Drive-Ins May Be Showing the Remake of “Pyscho”. Starring POTUS.
1. News this week that MAGA rallies may be broadcast using Drive-In Movie venues. But, wait. It’s no longer MAGA but “TTG”. “Transition to Greatness”. “You’re going to be hearing that term a lot,” he said. As Tony the Tiger used to say, “Grrreat.”
2. I saw the 1960’s “Psycho” at a Drive-In in Wareham, Mass sitting on a lawn chair because I knew the station wagon was going to be too crowded for enjoyable viewing. Scariest moment of my movie life. I dropped my popcorn for the first (and last) time in my life. My slogan is P!SKB. Popcorn! Small Kernels Best. I did not buy any this week. I will not buy any next week either cuz I bought sheet pastry this week to make tarts. More on that later.
3. Now, enter the real life scariest moment of my life and the remake of Psycho is starring the new Norman Bates of our times, “We Love Mom But We Have To Reopen The Motel.” Apparently, she was going to die anyway in our transition to greatness so why not open that tattoo parlor? 4. Dr. Fauci, is self quarantined at moment because of some exposure to Kate Miller, press secretary to VP Pence, who has COVID, even though as POTUS said she was tested and tested and still got it. “Those pregnancy tests sometimes just fail, don’t they, which is why I am skeptical of doing widespread testing.” Anyway, she’s married to that real charmer who could absolutely have played Norman Bates in the remake, Stephen Miller. If there’s a real-life Norman Bates, he’s it. Don’t. No, I mean it. Don’t get me started on him. Ok. One more thing about him. Kate Miller getting COVID19 is only the second worse thing that has happened to her. Having sex with Stephen Miller is the first. Want to know why women in every century have faked orgasms? Ask Kate Miller.
5. Ok. My meditation practice has still been interrupted, can you tell?
6. Dr. Fauci is testifying “virtually” today in front of the Senate. Send case of acid reflux medicine to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because Dr. Fauci reportedly is going to say that there will be “needless suffering and deaths” with premature reopening strategies. Separate from his testimony, there is this article that spells it all out. It’s about the best of what science can tell us and not the best of what we want to hear. Read it, if like me, thoughts of normalcy have fogged your brain.
7. But, what has surprised me, depressed me, angered me, disillusioned me, thrown me for an unexpected face splat this week is not how many buttheads are part of this reopen now crowd but how many intelligent, decent, loving, well-educated folks who know the difference in credibility between armed protesters saying they have the right approach to COVID19 and Charlie Baker, Governor of Massachusetts, saying he will reopen only based on science. I get the need for normalcy. I really do. As someone living alone, it is particularly clear that “aloneness” is my future for at least a year until a vaccine or something is created. A year. I’m 75. Maybe more than a year. Things are predicted to happen in a 75-year-old body and mind in a non-pandemic year. I contemplate that now, this week, more than I have for the previous two months. It sorta takes my breath away without the virus infecting me. And, Psssst! I don’t remember experiencing fear like this before. Ever. The silence of this fear is deafening. Beauty salons despite being high contact businesses are having petitions signed that they should be part of Phase One in Massachusetts? A state that has over 5 thousand dead. Retail Stores are considering the pros and cons of masks on business. Um. The downside is needless suffering and death. What part of this is foggy? So, I guess, I’m supposed to feel if I really need a haircut, I should have access to my hairdresser regardless of the risk to me or him, and if I choose a mask as I shop, that it’s just silly me who is fearful? No, I really am alone. Not separate-but-together alone, either. Alone, alone. I am realizing it day by day. Whoa. Breathe in. Out. Repeat. Today, I begin again, daily meditation. A promise to myself.
8. Hilary Mantel, author of “Wolf Hall”, “Bringing Up the Bodies”, and the recent, “Mirror and the Light” all about the 15th century of Thomas Cromwell, powerful minister to Henry the VIII, was interviewed on “Writer’s and Company” with Eleanor Wachtel and toward the end of the interview was asked if our current pandemic (She was interviewed by phone, quarantined in her seaside home in Devon, England) has any parallels to the historical period she was writing about with Cromwell. She basically said only in the sense that there was widespread illness and folks trying to stay away from it. The folks in the 15th century did not have the benefit of knowing, she pointed out, that a vaccine was even possible. They lived their lives knowing their pandemic viruses never went away. They expected them to come in waves or back in different forms because they did come in waves and back in different forms. They did not have the knowledge that one-day science might develop a vaccine. Now, on the count of three, tell me how we’ve changed from the 15th century? One. Two. Three. Go.
9. Food. Food is comforting. At last, a subject without a bat to our heads! Yes, I can hear you, dear readers. So, this week’s podcast at www.artofthediet.com noted my pandemic kitchen. Each week I make something with all the suggested ingredients in the original recipe. Each week I make more aprons to make these recipes. This week I sewed my “fuckit” fabric into a lovely cafe apron which I think is the best one to whip up full-fat recipes, don’t you? I don’t substitute low-fat cheese for full-fat cheese. I don’t substitute cauliflower flour for white flour (If I can buy white flour). I don’t eliminate “brown sugar” for the baked beans recipe. I simply make the full recipe of whatever it is and enjoy the hell out of it. Portion control is of course in operation most weeks. So, that I have one meal of this tasty dish every day. This week, I’m making this one, A Carrot with Riccota and Feta Tart, from the NYTimes food section which has a separate subscription if you don’t want the whole online newspaper or delivery option.
10. This morning, while perusing my arty emails, I discovered an article titled, “Brief History of Female Rage in Art”. I can’t imagine why I would click on that, can you? Anyway, lots of painting choices in murderous women apparently. The author says this is a topic that is trending on social media sites as well. Just sayin’. Some of us ragey gals can apparently get busy murdering. Caravaggio had a particularly instructive one: Judith Beheading Holofernes”. ” Holo” as I now call him, was not having a good day being beheaded and looks it in this painting. I think, in fact, Dr. Fauci might have seen this painting just before he chose his words: needless suffering and death. Judith, on the other hand, has a determined but resigned facial expression, seen, as I imagine it, all over in one of those meatpacking plants that have closed because of an outbreak of COVID19 and then told to reopen by our own King of meat-eaters. But, one really caught my eye. And, to be honest, I share it because it also made me laugh out loud. Believe it or not, I try to share at least one of those things each week, too. Anyway, the piece is called “Action Pants: Genital Panic” by Valie Export. The title, the name of the artist, all too perfectly hilarious. But, then the photo. And, it is a photo of the self-named Austrian performance artist, seated, wearing her crotchless trousers with a wild mane of teased hair to match her nether regions. She apparently walked into a cinema with her exposed genitals wearing her action pants and was trying to challenge movie viewers in theatre to engage with a real woman and not to look passively at the objectified images of women onscreen. So, I’m ending this week with these thoughts and warnings.
11. I have a sewing machine. I have material enough to make my own Action Pants and I don’t have to sew straight to make them. A 75-year-old woman in crotchless Action Pants challenging viewers not to look passively at objectified images of women on screen? Ok. I concede the fact that these images might make folks go from passively looking at objectified images of women on screen to aggressively looking at and for them. But, believe me on this, if it comes to it, I may single-handedly make these images part of where they truly belong: the “Transition to Greatness” movement. My “fuckit” apron will cover it up but, you all now know by reading this post, my not so secret message.
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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung
Dammit.
