Relativity
Here’s a newsmax.com headline that is not surprising given the national climate: “NRA Adds 150K Members This Year, Averaging 1K Per Day.” Obviously many relate.
Headline from foxnews.com of the can’t make this stuff up variety: “Hate crime suspect in NYC attack on parole for murdering his mom.” It’s all relative, I guess.
It’s tempting to look for symbolism and karma in this one, relatively speaking: “Biden dog poops on White House floor.”
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on OTA in NYC, ran Two Rode Together (1961), a hard-hitting though disjointed western starring James Stewart and Richard Widmark. It tackles prejudice and greed, painting an unflattering picture of the human race. Shirley Jones and Linda Cristal are the love interests. In researching the cast at IMDb, I focused on an actress unfamiliar to me despite a long run, Gertrude Astor. Her Hollywood career spanned 1915-’66, her last appearance coming on My Mother the Car. There are 334 titles under her name. What’s remarkable about her credits is that, unlike many of her peers, she did not make more than one appearance on any TV series. Born in 1887, she ran away from home at twelve, joined a riverboat musical troupe and learned to play the trombone and sax. She performed in stock, minstrel shows and vaudeville before being convinced by a friend to give Hollywood a shot. Because she was five-eleven, towering over many leading men, she was relegated to supporting parts, gold-digger, socialite, best friend. Her work is often noted as uncredited at IMDb, meaning she was in the background, without dialogue. Here are movies in which she appeared: The Great Ziegfeld (1936), San Francisco (1936), The Big Broadcast of 1938, The Wolf Man (1941), All About Eve (1950), Harvey (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), High Society (1955), The Searchers (1956), The Horse Soldiers (1959), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), The Sound of Music (1965). She did guest shots on I Love Lucy, Thriller! and The Untouchables. Here’s a quote attributed to her: “Books and personal contacts, coupled with travel, will give you an education that you cannot forget.” Never married, she passed away on her 90th birthday in 1977.
My thanks to The Quiet Man, who bought six more Do Wop CDs, and to Alice, who jumped on Up Country by Nelson DeMille, whom she’d inquired about two days ago; and to the woman who purchased The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud by Irving Stone; and to Wolf, who swapped five Nora Roberts Russian translations for a CD and 30-Second Einstein: The 50 Fundamentals of His Works, Life and Legacy, Each Explained in Half a Minute by Brian Clegg.
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