraq war but worried about the Kurds' fate, and thinking "The Americans don't give a &%#$ about the Kurds!"; telling Moira about the Salon article about Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart.
Things were noisy here this morning because of our visitors. It was hard to think straight, but they left in the afternoon.
Another dance lesson. Cynthia and I got our salsa routine ready for Friday.
Dinner was lasagna.
At the drama course, we were playing blindfold games like Hunter & Prey, and throwing around a whole group of objects. We also sang the "Gentle Robin" canon again, this time with a bass line.
Then we took random lines from a single play (Top Girls). First we made them into dialogues: Ryan and I made one called "The Adventures of Nit and Wit." Then we did monologues: mine was of a theatre director trying to comfort an actress who had to quit his play because she couldn't work with the leading lady.
Dreamed of the minstrel show sequence in the MGM musical Babes in Arms; the view from the hills of Rita McNeil's hometown Big Pond and the Brasd'or Lakes in Cape Breton; an offshore structure there (like in Breaking the Waves).
Cynthia and I went over sex dances today. The salsa is improving. (I hope the parents will come to the spotlight Friday.) She says her cough has eased.
After the dance lesson I went to the Cinematheque office near the College station and bought about $120 worth of tickets with my Visa.
The parents waited to have dinner when the guests arrived, so I ate early: KFC nuggets.
At the copy editing course, Shelley talked about the danger of libel litigation. (She recommends The Paper and Absence of Malice.)
"Frank, you're not a Methodist?"--Catch Me If You Can
Got up at 8:54.
Dreamed of the actress Asia Argento; seeing my reflection, in which I looked grim and slight; Dawn telling me I must be Italian because I value work.
It was so warm today that I opened the windows in my room for a bit.
Started typing up this diary.
We waited for guests flying in from Florida, but the plane must have been late and they never showed up. We ended up eating KFC after 19:00. (It turned out that they weren't coming until tomorrow.)
Got a new Cinematheque schedule with a big Satyajit Ray series. This time, fortunately, there aren't a lot of conflicts.
Saw Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can at the Bloor. Quite good. Leo Di Caprio was perfectly cast, while Tom Hanks had an interesting turn, with a good role for Christopher Walken. It's Spielberg at his best: he kept things hopping. Set in the '60s, it had a great sense of period. A fun movie.
US soldier: "Barbra and I spent a year in Africa. We helped build a school for orphans. They were orphans because the warlord across the border didn't like their tribe. I know that God has a plan for me, I just hope it's to help protect orphans, not make any"--We Were Soldiers
Got up at 10:53.
Dreamed of auditioning and being given an acting role; asking how long the commitment would be for and being told not very long; telling Genny's husband Jim about this; ordering a hamburger at an outdoor stand; the music from the animated NFB vignette "Dance."
The mercury hit at least 10 degrees today! We drove to the beach again, where there was haze from the melting snow. It was warm enough for my spring jacket.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Saw the DVD of Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers. A familiar Vietnam war movie, quite square and often shameless, but interesting history. Mel Gibson, like James Cagney, makes me smile even in a grim movie like this one. [I'm glad the DVD included deleted scenes: there's a good one where General Westmoreland says "We're going to run those red bastards home!" but Gibson warns, "They are home."]
It was warm today and we drove down to Sunnyside Park for the first time in months. But we just had a short walk.
Another headache.
John came over for dinner (vegetarian lasagna).
Saw Frida at the Royal. For all of Julie Taymor's visual gimmicks, it was pretty conventional. Did Frida Kahlo really have affairs with Trotsky and Josephine Baker? (I imagine I would have heard that somewhere before now.) It took over four screenwriters to come up with lines like "She's lost a lot of blood!" and "Diego, you need help." At least Alfred Molina was a brilliant Diego Rivera.
Too bad Allen Barra is leaving Salon. [He's the only sportwriter I've ever read regularly!]
Met my drama course classmate Tijuana on the streetcar. She's taking the intermediate class too.
Dreamed of the song "Thank God I'm a Country Boy." [Don't care for John Denver-- someone said that going to one of his concerts was like bathing in maple syrup!--but I do like this song and his "High, Calypso."]
Dinner was roast chicken.
Sergei taught an Argentine tango class. Argentine puerta is a fright! (I can barely handle the regular puerta.) At the party, Sergei did his Charleston line dance. Poor Cynthia still has a cough.
Went to the dentist's office to advance my May checkup because of this aching in my lower left molars. But it was past 15:00 and the place was closed.
Read Robert Fulford's article in Toronto Life attacking the U of T student paper for attempting an investigative report claiming that a Canadian mining company had buried some squatters alive in Africa. Really, it's so easy to attack the people who are trying to do something about the world's problems...
Dreamed of visiting Goodenough House and Mother coming to see me; becoming an assistant bandleader accidentally at my Mississauga junior high school, and the leader resenting my sarcasm.
