2003-07-27 - 9:21 p.m.

The Shop Around The Corner

A few decades ago when I was in college I ran with the film crowd.  Filmmakers, film students, film geeks, writers, editors, professors, film, film, film, film, film.  I was on the student union group that booked and presented films in the Student Center.  I worked in a movie theater and have pretty much paid attention to film my whole life.

You can imagine my surprise when I ran across an old film tonight I had never seen.  It was The Shop Around The Corner, 1940, with Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullivan and Frank Morgan and directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  Why have I never seen this?  Why did it take so long?

It is a nice, simple story about a man and a woman who become pen pals and fall in love with each other.  They don't realize they work together in the same shop.  Margaret Sullivan is constantly bitchy to Jimmy Stewart completely unaware that she is being horrible to the man whose letters she memorizes.  Through the written word they fall in love.

Leonard Maltin, in his movie guide, says that first it was a play, then it was a movie, then it was a musical, then it was remade into You've Got Mail, which I have never seen.  And never hope to.

But I did enjoy The Shop Around The Corner.  And God bless Turner Classic Movies and the education that cable channel is giving me.  I have seen such great things during this dearth of quality network programming we are experiencing.  They just keep going the cheap route with so called reality programming.  It's just shock radio bought to television.  Oh, by all means, let's have another season of people getting married, people going on dates, horrible people voting on who is going to get kicked off the island or out of the house or out of the final talent contest.  But Americans just lap it up and can't get enough of it.  At least we all have something to talk about at work the next day.  Or on message boards.

I had a good Sunday.  I drove around and looked at stuff.  I ate lunch, went to the bookstore, went to a few other stores, just to get out of the house. When I got back home I started doing my laundry, read some of my new book Impro by Keith Johnstone and did a little writing.

I could have cleaned up the house.  Could have but didn’t'.  HA!

One more improv class tomorrow night.  I will get the chance to attend a workshop in a week or so.  The workshops are open to class graduates and their regular troop players.  They do scenes and then talk about them.  It is sort of like a class but more free form.  I'm really looking forward to it.  The only thing that could ruin it would be if I have to be on call.

I had a dream the other night that I went to work and Viarum was gone and there was a big, empty place where his desk was.   You know what it looks like when you move out of an apartment or a house and the rooms are empty and there is just dust and scraps of paper and lint where all of your stuff used to be?  That's what it looked like.

Last night I dreamed I heard meowing in the bag I carry to work.  Inside a cat had given birth to kittens and they were all squirming around blind.  Then they found their mother's breast and started feeding.  How the hell did that happen? Why did that cat give birth in my case?

Later, in my dream, my father was trying to check out of a hotel without paying so he decided to fake his death.  I burst into his room as his landlady (?) was checking on him.  He pretended to commit suicide by eating necco wafers.  I pretended I was with the police and asked him why he did it.  He took a piece of paper and drew the cat's breasts and handed it back to me and said, "When it comes down to it that's all it is."

I did not know what he was talking about, but I decided to take him off to the hospital.

I looked up cats, breasts, kittens, nursing and suicide in a dream book and none of them are good omens.  Not even happy, fluffy kittens.  Isn't that funny, if I dream about sweet little kitty cats it foretells certain doom.   Unless I drive them away or kill them in the dream.  I don't know what is coming up but I don't think it is going to be good.
 

Then again, perhaps it is just my sleep deprivation catching up with me.  All week long I don't dream because I don't get much sleep.  When I sleep on the weekend I have to process everything my brain does not get a chance to process for the past five days.

Maybe it was just a jumble.

We'll see.

Jimmy
 

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