The Zuckerberg's New Clothes

   For the second time in a short period I have occasion to love my country.  The first was when I was leaving Bali, and was stopped at the airport because I didn't have "an exit permit," something I didn't know I had to have.  I understood it was an attempt to financially strong-arm me, and realized for the first time what it meant to be an American-- that I had never before been unable to leave where I was.  It all worked out(with all I had of cash) but for that moment, at least, I rejoiced in who we are, and what real Freedom means.

   The second time was today, when Facebook was up for an IPO. As the bartender at the Mosaic where I am staying, a sweet young man who wants to be a fireman, but they are cutting back on such hirings because California is running out of money like everywhere else, for unimportant things, like education, public safety and health, had no knowledge of the Emperor's New Clothes, I will assume there are those of you out there who could use a refresher course in that great tale-- an emperor has a bullshit tailor who garbs him royally in nonexistent regalia.  As he parades the populace oohs and ahhs at its magnificence, till a little boy chirps that the emperor is naked.  So it is with Mark Zuckerberg.

   As those of you know who know me-- it doesn't take much, you have but to ask, and my truths tumble out-- there are few on the planet, here or gone, with the exception of historical figures without compassion or conscience, that I loathe.  But in recent moons my craw(do you have one?) has been stuck with Mark Zuckerberg.  The fact that this empty(I am sure he is)putz became a billionaire by trading on people's loneliness, with nothing really to offer, has enraged me, a rage intensified by the fact that I actually know someone of whom I am genuinely fond, who wastes hours of their otherwise clever and touching life seeking connection on that idiotic -- what is it? a page? a layout? a hype?, well, yeah--to no real advantage.  My latest trip onto the empty turf that can be this burg(Hollywood) has introduced me to a woman who makes many claims of (professional) connection but I can find nothing out about her.  She says she is on Facebook, but under a pseudonym.  Huh?

   Anyway, I have had this loathing for Zuckerberg since Whitney Huston died and they went to him for a statement, as if he were Walt Whitman on the death of Abraham Lincoln.  Just because he'd made billions out of nothing. And it is nothing, and as Walt's favorite, Abe said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time," at least I think that's what he said.  As with Benjamin Franklin, the other most towering figure in our great history, I am glad he is not here to see what has become of of our country.  The post offices and the libraries he founded (not to mention swim fins) are going out of business.  But Zuckerberg prevails.

   Not as much as he might have, though.  God Bless America.

Embracing Your Age

   My lovely friend Amber and I were talking about all the older actresses, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep, etc, and I noted that out of all of them, the one who remains the most appealing is Judi Dench.  Amber, as wise as she is pretty and kind, said: "That is because she embraces her age."

 Because I have always been the youngest one, the youngest in my class, the youngest to go to Paris and sing my songs in a boite,  kind of an old/young American dream, the youngest to lose my husband, (at which juncture, Jack, my Jewru, said "When you lose a longtime partner, whether through death or divorce, you go back to who you were before," so I became a 17 year-old Chubette, which I had been before Don found and refined me) the oldest/youngest to move back to Paris to try and re-begin, then the oldest/youngest to start a new career, writing travel for the Wall Street Journal Europe.  So this constant process of starting over made me think I was starting over, too.  Which I suppose I really was, but my actual body did not start over with me, to my profound shock, not acknowledged till this weekend.

 Whatever I was going through in my life came to blazing reality on the no longer Silver Screen, as much in my life has done, when I went to see the still radiant Dame Judi in Exotic Magnolia or whatever the hell it is Hotel.  And there among the less radiant Oldies, was the still wonderful Maggie Smith, whose youthful brilliance had been the center of my once great and delicious celebrations.

 At the height of my success with The Pretenders,  we gave the first(and still, I think, the best tongue-in-cheek in-your-face)of the pre-Swifty Lazar/Graydon Carter Oscar parties. black tie to watch on TV.  It was at the height (or depth) of the Vietnam war, all of Hollywood of conscience hated Bob Hope, and John Wayne, and drum-majoretted by the estimable Ruth Berle, the surprisingly sharp wife of Milton, described in the article that emerged as the "doyenne" of the film colony, came to my house instead of attending the awards.

    Sandra Burton, then Time Magazine staffer for Los Angeles went to Dusty Fleming, my gifted and insouciant hairdresser, and while getting her hair cut, asked him what he was doing for the awards; he told her he was coming to a party at my house.  She called and said "This is Sandra Burton, of Time Magazine.  May I come to your party and cover it?" Publicity-mad as I was, and almost everybody in this town/business becomes, especially in the midst of a success enhanced by publicity, I of course breathlessly said "Well, certainly."

