COVER GIRL

Chorus girl (answering the phone): "Sure, I'll marry you.  Who are you?"--Cover Girl

Sunday afternoon was Reading Out Loud.  The subject was love, and I titled the event "Spring Is For Lovers"! The weather was so warm that I walked down to Victory Cafe!  I read a section from Doctor Zhivago where Yuri was riding between his wife and his mistress, as well as the early Yeats poem "The Cap and Bells, " and "Nora, the Maid of Killarney" by the World's Worst Poet William McGonagall.  Some other people lent me their material so I also got to read W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." (I noticed, more clearly than before, that "Dover Beach" is about aging.)

Choir practice was cancelled this week, so I went to the Revue and saw Charles Vidor's Rita Hayworth-Gene Kelly musical Cover Girl.  That's the one about a chorus girl who appears on a big magazine and goes on to Broadway stardom, but what about her sweetheart?  I liked the subplot about her grandmother going through a parallel story.  Phil Silvers (playing a character called Genius) did a number about wartime rationing with the classic rhyme "I'll keep on eating artichokes until the Nazi Party chokes!" The most famous song was "Long Ago and Far Away."

Tonight I went to a Storytelling Meetup, this time at Free Times Cafe.  I talked about my eight months in London twenty years ago (which I'd written about at the memoir slam the day before) and visiting the Canadian National Exhibition back in 1975.  Most of them were telling specific stories, but I was basically just doing brief rambles.  Oh, well...

For some reason, my back feels really stiff these days.  I had to nap a couple of times this afternoon because of it.