A post in which it is a gorgeous Monday

Well the weather was anyway. It was so beautiful when I got off work today it was almost worth getting up an hour early just to be able to enjoy a bit of the afternoon.

When I got home I didn’t feel all used up like I usually do. I wanted to get out in the yard, but I wasn’t feeling quite that productive, and Monday evening is usually my evening off. So instead I put another load of laundry in, organized bills, and balanced my checkbook. Yeah, I know, relaxing, but I did find $300 so that was pretty nice.

I finished reading Show Boat, the book by Edna Ferber today. I have seen the movie many times (I was lucky enough to see the best version, made in 1936 and starring Irene Dunn, years ago). I came about this in a roundabout way. Edna Ferber, aside from being a formidable woman in her own right, was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table. I had been doing a bit of reading about that out of curiosity, and looked up her name in the course of that reading.

When I found that she was the author of the book upon which one of my favorite movies is based, I decided it was high time I read it. It was a good read. Interesting word play, use of adjectives, and descriptions. Of course it was also interesting to read the un-hollywoodized story. Ms. Ferber was a good bit more fond of descriptive passages than the modern reader will put up with, but her writing is a product of her time, and I will admit that description is where the “real writing” gets done more often than not. My dialogue is pitiful anyway, but there are things you just can’t have characters say directly without sounding ridiculous, or worse, inconsistent. In dialogue, the character has to speak with their own voice, whereas in description the writer can speak with his. Probably it was just fancy on my part, but I seemed to hear, just beyond the page, hints of the author wisecracking in a lush dining room. I seemed to pick up ghosts of witticisms floating around the prose.

How I would have loved to visit the Algonquin Round Table, even as an object of derision, which I would have undoubtedly been. Hell, just to meet Dorothy Parker would have been the thrill of a lifetime. She died just three months before I was born.

Sometimes I feel as if I was born in the wrong era. But then I think about how lucky I am not to have been gay back then, which quickly dispels that notion. Even weighing the threat of AIDS on one hand, the freedom we enjoy today (limited though it is) seems to be worth it. And since I can’t go back in time anyway I may as well be happy with now.