    The story she wrote was sharp and brilliant, as Sandy was.  Lee Marvin, who'd won the previous year was there, as was Shirley MacLaine, who engaged in a non-stop battle with Bob Hope on the screen and John Wayne, and let loose with a ream of rage at all the higher-ups in the industry, in spite of my repeated imprecations to her,  that Sandy was covering the event for Time, and Sandy's own warnings as she held her pen and notebook under Shirley's nose.

    There was a kleig-light outside our house, Robert(2) was in a tux, Madeleine (4) in a gown, there was a red carpet in our driveway, and Pat McGivern, son of my old, dear friends from Torremolinos, was in an usher's uniform from the old Roxy, and carrying a flashlight.  I had made hors d'oeuvres, won-tons and empanadas for three days., there was a Sabrett stand in the back yard, many stars of the screen of the day and what now seems a very long-ago yesterday were in attendance.

  We had three rooms for viewing, Reformed(you could talk) Conservative(you could talk and watch) and Orthodox(you could watch and keep quiet.) It was truly a great occasion, as I remember clearly, even as memory sometimes fails, a magnificent occasion.

  And then the young and brilliant Maggie Smith won for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,  which the most surly of today's watchers, if they had the patience to actually sit, shut up, and not text would have to admit was one of the great performances of all time.  I had the privilege of meeting Maggie Smith a few years later, when she had an unrewarding role in the hash that was made of a movie I wrote that was scrambled into chaos by the director Bryan Forbes, who had lost it by then.  This would be authenticated as not just bitterness on my part, by the words of Larry Gelbart, the shiniest wit ever to glow in this town, who told me that Forbes said to him, when he desecrated a script of Larry's, "I know more about the English language than you do."

  But I got the money for the screenplay, and a trip to the south of France with my still young family, and I got to meet Maggie Smith, who was, as one might guess, as estimable as she seemed.  She loaned me twenty or maybe it was fifty francs in Cannes, when they were still coins, and when I went to see her in a play in London, I gave it back to her.  And she said "Twenty francs.  How squalid."  She never disappointed.

  So I tried not to feel sad or put off by how really wizened she looked in the new movie, as she seems to have stepped up to where she is in time, and is probably glad to still be working.  But the one who soars in Judi Dench.  I ran into her once and we had a conversation in an alleyway off Shaftesbury Avenue, where she was being magnificent in a play, and she seemed, like all the real Greaties, to really be Judi Dench.  As Cary Grant was really Cary Grant,(witty and dear and charming) and Gregory Peck was really Gregory Peck,(noble and gallant and articulate) and Judy Holliday was really Judy Holliday,(vulnerable and adorable) and Bette Davis was really Bette Davis(terrifying.)

  Thus it was that I awakened this morning determined to listen to the premature(she is quite young) wisdom of Amber, and embrace my age.  I wish I could get my arms, much less my head around it.  But in spite of the swimming and the yoga, they are a little stiffer than they were.  Oh, well.

Bagels

   As beautiful and terrible and challenging, which they say these days instead of 'difficult' as Bali was, the food, which I ate mostly with chopsticks taking the vegetables out of the Nasi Goreng, leaving the rice, so I am actually slender, was mostly delicious.  When I got back my two great hungers were for bread and TV, because as bad as television is, you cannot imagine what a comfort you realize it is when you are in Bali and it's beyond terrible, so you never turn it on, the only news you receive, besides the Jakarta Post which is mostly about which corrupt person got caught, which can only be because they did not steal enough to pay someone off, is the headline from the NYTimes digital, usually depressing because I thought our politics were, and did not enjoy our country's descent into the trivial.  Must admit I am saddened by the Justice Dept's action against Steve Jobs, as he was the only one of all these guys I really admired, but don't imagine it bothers him.  

   But turning on the tube I watched Anthony Bourdain doing the great job he does and which I fantasied for a while I should be doing, as I was still loving traveling, with that much joy and bright observations and thought I'd be good at that.  Anyway Jon Stewart, who it was a delight coming back to, asked him what New York was best at, and he said 'deli," and I had to agree, as I missed nothing so much as bagels.  Yoni, my gorgeous and put-upon driver, as women count as dust in the Bali culture(even your ancestors go over to his family when you marry, and although he is a brute and a fiend, he gets to keep the children) loved nothing so much as bread.  When we would go out to lunch, one of the great pleasures of my sojourn being going out with her at the end of my work-morning to research or restaurant, she would order whatever there was that had bread-- sandwiches or wraps, it made her so happy.  So I am eating now for two, having freely bageled in New York, and living now very close to the Bagel Nosh, which isn't the real thing, but is close enough.  

