Final Blog

This will be my last blog, a review of A Star Is Born, and what will be my last reference to my Countdown.

          I remember over fifty years ago when I was teaching in Barstow, California, telling my students that Barbra Streisand would become such a STAR (yes, caps) that soon no one would be able to afford her. This was in 1965 right after her first television special My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra in 1966. If you’re too young to have ever seen these first two specials, you should go to Netflix to see what I saw more than fifty years ago.  

          I think I’m safe in saying the same thing about another singer who will become such a STAR (yes, caps) that folks will be stumbling over each other to book her for a concert or a movie. Lady Gaga will become as large a star as Barbra became. Write it down. I’m a latecomer to the Gaga bandwagon. I knew her only from her audacious costumes, blatantly sexual videos, and songs from a style I didn’t like. But she was very much a star to the rest of the music world. I can see her from now on in more and more feature films, turning out more and more pop and jazz albums featuring more and more songs from the Great American Songbook. I can also see her starring in musicals on Broadway.

          There are quite a few parallels between Gaga and Barbra. The most striking is the nose, which many consider too big on both. The second is the remarkable voice. Barbra’s might be considered more perfect technically but Lady Gaga’s is a very close second. Technically, what she did on “Lush Life” on the Tony Bennett special was breathtaking. No singer has ever taken on that difficult song and come even close to what Lady Gaga did with it. I became a fan when on the 87^th Oscars I first heard her sing a tribute to Julie Andrews with selections from The Sound of Music. And now again with what she did in A Star Is Born. Barbra wound up with Oscars for acting in Funny Girl and best song with Paul Williams for “Evergreen” (from her 1976 A Star Is Born), a Tony for Star of the Decade, lots of Grammies, and lots of Emmys. Guess what—Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born will probably win an Oscar for best female lead and for best song with Bradley Cooper, “Shallow.” How are those for Streisand parallels?

          Now, what about the movie? I thought it was tear-jerking fantastic, not just for my adoration of Lady Gaga and her and Cooper’s songs, but also for what Bradley Cooper did as director and male lead and for doing very well with his own singing. The script did pretty much the same as the previous three versions of this story but differed somewhat with the modernization of the conflict between Ally and Jack. In the opening credits, the film even paid homage to Judy Garland, the second star in the Star Is Born series, by giving us eight bars of the introduction to “Over the Rainbow.”

In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Lady Gaga said she quit using makeup for three weeks before filming just to get used to her normal face, which she thought wasn’t very attractive. I kept looking in the frequent close-ups to see what she considered a blemished face. Couldn’t see it. I also kept wondering what they’d do about her two tattoos on the inside of both arms. Wouldn’t they be too much a signature of Lady Gaga and not the character Ally? Yes. So they covered both of them. Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) kept telling her she was beautiful and she kept denying it. She’s beautiful in the same way Barbra is beautiful, big nose and all. I loved the movie and would recommend it with five of five stars. What will be the Academy Awards view? I think it will be nominated for Best film, Best female lead, Best male lead, Best director, Best song (“Shallow”), and possibly even Best supporting actor with Sam Elliot as Jackson’s older brother Bobby. What will it win? Best film, best female lead, best male lead, best director, and best song (even though at least two others from A Star Is Born might have been nominated).

What about Lady Gaga? I hate having to call her that. The “Gaga” is too vomitous for her, but her real name is also uncomfortable—Angelina Joanne Germanotta. I think from now on I’ll just call her Lady.

This will be my last blog. I had wanted to get to the end of the year, but I just don’t have enough interest to keep it going. If I had to find a movie to review for my last blog, though, I couldn’t have found a better one than A Star Is Born.

This will also be my last Countdown. My trip to Harkins Theater to see A Star Is Born presented a much greater problem than I thought it would be. It took me forever to get from the car into the Harkins multiplex and then into the theater. I was using my four-wheel walker with attached seat and I had to sit down every forty or fifty steps, then wait five minutes for my oxygen level to get back to acceptable. Finally I got into the theater and got seated, panting like a dog. Watched the whole movie worrying about whether I would or wouldn’t have enough oxygen to make it back to the car. I did. But I also decided that this would be the last movie I’d ever see in a theater. It had been too tough on me and too tough on Rosalie, my caregiver. Nothing from now on but home films on Netflix or Dish rentals. That made me wonder how much longer I’d be able to go out for dinner with Rosalie. Probably not much longer. Nothing from then on but home-cooked meals mainly prepared by chef Marie Callender. That made me wonder again what my acceptable level of life is. My world keeps shrinking, my interests keep dying, and my acceptable level of life keeps going down. I’m not suicidal, but I do keep wondering how I might get to Oregon if push ever comes to shove.

