February 7, 2003

Got up at 10:01.

Dreamed of being one of a group of actors about to appear before a school assembly playing eccentric superheroes like the Mystery Men; of stopping at a park in coastal Maine on the Fourth of July.

We got a laugh from the headline list from the copy editing class: "Kids make delicious snacks"; "Juvenile court tries shooting defendant"; "British left waffles on Falkland Islands."

Dinner was spaghetti.

Puitak came over and looked at old pictures of our family, then went to the spotlight with Moira and me. (They had to leave early, before the end of the sequences.)

They all say my tango sequence was good.  Strangely, as I was doing it, it seemed short.  They had a birthday cake for people like me born in February.  My gingerbread was a hit, of course.

On the way back there were a lot of young men in the Ossington station. (I'm glad they had some police there.) They must have been returning from a Raptors game.

Is the space program like the quest for the Holy Grail? [Reading The Once and Future King at the time of the Columbia space shuttle disaster got me thinking about that...]

February 6, 2003

"The French have no word for 'entrepreneur'"--Dubya (priceless!)

Got up at 9:37.

Dreamed of meeting Shelley Winters; of seeing a big painting showing French parents in WWI receiving a letter saying that their son, who they thought had survived a big battle, had actually been killed.

Went shopping.  The bottom kept falling out of one of the boxes.

Baked gingerbread for tomorrow's spotlight.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw No Regrets for Our Youth at the Cinematheque.  It's an early Kurosawa, and Japan's first postwar movie to reflect the new antiwar orthodoxy.  Much of it was unsubtle:  the visual and verbal flashbacks were hackneyed and the peasant scenes reminded me of Soviet cinema.  But overall it was powerful, timely and very sad.  What would we do if our country were heading inexorably to war? (Wait, it is.)

February 5, 2003

Dreamed of being introduced to a journalism course; woke up; dreamed of being in a motel on a trip to Cape Breton; of looking through old comic books; of being about to do the tango routine, with pre-fanfare drum rolls, but Cynthia waasn't there (neither were my guests) and Chris Matthews wanted to do it with me; of considering appropriate fanfare music for a special occasion and thinking of movie music like Richard Adinsell's Beau Brummel theme (which I don't remember); of "waking up" and telling the family about my dream.

Got out of bed at 10:04.

Well, I'm 41 today.  Father's giving me $1500.

I couldn't upload my photo yet because I need a ZIP-CD scanner. (Ours is only PC.)

They remembered my birthday at the dance studio.  Cynthia, Dawn and even Lisa gave me hugs.  Cynthia says our tango sequence is ready!

Dinner was Chinese food.  My fortune said I love sports, horses and gambling(?), but not to excess.

In the drama class, we did story development: introduction, development, climax, falling action and resolution.  We were doing skits where our characters wanted to communicate but couldn't talk.

A girl and I played a priest and a nun in processions, where I wanted us to run away but she lost her nerve.  Then we did one where I was supervising an archive and one of the two guests there wanted to rip out and steal an important document and ended up eating it.  

Then we enacted five-stage tableaus of Little Miss Muffet with me as the spider.  Then we tried to improvise a five-stage pantomime, but we disagreed and one of us walked out.  We were lucky to come up with anything. (Chinese Sean and Russian Alexei didn't know our nursery rhyme!)

Looks like I managed to upload my photo after all.

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.

February 4, 2003

Dreamed of being in junior high school in Mississauga [I really was for one year]; of seeing that season finale of The Sopranos, in which the dead included Anthony Jr. and the Meathead from All in the Family, and part of the new season premiere in which one character was a transvestite; of reading a book about cinema (like John Naughton's Cinema:  A Crash Course, which Moira just bought), including a '50s British musical in the Powell & Pressburger style [like their The Tales of Hoffmann], set in the colonial Orient, with a rehearsal scene showing dancers in their shorts.

Chapter 13 of The Ill-Made Knight is beautifully written. [It talks about Guinevere getting older.]

Cynthia and I went over the tango routine again.  I hope it's ready by Friday!

Dinner was pork chops.

The copy editing course was about writing headlines.

Started reading a Harper's article about the actual end of the world.

Picked up the picture scan I'm going to post at matchmaker.com.  The parents liked the picture. (Father said I look pensive in it.) [You can see it at the upper right.]

February 3, 2003

Dreamed about walking home from some function with Brendan Fraser.

Didn't get up until 11:30, same as yesterday.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Davis taught a swing class.

There was freezing rain so the sidewalks were slippery.

I'm back to wearing my brown overcoat. [The winter was getting milder.]

February 2, 2003

Dreamed of trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle with fairly big pieces, except that another puzzle with smaller pieces had been mixed in.

We drove down to Sunnyside Park for the first time since fall.

Baked some cheese bread.

Dinner was steak (which I fried) and leftover lasagna.

60 Minutes had a big report about how bad things are in North Korea, but didn't say anything about what to do about it. (Typical.)

Saw the first part of Lonesome Dove for the third time.  It's still stirring.

February 1, 2003

Dreamed of being in a big dance show, with some routine related to the spelling bee documentary Spellbound, but I couldn't remember the steps (it involved a diamond-shaped box-like cha cha), and I wandered off into the nearby streets, taking a secret staircase down to a theatre class, but I couldn't find my pen; passing in front of some royal steps after the death of some big bug (in business) and avoiding the Household Cavalry as it stepped out.

Returned Lolita.

Moira came back from Kingston.

Saw a Civil War movie titled Shenandoah.  It was rather pedestrian.