Don't open that door!

Hitchhiking on a truck: "And what a driver-- a great big tough truckdriver [sic] with popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig under way and paid hardly any attention to me.  So I could rest my tired soul a little, for one of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn't make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you're going all the way and don't plan to sleep in hotels"--On the Road

On a potential US Secretary of Energy: "Trust me, his only loyalty is to the Capitalist Party!"--Damages

Saturday afternoon with Dawna I saw two episodes of The Monkees and two of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Monkees were the first ersatz pop group-- my mother hated them!-- in a mildly goofy show. (There was a funny bit during a hotel caper when one of them entered a linen closet and ran off with a towel, and they showed the caption "Everyone does it"!) The Dick Van Dyke Show is still fairly funny today, and Mary Tyler Moore as his wife does a lot for it.

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup with scary writing the topic:  I titled the event "Don't Open That Door!" Eleven people came!  One of them was an American opera singer now performing in the COC's Arabella, who read a pretty good scary poem he'd written some years back.  

I read "Tam O'Shanter"; a story within a story in Richard Adams' rabbit adventure Watership Down, in which the rabbit hero Elalairah goes to the Black Rabbit in charge of death and tries to sacrifice his life to save his starving people; and the last chapter of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set in a charnel house for the executed. There was a Lovecraft story, a science fiction story someone had written, and a poem by James Agee! (I also got one girl to read Poe's "The Raven.")

We met in the Robarts Library food court, where there was a Chinese woman called Wendy drawing sketches of everyone in the place!  That's mine at the top.