a fly on the wall, you know?

You know when you’re sitting in your living room and suddenly a bean of sunlight streams into the window and you sit there staring at it?   You know how, like, after you’ve been staring at the beam of sunlight streaming into your living room you see hundreds of dust particles just floating there? And then you start to think, wow that’s a lot of dust, I should clean the house more often? But then you don’t because you don’t like to clean house?  And then you start thinking, crap I wonder which one of those dust particles is going to make me sneeze for an hour?  And then you know when you go to the mall and you’re having some frozen yogurt and you see a beam of sunlight with dust floating in it, and you think wow the mall is cleaner than my house?  And then you think you should spend more time at the mall, but then you don't?  And then you start thinking about when you’re walking around the house and you stub your toe a stool that you left in the middle of the room because you were going to clean something up high but then you didn’t? And then you curse and say ouch? You know? And then you start thinking about all those poor little flies.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

No?

You know when you’re writing a blog post and your readers can't figure out what you’re talking about?  Sheesh, I’ll explain.

Flies have to fly through those thousands of suspended dust particles all the time, all day long, for all of their lives.  And then you think about how fast flies fly and you wonder how many times a day they go wham into a dust particle, that to them is just about the size of that stool you left in the middle of the room. And then you know when you start wondering if flies curse and say ouch all day? And then you know when you sit there wondering whether flies displace enough air to move dust particles out of their way before they the fly smack dab into them?  And then you start thinking about 6th grade science and you remember that flies have five eyes.

You know when you’re walking down the street and you get some dust in your eye and you have to stop walking and rub your eye until the dust stops irritating your eye? 

You see what I’m getting at?

You do? Good for you!

And then you think about how glad you are that the piece of dust in your eye isn’t a stool.   Well, anyway, next time you wish you were a fly on the wall… don’t!  It’s just not as glamorous as it seems, you know?

The demise of perfection or the day I read Dropped Names by Frank Langella

The demise of perfection or the day I read Dropped Names by Frank Langella

There have ever only been two perfect men in the history of humanity:  my grandfather and Frank Langella.  My grandfather, because he died when I was 14 before I had found fault in him.  If he had lived a few more years and I had known him when I was 16, perhaps his perfection would not have endured the onslaught of the rite of passage we call adolescence and its ravenous disinterest in everyone and everything.  And Frank Langella because when I was 17 I rented a VHS tape and at the exact moment my interest in the movie was about to be consumed by my newly found ravenous disinterest, the heroine was startled by a man in her hotel room, and there on the TV screen was the most beautiful, the most handsome man I had ever seen or imagined. I had to rewind the tape (yes, VHS tapes had to be physically rewound and phones had cords!) to discover the name of this Adonis.  Once I eliminated Lesley Ann Down and John Gielgud as possible candidates I was left with Frank Langella.  At 17 you are able to reach absolute conclusions with absolute certainty without the tiresome bother of consideration and critical thought. It’s a gift we lose with age. At 17 my absolute certain conclusion was that any man who looked like that had to be perfect.

Over the years I lost my ability to jump to absolute conclusions, which is probably for the best, though I miss it occasionally.  Without that ability I never again deem any man perfect at first glance, that particular super-power faded and was gone by the time I was 20. Furthermore, I realized that Mr. Langella couldn’t possibly be perfect, no man is, and that his claim to perfection was solely based on the warped workings of my 17 year old brain.  But I enjoyed having that one perfect thing, there are so few perfect things that even imaginary perfection is in short supply, so I kept it. Why not? In the private universe of my mind, the scale of male perfection went from Pewee Herman to Frank Langella, all men fell somewhere in between, including Paul Reubens and Frank Langella.

I’ve watched most of Frank’s movies and I’ve been privileged to see him on stage a few times.  And that was the extent of the information available to me about the real Frank Langella. I’m not inclined to read gossip magazines or search for information on the lives of people I think should be left to live their lives in privacy. So I knew absolutely nothing about him, until he moved in with Whoopi Goldberg.  I heard about that. It couldn’t be helped, though there were unconfirmed rumors of an aging Yupik Eskimo in Siberia who knew nothing about it at the time.  Complete lack of information is extremely conducive to imaginary perfection, as you might imagine.  So he remained perfect over the decades. 

