My favorite thing about my apartment is the fact that every room has a tin ceiling. Each one boasts a different pattern, and each one is 12 feet high. Because of these ceilings, I actually own a ladder—two of my three closets begin six feet from the ground, and my overhead lights blow out with a serious regularity. (My intuitive abilities have something to do with the frequency, all puns intended.) Given that each fixture is a pre-war oddity–gorgeous, fragile, and one-of-a-kind–I have to really psych myself up to replace a bulb. During the retrograde, they all blew out, but I decided I wouldn’t fix anything until Mercury went direct lest I compound the damage. I actually put FIX LIGHTS in my calendar for January 8, that’s how serious I was about waiting. So today I donned sneakers, pink rubber gloves, and overalls with 65 watts stuck in each pocket. Cussing and sweating, I dragged the ladder from room to room to carefully so carefully repair each one. Not one of those lamps unscrews easily, and while balancing at the top of my ladder, I cried more than once out of frustration and fear before the covers finally gave way. People often ask me how I do public speaking without getting nervous. The truth is, I get very nervous, every bloody time, but I am accustomed to doing things that make me nervous as hell. It’s called being a grown woman.
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A Few Notes on Mating Rituals
The other day, I met a cute guy in a luncheonette. We exchanged numbers and flirty texts. Then he started messaging about video-gaming and I went radio silent. I am an old-school dame, and old-school dames don’t date boys (cis or trans) whose mating rituals include Mortal Kombat. Old-school dames prefer gentlemen who phone rather than text, speak in complete sentences rather than monosyllables and GIFs, and listen and learn as much as they hold forth. Old-school dames prefer suitors who ask, don’t tell, and old-school dames don’t chase so much as stride. Really, I most prize notes hand-lettered on engraved paper and stately walks through parks, but I’ll accept any heartfelt exchange that makes me shine, not shrink. True courtship entails communion, not coercion.
Melodrama, Distilled: ‘Julieta’
“Julieta,” Pedro Almodovar’s adaptation of the Alice Munro Runaway short stories “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence,” was meant to be his English-language debut. Instead, he rechristened the protagonist Julieta and swapped out Vancouver for Madrid, where he contrasted her quiet despair with the bright colors and patterns that are not only that city’s trademark but the Spanish writer/director’s trademark as well.
If at this point you are thinking, “Gosh, I didn’t know Almodovar had a new movie, let alone that he had adapted Alice Munro,” rest assured you are not the only one. Early festival circuit responses were so lukewarm that its regular theatrical release was buried, and it didn’t even make the Academy Award’s foreign-language short list. Certainly this film has not made any critical top-ten lists except my own. For while I agree with critics who claim this is “not Pedro’s best,” I happen to think his best film (“Todo Sobre Mi Madre”) is one of the best films ever made. “Julieta” is merely one of the best films of 2016. Continue Reading →