    I am about to go to lunch with Gabi and Fernando, an adorable couple who worked at the Apple store in New York, who became friends of the heart when I worked with them in my One on One sessions, so when I was in Bali and my Mac had a breakdown, Gabi called me from the States on her dime, and worked with me for almost two hours to fix it, which she did.  They have moved to LA now, so we are about to reunite for brunch(she is now a film editor and she and Fernando are setting up a website company called NetWorkFolio which I know will be the BEST, as they are. As they have not lived long enough in LA to become bullshitters, I am taking them to the Bagel Nosh instead of Kate Mantelini's, because they are probably still real enough to be interested in the food and each other and friend and not who is in the next booth.  I don't really care anymore because Anne Bancroft won't be there with Mel Brooks.

     I am happily ensconsed(sp?) in the Hotel Mosaic, where I started writing SCANDAL, and where the story is actually set (now available on Amazon.com with a great cover that should be in the window of a bookstore but there aren't any.  Ah, how happily I recall Hunter's and Pickwick and all the dead.  And here it is.

   I remember Larry Todd from Hunter's, who, at the time of The Pretenders, called me "the Jane Austen of the jet set."  I understand that the hot new book, that Gray thing, is filled with erotica, so it must be back, but I have no appetite for writing it, or, I think reading it, as having gone back a few months ago to look at my once bestseller, I was embarrassed.  I remember how Donnie would come home at the end of the day when I was pregnant with Robert, and reading what I had done, would say "It's terrific; now go back downstairs and make it worse."  So I would waddle down to the basement, one of the only ones in LA, and with my big belly close to the typewriter, (it still was then, albeit electric) and make it even steamier.  I was exhausted.  Robert claims he heard the noise of the keys from inside.  I don't disbelieve him, as I think I became a writer partly because Gene Kelly was my dancing teacher in Pittsburgh when I was two, and he told my mother I would never be a dancer.  So the tapping of the keys was like the metal on my sole/soul.

   Here's Gabi and Fernando. Aren't they wonderful?  

Love to you all.

Transformation, Almost

  Those of you who know me know that patience is my short suit. When I was in Bali, my beloved host Scot, husband of my beloved hostess Farah, told me that yelling at a taxi driver in Bali, which I did, because he had no idea where he was going, was like pulling out a gun in New York. So I never again, I don't think, yelled at a taxi driver.

  Those of you on this list know that I have been undergoing some e-challenges, going to the Apple store, reuniting with my beautiful friends from Apple in NY, Gabi and Nando, who are going to make my website so I can become even more stressed and confused. Gabi showed me the iPhone, and it looked much simpler than I thought and I hated my Samsung, so I went today again to the Apple store, and bought one. Then began, at 2:09 PM it said on my helper's iPhone, yet another test which I quickly failed, a delay on approval of my credit from AT&T which I had been told would make it easier to use my iPhone. A very pretty Molly, who had helped me with my One on One some days ago, tried to clarify the situation, but could not understand what the operator was saying, (I think they are in some Asian country where English is the third language,) so got a manager, who couldn't understand either. I explained at that point-- it had been an hour and a half-- that I had a very short fuse and was about to lose it. So they called in Kyle, to trouble-shoot, though at that point I would have liked to shoot AT&T.

  Kyle is twenty-five, to turn 26 next Saturday, and is already concerned that he is old to be a producer, to which he aspires, and was beat up last Saturday in Santa Monica by a bouncer who was offended by Kyle's companion's telling him to move at the bar, because he worked there. They have a lawsuit against the guys who beat him up which Kyle is hoping will get him the option money to be able to option something for film. But in the meantime, here is this sweet-faced, gentle man, who has a right arm hanging. He was an All-star baseball player at 11, when he had a stroke, and had to re-learn everything. Somewhere into his third sentence I lost any thought of losing my temper. So even though we were there with the morons from AT&T, wherever they were that was a Third or Fourth world nation, which is how, I would guess, AT&T makes even more money, when Billy Rose had started it in whatever year it was and it was the only monopoly that worked so of course they broke it up.

