Arsenic and Old Lace

I received quite a few nice e-mails from friends with condolences about our parting. They did make me feel a little better. I have always had a hard time feeling, deep inside, that people care about me like they obviously do. It's not like they don't demonstrate it regularly. It's like I have some thick shell which prevents me from entirely feeling it. It's strange and a little perverse. When people tell me straight out that they care about me, I always end up having these pangs of modesty (or something), which make me think, "Why would you care about me? I'm no one special." Perhaps I feel that I don't reciprocate properly (whatever "properly" means) and therefore I don't feel deserving of their caring.

Anyway. I received letters and I appreciated them.

I proceeded to spend most of Friday walking around like a zombie. Though in my defense we had both an extended farewell lunch for an intern whose last day was yesterday, and a beer bash. Plus I worked out in the morning which made me feel physically tired as well as emotionally tired. So that's not really too unexpected.

I took it all out on Tom by kicking his butt several times at Quake. Actually he kicked my butt the first couple of games and I got frustrated with him and shouted at him when we had trouble talking to each other over the phone. Ugh. I got over it, I think.

Friday night we played Bridge at Becky's. Me, Becky, Grant, Subrata, Ben, Rollie, Kelly, and special surprise guest John. I think John mainly wanted to grill me about Adrienne. He has barely played Bridge in the past year, and it sounds like he has some vague interest in getting back into it, though I'm not certain. Anyway, he and I ended up partnered up for most of the evening.

It was a good evening. I even had some port (I rarely drink, especially if I have to drive). The port was very yummy.

Today I puttered around at home for a while, and then met Subrata to go see Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, playwright and famous bachelor, who has just gotten married to his neighbor Elaine (Priscilla Lane). En route to their honeymoon, he stops off to visit his aunts Abby and Martha (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair), lively old ladies who live in the house he grew up in in Brooklyn. While there, he discovers that they've been quietly killing lonely old men who come into their house looking to rent a room, and having his brother Teddy (John Alexander), a nutty guy who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, bury them in the basement. Mortimer tries to figure out how to get them to stop without sending them to jail, and things get worse when Mortimer's itinerant cousin Jonathan (Raymond Massey) and his assistant Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) show up.

The whole thing is played as a very broad farce, based mainly on all of the characters being essentially stupid or tunnel-visioned, and therefore unable to make sense of one another. While this gives Grant the opportunity to mug the camera with his many funny faces (and who knew he had so many?), the story is fundamentally unbelievable and ultimately frustrating, even if it does towards the end poke fun precisely at stories which are based on characters being stupid. (It might have actually worked better as a satire on 1970s horror movies, which it obviously can't be.)

There are plenty of giggles to be had, but it's far from Grant's best work. Only Peter Lorre comes out of this one not looking like a complete ninny.

After the movie we went to the Peninsula Creamery for dinner (well, I had dinner; Subrata just had a malt), and then I headed to Borrone to read. John joined me there around 7:30 and we talked. Yeah, he finally grilled me successfully about Adrienne. We talked about relationships generally for a while, and then moved on to other things. (I had hoped that Lucy would show up at some point, but she never did. I have this nagging feeling that she told me at some point that she'd be out of town this weekend, but I'm darned if I can remember.)

We headed back to John's place around 10:00, where we went to pick up some junk food (mmmmm) and watched the first episode of The West Wing on tape. It turns out that NBC recently had a West Wing Week where they showed five episodes from this past (first) season, and since I'm weeks behind on my television (gee, wonder why?) I had heard nothing about it. Anyway, I'd never seen the pilot before, and it was quite good, though it seems clear that it was originally written without the President (Martin Sheen) ever showing up, which I think was the original premise of the show. It's much better with him in it, of course; Sheen is one of the show's biggest assets.

We had a fine time, all around. Even if we did spend ten minutes watching Martha Stewart on cable afterwards.