I just finished Dropped Names by Frank Langella. It’s a very well written, interesting and clever collection of stories about encounters with people who are now dead.  Needless to say that by the time you amass a “collection of stories about encounters with people who are now dead”, you’ve probably done some introspection and analyzed your relationships and existence, so there is some of that in the book as well.  If you’ve read this far, I highly recommend the book, for whatever that recommendation is worth.  And I’m sure that the devastation it caused in my life will not befall other casual readers.

While I was reading the book responsible for the complete eradication of my imaginary standard of male perfection, I often found myself looking up from the book and around the room as if I had been reading something subversive that could somehow compromise my good character and feared that someone might be watching.  The book describes relationships and expounds on the author’s opinions and impressions of some well known people.   It felt much too intimate to be proper.  It wasn’t the intimacy Mr. Langella shared with the people described in the book that felt inappropriate to me.  It was stranger than that.   It was a sort of unshared intimacy.  A unilateral intimacy, if you will, derived from an insight into the personal thoughts and relationships of the author, things I was never meant to know. It was as if I was peering into his relationships with these people, into his thoughts and opinions; that he was sharing moments and situations I never sought to know.  I felt an intimacy unbeknownst to the other person in the intimate moment.  I’m sure the peculiar feeling was a result of the remnants of some warped conclusions of my 17 year old brain.  But my present brain paused to consider the situation.  What would you call that? Unilateral intimacy… After some thought I realized that anyone with any moral fortitude would call it voyeurism.

Not only has Frank Langella managed to loosen my extremely fragile hold on imaginary male perfection, he has made a voyeur out of me, obliterating both a treasured delusion and whatever moral high ground I held over the average peeping tom. Next time I run into a peeping tom not only will I be completely unable to gage his masculine wiles, I won’t be able to toss my nose in the air and leave in a huff of superiority. This is obviously a very serious problem that will impact my daily life. But I really should have known that nothing good could come from reading this book, since years ago Frank Langella nearly had me arrested for groping.

It was an off Broadway play and he was playing a Cyrano de Bergerac sans panache, which I found an odd choice because without panache Cyrano is just a guy with a sword. But any way, where was I? Yes, groping.  In a scene too boisterous to be restricted to the stage Mr. Langella and his rival came down the aisle in some well rehearsed sword play.  At a specific point in the interlude they were fighting right next to my aisle seat. In a lunging motion Frank Langella’s butt was mere inches from my shoulder.  The butt of the only living perfect man was literally inches from me.  My mother, sitting next to me, in her infinite wisdom realized the rarity of this once in a life time opportunity and verbalized the fleeting magic of the moment with the whispered words “grab it”.  I doubt Mr. Langella remembers two women desperately trying to contain a most inopportune and inappropriate guffaw inches from his butt during a performance. But I’m sure the subsequent police report would have contained the words ‘groping in a public venue’.

Somewhere in the rules of depravity there must be a loop hole that provides absolution of guilt associated with present day voyeurism if the object of the voyeur had in the past also been the intended object of groping in a public venue.  It’s the old stand-by “I can’t be a voyeur, I’m a groper” defense we’ve all used at some point.  You haven’t? Really? So it’s just me then.

The point I’m trying to make is that this book will not shatter your frail grasp on delusional male perfection, it will not make you question the quality of your character and it will not remind you of judgment calls that might have landed you in jail and banned you from Broadway audiences.  That’s just me.  Most people will find it a beautifully written, perfectly entertaining, insightful and memorable collection of stories.

Even if you are not delusional and living in an imaginary world where Frank Langella is perfect, go read the book! It’s called Dropped Names.  You can get it here: Amazon Don’t worry, it probably won’t make you want to drown your morally weak, reality recognizing self in a glass of wine, that’s probably just me again.