Got up at 9:02.
We went to the big hardware store and got five more pipe insulation tubes. Remarkably, that was about the right amount.
Saw Roman Polanski's The Pianist at Canada Square. It's everything they say, and a real triumph. Adrien Brody, that cool actor, had a suitable sense of the detachment that must have made the hero a good oberserver and even a good survivor.
The part that creeped me out the most was the scenes where Nazis chose individual Jews randomly out of a lineup (for sparing or for killing) by saying "You... you... you..." in German, only they used the intimate du instead of sie! And I remember the moment when the woman asked "Where are you taking us?" and the Nazis' response was to shoot her in the forehead. (A very honest reply.)
Dinner was meat loaf. Unfortunately, Mother made it with and without onions in two different pans, so it was dried out. (She'd have done better to put the with in one side of the pan and the without in the other.) The movie was longer than I expected, so we didn't eat until around 19:00.
When I went to the dance studio it turned out that they'd upgraded the Thursday class to Bronze III, so I no longer qualify for it. (But since I'd come, they gave me a half-class in cha cha, with the help of Donna the secretary, taught by Sergei and Don.) The frustrating thing is that I'm too good for Mondays but not good enough for Thursdays, which leaves only Wednesdays and Fridays, and I can't make Wednesday for the next two weeks, and the week after next there's no Friday either. (Cynthia had forgotten to explain this to me earlier.)
Dreamed of visiting with Father a formerly Syrian river valley that the Israelis had just conquered (like the Golan Heights) and hearing the start of a Syrian bombing raid. It was something of a nightmare.
Did my tax form this afternoon. My income was just over $5K, not enough to pay tax bu too much for a refund. Father went through everything to confirm for Mother what I already knew.
Dinner was halibut (which I marinated and fried).
Cynthia and Armand taught a salsa class with stuff I was familiar with. I was relieved that Cynthia had recovered from her earlier sickness. (She said I was all smiles today.) A new East Indian girl was impressed with my salsa. Natalia was wearing a white blouse with a nice floral design.
Some guests were leaving for an early plane so I got up pretty early.
Brought my diary to read to my shrink Dr. Hassan. He says it's a big breakthrough. (My dreams impress him.) He'd also like me to look into writing crossword puzzles. I'm going to print this out for him.
Went shopping but didn't get much. Then we went to that huge hardware store at St. Clair & Keele and bought a new light switch, a pipe connection and some pipe insulation. The insulation turned out to be the the right size (half an inch) so we'll be getting some more.
Another headache.
Looked at the Li'l Abner website.
Dinner was scalloped potatoes and ham.
The copy editing class was about story structures.
Dreamed of going to a karaoke place with an adjoining hotel; meeting John but being unable to find a song to sing; Father wanting to stay overnight at the hotel because Mother was having a baby(!); being naked in public; The Sopranos filming an episode during the 1992 riots about a policeman looking for into from petty crooks; a 19th-century version of Tony Soprano (resembling Lincoln) striking a 19th-century Meadow (probably from reading the first chapter of Jane Eyre); a woman singing "When the Saints Come Marching In."
Forgot that my dancing lesson wasn't until 3:15. I killed 45 minutes walking to the Islington station and visiting the end of the line at Kipling. (It's nice to have a Metropass.) Cynthia was unwell so I had a lesson with dawn. We went over the foxtrot grapevine and the merengue conga point. It's just as well I didn't spend any time on the salsa routine this wekk. (We've been spending too much time on routines.)
Dinner was churrasco chicken.
Spent a lot of time online today. Salon had a good Gary Kamiya article on the coming war, though he lost me when he distinguished between the "political" and the "historical." [Invading Afghanistan was OK, see, because it was just political...]
"...every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near"--Jane Eyre
Got up at 9:56.
Dreamed of entering a stadium to see an athletic game the movie Rose Marie.
John came over for lunch (pancakes) and stayed for supper (spaghetti). I hope he and Nancy [his ex] come to a settlement soon. He's really frustrated about it. [I think they did.]
Started reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It's a novel that grabs you on the first page. I'm reading an edition we've had since I was a child, with great expressionistic woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg.
Went to see The Pianist at the Varsity, but it was sold out.
I've been looking at a new big book of puzles we just got.
Dreamed of filming a movie about a wagon train crossing the mountains to the Pacific coast.
Went to the big Loblaw's near the St. Clair West station to get whole wheat and multigrain flour.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Saw the second Harry Potter movie at the Revue. It was like the first, competently made but not really anything special. Frankly, I prefer the books. [I got more into the movies with the later ones.]
My favorite line was "It's not your abilities that show what you are but your choices." (People who go on about what a skilful politician Bill Clinton was ignore the inept choices he kept making.)
