Mon 6.30.2008 - 9:59 pm

Mon 6/30/08

Has this happened to you?

There’s a business in your neighborhood - a store, a restaurant, a movie theater, what-have-you - and it’s kind of interesting and funky (maybe it’s an independent, “Mom & Pop”-type operation), and you like that it’s there, even if, for whatever reason, you rarely if ever actually patronize it?

Then one day, as you drive past, you see a “For Sale” sign on the door?

I’ve had that happen a number of times, and I always feel a pang of guilt when it does, as if I’d personally caused the business in question to fail.

Is that weird...?

(I own copies of Singing In The Rain and The Band Wagon, so I didn’t need to see those. But I’d never seen Silk Stockings in it’s entirety before, so I DVR’d it, to watch at my leisure.)

There was nothing in Silk Stockings as transcendent as the “Dancing In The Dark” number from The Band Wagon, but it was still pure pleasure watching Cyd Charisse dance (especially with Astaire); my knowledge of movie musicals is by no means encyclopedic, but I personally have never seen a more beautiful dancer on film, before or since.

Afterwards, I found myself thinking of something I’d written on my MySpace blog, something to the effect that “when certain people die” - certain writers or performance artists - “I feel like a piece of my past has died with them”.

I was referring specifically to the recent passing of George Carlin. But watching Cyd Charisse dance, as young and beautiful - and sexy - as ever, it suddenly seemed wrong to say, when an artist I admire dies, that “a piece of my past has died with them”.

On the contrary - while the people in my life have come and gone by the score, and many places where I've worked and played and laughed and loved are gone, the movies I’ve seen, the novels I’ve read, and the music I’ve listened to, for the most part, are still there for me to revisit whenever I want to.

It’s actually the one part of my past that, in a way, will never die.

previous - next

email: