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Social MishapsSunday evening Debbi and I went to see a couple of 1950s Fred Astaire films at the Stanford Theatre: Funny Face (1957) and The Band Wagon (1953), both of which are musicals. Funny Face has Astaire playing fashion photographer Dick Avery, who finagles bookseller Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn) into becoming a model for a fashion magazine. They travel to Paris for a shoot, but Jo is more interested in hanging out with the philosophy crowd and meeting her idol, Professor Emil Flostre (Michel Auclair). The Band Wagon, on the other hand, has Astaire playing downtrodden movie star Tony Hunter, who returns to the stage to perform in a new play, conceived by his writing friends Lester and Lily Martin (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray) as a light singing and dancing piece, but reconceived by renowned director Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan, who out-hams everyone else in the cast - no mean feat, that) as a Faustian tragedy. Along the way, Hunter encounters various kinds of friction with his co-star, ballerina Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse). What's perhaps most remarkable about these two films are their similarities to the great Gene Kelly films, An American in Paris (1951) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), which I saw in 1999. It's as if someone decided that Kelly had ushered in a second golden age of the musical, and who better to cash in than Fred Astaire, who starred in the first golden age? So The Band Wagon has a musical production gone amusingly wrong, and several peculiar, nigh-abstract dance numbers (the ending medley seems reminiscent of nothing so much as 42nd Street). And Funny Face has the Parisian backdrop, and the struggle among art, patronage, and being true to oneself. And heck, The Band Wagon has two of Kelly's co-stars from his two great films in Levant and Charisse! Whether all of this was Astaire's doing, or someone else's idea, I don't know. The big downside to these films is that Astaire by this point is rather long in the tooth to be playing a romantic lead alongside Hepburn and Charisse. No, that's not quite right: It's really that he seems to be playing the role as a young man - in a sense, as Gene Kelly - but he by no means looks young. (Indeed, the early gags of The Band Wagon are that he's old and washed up, but that theme quickly falls by the wayside.) In many ways Astaire seems like the same old Astaire, but I found it hard to suspend my disbelief. Neither film is a great film, and neither has a truly great song as its keynote (though "That's Entertainment" from Band Wagon is both famous and pretty good). The Band Wagon is pretty much a straight farce with a simple story and a simple method of redemption. Funny Face is more complicated in its message and actually has some evocative dance numbers (Hepburn is rather a talented dancer), and so it's the superior film (although the print we saw was pretty scratched and the colors had gotten muddy on one of the reels; hopefully someone's working on restoring it). But overall neither is essential viewing; they're entertaining, but fluff. By the way, if you live in the area, the Stanford is planning to start a Cary Grant film festival in January! I love Cary Grant, and will probably go to see as many of the films they show that I haven't already seen that I can. My favorite Grant films - which I'll probably go back to see - are Only Angels Have Wings (1939, with Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth), North by Northwest (1959, with Eva Marie Saint and James Mason) and Charade (1963, with Audrey Hepburn and Walter Matthau).
 Before the movies, we met a couple of Debbi's friends for dinner. Turns out they didn't really know downtown Palo Alto at all, so we walked down University Avenue and then back down Hamilton Avenue past The Prolific Oven to the Peninsula Creamery where we dropped them off to get dessert while we headed to Walgreens so Debbi could buy some candy she wanted, and then go to the movie (which her friends weren't joining us for). I mention all this detail because it turns out Debbi was annoyed with me for the rest of the evening. She had wanted to head to Walgreens first (a fact I'd apparently missed somehow), and had wanted to walk down University with her friends to window-shop, not tromp past a few specific things on the route we took. So after we got home we ended up spending a while talking about my tendency to like to show things off, and the fact that she doesn't like to argue and didn't want to make a big deal out of this particular issue in front of her friends. I admit it: I do like showing off things that I own, or have seen, or enjoy. I know that I'm not particularly humble in this way, and I guess I've been surprised at times that it doesn't drive people up the wall (or at least that nobody ever seems to say so). I think a lot of this is based in my insecurities, probably due to my being something of an oddball, with a lot of oddball interests. When I've found someone who shares my interests, I really get into sharing them with them, and although my interests have become somewhat broader and more mainstream as I've gotten older, that tendency has stayed with me. I'm reminded of days in high school when I'd bring in a backpack full of my comic books for my friends and I to sit around reading during study hall. Particularly on those end-of-year days when all we were waiting for were our final grades. I thought bringing in this big stack of stuff was cool. And even today I like having people over to see my library, and lending books from it. I also know that I can be kind of myopic at times, not terribly receptive - literally! - to what other people want. Sometimes I do need to be smacked with a two-by-four, or at least have someone raise a differing point of view. (Sometimes I bend over backwards to be sensitive to others, but this usually backfires if they don't have a strong opinion on whatever the issue in question is; then we end up hemming and hawing and not really making a decision.) I don't particularly like being confrontational either - especially in public - but I pointed out that she could have raised her point before we headed off down the path I'd suggested without being confrontational about it. I don't know that we really resolved anything, but I guess we each had some things to think about afterwards.
Tonight - New Year's Eve - seemed equally mixed. We got together with Debbi's friends again, this time at my house, to have dinner, play games, and await the new year. I built a fire in my fireplace (the cats, it turns out, are kind of afraid of the fire, but hopefully they'll - pardon the pun - warm up to it), and two of the others cooked dinner, which was quite tasty. Afterwards we played a Trivial Pursuit-like game called Battle of the Sexes, which was entertaining and we got a lot of laughs out of it, but we had some disagreement about some of the rules, and it turned out (though not entirely due to the rules ambiguity) that my side ended up losing, albeit fairly narrowly. Afterwards I, at least, didn't feel like playing another game of that, and it seemed like no one else was sure what to do, so we watched Dick Clark on TV, I spent some time reading (I did a lot of reading this weekend since I feel like I didn't do as much reading this week as I'd have liked), and we eventually rung in the new year and then called it a night. My view of the evening was quite different from others': Apparently they perceived that I didn't want to do anything with them anymore, was upset about the game, and was being antisocial by sitting and reading. I was quite surprised at this, since I felt like I'd put my frustrations with the game behind me once we'd finished it, and I'd started reading largely because it seemed like everyone was getting sleepy and wasn't sure what - if anything - they wanted to do until the new year (which, in my experience, is not uncommon at New Year's parties). So I was rather taken aback by that and not sure what to do about it. Despite that, I did have a good evening leading up to New Year's Day. I hope everyone else did, too. All things considered, I've had a pretty good year, but also a pretty exhausting one. I've started a new relationship, I've changed jobs within Apple, I've bought a house and moved, I've attended my sister's wedding. Even without the theft of the Presidency, the terrorist attacks, the anthrax or the "police action" in Afghanistan, that's a pretty full year for anyone. (What is it they say? The four most stressful events are death, moving, ending a relationship and changing jobs? I've got two of the four this year.) I'm looking forward to not a whole heck of a lot happening for the first few months of 2002. Wish me luck.
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