A fantastic evening at home

Hero Woman had mentioned needing to have dinner since she was coming over directly from work, so I’d kinda planned to have stuffed mirlitons, which I’d been planning to make for a while to find out what they were all about.  As is often the case with my cooking, I underestimated prep time so nothing was anywhere near done by the time Hero Woman arrived, and I had to keep getting up to tend to kitchen stuff during the movie.  I rushed scooping the pulp out of the shells—they were almost too hot to handle and I tore them up too much to be stuff-able, so I ended up putting the “stuffing” into a baking dish and calling it mirliton casserole.  It was good, but I need to halve the creole spice next time ’cos what I made was far too hot for L’s palate.

We watched Play It Again, Sam, one of my favorite Woody Allen movies and one of the few of his I think to be re-watchable (the others, in case you wonder, are Love and Death and Annie Hall).  After that, I offered a selection of three or four lighter films and one “heavy”—Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.  To my surprise, Hero Woman chose Last Picture Show, which I regard as something of a downer but absolutely the most honest of McMurtry’s novels about West Texas, and the one of his books that was loused up the least in transition to film, perhaps ’cos he wrote his own screenplay.  (Hero Woman and I agreed that Cybill Shepherd was hot, and Cloris Leachman maybe wasn’t hot but was definitely classy and beautiful.)  We watched almost until Sam the Lion’s death, but somehow seeing Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman going All The Way sorta . . . distracted us, so we’ll have to re-watch the end of the movie another time.  (The whole movie deserves a full-attention watching.)

Having been distracted, we excused ourselves and stayed distracted for A While, most pleasantly.  Afterward, I think I said far more than I ought and more than the situation should have had to bear.  I only hope I didn’t say something irrevocably wrong and fatal.

In short, it was a wonderful evening and I’d do almost all of it again in a New York minute.

The fluorescent speaker resounds with some evangelical whiffletrees.  Fnord.