  The point is, I was so touched by this young man, that I actually lost my burn. He was so gently consistent with whoever was on the phone, that I told him he was stalwart, a word he had never heard before, and said he was going to use in future interviews, and perhaps also with Words with Friends, something that the Apple guy last week told me was a game that so obsessed Apple Geniuses that when their time for a break came all they did was go in the back room and play. I have a beloved friend who usually sounds distracted when I call her, and when I visited her I saw she had Words with Friends, and I understood why she always sounds like she is on her way to someplace else, which she often is, but now the whole picture starts to clear,-- as my friend Kurt Vonnegut wrote: But I digress. At any rate, I am glad I never acceded to Jamie's invitation to join Words with Friends, as I have obsession enough writing words to friends, and those I don't know who I hope will become friends when and if they read what I've written. But I stop digressing. Eleven years old. If you have tears to shed, the greatest of the greats wrote, prepare to shed them now. Except that he picked up his life, played basketball in high school, and now works in the Apple store while he is waiting to become a producer. Come on. How can anyone be angry in the face of that. Stalwart is not a good enough word. Heroic, I think. I would write to Steve to tell him what a jewel he has, except I don't think he's still getting mail, except from the Justice Department.

  By the way, I have a new number on my iPhone, but it is from New Jersey, the only one that is available. I don't know it yet and it's very hard to remember, so please if you want to contact me, use the old number which I still have because I couldn't trade in my Samsung for the iPhone. I am locked out of my e-mail, as I put in the wrong password, and I am simply in a struggle not to explode. But I think of Kyle, and realize nothing is really as bad as it feels for that moment.

  Still, I wish I had stayed in the 19th century, with my sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne. Love to you all, Gwen Bronte.

COMING home(?) Is It(?)

     And now I am in the Apple Store in LA trying to catch up on all the things I have to learn and know in these strange climes, Bali having been left behind, and NY and DC but brief interludes. The novel memoir, as I am calling it, that I went to Bali to write is written, and nothing has been lost but my fitness and eyesight, as I didn't get up from the desk for five months until it was finished, so have to start walking(I swam, but that doesn't work your cement muscles) and the eyes are itchy and tired from too much devotion (can there be such a thing?) and maybe a bug, they're checking.  Have already lost my new eyedrops($52 generic , God bless America, or at least the drug business,) my purse(found it, it was in my son's car,) and several friends I realized were not friends of the heart(you can hear it in their voices, when you've spent a half year in Bali.)  Have no time or appetite for anything but real.  After my airport experience and my escape, I really love my country so am trying not to pay attention to any of the shit that's going on here as I know it is only Illusion, and the Truth is, we are all basically divine except people who pretend to love.
     Had the frenetic time in NY trying to catch up on the jet lag, went to a birthday party in DC for a loved friend turning older as we all are if we are lucky, but it still hurts, and then found myself Hating, which I hate, but I truly impersonally despise Mark Zuckerberg, whom I don't know, but the people frittering away their lives on Facebook make me sad, as I now understand Life is Short, and my window in Beverly Hills faces Whitney Houston's room at the Hilton, and I think of the incredible dumbness of whoever was handling her death going to Zuckerberg for a reaction, like he was Walt Whitman on Lincoln's assassination, (O Whitney! My Whitney!) just because he made a fortune out of trading on loneliness, no real gifts except Asberger's. 
     So I broke for lunch with my boy attorney, Burt, who has stayed young and smart for the thirty odd years he has watched over my estate, what there is of it, and I asked him how come he doesn't age, and his theory or rather thesis is if you like what you're doing and it makes you happy, you don't get old.  Well I am the living dispute for that argument.  I love what I do, and I was always young.  I jut don't know what happened.  Maybe it was the 19 books that always came out at the wrong time(except one, The PRETENDERS because everybody was ready for sex) like The Motherland, my best book, about Washington, destined for(everyone was sure) greatness but it came out the day that Watergate exploded, and nobody cared about fiction, and now there's SCANDAL with the best cover ever to grace a bookstore window except there are no more bookstores.  Still it is a lot of fun, so I hope you all will read it and tell your friends.       
     But I have, I think/hope just written my best book which I hope will see the light while I still can.       
     Now I am about to leave the Apple store to which I returned to learn to use my Ipad so I an write on planes if I ever travel again. Thank you all for keeping me going all the time I was in Bali, hard-working and devoted and itching but never leaving my post.  My post for the next few weeks, in case anyone wants to call me-- I have lost my telephone book along with remembering all numbers, -- is the Hotel Mosaic, Beverly Hills, the setting for SCANDAL,  renamed the Royale for the novel.
     I love you all.  Whoever you are. 

