Spring has sprung

Autumn's long been my favorite season in New York, but when it doesn't last just a day or two, as is too often the case, spring has much to recommend it.

On Friday, I took a stroll of just three blocks, from my workplace to the post office to mail a letter, and look at what I came across in those few dozen steps on what was otherwise a gloomy, cloudy day (the photos were taken with my iPhone and aren't great, but you'll get the idea):

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 66

I saw my Guardian Celebrity, Ethan Hawke, hugging a friend before hailing a cab this morning at 22nd and Ninth Avenue.

You'd think by now he'd start to recognize me, I've encountered him so often.

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 65

On Friday, I spotted baseball announcer and former sit-com actor Bob Uecker at the concierge desk of a midtown hotel.

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 64

Around midnight last night, near the corner of 21st and Seventh, Flo and I passed Gabriel Byrne. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, deep in conversation with a woman. We couldn't tell if she was a friend, a flame, a fan, or perhaps a patient.

The Lubitsch touch

Peter Bogdanovich on the great Ernst Lubitsch:

The Importance of Seeing Ernst

Who was Lubitsch? The greatest director of wit, sex and sophistication laughs insouciantly from a distant world

by Peter Bogdanovich | April 8, 2008

Sometime in the late 1960's, I asked Jean Renoir what he thought of Ernst Lubitsch. He raised his eyebrows and said, enthusiastically, "Lubitsch!? But he invented the modern Hollywood." By "modern Hollywood," Renoir meant American movies from about 1924 to the start of the '60s. Before Lubitsch's arrival to California from Germany in 1922 (to make a Mary Pickford vehicle called ROSITA), Hollywood films were under the overwhelming influence of D. W. Griffith, circa 1908 through the epoch-making THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915 and beyond. Victorian, puritan, Southern, montage-driven, Griffith was the father of film narrative. As pioneer Allan Dwan told me, he would go to see Griffith's movies and just do whatever Griffith was doing. The majority of American directors felt similarly, including John Ford and Howard Hawks.

When Lubitsch arrived, however, things started to change. He brought European sophistication, candor in sexuality and an oblique style that made audiences complicit with the characters and situations. This light, insouciant, teasing manner became known far and wide as "the Lubitsch Touch." By the end of the 20's and throughout his short life -- he died in 1947 at age 55 -- Lubitsch was probably the most famous film director internationally, except perhaps for C. B. DeMille. Today hardly anyone remembers either one of them. Yet while most of DeMille is pretty forgettable, if sometimes fun, Lubitsch is always fun and often as good as it gets....

Much more here.

Goodbye to another Hollywood great

It's never a surprise when a 93-year-old man passes; still, I can't help but feel saddened by the passing of the great Richard Widmark.

He was one of her favorite actors when she was young, my mom once told me, and he was one of mine, too. His career was long and varied, but he particularly left his mark on my beloved film noir genre. KISS OF DEATH, THE STREET WITH NO NAME, ROAD HOUSE, NIGHT AND THE CITY, PANIC IN THE STREETS, NO WAY OUT, PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET -- that's a career's worth of darkly entertaining highlights right there.

In 2001, the Walter Reade theatre at NYC's Lincoln Center held a 16-film retrospective to honor Widmark. They showed most of the aforementioned films, with a western or two thrown in for good measure. But the best part was that Widmark was on hand for several of the screenings.

Here's what I wrote at the time following the opening night double-bill:

Tonight launched the Walter Reade's Richard Widmark festival. It was great. They showed NIGHT AND THE CITY and PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET. Both were good-to-great prints, and Widmark himself was on hand to answer questions after each film.

The man's 87 and doesn't appear a day over 65. You'd recognize him if you saw him on the street. He's spry, and his memory is sharp. The only sign of age is his pure white hair (looks good), and the fact that he seems to be a bit hard of hearing.

He received standing ovations at both appearances and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself.

He said the three actors with whom he would happily work anytime, any place (including today, he said, if they were still around) are Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy, and Henry Fonda. He said he learned more from that trio than from every other actor he ever worked with, combined.

I'm now kicking myself for not recording more of Widmark's remarks from that memorable evening, but I'm glad I put down for posterity what I did. I was thrilled to attend the event, and I guess I held out hope that one day there'd be a followup.

And there may well be, but Widmark, alas, won't be in attendance.

