Schwinn 48

I finally got out on my bicycle in 2013. It has been two weeks since I last rode; since I rode down to view the high and dry wreck of the USS Inaugural. That was so last year though. In the interim they’ve decided to cut that boat up for scrap. By way of an excuse, I was laid up for a week. I had an awful pain in my back, really my backside, but time seems to have healed that self-inflicted wound. I really don’t know what caused the muscle cramp, but the result was painful and it has taken longer than I would have liked for it to disappear. I did feel a momentary twinge, when I first hunched over the handlebars, but I was racing other cyclists by the time I hit Wydown. Saturday, was a beautiful day. Everybody and their brother were in the park.

Anne walked her bike over to Mesa. It has been two months since her accident and she is not yet ready to throw her leg over the bike again, but yesterday’s weather got her blood moving too. Now, when she is ready, her bike will be also.

I watched a pair of movies Saturday night and no odder couple could you find. They were as different as night and day. The first one is available on Amazon Prime, “My Man Godfrey”, a 1936 American screwball comedy. Carole Lombard plays a scatterbrained socialite who hires a vagrant, William Powell, as the family butler, but ‘there’s more to Godfrey than meets the eye’. I watched this movie after hearing Stephen Metcalf, of Slate’s Cultural Gabfest; he endorsed this film as one that he and his children enjoyed watching together.

Having watched this movie, I can see how the passage of almost eighty years, could have eroded what was once first-run fare, to something for entertaining the kids. The passage of time not only scours these gems of comedy, but is also obfuscates some of their meaning. In his review, Roger Ebert illuminated the scene where Carole Lombard and the maid discuss sewing on Godfrey’s buttons. Then elegant men’s formalwear didn’t use zippers. We can read her mind when Lombard says, “I’d like to sew his buttons on sometime, when they come off.” In 1936, the audience must have gotten this joke without explanation and they wouldn’t have shared it with the kiddies. The fact that Powell and Lombard had once been married could only serve to heighten the tittering crowd’s volume.

The second movie was night to “Godfrey” ‘s day. It was Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”. This apparently self-directed thriller, at least according to the Academy, is otherwise in the Oscar hunt. In a cold rain, Anne, Joanie and I drove to the Esquire to watch it. This movie is really too big a subject to try to shoehorn into this already full post.

I’ll save it for another day, except to say that there were so many previews for violent action movies that I almost came to believe the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, when he asserts that guns don’t let madmen kill people, Hollywood does. As penance, I assented to Anne’s demand to choose the next movie and this was all before the movie began. I have a feeling that I’ll be feeling a little ”Les Mis”-erable later this week, but I won’t worry about that today, I’ll worry about that tomorrow. Tonight it is the Golden Globes with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Let the drinking games begin! 😉