Month: April 2011

I started to write a post about the free online to-do list I found: Toodle-do. You can list tasks and goals and make notes and set due dates and start dates and set it to send an e-mail each morning to remind you what you’re supposed to do for the day. You can spend hours setting up your list, deciding whether things look better in green or blue or pink or salmon or beige.

Then I thought about Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. She’s telling the painter what colors she wants the various rooms painted, describing the colors in the  most specific terms possible. I googled the scene and found it on Youtube, and I watched it, and she is just marvelous.

I noticed a link to an episode of What’s My Line when Myrna Loy was the guest challenger, so I watched it. I’d never realized how much she looked like my Great-Aunt Elizabeth.

My grandmother looked  like Claudette Colbert, and right down the column was a clip of the episode with Claudette Colbert as the guest challenger, so I watched that, too.

Then I watched episodes of What’s My Line with Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jonathan Winters.

After that, I watched Jonathan Winters on the Steve Allen Show; and on the Jack Paar Show, first playing the Voice of Spring just arrived from the forest, and then improvising with a stick; and then as Maudie Frickert on the Dean Martin Show; and then being interviewed by Jack Paar in England, first playing a British gentleman and then playing an American tourist; and then in a recently-discovered clip, playing an airline pilot; and then on the Dean Martin Show, improvising with props in an attic.

I read a comment that reminded me that Jonathan Winters was in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Because I had just seen a link to the entire movie of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, I decided to see whether I could find a link to the entire Mad World movie. I couldn’t.

Remembering that I had intended to copy the link to Myrna Loy choosing paint colors, I again googled it and so found myself back on the page with all the links to What’s My Line. I was tempted to watch the one with Alfred Hitchcock and the one with Grace Kelly as well, but a look at the clock reminded me that I had begun this post with the intention of finishing it tonight and then moving on to write a piece I have to send to a Story Circle Network friend who edits one of its newsletters.

I volunteered to write a column for April, but that was in January. Actually, I volunteered for February if she couldn’t find anyone else, but she did, so I’m April, and it’s due tomorrow, and oh, how I wish I’d done it in February and gotten it over with. But I didn’t.

I e-mailed the editor this morning and told her I hadn’t forgotten, even though for several weeks I had, and said I would send it to her. I intended to write it this morning and e-mail it, but the muse was busy helping someone else–I don’t have a muse of my own, mine comes from a temp agency–so I’m hoping that the pressure of a deadline will come to my aid tomorrow well before breakfast.

Now for the other things that were to go into this post: I was going to write about all my Franklin planners, particularly the ones that were stolen from my car one night while I slept, along with a can of asparagus, and I was going to refer to Alice Flaherty’s observation in The Midnight Disease, and quoted in my last Teaser Tuesday, that to-do lists don’t cure procrastination because people who procrastinate know exactly what they’re not doing, and I was also going to point out that although Toodle-do sends me a daily e-mail saying that each of the three tasks I entered is overdue, said Toodle-do cannot make me open and read said e-mail.

That’s what I was going to write about before I thought about Myrna Loy. I will mention that Myrna Loy was also an outstanding citizen who held benefits for my hero, John Henry Faulk, back in the ’50s when he was blacklisted, but then I would have to go into everything about John Henry and the First Amendment and the Constitution and James Madison and Louis Nizer and John Henry’s court case and Molly Ivins and various other things, and I would also remember that last Thanksgiving we had lunch with friends at Green Pastures, the Faulk family home, which John Henry’s sister turned into a restaurant, and that it sits among old live oaks and has peacocks strutting about the lawn, and that it isn’t far from here, and that they start you off with a milk punch (3 C vanilla ice cream, 1-1/2 C milk, 1/2 C bourbon, 1/4 C white rum, 1 jigger brandy, 3 ice cubes, nutmeg, combine and blend until consistency of milkshake, serve in wine glasses and sprinkle nutmeg on top, makes about 5 C) that is to die for and that I drank both mine and David’s and was quite relaxed and rather jolly throughout the buffet luncheon.

Isn’t it amazing how you can manage to come up with 900 words when you don’t have to write but can’t eke out a half-dozen when you do.