Rest in peace, Mr. Widmark, and thanks.

The Prince of the Cinematic City

Film Forum held a tribute to Sydney Lumet last night that took the form of a two-hour Q&A with the venerable director, interspersed with clips from some of his most memorable films. (Note: All of Lumet's remarks below are quote from memory.)

Lumet's father, Baruch, was an actor in the Yiddish theatre, and Sydney himself got his start there at a very early age.

He went on to appear in a number of Broadway shows, among them a Max Reinhardt production, before slipping behind the camera as a television director in the 1950s.

So it was fitting that the evening opened with a clip from One Third of a Nation (1939), which boasts Lumet's only film acting appearance. The then-14-year-old director-to-be starred as the nephew of Sylvia Sydney.

The next clip shown was from the first movie Lumet directed, Twelve Angry Men. Asked if he'd made a specific effort to make the film in a cinematic style, so as to prove to the industry bigwigs that he could direct as well for the large screen as for the small, Lumet admitted with a laugh, "I was too arrogant. It never occurred to me that I might need to convince anyone."

Asked later about working with Henry Fonda, Lumet said Fonda was constitutionally unable to make a false or dishonest move as an actor. "I don't think he could've done it if I'd asked him to," Lumet said. "He could only play the truth."

Lumet said that he shot Twelve Angry Men in 19 days. He said he shot the film in a very particular way. There were three levels of lighting in the film -- sunlight through the windows, cloudy skies, as a storm approached outside, and with the overhead lighting in the jury room illuminated once the storm is underway.

Lumet shot the film entirely out of sequence, rotating around the room, getting each shot he needed from each actor under that particular lighting. Once he'd shot all of his sunlit shots, Lumet had the set relit to suggest cloudy conditions and slowly worked his way around the room again, going from character to character, getting every shot he needed.

Finally, he had the set relit once last time, with overhead lighting lit, and made the rounds again.

Lumet said he never uses storyboards, as Alfred Hitchcock was famous for doing. Instead, he prefers to rehearse his actors for two weeks, as if they were mounting a play, and when he has all the blocking down, then he considers where to place the camera in each scene.

Regarding The Fugitive Kind, which paired Marlon Brando with Anna Magnani, Lumet said that Magnani, despite her reputation as an earthy, instictive actress, actually came from a show business background, that she had been a song-and-dance performer when she was young -- "a hoofer," Lumet termed her.

As such, she and Brando worked very differently, and there was a just a hint offered that they might not have gotten along very well. But Lumet refuses to gossip, and he was very careful in choosing his words when he spoke of actors he'd worked with.

As an example of his disinclination to use aspects of an actor's personal life to draw a stronger performance from him -- as opposed to Elia Kazan, whom Lumet cited as standing ever ready to throw facts from an actor's private life at him in order to get what he wanted -- Lumet told a story of a monologue in The Fugitive Kind that Marlon Brando was struggling with. Take after take, Brando strived to get through the monologue, and each time, he faltered at the same point in the speech.

Lumet said that Brando had told him a personal story the week before that gave Lumet insight into why the actor was repeatedly stumbling at the same point in the monologue, and the director knew that, if he'd only cited that story, it would've freed Brando to get through the speech.

But as Lumet put it, "I'm not his analyst. That's his private life; this was his work."

At one point, as the evening dragged on, Brando said to Lumet, whom the actor knew did not like to work overtime, "Let's call it a night. Let me get some sleep and I know I can do this in the morning."

"No," Lumet recalled saying, "You won't sleep well, with this hanging over you, and the pressure will be even greater in the morning. We'll stick with it; you'll get it."

Eventually, on the 32nd take, Brando nailed the monologue, and all was well.

Lumet told Brando later that he knew could have merely reminded Brando of the incident from his life that he had shared with the director and it would have allowed Brando to complete the monologue, but that he didn't feel right approaching it that way.

He said Brando was moved to lean over and kiss Lumet. And yet, Lumet is fully aware of the irony inherent in the fact that Brando cited Kazan as his favorite director.

"There's no right way to do things," Lumet repeatedly stated. "I just have to do it my way."

Lumet beamed after a clip from Long Day's Journey into Night. He clearly considers it one of his finest films, and he bristled at the memory of certain critics of the day dubbing it a mere "filming of the stage play."

