Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, folks. I'm not gonna write about any "stuff" on Christmas Eve, so don't worry. I have two more good movies: "Beautiful but Broke"(1944), starring a comedienne named Joan Davis who had a hit TV series in the mid-1950s called "I Married Joan", which was also notable for co-starring Jim Backus as her husband. We've never seen Davis before, and she takes some getting used to, but once you settle in she's quite funny and very talented and adept at physical comedy. This movie is also a musical, with one song by a girl group called The Brian Sisters who are hands-down fantastic. There are other excellent singers in the movie but these gals rule.

Our second movie is "Petticoat Larceny"(1943) and stars another Joan, in this case 12-year-old Joan Carroll, the young sensation who would co-star in "Meet Me in St. Louis" a year later. Here, she plays "Joan Mitchell", a child radio star with her own hit show, who becomes dissatisfied with the quality of her scripts and decides to write her own. Seeking advice from her butler, an amateur writer himself, she sets out to pen the story of a jewel thief by "getting to know her character" at the butler's suggestion. Since she doesn't know any jewel thieves, she becomes one herself, but in the act, she runs into another burglar. This sets the stage for non-stop hijinx of the "three men and a little lady" kind, as the hoodlum (who ain't too bright) mistakes Joan for a real safecracker. He brings her back to his gang's hideout, where they plan to use her for jobs. Meanwhile, her aunt and uncle are looking everywhere for her. So are the cops and her producer. Joan Carroll is a one-girl dynamo in this flick as she carries the whole picture, aided by a top-notch cast. No wonder she was chosen for the first scene in "Meet Me in St. Louis", opening the movie with it's unforgettable title song, climbing the staircase in wet clothing from the swimming hole in a shot that wouldn't be allowed today. Now, in that movie she was part of a family that included Judy Garland, Leon Ames, Mary Astor, and Marjorie Main as the maid, so as great as Carroll was, she lost out on screen time, and little Margaret O'Brien (one of the top child actresses of all-time) ended up stealing the movie. But wow, no one should forget Joan Carroll, who was as good as they come. She quit the biz at 20 to get married, and had turned into a beauty by then. Two Huge Thumbs Up. Man, they couldn't make 'em like this anymore if they tried.

As for "Meet Me in St. Louis", it's well-known here at the blog as being not only one of my favorite Christmas movies, but one of my favorite movies, period. I've seen it a dozen times and may watch it tonight or tomorrow if I can get myself more into the Christmas spirit.

It's not that I'm not in the spirit, I always am, every Christmas. Right now, I have KUSC playing with various Christmas music, and I've been enjoying the house lights I see on my walks, but I'm lacking the immersion in the spirit that I had for so many years when I was living with and caregiving for Pearl. That was, in many ways, the best time of my life, those twelve years, and at holiday time it was always so much fun, helping her write her Christmas cards, driving to Candy Cane Lane, taking the Kobedog on winter walks in his sweater, watching old movies on TCM and singing on Christmas eve in the church choir. I sang for six Christmases at the United Methodist Church of Reseda. In 2018 and 2019, I had the opportunity to sing solo and that was a wonderful experience. Then, just weeks after Christmas in 2019, two things happened. Pearl got sick, and then Covid happened. Though we were blessed with 20 more months, 2019 was our last Christmas in church and our last Christmas dinner together with Helen, because of the pandemic.

Since September 2021, it's been just me alone, which I've adjusted to because I have my writing and my routine, but this year has just been overwhelming, and that's why I'm not in the Christmas spirit to the same degree. It's not that I'm not feeling it, I'm just preoccupied with other things.

Well anyhow, the writing is progressing with the new book, 75,000 words just this month. Because it's a first draft, it's just "scratch writing" as I call it, the barest-bones of sentences that wouldn't even qualify as blog writing, even moreso with this book because it's gonna be gigantic and I'm writing as fast as I can. Thus the sentences are half-baked and full of typos because I'm trying to get every last bit of content down. I'm trying to remember, and capture, every important and relative thing that has happened in my life, through childhood and up to the present. The core of the book will be 1989, of course, but right now, for the past few days I've been working on 1981, and I've had fun recalling details from the early months of my relationship with Lillian. In those days, her friends called her Lil. She was sixteen years old. I was twenty-one.

Those are some very good memories.

Well anyhow, it's now eleven o' clock. I just got back from my walk, but before I finished, I stopped at the campus cul-de-sac located at the south side of Etiwanda and Halsted. It was quiet, and I was pausing, to decide whether to head over to the Midnight Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes, which was about to start at 10:30. I decided not to go, but when I turned around, I had three raccoons staring me down, spread out in the cul-de-sac about fifteen feet away. They just stood there, not moving, and looking directly at me. I thought they might be hungry and were wondering if I had anything to eat. I didn't, but I crouched down anyway, to kind of show them I was harmless. I wanted to watch them for a minute, and didn't want to scare them away. Well, they just stood there, staring me down, and then I started to get nervous. I wondered "do raccoons attack people?" I saw three coyotes last Summer, together in a pack, at Aliso Canyon. There were two adults and a young one, and I gave them a wide berth because one coyote is no problem (they trot off), but I didn't wanna chance a trio. And tonight, because they weren't budging, I got nervous about the trio of raccoons. Then, the middle one started approaching. I stood up, but he or she kept coming, cautiously, now about 8 feet away. That's when I began to leave, and they all started coming, and now I saw why they'd been standing there staring at me. I was unknowingly blocking their path to their home. They went across the street, past where I'd been standing, and went under the fence of the corner house on the north side of Halsted, which has a giant backyard. I thought, "Oh, that's where they live. Hey guys, why didn't you just say so?"

Anyhow, I'll say good night and Merry Christmas. Gotta watch the Norad Tracker. Santa could arrive at any minute......////