Trees, Horses, Monkeys

We bought an eight-foot Christmas tree today, from the drowned-in-the-flood Unitarian church up on Claiborne. By flood I don’t mean the Biblical one: I mean the one brought to us by Katrina and the US Army Corps of Engineers. It feels more like a New Zealand Christmas than an American one today, because it’s 81 degrees. Our friend, Dwight, tied the tree to the roof of his car so we didn’t have to stagger through the streets with it, and luckily he and T. Middy restrained themselves from a second round of last night’s argument – whether Elton John’s “Indian Sunset” is inferior to “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel. (Dwight’s point: Billy Joel uses cultural clichés but at least it’s his own culture. T. Middy’s point: Bernie Taupin is a better lyricist than Billy Joel – “It’s ‘a bottle of white/a bottle of red,’ for Christ’s sake!”)

My contribution was to play “Crazy Horses” by the Osmond Brothers for Dwight and his wife, Meghan, because they’d never heard it before. Never heard “Crazy Horses”! Dwight didn’t even know there were Osmond Brothers: he only knew about Donny and Marie. T. Middy misled him somewhat by listing their names as Harpo, Groucho and Chico rather than Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay, but hopefully now he knows better. He didn’t grow up glued to the Donny and Marie Show, as I did, and he’s never been to a show at the Osmond Family Theater in Branson, Missouri, as I have with my friend Julia Hamlin in 1998.

Tomorrow we are Federal government monkeys. T. Middy has been summoned for jury duty, and I have to get fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security. Both of us are dreading these duties, mainly because both of us expect to spend hours waiting around.

Maybe I can spend the time thinking about some of the questions plaguing me right now. For example, why did nobody tell Alicia Keys that she was singing flat all the way through “No One”? Why do so many people think that Eat, Pray, Love is a good book? (I’m finally trudging my way through the Love section, though I got bored senseless very early on in Eat.) Why do so many drivers ignore the one-way system in the Whole Foods parking lot, driving in past “no entry” signs and trying to squeeze their over-sized SUVs into spaces marked “compact only”? Who would eat that vile-looking McSkillet burrito we just saw advertised on TV?

And does Alfie, one of the cats who are not ours, really think he can get into our house by scaling the screen door?

Comments

[New Orleans News Ladder]

I really like your blog and hope that you like mine.
I posted you all the way at the bottom of today's issue.
http://noladder.blogspot.com/
Thanks,
Bruce

[TLB]

81 degrees! Do you you KNOW what we're dealing with up here? More than a foot of snow and now it's going to blow us into Canada.

Alfie does think he can get in that way. Mine think they can get out that way.

[pjkm]

If it makes you feel any better, there's a cold snap today. It's 60 degrees.

Alfie made it in yesterday, after wedging his paw between the door jamb and the just-open screen door. He got as far as the kitchen before I scooped him up and carried him back out.

[Brando]

T. Middy is correct, Taupin in a landslide. "Scenes..." came up on my iPod the other day and it's...not good.