The Match

        

  I swore I wouldn’t do it, yet there I was, about to watch The Match between Tiger and Phil. The watching isn’t what I swore I wouldn’t do; it’s the paying of $19.95 to watch it. Something about pay-per-view television rubs me very wrong. Would it be worth twenty bucks to watch these two engage in a meaningless match? There won’t be any commercial breaks, so what will we be seeing and hearing between shots? Tiger and Phil walking to their balls; Tiger and Phil trying to trash talk; talking heads in the studio trying to say something interesting. None of it was very interesting or exciting. All I kept thinking about when they were striding to their balls was that Phil sounded like a panting dog, either from the pace of the striding or from the pressure he felt. The only pressure was from both of them wanting so bad to beat on the other. It certainly didn’t come from the $9,000,000 they were playing for since that amount would be chump change for either of them. This match caused me to come up with several new words: “i-con-ic” (in which the viewers were conned), “puttrid” (just add a “t” to “putrid” and that’s what their putting was), and “mediocre” (just go to a Webster’s, look under the “m” and find a picture of this dynamic duo right next to “mediocre”). And while you're at it, go to "match" and take a farmer's match to another picture of Tiger and Phil. Even Charles Barkley, late in the round, said he could beat either one of them. And if you’ve ever seen Charles swing a golf club, you may understand just how bad he thought they were playing. It was four hours of awful. Neither could hit irons anywhere close to pins; neither could make a putt. And the trash talk was more like kitty litter conversation. I believe this match did more harm to the game of golf than anything else in the last fifty years. Please, whoever came up with this idea, never ever try it again.

Countdown

I seem to be running out of topics for my blog at the same rate as my living space is shrinking. On my blog, I’m coming to the end of a ten-year tunnel and the dimensions of my world are closing in like the walls in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I haven’t written any Countdowns for over two months. It’s not that my life has gotten better, thus no need for a Countdown. Quite the opposite. My mental world is still as extensive as it’s always been, but my physical world is down to about 3200 square feet, pretty much the radius of a circle determined by my concentrator in the middle with my 32-foot oxygen tether. As my world narrows, my interests shrink. Favorite television shows can carry me only so far. Televised sports don’t excite me with Arizona teams stinking it up, and professional golf is taking its year-end vacation. Foods no longer tempt me. I’m not quite to the point where all items on a menu disgust me, but I’m moving in that direction. And now, with the Romaine lettuce scare, salads not only revolt me, they frighten me. Where am I, then, on my trip to midnight? Somewhere between 11:56 and 11:57.

Our Thanksgiving meal this year will be really simple: honey ham, potatoes au gratin, asparagus, soft rolls, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Sounds good and sounds really simple both in preparation and cleanup. That pretty much describes my life now—simple prep, simple cleanup.

This ‘n’ That

Forgive me for another comment about dreams and some of my weird ones. Last night, somewhere in that strange land in our heads, I wrote what I thought was a really funny, really clever bit involving a pun. See what you think:

When Charlie woke up in the ER after his bike accident, he realized he had lost one of his fingers. “Well,” he moaned, “I have nine left” A man in the bed next to him raised his bandaged hand and said “Me eight.” Later, Charlie sighed and said, “I have bad dreams about that oaf in the Oval Office.” The man next to him echoed, “Me eight.”

What do you think? If you got the pun, you may have moaned like Charlie. It wasn’t a very good pun, but it sounded so much better when I dreamed it than it does in the light of day. The key? The transposition of the words too and eight.

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          I recently spent a week or so in the hospital, for pneumonia again. And now that I’m home I find that my librium isn’t so equi anymore. I might come up with a neologism for it: tippsilibrium.

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          In one of the Keller stories by Lawrence Block, Keller is having a medium read his palm.

“She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.”

I know, I know, I’ve already written quite a bit about harassment but here’s another thought regarding this subject. I’m a huge fan of the hug as a truly important part of touching. At what point does a hug become harassment? Nearly everyone by now has seen the video of the little boy and his mother leaving a music festival with a hundred or more people sitting on the grass. The boy, at most two-years-old, maybe younger, went to each person and gave them a farewell hug. It was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. Here’s this little boy demonstrating for the world what a hug is supposed to be, an unspoken union of two people using an embrace to show how we should be, loving, caring for everyone even if we met them only once at a music festival in the park.