tiny tim who did not die
The airplane ride was surprisingly uneventful. The crossword contanied the words "angst" and "Camus," which pleased me, and the inflight movie was The Replacements. Without the headphones, all I could glean was that Keanu Reeves is some doofy guy who shouldn't be a quarterback but for some reason is a quarterback because he can throw the ball really far, but he also gets knocked down a lot by burly guys who make animalistic faces while lying atop him. Keanu presumably says witty things back, but it's hard to tell. There's also a cheerleader love object who wears low-cut tops. A middle-aged man in the row behind me had actually bought headphones to listen to the movie, and every time something funny happened (usually when Keanu got knocked down) he emitted this laugh that was more like a bark. The first time I thought he'd noticed something dangerous like an engine going out and was alerting his fellow passengers.
Anyway, now I'm in San Francisco at Chez Lyse, where Stanislavksi tracts lie next to back issues of Cosmopolitan and a cat named Ezekiel attacks your shoelaces. Last night we went to see the American Conservatory Theater's production of "A Christmas Carol," assistant directed by my hostess. Despite my snotty aversion to Dickens, I enjoyed it; it mostly just played on my white liberal guilt, but then I bought the life-affirming stuff at the end. I know, I'm a sap. There's a clever bit of staging where the set starts out encrusted in Victoriana which gradually falls away, so by the end there's nothing but some girders and a chair. Scrooge wakes up a changed man on the bare set and learns to laugh by knocking the chair around the empty space downstage. Good stuff.
We have to go buy groceries now. Side note: scientists have decoded the genome of a dinky cabbage, which can't help but seem anticlimactic after the Human Genome Project. Unofficial plant cloning is already standard, as attested to by the five philodendrons with identical genomes in the pot beside me.