It snowed again tonight and I cleared the sidewalk before it changes to ice tomorrow.
Dreamed of working in the Sackville house's garden in the spring, with mud-filled ditches; vacuuming the dust out of an appliance's inner motor.
Baked brown bread overnight.
We went to Canada Square where I saw Spider and the parents saw About Schmidt. Spider was taut, atmospheric and brilliantly creepy. Ralph Fiennes kept going so far but never over the top. (I'd seen the trailer umpteen times.) Great directing job by David Cronenberg. Oddly, I heard someone snoring. Afterward we had a Chinese buffet dinner at the nearby Mandarin Restaurant.
Then I went straight to the dance studio. Dawn taught a tango class with the Argentine link and promenade flare. (For me, the flare is the hardest tango step so far.) At the dance party, instead of a line dance we did a mambo in a circle, passing the women around. Great snakes, Natalia really knows how to dress well! Tonight she had this short-sleeved red shirt with these things on the shoulder like mini-epaulettes.
Dreamed of Meadow Soprano and her friends forming a crew; being in a car speeding down a hill (in neutral gear?) into the quarry near our Sackville home.
Dinner was toad in the hole.
Dawn taught a swing lesson, including Cuban motion and the flirtation. Afterward I gave Cynthia the monologue test. I said "There'll be a test on Tuesday" as a joke, but she took me seriously!
The first issue of our new Atlantic Monthly subscription arrived today. (I read it mostly for Christopher Hitchens--certainly not for Michael Kelly's commentaries.) It was April already, but we hadn't got March yet, so I went out and got it at the drugstore! I also got a People fashion extra for Puitak.
Saw part of Nick Broomfield's documentary Fetishes. It's a strange world. (Was that Bettie Page in the B&W footage?)
Dreamed of trying to apply the word "serendipitous"; watching an SCTV episode being taped live.
Got up at 9:06.
Went shopping. There was heavy snow and I had to push the car a bit as we got started.
We're still working on the salsa routine. There's just one hard part involving a cross-body lead. I decided not to perform it at this week's mini-spotlight. The problem with the step is that I can get my shoulders right and my feet right, but not at the same time!
Dinner was fettucine with pesto sauce.
In the acting class I was part of a group that rearranged the room to express claustrophobia. Then we did status games involving numbers 1 to 12. (Sue forgot her deck of cards.) I was also in a dialogue between two people trying to appear worse off.
I did my Salinger monologue to a fellow mountain climber, a new acquaintance on a bus, and people about to jump out of a plane. I borrowed Donna's text (from Shirley Temple's memoir) so Cynthia could recite it. I'd memorized my text and recited it before class to Sarah, who thought I was talking about myself! (A good sign.) Ryan did his text as a drill sergeant.
Dreamed of the Sackville cottage as a larger house; a series of old clippings with a Variety magazine-like reporter on movies; visiting Jan Wong's huge Forest Hill home with a great grand piano.
Cynthia and I went over the salsa routine. It was pretty frustrating. Afterward I talked to her about my Mission: Possible experience and recited my Salinger monologue.
Dinner was roast chicken.
In the copy editing class Shelley talked about leads. She showed a report about a marijuana seizure and I was the only one who guessed where she thought the lead should have been: the jogging Mountie smelling the plant among the brambles.
Saw the episode of The Sopranos where the Feds put the bug in their basement. [The first episode of the third season.]
Another cold snap today. Why does this always seem to happen just after I've removed the heating element from my room?
Baked whole wheat bread, but I forgot to add the yeast! Now we have Passover bread.
Went to the Deer Park library to find some more books to read at the Hellenic Home, but it was after school and there were a lot of kids there, and I just didn't feel like getting any today. I did read Dr. Seuss' And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Dreamed of ansering a school-type questionnaire involving audio-visual stuff I couldn't find around Baddeck, Cape Breton.
Visited the ROM and saw the Friuli mosaid display and the woodcuts by a Japanese-Canadian whose name I forget. (According to the member's news, it's Naoko Matsubara.)
Chose a monologue text for the next acting class: a paragraph from The Catcher in the Rye in the last chapter where he says, "I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" I can identify with that.
Dreamed of visiting Goodenough College in London; looking for the Mensa games house near Yonge St.; meeting Natalia with a friend; accidentally(?) swatting someone on the head.
Saw The Quiet American with Pui and Gordon at the Varsity. It was quite good, intelligent and beautifully made. The only problem was that to sit together we had to go near the front row, with one of those huge stadium screens.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Went to a Mensa games night. I played a game of Scrabble, then The Amazing Labyrinth for the first time. [I later bought that game.] With the latter, the first game was over before I could score my first card, then I won the second game by a street!
Then we played Upwords, which is sort of like Scrabble but with multilayers and all the letters having the same value. I won my first game!
Started reading Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples again. I'm now in the 19th century.
