BORGEN

There's a technical problem that prevents us from watching Netflix on the big TV. (We keep getting a message about "network interference.") It looks like this time we will need Donald to figure it out.  In the meantime we're renting DVDs from 2Q to make up for our lost entertainment, so we've started watching the third season of Borgen.  This time Birgitte is starting a new political party!

At yesterday's acting class Martha came and did her Marion Bridge monologue in preparation for an audition next week, where she's out for a role as Lizzie Borden's sister. And we did the scene from My Best Friend's Wedding where Julia Roberts got her gay friend Rupert Everett to pose as her boyfriend to make her true heartthrob jealous and win him back from his fiancee. (These Julia Roberts romantic comedy vehicles tend to have plots that require her to act childishly!) I had Dermot Mulroney's heartthrob role.  When I told Moira about it, she wanted to rent the movie again, which I've never seen.  I've seen very few Julia Roberts movies, and mostly with her in supporting roles.

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event at the Victory Cafe.  We talked about Balzac's Pere Goriot.  Twelve people said they were coming, so I made the reservation for six, and three people showed up. (John Snow would have been there, but he took sick.) Bernard was impressed when I guessed that he was from Mauritius:  his surname looked so exotic that I'd Googled it!

Our next event will be on November 16th, and we'll be discussing Henry James' The Europeans.  I decided that the following event should be ten weeks later, on January 25, and that we should read a moderately long book. (For a thousand-page book like some of Dickens' novels, we'll have two consecutive events.) We considered stuff like Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Dreiser's Sister Carrie, but I've decided I prefer Melville's Moby-Dick, because the other ones are too much like Pere Goriot.

This evening I got sick.  It must have been a combination of the home fries I had with lunch at the Victory Cafe--I always order lunch there in appreciation of our reservation--and the pizza we had for dinner.  I actually had to leave the room toward the end of the Borgen episode we were watching, though of course I was able to return and look at that part again.  And I burnt my mouth on the pizza:  the gum just over my upper front teeth, as usual.