So just in case we have not had enough disappointment and frustration in recent times, all these alleged candidates may be messing up the election. My smartest friend Joanna says the rumor is Biden may be drafted, and that would be a reward for people who care, who cannot find it in their souls, which they probably have, to root for Hillary. I don't know if that's how you spell 'root,' but I would however you spell it do that for her if she were the nominee. But nobody is that sure anymore she will be, things are so crazy.
Meanwhile, my former sort-of flatmate, Marilyn, is back in the news, or even better, The New York Times. I lived in her former apartment on N. Doheny Drive, just below Sunset, when I second (first, I was in Laurel Canyon, so long ago that Dennis Hopper was a teenager, and seemed cute if not super-talented, and had an affair with the wife of my writing teacher whom I had warmed up by writing about him) was inspired by LA. (I remember my writing teacher warning me about run-on sentences, but he's likely dead now, as it is very much later and they're still talking about her, Marilyn.)
But she was darling, a lightweight word to use about her, especially with the picture that's in the NYTimes, --where even more appropriate might be 'adorable,' not seen with all her baggage. One could write a book about what the world might have been like absent a Marilyn Monroe, but nobody's writing that kind of novel anymore, nor, more importantly, would anyone probably read it. Meanwhile the one I DID write, about which a publisher was really crazy and sure everybody would want to read, languished, as it came out exactly the moment that Nixon fell, and God, (I wrote at the time,) convinced there was One, had to choose between saving my career and the country. So the winner among books, palm up to Heaven, was All the President's Men.
I am not so sure about God anymore although I did have a religious, if not a spiritual experience yesterday, when I went to the temple observed at by my most unusual and lovely daughter-in-law, Jennie Davis(no relation other than by marriage and coincidence of name, unless it was Destiny.) I had apparently Quakered too long, at least one time too many, and fled the sweet little meeting in Santa Monica, and reached out to Jennie, who invited me in. I am hoping if indeed He/She does exist, my wavering of mind if not soul will be forgiven, and I will continue to grow spiritually at least and this Trumpian nightmare will fade. It would have been hard to believe as a story construct, but people are apparently dumber than we think.
I sat behind Arthur Miller once, when he came with the president of the country to see his play about Marilyn that I assumed would be in English. I had a teacher once who said "Never Assume." Also never assume you will remember later which country it was when you have lived in a lot of them, but I do remember Miller's back: it was broad and had clearly shouldered a great deal. The president was one of those heroes, the only one who had stood up against oppression and been an artist besides. Am sure you all will remember his name and e-mail me. We did not stay for the entire play as the language was unintelligible, and so the play, unmoving, unmoved. Oh, right, I just remembered-- it was in Czech, in Prague. Nobody expects you to be able to speak it: it's enough that you tried actually to live there.
Am of course no longer that touched by Miller, as he gets to live forever, an upper that not that many people get to have, besides getting laid. A crude expression for the reward that awaited him, but it is, in my opinion, and my mother's before me, probably what excited him most. That, and to be in The New York Times on Sunday: what more could anyone hope for?
