odd night

[fflo]

Had a lousy headache this evening. Had to come home & lie down, and just felt like crap. Eventually I got up & watched the end of The Marrying Kind, a Ruth Gordon Garson Kanin George Cukor Judy Holliday picture I'd never seen. I'd stopped late last night, sensing where it was about to go, and not wanting that then. But it was alright tonight. I pronounce the movie a good movie. A lot less schtick than usual with Ms. Holliday, and some smart stuff, and some odd stuff. And some old New York stuff.

Then I watched a copy of Fame I've had out of the library, fast-forwarding through parts. I sure was into that movie when I was a kid. Went to see it twice, when I rarely went to movies once. It wasn't anything to do with fame, or the desire for it--- the draw, for me. It was those young people practicing taking themselves seriously. Terribly seriously, yeah, sure. But. The novelty, at the time, I'm tellin' ya. And, y'know, the deep gaping need for a shot at such an attitude myself.

Boy the gay guy was sure expected to have a shitty life cuzza the gay thing, wasn't he? "Never being happy [pause] isn't the same as being unhappy, [pause] ---is it?" he asks his fellow acting students, monologuing, and they applaud with silence, in the heavy rhetorical air.

Paul McCrane eventually became a doctor on ER. Nancy Kulp, the lesbian from The Beverly Hillbillies who was later a politician, has a bit part in The Marrying Kind. I recognized her but not Charles Bronson, who was apparently in there too. And Wallace Shawn was in (the truly lousy) All That Jazz, which I finally saw most of last night, when I wasn't fast-forwarding through it. His part's so small I'm not sure he even has a line.