my fingers are still cold from spending the day outside. well, the day post– a second showing of rings which ben hadn’t seen. he suggested we hop to over breakfast at 11:40; we found that it was playing at the Uptown, a classic old movie theater, at 12; so off we went, making it with only minutes to spare. i called it impulsive but that got euphemismed “spontaneous”. why ‘impulsive’ is more insulting i don’t know.
at any rate, he enjoyed it and even a second time through, i didn’t find it overlong and the photography was, if anything, more beautiful. i very much admire a director who can go virtually the entire movie without lingering on a horizontal axis. i guess keeping the camera moving is one trick to keep the film moving too.
we picked up cheap, excellent pizza at Vace’s, an italian deli were my mom buys dough, and tracing the path lana jay and i trod countless times over the summer we walked down to dupont circle. i narrated as we went:
… the zoo where i spent the summer when i was sixteen, volunteering in the greenhouse with a little person engaged to another little person (he would pick her up in a red car specially made to accomodate him); a harmless, mentally ill man from a rich family who’d been working there for years; an elderly lady for who liked working with the flowers; and toni, my skinny, chain-smoking boss who got a wandering eye from a car accident that landed her in a coma for six weeks after her husband of twelve years informed her he’d been sleeping with their mutual best friend for a year. she was only slightly bitter; they continued to live together after the divorce. she told great stories. i rode in the back of a pickup truck for the first time that summer and if you go to the small mammal house or the elephant house, you will see trees in the planters that i installed myself.
… the chinese embassy where i arrived after a march in paper chains from the white house with jay, winter, tenth grade. i’d been wondering how to get his attention and settled on this route, which ended with me standing, up to my shins in snow shouting “Free Tibet!” at the brick walls
… calvert street, where i worked last summer at wifp and got heckled frequently for having the audacity to walk to the corner
and so on. we stopped at Second Story which was having a 20% off sale. he picked up blues records; i found a copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a book by ntozake shange, the author of for colored girls…. then we metroed to friendship heights for more book shopping so he could make good use of a $50 gift certificate to an evil corporate conglomerate. now home. it was a red-cheeked loose-hair day. i liked it.