tilt

 

        Recently on You Tube I encountered some videos about "flat earthers" -- people who say they believe the earth is not round, but rather flat.

        Someone in a comment section said, "If the earth were really flat, the cats would have pushed everything off the edge, by now."

        Makes sense.

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Comments on a news story today:

~~ Our country is in jeopardy of becoming an authoritarian regime.

~~ Well, George Wallace failed, and so will Trump.  America's democracy is too resilient.  It is not in our political DNA to tolerate autocrats.

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Remember in Friends when Monica's parents refer to someone messing up as, they "pulled a Monica" - ?  (Terrible parents, really, with their Ross-favoritism, that dynamic was played for laughs in the show....)

        I just found out today that the pretend-expression "pulled a Monica" had a real-life antecedent:  to "do a Brodie" meant 

to take a chance or a leap, specifically a suicidal one.

-------------------------- [excerpt from Woody Allen's autobiography] -------------------------------------- When he comes home, the old man, my grandfather, has added a few zeroes to his bank account and smokes Corona Coronas.  He's the only Jew working as the traveling rep for a big coffee company.  

My father runs errands for him, and one day lugging some coffee sacks around he passes a courthouse, and down the steps strolls Kid Dropper, a thug of the times.  The Kid gets into a car and some nonentity named Louis Cohen jumps on the car and puts four slugs through the window while my dad stands there staring.  

The old man told me this tale many times as a bedtime story, which was a lot more exciting than Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter.

        Meanwhile, my father's father, looking to become an industry, buys a string of taxicabs and a number of movie houses including the Midwood Theater, where I would spend so much of my childhood in flight from reality, but that came later.  I first had to be born.  Unfortunately, prior to that little cosmic long shot, Dad's dad, in a burst of manic euphoria, bet more and more on Wall Street, and you can see where this is going.  

On a certain Thursday the stock market did a big Brodie, and my grandfather, high roller that he was, was reduced to instant abject poverty.  The cabs go, the movie houses go, the coffee company bosses jump out windows.  

My father, suddenly responsible for his own caloric intake, is forced to go on the hustle; he drives a cab, runs a poolroom, strikes out with assorted scams and makes book.  

Summers he is paid to go to Saratoga to attend to questionable horse-racing business for Albert Anastasia.  

Summers upstate were another series of bedtime stories.  

How he loved that life.  Fancy clothes, a big per diem, sexy women, and then somehow he meets my mother.  Tilt.  How he wound up with Nettie is a mystery on a par with dark matter.  

Two characters as mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit, they disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards.  And yet with all the verbal carnage, they stayed married for seventy years -- out of spite, I suspect.  

Still, I'm sure they loved each other in their own way, a way known perhaps only to a few headhunting tribes in Borneo.

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{Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen.  Copyright 2020.  Arcade Publishing.}

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