"I shot each character in the film from a different level, shot each with different lighting," Lumet said emphatically.

Lumet lavishly praised Katharine Hepburn's performance in the film, stating for the first of several times on the evening that when an actor is that locked into a role, it makes the director's job easy. The director just has to follow the lead of the actor, he said, and go with the flow.

Lumet expressed regret at the disappointing fortunes of Fail-Safe, which he blamed on the fact that it came out after, not before, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The producers of the latter film sued for plagiarism, claiming that the novel on Fail-Safe was based stole directly from the novel on which Dr. Strangelove was based. They won the case, and Columbia ended up owning both pictures.

Lumet went to the head of Columbia and urged him to release his film first. "If it's a hit," Lumet recalled telling him, "it'll make Dr. Strangelove that much funnier. And if it bombs, it won't have any impact at all on Dr. Strangelove."

But Lumet's pleas went unheeded, and Fail-Safe came off badly in the wake of Kubrick's film. Attendance was so meagre, he said, that "you could shoot deer in the theatre."

After a clip from The Hill, which starred Sean Connery, who moderator Foster Hirsh said "really acted" in the film, Lumet came to the actor's defense. "People thought Connery wasn't acting in the Bond films, because he made it seem so effortless, but he was acting -- he was acting high comedy, and that's not easy."

Lumet went on to cite Cary Grant as another actor who doesn't get enough credit because he made it look so easy.

Lumet clearly felt that much of the credit for the success of Serpico should go to Al Pacino. It was another instance in which Lumet clearly marveled at an actor's ability to be so "locked in" to a role. He spoke often throughout the evening of the benefits of an actor coming in "full," with all his work done and the character a part of his very being. When that happens, Lumet said, an actor can climb the walls and the audience is right there with him. The most theatrical, over-the-top gestures can work, he said, when an actor is fully in the role.

He also said he'd much rather have to rein in a very demonstrative actor -- Pacino, for example, or Rod Steiger, who starred in Lumet's The Pawnbroker -- than to have to extract a more energetic and demonstrative performance from an inhibited actor.

Lumet said that he very consciously aimed for a verite look for Dog Day Afternoon, a picture with which he wanted to show, he said, that "freaks and outsiders are not so different from the rest of us. We have more in common with them than we allow ourselves to admit."

Dog Day Afternoon was shot almost entirely in natural light, Lumet said. In scenes inside the bank, if more light was needed, they just added more florescents. He likes it, he said, when an audience feels as if they're right there, and that's why he's very enthusiastic about shooting pictures in hi-def video, as he's done with his last two movies.

"Hi-def allows you to capture exactly what you see," said Lumet. "With film, you almost never get what you're seeing."

Lumet said Pacino was totally locked into his character, so much so that Lumet allowed him to ad lib extensively.

Lumet said that, if ever a film could be credited to a single individual, it was Network, which was entirely a product of Paddy Chayevsky's brilliant script. He acknowleged that some feel the picture has proven to be prophetic, but that he never considered it a satire. He felt then and still feels, having worked in television, that it was actually pretty realistic.

Lumet agreed with Hirsh that, as great as Peter Finch is in the picture, William Holden is the heart of the film. "There was a humanity to Holden's performance," Lumet said, "that is far too often missing from films today."

Lumet said his favorite thing about Prince of the City was that he got to meet Akira Kurosawa because of it. The film features a memorable, lengthy on-foot chase scene in the rain shot on location on the streets of New York, and the great Japanese filmmaker, who knew something about rainy scenes in movies, was moved to pull Lumet aside at a dinner party and ask him how he had achieve that impressive deluge.

Lumet spoke very highly of Paul Newman, who starred in the director's acclaimed 1982 feature, The Verdict. "What a shame it is," Lumet said after viewing a clip of Newman's performance in the picture, "that Paul has announced he'll no longer act in movies. That's a real loss."

Newman's alcoholic attorney, Lumet said, is a character who finds solace and comfort only in the past, who has nothing in the present to make life worth living, so he set out to make the film using only autumnal tones. "There's only one scene in the whole movie that has blue in it," Lumet said, "and that was the sky, and I couldn't hide it."

Asked why he thought that so many of his films dealt in one way or other with the justice system, he said growing up in a poor immigrant family had given him an interest in how the system worked. "All Jews have a certain interest in the workings of justice," he added.

