I had occasion this morning to look up an old friend of mine on the Internet: Gail Kobe. Gail was an extremely smart, quite attractive actress who became a power in soap television, and came to court me and Don-- so you know how long ago that must have been-- with the hope of bringing us into Proctor and Gamble as... I don't know, writer-performers? Or maybe she was just lonely and wanted some people she genuinely liked that she knew genuinely liked her to come to Ohio or wherever the hell it was, so she wouldn't be quite so lonely/isolated/whatever it is we become if we live long enough and don't fail completely. But I do remember and think of her at several stops of hers along the way-- the first shortly after she married and had me to her house, and I said something about being able to see her before their first fight, and she said: "Too late," the next, in a sushi restaurant where she took us as a couple in her attempt to woo us and she got drunk on sake or maybe I did, and it was all just too sad. After all, she was truly smart, as well as gifted, and it kind of broke my soul that you couldn't be those things in Hollywood and prosper as a spirit, or even in Dayton, Ohio which might have been where she had to go.
But wherever she is now, and I hope it is somewhere, which I imagine you can imagine this time of year since I caught a glimpse of Rudy Giuliani on TV last night with Ash on his forehead, flASHing, I guess you might say, so we can all think about the miracle of Christ if in fact he really existed, and wonder why it's so hard for those who aspire to Something, even as the world comes apart everywhere but here, the Capital of Emptiness. I have never known whether you spell that tal or tol. I know one of them is Washington, which doesn't really seem to be there anymore.
My beautiful Heidi, daughter of my beloved friend at Bryn Mawr, told me that her dad whose whole life was consecrated to America, had begun to be dispirited towards the end of his time here at what the country was becoming. So it is, like they say, a Blessing, that he isn't here anymore. And probably it's good that Gail Kobe isn't here, either, lovely and smart as she was, and genuinely funny, which didn't work all that well for a woman.
