Four of us went to see the play, “Left on 10th” yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It started slow, but got good. It’s an adaptation from Delia Ephron’s best selling book about here life.
It stars Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher, two tv favorites of mine.
The ending was surprising to me, which made it more enjoyable.
Julianna plays Delia, Nora Ephron’s sister, and the play is about her fight with cancer and her meeting Peter and falling in love at the same time. It’s sad at times, but mostly it isn’t. And knowing that it is all a real story, makes it even more interesting.
They meet up again after the death of both their spouses, they had gone on a date many years before but Delia/Juliana doesn’t remember and it goes on from there.
Left on Tenth refers to the direction Delia would give to people to help find her apartment in the West Village in NYC.
Went to MOMA yesterday because it was raining. But who am I kidding, I would have gone anyway.
But so many other people showed up as well. They mobbed Starry Night, I guess mostly because it was moved from the fourth floor to the second floor for some sort of exhibit related to that era.
I found a wallet on the floor and brought it to lost and found. The lady there said, “Thank you, I’ll keep it for you.”
I said, “Don’t keep it for me, hold it for the rightful owner.”
She said, “Right.”
Hopefully he gets it. I didn’t really go through it, but there might have been a phone number, I didn’t think of it at the time.
This is the third time I found someone’s wallet. One time it was on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa. A guy left his wallet on the roof of his car at a gas station and drove off. All the papers and everything blew out of the wallet along with the wallet. My friend Victor and I chased down the papers and managed to track down the guy using a check that was in the wallet.
Anyway, if you ever lose a wallet, check with me, I might have it.
We’ve have painters here, painting our condo building for over a month now. They’ll probably be here for another month. They’re doing a wonderful job, but it’s almost like living on a reality show.
What I mean is, they are everywhere, but we sort of ignore them. I mean we say, “Hello,” and “Goodbye” and we buy them coffee and snacks and things, but during the day, they are all around us and we just go on about our business with them sort of in our faces.
One day they are out on my balcony and another day up on a lift outside my bedroom window. And I just go about my business as does the rest of the residents in our small building.
Everyone knows everyone and we all know the painters, but still, they are not one of us – they are the camera men and the sound men and the lighting men, “shooting the show.”
It’s an odd thing. Odd feeling. As I sit here typing this, one guy is outside the window sort of looking in. He’s not really looking in, but I feel as if he is – filming me for the reality show.
Every time you turn around, there they are – with their imaginary camera in your face, staring at you. At least it feels like that. No privacy when they are literally hanging right outside your window.
The painters know our schedules and all our little quirks. I’m sure they know I would rather park in my regular parking space than out on the street, as many neighbors are doing. They covered my car with a drop cloth the other day so I didn’t have to move it. They didn’t ask, they just knew.
They know when I leave for lunch, I usually come back with coffee for them – they like Cuban coffee, I get them a double colada, a doble, and I usually buy them doughnuts and other stuff.
I like them all. They are all friendly and polite and nice guys. And they are doing a wonderful job, they clean up after themselves and are always on time, but I can’t wait for the day they yell, “CUT!” and filming of the reality show is over.
Looks like everyone is moving to Bluesky – it’s a better version of X/Twitter.
I already had an account, I don’t know when I opened it, but sometime when it was new awhile ago, I think I got an invite and I opened the account then. It sat dormant but now I am interacting and have three accounts.
It all feels so new, like when Twitter was new so many years ago. I’ll go onto people’s profiles to see what they are all about and they have maybe two or three posts. That’s it! So new and fresh.
I am still on X/Twitter, but I’m trying to build up my Bluesky readership, so if you are there, let’s follow each other! And the same names/handles are on Threads, if you are so inclined.
On another note, I put up the Christmas tree yesterday. I know, I know, too early.
I’m going out of town until December, so I wanted to get it up so I don’t have to deal with it when I return home. I only lit it to take this picture, I’m not lighting it until mid-December. That’s when I’ll bring it alive.
I’ll be in NY for Thanksgiving – leaving early, coming home late, you know, stretching it out.
I’ll be putting up the Christmas tree over the weekend.
I know, I know. Too early.
The thing is I am going to NY for a couple of weeks and when I get home, it will be the first week of December, so I like to just have it up so I don’t feel rushed and have to deal with it then.
I don’t light it up until December. Right now I’ll just have it up and decorated. Ready to go.
One year, I had the tree up in October! It wasn’t decorated.
What happened was, my friend Michael was visiting from NY and the spare room he was sleeping in, is used as storage for the tree, which of course, is artificial, so to make room, I dragged the tree out and stood it up in the living room. That’s it. It was not decorated or lit or anything like that. It just stood there. Naked.
I always had a real tree. I would throw it in the back of my convertible and lug it home.
One year I saw a nice tree in a big box store and thought I would get it and use it for a year or two and then go back to real trees, but it’s been so many years now and I still use the artificial tree. It’s so easy – just pull it out and it’s up. No lugging real trees in and out. To dump the real trees, I would throw them off the balcony, making sure no one was below. Then I would just drag it to the street.