He told a story of being a kid and pitching pennies with his pals. A cop would come around and break up the game, he said, but the cop would keep the pennies. This was in an era when a pack of cigarettes cost twenty cents, he said -- a penny a cigarette. So those eight pennies, which bought about a half a pack of cigarettes, were, to them, a substantial amount.

Asked about the melodramatic aspects of his most recent picture, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, he said the two brothers who plan the robbery were originally friends, but he felt the tension was heightened if they were brothers.

And he has no use for those who would mock melodrama as somehow a lesser form.

"Imagine it's a warm spring day in Greece," he said. "You pack a lunch and you join your friends at the theatre. It's a lovely setting, and you're enjoying a good play. After an hour and a half or so, the lead character has plucked his eyes out, there's blood streaming down his face, and he's holding two dead children in his arms that he fathered with his own mother.

"I'd say that's pretty melodramatic, but it works."

At 83, Lumet couldn't be sharper, more alert, or more energetic. He seemed far more like a man of 60 than a man in his eighties, and he harbors no thoughts of retirement. He's at work already on his next project, and if the actors, who are next at the bargaining table after the resolution of the writers' strike, don't put the project on hold, he expects to start shooting in April.

Now available via the wonders of the Internet: Time Travel

This is cool. It's an audio transcription of a complete broadcast day for station WJSV in Washington, D.C., from September 21, 1939, in the form of 19 one-hour mp3 files that can be streamed or downloaded.

Here's the lineup:

6:30 Sundial with Arthur Godfrey (music)
8:30 Certified Magic Carpet (quiz show)
8:45 Bachelor's Children (soap)
9:00 Pretty Kitty Kelly (soap)
9:15 The Story of Myrt & Marge (soap)
9:30 Hilltop House (soap)
9:45 Stepmother (soap)
10:00 Mary Lee Taylor (soap)
10:15 Brenda Curtis (soap, featuring Agnes Moorehead)
10:30 Big Sister (soap)
10:45 Aunt Jenny's True Life Stories (soap that Bob & Ray loved to parody)
11:00 Jean Abbey (news for women)
11:15 When a Girl Marries (soap)
11:30 The Romance of Helen Trent (soap)
11:45 Our Gal Sunday (soap)
12:00 The Goldbergs (comedy)
12:15 Life Can Be Beautiful (soap)
12:30 Road of Life (soap)
12:45 This Day Is Ours (soap)
1:00 Sunshine Report (news)
1:15 The Life & Love of Dr. Susan (soap)
1:30 Your Family and Mine (soap)
1:45 News
2:00 President Roosevelt's Address to Congress (speech)
2:40 Premier Edouard Daladier
3:00 Address Commentary (news)
3:15 The Career of Alice Blair (soap)
3:30 News (news)
3:42 Rhythm & Romance
3:45 Scattergood Baines
4:00 Baseball: Cleveland Indians at Washington Senators (sports)
5:15 The World Dances (music)
5:30 News (news)
5:45 Sports News (news)
6:00 Amos and Andy (comedy)
6:15 The Parker Family (comedy)
6:30 Joe E. Brown (comedy)
7:00 Ask-It Basket (quiz)
7:30 Strange as it Seems (true stories)
8:00 Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour (variety)
9:00 The Columbia Workshop - "Now It's Summer" (drama)
9:30 Americans at Work (true stories)
10:00 News (news)
10:15 Music (music)
10:30 Albert Warner (news)
11:30 Teddy Powell Band (music)
12:00 Louis Prima Orchestra (music)
12:30 Bob Chester Orchestra (music

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 63

Yesterday, while browsing what remains of the once sprawling and vibrant 26th Street Flea Market, I encountered actress Jaime Murray, probably best known as the femme fatale Lila on the Showtime series, Dexter.

I even managed to secure a surreptitious (and blurry) snapshot of her,
from between two racks of old clothes.

Vive Leconte!

I was very pleased to attend a screening of The Girl on the Bridge last night at which the director Patrice Leconte was feted. He's long been one of my favorite directors, and it was a kick to get to meet him (he took a picture with me and signed my DVD of The Hairdresser's Husband, my favorite of his films).