Bagels

    As beautiful and terrible and challenging, which they say these days instead of 'difficult' as Bali was, the food, which I ate mostly with chopsticks taking the vegetables out of the Nasi Goreng, leaving the rice, so I am actually slender, was mostly delicious.  When I got back my two great hungers were for bread and TV, because as bad as television is, you cannot imagine what a comfort you realize it is when you are in Bali and it's beyond terrible, so you never turn it on, the only news you receive, besides the Jakarta Post which is mostly about which corrupt person got caught, which can only be because they did not steal enough to pay someone off, is the headline from the NYTimes digital, usually depressing because I thought our politics were, and did not enjoy our country's descent into the trivial.  Must admit I am saddened by the Justice Dept's action against Steve Jobs, as he was the only one of all these guys I really admired, but don't imagine it bothers him.  

    But turning on the tube I watched Anthony Bourdain doing the great job he does and which I fantasied for a while I should be doing, as I was still loving traveling, with that much joy and bright observations and thought I'd be good at that.  Anyway Jon Stewart, who it was a delight coming back to, asked him what New York was best at, and he said 'deli," and I had to agree, as I missed nothing so much as bagels.  Yoni, my gorgeous and put-upon driver, as women count as dust in the Bali culture(even your ancestors go over to his family when you marry, and although he is a brute and a fiend, he gets to keep the children) loved nothing so much as bread.  When we would go out to lunch, one of the great pleasures of my sojourn being going out with her at the end of my work-morning to research or restaurant, she would order whatever there was that had bread-- sandwiches or wraps, it made her so happy.  So I am eating now for two, having freely bageled in New York, and living now very close to the Bagel Nosh, which isn't the real thing, but is close enough.  

    I am about to go to lunch with Gabi and Fernando, an adorable couple who worked at the Apple store in New York, who became friends of the heart when I worked with them in my One on One sessions, so when I was in Bali and my Mac had a breakdown, Gabi called me from the States on her dime, and worked with me for almost two hours to fix it, which she did.  They have moved to LA now, so we are about to reunite for brunch(she is now a film editor and she and Fernando are setting up a website company called NetWorkFolio which I know will be the BEST, as they are. As they have not lived long enough in LA to become bullshitters, I am taking them to the Bagel Nosh instead of Kate Mantelini's, because they are probably still real enough to be interested in the food and each other and friend and not who is in the next booth.  I don't really care anymore because Anne Bancroft won't be there with Mel Brooks.

    I am happily ensconsed(sp?) in the Hotel Mosaic, where I started writing SCANDAL, and where the story is actually set (now available on Amazon.com with a great cover that should be in the window of a bookstore but there aren't any.  Ah, how happily I recall Hunter's and Pickwick and all the dead.  And here it is.

    I remember Larry Todd from Hunter's, who, at the time of The Pretenders, called me "the Jane Austen of the jet set."  I understand that the hot new book, that Gray thing, is filled with erotica, so it must be back, but I have no appetite for writing it, or, I think reading it, as having gone back a few months ago to look at my once bestseller, I was embarrassed.  I remember how Donnie would come home at the end of the day when I was pregnant with Robert, and reading what I had done, would say "It's terrific; now go back downstairs and make it worse."  So I would waddle down to the basement, one of the only ones in LA, and with my big belly close to the typewriter, (it still was then, albeit electric) and make it even steamier.  I was exhausted.  Robert claims he heard the noise of the keys from inside.  I don't disbelieve him, as I think I became a writer partly because Gene Kelly was my dancing teacher in Pittsburgh when I was two, and he told my mother I would never be a dancer.  So the tapping of the keys was like the metal on my sole/soul.

    Here's Gabi and Fernando. Aren't they wonderful?  

Love to you all.

Happy Nyepi (Bali New Year)

First, let me apologize.  I have not posted these for months, I was so caught in writing my novel.  But I will go back and find them soon, and if you didn't get one, you can find it. Meanwhile, here's today's Report.