When we were cleaning my parents’ house out this year, I was hoping to find the old Christmas ornaments from years past – from when we were kids and before; vintage stuff. But there was nothing old – just new ornaments. I’m guessing the old ones were ruined years ago in a hurricane, and I never paid attention to what was on the tree all these years, which obviously was new things which took their place.
When we were kids, I mean very little, we would put the tree up (real tree) a couple of weeks before Christmas. Now it seems people have trees up right after Halloween. I see some of the lots in the neighborhood at churches and clubs, already have their tents up with trees – probably to be sold out before Thanksgiving.
Whenever I want to talk to one of my friends on the phone, I text him. Because he doesn’t usually text back, he calls.
I don’t call him because he is on the phone a lot due to his job, so he can’t always talk when I call. So simply by texting, I get him to call back, when he can, which oddly enough, is right away.
As for me, I don’t pick up the phone most of the time – especially with business.
Years ago, my accountant, well, my father, asked me why business was down so much in the last quarter, and I told him probably because I took the business phone number off the website. And he said, in a half joking way, “Well, you better put it back on.” And I did, but for the past few years I haven’t.
When people call, which is few and far between since today most people email or text, the messages asks the to email us, and they do.
I know it’s maybe a Millennial thing, where they cringe at the sound of a phone ringing. But I do the same. There’s something new with cell phones now where even if you don’t have the person’s or company’s phone number in your phone, it will tell you who it is, many time by the person’s name, not just the company. So that’s a big help.
I can remember when Caller ID came out. That was a big thing. It was a small electronic thing you attached to the phone (which was still on a wire back then). And then you could avoid most calls. Although we didn’t text or email back then, so we picked up anyway, no matter who called. We had to.
Western Electric Telstar Phone
At one point I had a hot dog cooker type phone, I don’t know how else to describe it. It took me forever to find this image online – I didn’t know how to describe it. But here it is – it’s called the Western Electric Telstar Phone. You had to roll back the cover every time you wanted to use it, but that was part of the charm/coolness. I had it for years.
Now we have smartass phones. Wonder what’s next. Probably telepathy.
Did you turn the clock back to standard time? I know many of you don’t like that, it seems as if the majority of the country prefers Daylight Saving Time (DST). I don’t. I like standard time. DST sounds like a disease.
I get up early, so I don’t like the pitch black mornings, I like it light out. I don’t mind it getting dark at 5:30 or 6:00 pm. When I’m in New York it gets dark earlier, sometimes it seems like 4:30 or 5:00 pm.
DST started in the U.S. with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources. It was implemented again during World War II all year round. In 1966 it was set as it is now, basically half the year.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises permanent Standard Time. They say it is more in line with a person’s natural bio-rhymes and produces less negative health outcomes. They say Standard Time is important because it aligns the earth with the sun.
These days I’m in for the night at dinner time, not too long ago I was out all night, but even going out all night entailed going out after dark, so I never really cared about this stuff about having those extra hours of daylight for whatever people need it for.
I say you’re never too old. There’s a thing where certain cities have age limits, I don’t know how they enforce that. Do they ask 12-year-olds to show I.D. to be sure they are not 14 and over the limit? And what sort of I.D. do 12-year-olds have?
If a 16-year-old wants to go through the trouble of dressing up and walking around trick-or-treating, so what? What if a 50-year-old wants to do that? So what?
If you’re gonna be cheap about handing out candy, then turn the lights out at your house and don’t participate.
I don’t think as many people as in the past trick-or-treat. I know when I was a kid the whole neighborhood was out and it went till late. Now I don’t see as many people, but maybe it’s just around where I live.
One of my favorite parts of one of my favorite movies, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” is when the kids are doing Halloween in 1903. So Halloween has been a long-standing thing in the U.S., and many other countries.
Adults have parties, they dress up at banks, schools, even the car dealership, so if these people want to trick-or-treat after work – so what?
I dressed up for years, my whole town did. I didn’t trick-or-treat, but I did go to parties and things. I think I only ended it because I didn’t want to be bothered making a costume every year. But I enjoy seeing everyone else dressed up and enjoying the day.
Give everyone candy if they are dressed up and come to your door. Full bars if possible!
If you swipe back and forth on this recent cartoon, you can see the difference. No, it’s not the cat or the box, it’s the text at the top.
I wanted to publish it with the script type which says, “Thinking outside the box,” but at the last minute I changed it to the usual block letters because I wasn’t sure if everyone would be able to read it.
As you know, script/cursive was not taught in schools for about 14 years. I’m not sure why. I know things are mostly typed, spoken and digital these days, but don’t people need to sign their names? And no one writes a note to the milkman anymore. Oh, wait, I guess no one knows what a milkman is either.
I really like the look of the script text in the cartoon, but in the interest of all my readers – young and foreign, who maybe read English as a second language, I went with the block letters.
Oh, and a funny fact – this cartoon ran on National Cats Day. A reader mentioned it. I didn’t know – it just happened. Right place at the right time.
tomversation.com 