sundries

Up and out of bed hours before I wanted to be today because someone else screwed something up and I had to fix it. Not happy.

I think the tomato plant has a third tiny tomato, but I am not sure.

Last night a bunch of us went to a fundraiser for the Jazz Age weekend at Governor's Island in a couple of weeks. It was held at Green Building and it was a stunning, delightful space and a hell of a night even if I feel like I know the Dreamland Orchestra's set by heart now. Pictures will be forthcoming.

I danced a bit with a photographer, Don Spiro, whose work I've posted here before. That was nice because I was dressed like a man and he was so chill about asking me to dance and whether I wanted to lead or not. And he taught me stuff, because this is not my era of dance and it was just fun, and I wasn't awful (although I never understand which way to turn) and it made me feel like, yes, I can totally learn to be a better lead even though I'm small, and you know, it really won't kill me to go take some proper swing dance classes -- I've avoided this because it speaks to some deep trauma of my teens and twenties, some idea that it's too horrible to force a stranger to be so close to me, some certainty that any man there will assume I'm there not to learn to dance, but to try to pick someone up. I know it all sounds crazy, but I've known a lot of crazy people, many of whom thought the worst of me even while desiring me, and I'm good at navigating around my issues, shall we say.

Okay, goal is to hunker down and get stuff done so I can get out of here as quickly as possible.

Dear Donna

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/arts/25donna.html

“It has been a long time since any of us boys have seen a woman, so we are writing to you in hopes that you’ll help us out of our situation,” Cpl. Frank J. Gizych lamented in a letter posted from the fog-shrouded Aleutian Islands. “Since we know that it’s impossible to see a woman in the flesh, we would appreciate it very much if you could send us a photo of yourself.”

It was July 1944, and America was at war. From bases and battlefields in Europe and on Pacific islands, soldiers, sailors and airmen were sending streams of letters to their favorite actresses in Hollywood, asking for pinup photos and commenting on life on the front lines.

Almost all of that mail, which studios usually answered with a glossy shot showing the star in a saucy pose, has been lost. But the actress Donna Reed, later famous for her roles as Mary Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the middle-class housewife Donna Stone on “The Donna Reed Show” and who won an Oscar for “From Here to Eternity,” saved some of the correspondence. After nearly 65 years in a shoebox inside an old trunk long stored in the garage of her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., the letters have at last been read and made public by the actress’s children. Ms. Reed died in 1986 at age 64.

...

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.

...

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

I can't recommend this story highly enough. Both because it is Memorial Day, but also because it offers a really unique window on (and starting point for discussion about) fan/celebrity interaction.

really super sundry

Tom Felton has been confirmed as a guest for Dragon*Con. This changes the shape of the con for me a little bit, as you might imagine.

Vernian Process's cover of Cloudbusting seriously weirds me out and gives me plot bunnies.

Patty and I just got tickets for:
- Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (What are they going to do with Lady Anne, this is what I want to know!)
- Leila
- a screening of Metropolis (still incomplete) with music from 3epkano
- There's some other stuff we've got to get on in the ticket department too, including Joe Turner's Come and Gone. I'll probably look at that after I've eaten dinner.