    So as the sun sinks not so slowly in the West, which it does here, too, even though we are upside down in time, we bid almost Farewell to the beautiful(and exceedingly magical and strange) island of Bali.  Today is Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, which is marked by an end of the many celebrations that have led up to this day, by a day of silence, how the Balinese celebrate their holiday.  No one is allowed out of their house, the only people in the streets the pecalangs who are patrolling them for disbelievers or disobeyers who will be punished.  No cars, no motorcycles or bikes, no lights tonight, no planes taking off or landing or permitted to fly over, so the island will disappear in the darkness, and the evil spirits will be unable to find Bali, and so will go away, and the island will be free of evil for another year.  Ha.  Not laughing at the holiday, but at the corruption that is rife here, that is hardly paid any attention to anymore unless a bigwig gets caught stealing a couple of trillion, which some of them do, in which case they can also often pay their way out of being punished. Police pay to becomes policemen and for every promotion, so it is not all that unusual for you to be stopped on the road for no apparent reason and have to pay one of them off to continue, so you can imagine what they can pull in in the case of an actual crime.  Apparently for a hundred dollars you can get out of jail for the day, gangs incarcerated continue to do business from inside the jail, often improving their network of felons, can have Tvs in their rooms, and many better movies than I was able to buy.  It is my theory, based on observed fact, that the reason the five suspected terrorists here were shot dead rather than arrested for questioning, was because if they had gone to jail they could have possibly connected with so many criminals that might have been even smarter, and so wiped out the entire world.
    But the hearts of the Balinese people are pure, if a bit childlike, and this holiday season has been marked with many colorful celebrations, most of which I have attended, some of which I have written about in my new novel, which I am radiant to say is about a day away from being finished.  Tonight, Nyepi, I am not supposed to work, as it is designated as a time of reflection and contemplation, so I will just quickly finish this up so I do not violate any spiritual laws, the ones I usually respect most.  Nor are we allowed to have any lights, for the reason already noted.  So the Baaaas, the way you call your servants or the waiters in Bali, BAAAAAAA you call out like a lamb, have lowered the slatted blinds made from pandan, a leaf that makes hats too and is also used in tea, so we are closed against the light even as it is fading in the sky, in case we want to be in violation of the ordinance and turn on a lamp or light a candle, one of which I will probably do.
    This has been, without question, the most exciting creative adventure of my life, as I came here with a project in mind that mattered a great deal to me, and I hope will matter in some measure to many other people, since it concerns justice.  I have been engaged since coming here in the writing of this, so I am probably the only one in Bali who came here to work hard.  I have been essentially on a retreat, with little or no communication with the outer world, except for you guys, and only a few occasional forays into civilization, such as it is here, mostly involving restaurants it didn't hurt to discover and enjoy as I did get hungry, and was, for a while in my lucky life, writing restaurant reviews for the Wall Street Journal Europe as part of my travel writing job, and it was a really great assignment, thank you Jim.  But there have been no movies, except for illegal DVDs which they sell quite openly all over, and that only because I did have to give my fevered brain(which it was, though I tried, I hope successfully, to avoid Dengue) some diversion, and could hardly read, my eyes were so tired from staring at the computer. But I did manage an occasional New Yorker, which still has the best short stories and the worst poems, and consistently brilliant theater reviews from John Lahr, Bert's little boy. My movie IQ has been kept up by e-mailed reviews from Rex Reed(thank you Rex) though I have been occasionally deeply frustrated by not being able to get the ones(very few) he raved about, great relief coming at last when I was able to get My Week with Marilyn, my idea of the best movie in a long time, Michelle Williams being so brilliant she should have won but Meryl Streep is unstoppable.  I still liked her Julia Child better than her Margaret Thatcher, as I knew that wonderful woman as she was exiting Cambridge and soon afterwards the planet, and she was enough like Meryl Streep's portrayal to be Meryl Streep.
    I have been blessed(it is after all, a spiritual day) in my sojourn to have been given sanctuary by arguably the most adorable family in Bali(I would state absolutely but I did not meet them all,) an Australian cattle man and his delicate Javanese princess wife, and their two miniature children, the mother being so tiny the children came downsized, and their two really ugly but lovable dogs, one actually named Mimi, the dog whose death I came here to try and recover from, but mine was beautiful as opposed to wall-eyed and stupid which this Mimi, a part Jack Russell definitely is, her sister, a chihuahua/dachshund(I know, I don't know how it could have happened either) named MuMu having gotten the only brains in the litter, which also included a big hairy dog (I know, I know.)
    They have recently acquired two kittens which rapidly became big ugly cats, so I will not be sad to leave them.  But I will feel a true sense of loss at leaving my family, which they really have become.  It  has been a long time since I was in a family situation and I don't think mine was ever this adorable, grandchildren aside.
    Anyway, I love you all, and thank you for sustaining me by allowing me to be in touch with you.  I wish you in the Western world a Happy Spring, my friends in Oz a happy autumn, and I wish the world peace (Good Luck) and the Republicans no better a candidate.


     xxx Gwen of(not much longer) Bali