Leconte was charming and funny, in an understated way, during the Q&A following the picture. He said that he and actor Daniel Auteil have a two-man mutual admiration society and when Leconte announced recently that he's going to make just three more pictures (he's concerned about slipping into mediocrity, as some directors do), Auteil got quite miffed with him. Auteil finally forgave him, Leconte said, but only if he promised to make all three pictures with the actor.

Leconte said doesn't have a favorite among his movies. He loves them all, even though he knows there were some that don't really stack up. It'd be like choosing between his daughters to select a favorite movie, he said, and he could never do that.

Leconte had Vanessa Paradis in mind for the female lead in The Girl on the Bridge from the very beginning, Leconte said. "I don't know if she's a muse -- you'd have to ask Johnny Depp" he quipped. "But she was for us."

Leconte revealed that it took nearly as much effort to convince Paradis to cut her hair for the film as it did to make the whole picture, but he's convinced that her fetching hairdo is what cemented her character and put the film over the top.

The Girl on the Bridge is the only movie Leconte's ever made in black and white, and the only one he will make, but he was adamant from the beginning, he said, that it had to be made in black and white. Color, he is convinced, would have overwhelmed the story.

For Leconte, the magic of cinema is not that it can show everything, but that it can be used to suggest so much. Much is lost, he said, when all the details are revealed -- it is suggestion and allusion that interests him.

A recent interview with a film student revealed to Leconte something he'd never realized about his movies -- that virtually all of his movies begin with an encounter between strangers, and their lives being altered as a result. He was startled, he said, at the realization; no one had ever pointed it out to him before. He said he realizes now that he'd struggle to make a movie about, say, a long-married couple, that he thinks there's a similarity between movie-making and chemistry.

"You take a few drops of Vanessa Paradis and put them in a test tube," Leconte said. "She's a sad young woman ready to end it all. Then you add a few drops of Daniel Auteil, a knife thrower at the end of his career. And poof! You watch how they interact with each other and impact each other."

Leconte said that he's always apprehensive about introducing one of his films, as he did The Girl on the Bridge, as he feels he is expected to come up with something brilliant and insightful. "I can't say, 'This film is in black and white,'" he quipped. "You'll see that soon enough." He much prefers a post-show Q&A, where he can provide concrete info in response to viewers' questions, and he certainly did that last night.

I was very pleased to see that Leconte had signed my DVD, "Vive le cinema!" Everyone in attendance for this delightful evening would no doubt have echoed that sentiment.

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 62

Today I stopped in during my lunch hour for a decaf Americano at Flo's former place of employ, and as I departed, it hit me that the knit-capped schlub standing in line waiting to order was Paul Giamatti.

Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 61

On Friday evening, I turned north on Broadway from 54th Street on my way to meet Flo for dinner and who should I cross paths with but Sean "Puff Daddy-P. Diddy-Puffy" Combs as he exited what I think is his corporate headquarters.

Then, on Saturday, Flo and I were strolling south on First Avenue along about Fourth Street, and we passed Mario Cantone, walking north and looking preoccupied. As a child, Flo appeared on Steampipe Alley, a children's television show Cantone hosted on WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey, from 1987 to 1993, so you'd think he'd have been thrilled to see her. But did he greet her warmly? Were hugs exchanged? They were not.

A timely treasure

Flo and I spent a couple of chilly days down in Cape May, New Jersey, over the weekend and I picked up a watch at an antique store there. It's from 1930, white gold with black enamel accents and interesting etchings on the side, 17-jewel.

I like it a lot. See what you think:

Christmas in Oklahoma, pt. 2

Longtime B&Y readers probably are aware that I'm a Route 66 aficionado. I traveled the Mother Road from end to end as part of a four-month, 48-state, 22,000-mile road trip back in 1992, an excursion that ranks as one of my life's highlights to date, and even had a Route 66 road sign tattoed on my upper arm.

But, like drive-in buffs, fans of old roads must too often deal with news that is bad rather than good, developments that are too often discouraging rather than heartening. Classic establishments -- mom-and-pop roadside eateries, long-standing motor courts, vintage bijous -- fall by the wayside and are, one by one, replaced by franchised operations that have not half the character of the venerable operations they replace.

So it was with cautious optimism that I received the news some months back that a local entrepreneur was opening a new kind of roadside traveler's stop not on the interstate, but smack dab on Route 66, just up the road (or down, depending upon the direction one is traveling) from the historic Round Barn in Arcadia, Oklahoma.

