Aurevoir, Mon ami

Of course, in the indigence tableau of choices, free broadcast is offering a film to honor Mary Tyler Moore, Just Between Friends. Ted Danson walking in the doorway as if caught with his pants down; Ebert saying it had a made for television feel, which it did. Despite progressive analysis of Moore as sexually assertive against Dick Van Dyke, I never saw her character, as Mary Richards, basically all she knew how to play, as anything but brave and glaring veneers, which made her angry and repressed matron all the more terrifying in Ordinary People. (I agree with certain online critics that Ordinary People ignites genuine terror, and it is due entirely to Moore miraculously winding up her fury into something we all desire to flee. Oh it is dated, with all the known elements, Hirsch the patriarch who can absorb anything, but if anything indicts Episcopalian America, Ordinary People deserves a shrine.) But as to this Reagan era teleplay, the premise was interesting, and might have been a vehicle for vicious recrimination which doesn't, in fact, so easily resolve. It was too civil, and lacked courage to truly say something about marriage, family.

Facebook at least did me one service, and that is to realize I cannot roll backward and go home. Looking at my mother's sister in her anniversary photo with my uncle. I cannot go back, so, if I step off Presby, I am essentially on my own. I am so scarred that the mold no longer fits, sitting down to my sister in law's eggplant after a vigorous affair with a computer consultant who lived westward past Longwood Gardens: I'm not there anymore, and realized, that if so many days back, I grabbed O'Brien's follow like a floating life raft, it was a rather brittle salvage effort: I am not strong enough, not anymore, either for my complacent unhappiness as a life long public housing tenant with one sole agent, or to survive the violent disruption I'm shortly to bring upon myself. I have no answer, truly. I can battle waiver services again, but my temperament is such, that if I terrified Eddie the day after her sexual conduct, minority attendant conflict resolution 2.0 may get me a jacket, or killed. These rationalizations from all the duress I've eaten, maybe the next one won't, what? Maybe the next one won't swindle me? Try to extort me?

In that sense, my failure to see Moore, despite her comedic timing, as anything more than a titular representation of a fait accompli, might be forgiven. Always there, her gregarious teeth, her occasional references to diabetes.