Some people have a talent for one thing, others another. It takes a while to
discover how one’s strengths and weaknesses are distributed but by mid life
most of us have that mostly figured out. Once in a while you run into someone
who doesn’t know. I’m reminded of a wedding I attended long ago where the best
man thought that he was funny but really wasn’t. You’d think that the fact
that people stopped laughing would be enough of a hint, but no.
I mention this because Appenzeller said this week she realized that I’d been
rapping to a raptor. This struck her as a very funny thought, so she repeated
it. I smiled, acknowledged the wit, moved on. She didn’t. Every day, several
times a day, “Rapping with a raptor.” The other chickens began foraging far
and wide. Still she didn’t notice. Eventually I had to say something. It’s
all forgiven and forgotten now, I hope, but for a while she tried to give me
the cold shoulder. Which is a hard thing for a chicken to attempt.
I mentioned to Mimo that I’d been to possibly the worst play I’d ever sat
through. She was cheered by the thought.
“I’m worried about critics and that keeps me from composing.”
“You’re working on a play then?”
“We have a title.”
“'Big Bertha and the Chickens of Doom.' You mentioned it last week.”
“It’s hard getting going.”
“I hear you.”
“You do?”
“I don’t mean literally.”
“You don’t listen outside the door at night?”
“In this weather?”
“I just wondered if you might be stealing our ideas.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said, and smiled.
Pecorino said she’d taken up needlework. “It passes the time.”
“How to you manage that?” I asked.
“With my feet. There’s a trick to it. Technique.”
“Could you demonstrate?”
“First we have to find some needles.”
She meant needles from a Douglas Fir.
“I also do worm turning.”
Watched a strange and amusing DVD this week, “My Generation,” hosted by Michael
Caine. Lots of clips from the sixties edited together to form an
entertainment, with documentary aspiration. My favorite anecdotes came from
Caine himself. “I was up for the part of the plucky Cockney corporal in Zulu.
We didn’t have phones in those days so there was no way they could tell me, but
when I got to the audition they said they’d filled the role. Lucky for me it
was a big room. I’d not walked the full length of it, heading for the exit,
before they said, ‘Could you do an upper class officer?’ I said I’d been in
repertory theatre for nine years, I could do any bloody accent they wanted. If
the room hadn’t been so big, my entire film career would have been different.
Lucky for me the director was American. No British director would have cast a
Cockney boy as an upper class officer.”
And then there was how he got his name. “I used to pop into a phone box in
Leicester Square to ring up my agent at the end of the day, see if there was
any work. She said, ‘I’ve got you something in television, but you need to be
a member of Equity.' I said that was fine. She said, 'But they’ve already got
a Michael White.' By that time I was using Michael White because Maurice Joseph
Micklewhite was too much of a mouthful. She said, ‘You can keep the Michael,
but I need a surname.’ I looked out the window of the phone box and on the
marquee was Humphrey Bogart in ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ I said, ‘Caine…C-A-I-N-E.’
If I’d looked the other way I might have ended up Michael a Hundred and One
Dalmations.”
David Ritchie,
Portland,
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