I never dreamed just how thrilling I'd find this new establishment, which has been dubbed Pops, once I got to visit it. But thrilled -- even giddy -- is just how Flo and I felt when we paid Pops a visit over the holidays (Flo took the photos seen in this post, by the way). Our hearts fairly skipped a beat when we saw the 66-foot, four-ton soda bottle rising on the horizon, and we were in no way disappointed after our visit had ended.

The concept behind Pops is simple, really. It's a travel stop not unlike a golden-era Stuckey's or a Love's Country Store or any of a thousand other roadside service stations motorists patronize on a daily basis while traveling the nation's highways and byways. They sell gasoline outside and one-half of the interior space is a convenience store, with the same snacks and sundries you'd expect to find at a 7-11 or a truck stop.

But in the coolers of that convenience store, one finds not just Coke, Pepsi, Sprite and Mountain Dew, but 500 different types of soda (or pop, as it's known in Oklahoma) -- brands both old and new, familiar and forgotten, local and international. Pops features 43 varieties of root beer alone!

You can buy the bottles individually or put together mix-and-match six-packs or even a wooden crate full (these crates are created especially for Pops, and like everything else in the place, they are beautifully designed).

The other half of Pops is a restaurant and shake shop. The diner-style food's top-notch, too, with quality ingredients like all-natural, pesticides-free beef from an area ranch.

The building, as you can see in the artist's rendering above, is a non-kitschy throwback to service station architecture of the 1950s and '60s. As described at pops66.com, it's a "futuristic vision rising from the pastoral Arcadian valley itself, with its native Oklahoma red rock base and steel trusses like giant tree branches.

"The huge canopy cantilevers, unsupported, 100 feet to shelter vehicles and their occupants from sun, rain and snow. So big, it creates an 'outdoor room,' it’s an unexpected sensation we bet you’ve never experienced -- with wildflowers and trees all around you.

The huge windows at Pops are filled floor to ceiling with shelves lined with hundreds of colorful soda pop bottles. It's a whimsical touch that proves to be quite engaging. And they've fully embraced Route 66, too, selling 66 souvenirs that don't even mention

The notion of such a wonderful new attraction thriving on America's Main Street -- and in my home state, just east of my home town -- makes me just as pleased and proud as I can be.

Christmas in Oklahoma, pt. 1

So, did I mention that Flo and I got hitched?

It's true. We tied the knot and strapped on our respective balls-with-chain on December 8, so our one-month-aversary approaches. I've yet to be exiled to the couch for even a single night, so I guess I'm doing something right.

We spent the holidays in Oklahoma City, flying in on Christmas Eve. It was our first time to spend to Christmas Day together, and we had a lovely time. The entire Leveridge clan was present and accounted for. Most years, either my eldest niece or my eldest nephew, along with their spouses and kids, are spending the holiday with their in-laws, but somehow things panned out this year for everyone to be on hand.

The four grand nieces and nephews were cute as a button, and a good time was had by all, even Flo, who couldn't help but feel a little daunted by the occasion. She'd met most of the Leveridges, but spending hours with them in a room amidst ever-rising piles of torn wrapping paper and ribbons? There's no preparing for that.

But Flo is ever the trouper, and she came through with flying colors.

On Thursday, we threw a reception to celebrate our nuptials. Our wedding was semi-private, attended only by a few local friends and family, so we decided a celebration in OKC was the best way to mark the occasion with our Oklahoma friends and family.

The event was hosted by my brother and his wife, bless their hearts, in their brand new home (it still had that new-house smell!). We had the event catered, and all went very smoothly indeed. Most (though not all, alas) of the invitees were able to attend, and a good time was had by all.

All, that is, except me.

Oh, I'm being a bit dramatic, but I did find the affair more than a little frustrating. One finds oneself stationed in a room (or, in this case, a series of rooms) filled with all the people you love -- and that's just the problem. There are too many people on hand to really spend any quality time with any of them. My dear pal Andrea drove 2.5 each way from Muskogee to attend our little soiree, and she was gone before I'd managed to say even two words to her (or so it seemed).

But that's the nature of the beast with such shindigs, I suppose. From all reports, everyone had a good time. The company was stellar, the food was tasty, the beer was cold, and Tony and Marci's house survived mostly intact, so who can complain?