My wife and I are frequently driven to marvel at what the entertainment media offer as the way couples are depicted going about the business of being couples. Apparently, one is supposed to devote a good deal of time trying to achieve petty victories over the opposite number, while remaining at constant hair-trigger for any signs of infidelity. This latter is defined as an inability to overcome countless millenia of biology and a lifetime of programming (largely by the very same media) to have one’s attention engaged by an attractive member of the opposite sex (or, in roughly 10% of cases, the same one). We are of the opinion that people who actually act in this manner are extremely insecure in their relationship. She does not panic when when I’m in the room during an airing of “Next Top Model”, I do not decry her watching of Conrad Veidt or Vincent D’Onofrio films.
Which brings me to a couple of nights ago, when Flying Down to Rio was showing on TCM. I was giving our son a bath, and missed the beginning; I came out to find a musical number underway, which given the era and nature of the film unsurprising. My wife entered from the kitchen, and we spoke to each other, she with her back to the TV, and so she missed Ginger Rogers appearing in a dress that I have to imagine was viewed in 1933 as somewhere between “extremely daring” and “utterly scandalous.” As we conversed, I interjected, “Say, have a glance at what she’s wearing.”
“Well, that is a corker,” said my wife, and we went on with the topic of the moment.
A few minutes later, the scene went to Gene Raymond and Dolores del Rio writing telegrams in adjoining booths in a hotel lobby. Both of us had left the room to attend to diverse cat emergencies (she a hairball, me our son’s efforts to draw one of them into recreating a Looney Tune scenario), and we found ourselves in much the same arrangement as previously. She said something to me, and I attended not in the least, my gaze fixed upon the spectacle on the screen. Eventually she stopped talking, looked at the TV, turned back to me, and poked me gently in the chest to bring me back to the present.
The astonishing thing I could not tear my focus away from? The amazing penmanship being attributed to Gene Raymond in a close-up of whatever he was writing. I don’t even remember the content.
…and yet, somehow, she puts up with me.
Today’s pen: Parker 50 Falcon
Today’s ink: Noodler’s blue
A quick filmographic aside: If you’ve not seen Flying Down to Rio, it’s worth a look for three reasons. First, there is amazing whimsy of a restaurant called The Aviators Club, which includes some dining spaces in an upper area rigged to look like an airship’s gondola. Did they have such things in the reality of 1933, or was it as astonishingly unreal to the contemporary audience as it was to us? Second, there is a lovely deflation of the racist notions of the day, regarding some “island savages” briefly encountered about half-way through. Finally, for those who want an example of the sort of saucy stuff movies were getting up to before the actual enforcement of the Hays code, there is the big final dance extravaganza, in which some of the chorines’ tops are far more diaphanous than the thing Rogers was wearing. One doesn’t really expect to be able to describe a single film as containing Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and frontal nudity, but this one can manage it of one doesn’t balk at some purely technically-present garments.