And, Susan, if you’re reading this, don’t you dare tell Lee how far behind I am.

For a look at what I did the rest of my day/year/life, please watch this video:

http://www.addadhdblog.com/age-activated-add/#71ec7

Doris Day is eighty-eight today. Or eighty-seven or eighty-nine. The number doesn’t matter. To celebrate, we watched Send Me No Flowers. Not her best–I much prefer Lover, Come Back–but we were limited to whatever we could find on streaming. She’s still cute. Rock Hudson and Tony Randall are still cute. They’re part of my childhood. I like them. So sue me. Doris Day is also good to animals.

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Richard Chamberlain was seventy-seven several days ago. When I was ten, he was Dr. Kildare on TV. All the girls in the fifth grade were simply agog. He sang, too.

I’m going to post this to meet the midnight deadline. Then I’m going to come back and write some more.

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That was totally unprofessional, but until I’m paid to do this, I shall take liberties.

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In one episode, Dr. Kildare sang. Actually, he sang in more than one episode, but I remember best his rendition of “Hi Lili Hi Lo.” Here’s a link to a video accompanied by the song.

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Lew Ayres starred in the film Young Dr. Kildare in 1938, and went on to star in several more Dr. Kildare movies. According to Wikipedia, he was offered the starring role in the NBC television series. Ayres requested that he show have no cigarette advertising. The network refused and the part went to Richard Chamberlain. That was in 1961.

Rocking the boat over tobacco was a very Lew Ayres thing to do. Denied guaranteed entry to the Medical Corps in World War II, he declared himself a conscientious objector. Faced with unwelcome publicity, the government revised the rules. Ayres joined the Medical Corps and served in the Pacific.

Lew Ayres was one of those actors, like Charles Laughton and Audrey Hepburn–who brought class to a show–whether Johnny Belinda or Mary Tyler Moore–by just showing up on the screen. That class obviously wasn’t an act.

Here’s a link to Young Dr. Kildare. In its entirety.

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Now that I’ve demonstrated my own deficiency in the class department–posting an unfinished piece shows an appalling lack of respect for my readers, as well as for myself as a writer–and now that I’ve groveled sufficiently–I’ll put an end to this.

Thanks for your support.

 

11:56 p.m.: Some things do not change.

Here we go again.

April 1, 11:38 p.m., I’m working as fast as I can to finish Hotshots! so it will go out tomorrow–today no longer being an option–and I remember that I said I would blog every day this month.

So I close Hotshots!, open To write is to write is to write, and start typing. Not thinking, just typing.

11:41. Charlie Rose is conversing with Roger Rosenblatt and Stanley Fish. They’re saying all kinds of memorable things about writing, but I’m not fast enough to write them down.

11:44. But here are some scraps. Writing is for some students the site of anxiety. Couldn’t get Harvard students to get anything original out of themselves until he closed the door and said, “Write. No throat clearing. Write.”

11:46 Clip of Ian McEwan. Beginnings are difficult. You finally find yourself in control. That’s the real pleasure. How can you not write? But always craving to reach the end.

11:47  It’s in my DNA. To figure things out and explain to other people. Same joy as teaching, but teaching is harder–pesky students aren’t always cooperative.

11:48 Rarely know what I’m thinking before I write. Don’t have anything to explain. Living in the mystery and discovering what you’ve said when you look back. Write what you know? Shelley: Must learn to imagine what we know.

11:49 Write what you want to know. A problem or a puzzle you want to figure out what’s going on.

11:50 Satisfaction from teaching. Don’t want to let them down. Writing lonely. Give self to students selflessly. If you fail them, you want the time back.

11:51 How do you know when it’s finished? Have a feeling, like music. Easier to know when finished than to know when begun. Eliminate the first paragraph.

11:52 In search of something. In search of answers. Then surprise when what you’ve written raises a question you didn’t know before and you want to follow it. We express ourselves, and the selves we express are different.

11:53 Quotation–last lines from “Dover Beach.” Writing makes suffering beautiful. Quotation–from George Herbert’s “The Forerunners.” Verbal thing that knocks your socks off.

11:55 Goodnight.