Midnight in Paris

 Good evenin' !

This afternoon we went to the movies to see Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's latest attempt at directing a movie.  Frankly, I loved the movie. Instead of being just a crabby family in-fighting scenario, it opened itself up and went into time travel.  That was a surprise.  The hero, a writer, gets to meet up with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and all sorts of other people from the twenties who were living it up in Paris after WW One.  He fits right in with them, and they really like him. He has the idea that the twenties were the best time to be alive, and isn't happy in his century at all.  He has a girlfriend and potential in-laws who show themselves to be so superficial that we're glad when they part company with him at the end of the movie. It was fun to see Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel,  and DALI !  And, in a double regression, Gauguin, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec...The best thing in the whole movie are the beautiful shots of Paris. Just lovely.

When I was in Europe, I was alone and I didn't go out at night. At all.  The shades of evening saw me headed for my room to hunker down till morning came. I'd like to have seen midnight in Paris for sure.

I did see midnight in Venice, though. One night  a storm came in, and a fierce wind blew open the shutters of the one large window of my little camara singola.   A terrible stink blew in with it, a hideous and ancient smell of old sea edges and brackish mud and canals--and I knew that I really was in Venice , for sure, at last.

Midnight here in Chula Vista mostly passes my notice. I am glad for that. I have a strange sleep pattern and now in my old age midnight is the time when I 'm likely to be most deeply asleep. Around one-thirty or two I'll wake up and have a couple of hours of restlessness which I pass listening to gun-nut radio, happy real-estate-selling radio, or tales of big foots and aliens, --or, my favorite, the economy's-down- the-tubes radio. Strangely enough, these diresome programs keep me happily occupied until, toward morning, I'll turn over and snuggle down and snooze deeply till dawn. YAZZYBEL