Wednesday, June 3, 2009

What I'd do if I were Free, or If My Life were a Katharine Hepburn Film



I'd go to the window and yell, "SHUT the F&^% UP!" to this guy outside my window having a loud, enthusiastic conversation in a foreign tongue.  

Then, I'd dive into a swimming pool in the moonlight and come up for air, and gingerly sip champagne I don't like very much from a pretty crystal flute at the edge.  And then Jimmy Stewart would jump in in his tuxedo and sing to me, and pick me up and haul me out and we'd turn on the portable radio, and we'd dry off as he'd teach me and/or re-teach me how to dance.  This includes the Real Charleston.

Then I'd hear a telephone ringing.  A real live house phone, inside this beautiful, glamorous little room.  And I'd let it ring and keep dancing.  There would be frogs croaking in the distance, and maybe some crickets.  Trees swaying in the heavy, humid air.  Just us.  All magic.  Spouting silly rhymes and poetry and laughing and swaying like those trees.  And I'd tell Jimmy Stewart he's a great writer and can do anything in the world and he'd say I'm swell, and say how I could do anything too.  And we'd get tired or drunk or the sun would start peeking up, so he'd pick me up in a robe and carry me off, still singing.

And the dawn would come with a headache and a bruise and a lot of good jokes and we'd walk around reading papers and smoking cigars and eating hard boiled eggs from sweet little egg holders, and chasing a dog named George who hid somebody's "interclosticlavical".  And there would be tea china and kempt little gardens and telegrams and flowers in buttonholes and no worries, no worries, no worries for me.