Billie’s introduction to Andrew and Isabel’s parents took place that night in the kitchen while she was doctoring a can of baked beans with onions and ketchup, topping some iceberg lettuce with Seven Seas Italian, and grilling some hot dogs to feed her new charges. Billie didn’t know if it…
Category: Writing
On a member of the Resistance helping a nightclub owner escape occupied Paris: …We talked about the war. About the scenes we’d witnessed and couldn’t get out of our minds… I wish our conversation could have been recorded. I found it intensely interesting: the jabbering of two women high on…
We are so much closer to the 18th century than the gap of years, fashion choices and sanitary inventions suggests… via the Last Post, another side of actress, Pippa Rathborne Clarissa is an enormous book of approximately 970,000 words – the author himself was worried about the length. The…
Rosalind Russell wrote an autobiography called, “Life is a Banquet”. It used to sit on my grandmother’s bookshelf and I remember picking it up when I was around twelve and sitting down one afternoon and becoming completely engrossed. The book, like the author; is candid, genteel, and witty. Buy it,…
“He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say a fine piece of prose could not only cure depression, it could clear up a…
Babies, that’s Pop, sometime in the late 1940s early 1950s. You know, I’ve mentioned him and my uncle a couple of times on the weblog: Once upon a time (when I was oh so much younger) I cracked wise to my pop – something about Hollywood being a cesspool, or…
Here’s the deal, I only saw Mr. Newman on film sets and in elevators. He was about the same age as my dad, quite a bit younger than my uncle – so, as a kid I just categorized him as “old.” My dad, well, I don’t suppose there was a…
Billie was in pre-pre-production for months, which is otherwise known as “development.” It’s mostly an accounting trick, cinema semantics, as some impressive dollar deals are tied to certain points in the film schedule, like the huge fees that are handed out the first day of principal photography. In the meantime…