Tommorrow (Thursday), 9:00 PST. 
(Figure out your own time if you’re somewhere else, I’m busy.)

Carole Radziwill on Satellite Sisters …

Promo: 

Catching up with Carole!

Here’s how you can listen:  http://www.satellitesisters.com/affiliates.html

A. is going to a place called “Maupin, OR” tomorrow.  A. was not brought into this world to go to places called “Maupin, OR”.  A., what are you doing?  In Maupin, OR, for crying out loud, it doesn’t make sense to me. 

Movie tonight is The Graduate, and is likely rained out.  Come back tomorrow.

Because it’s raining and dreary today, let’s have a dinner party!

Who will be there? Joe Torre, Gertrude Stein, Elaine May, Herbert Ross. A. and I, of course.

Why? Well, Gertrude because she’s batty. I recently got Poetry on Record, and on Disc 1 she reads her poem “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” And I thought how charming it would be to have her mutter for two hours, the same words over and over, the same answers to every question, at the table. There’s nothing like it.

Elaine May because she plays a movie star who plays Gertrude Stein in a skit she did with Mike Nichols a long time ago, I forget the name.

Herbert Ross because I haven’t had a movie director yet and he’s elegant and polished and poised and has 5 million stories but will only pick out three really good ones and his storytelling, not the story, will leave us happy.

What will we eat? Something au gratin — potatoes and leeks and gruyere cheese, I think — will be one of the sides. A big fat juicy prime rib (w/whipped cream, horseradish sauce) will take center stage. Blueberry cobbler for dessert.

Drink? Gertrude will have absinthe, she’ll bring it with her in a small bottle in a bulky handbag, which she’ll keep at the table. Elaine will drink wine with dinner, then vodka with a twist of lemon, Joe will have scotch or bourbon (he’ll nurse one drink all night), and Herbert Ross will drink kir royals, I think, then vodka neat, with Elaine.

After we’ve all drank too much, Gertrude will begin reading, starting in the middle, from Autobiography of Alice B. She’ll read softly and continuously, regardless of what’s going on around her, in the same low dull pitch. Herbert will be engaged with Elaine, they’ll have animated conversation, heads low, at the end of the table and I’ll be jealous and interrupt them constantly with stories of my new puppy Scruffy. A. and Joe will hit it off, wonder how they got stuck with all these cuckoos and the next morning A. will assure me I was witty and charming and loved by all.

Come over, we’ll have some laughs.

It’s Hunter Thompson’s birthday and some dude had worms in his head.  Gross. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned from tearing the house up (besides Newel Post, see below).  It’s that I can’t, in fact, live in Manhattan with A. and the kids.  We’re not built for small space. Maybe one of us at a time, but combined we’d destroy it.  Manhattan, I mean. 

Today it’s raining so we don’t have the outdoors, and we’re crammed into the stinky-dog smell room on the one couch.  My coffee’s cold. 

There are a thousand people, I think, coming through here starting on Saturday.  Visitors, not the floor guys.  People expecting warm meals and clean air and poolside wines.  A. has gone into spray mode, walking in circles, waving cans of lysol deodorizers around in the air.  The words “Stark” and “Raving” come to mind. 

The phone’s been unplugged for weeks, I’m sure I’ve won contests and have rooms of prizes now unclaimed. 

The gameboys have died, the charger’s unfound. 

We’re in despair.  Come, please.  Bring casseroles. 

Some of you have this site bookmarked, and there’s a special place for you somewhere for that. 

Other people find me through search engines.  They type in motley combinations of words and then Google pairs us up, like chips and salsa. 

I have a list of all those words, the ones that get typed in, I get a report.  On the list are things like “Fishopoly“, “Giacometti“, “Cool ways to say Happy Birthday” … and then some people punch in ”Teresa nude“ … heh, heh.. Don’t think I don’t know who you are, little rascals.  Well, I aim to please here at Teresa DiFalco dot Com.  Send five bucks and I’ll turn over my “sex tape” with Steve from Blues Clues. 

Until I see hard cash, cold showers everyone.  Chop-chop.

My friend Lisa Austin (who is NOT hosting BWC tonight, by the way.  Nice, Lisa) wants to do a Super Size Me-style documentary about Taco Bell.  So she can eat Taco Bell food every day and change your life. 

My friend Lisa Austin can can rattle off the entire Taco Bell menu, backwards and sideways and three times fast, plus tell you her customized preference for each item (bean burrito, for instance, no onions and something else) all before you can say, “Hey, slow down, amigo.”  It’s no small feat.

I say this because I went to Taco Bell today and I can’t go there anymore without thinking of Lisa and her pure and true love for everything Taco Bell stands for.  (Why doesn’t she just marry it?) 

The drive-up line was three miles long but I waited in it anyway, idling my car (no truths inconvenient) and listening to Neal Conan talk to Dave Zirin about his book Welcome to the Terrordome.  It was an interesting interview, but I don’t retain well, so the only thing I remember is “Greg from Portland” calling Barry Bonds a big jerk.  Where are you “Greg from Portland”?  That was funny!  People don’t call other people jerks nearly enough; they should.

(Speaking of baseball, this is hitting some of my readers harder than others.) 

You’re surely not still reading, but I’ll go on. 

The one thing I’ll take away from ripping up the house is “Newel Post.”  I’ll know it now for 50 years.  Newel Post.

I’ll tell you why.  Mike Nichols and Elaine May did comedy improv sketches for radio / tv / broadway in the late 50′s, early 60′s.  One of them is called “Telephone,” we’ve listened to it three million times.  The kids could recite the whole thing before they could walk, they demanded it at bedtime. 

Anyway.  In it, Nichols’ character calls Information (old-fashioned ’411′) for a phone number, and his life unravels. May plays the operator and spells back his request for the number of someone named ”Kaplan” (George Kaplan, who pops up in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest) like so: 

“That’s ‘K’ as in ‘Knife; ’A’ as in ‘Aardvark’; ’P’ as in ‘Pneumonia’; ’l’ as in [I forget]; ‘A’ as in ‘Aardvark’ again; ’N’ as in ‘Newel post‘ Kap-lan?”

See?  Newel post.  But I never had any idea what a newel post was. 

Then Saturday I went to McCoy’s with A. to pick out moulding and MDFs and boxtops and a bunch of things I’m saying wrong and I learned what a Newel Post is.  I even picked one out, we’re getting one!  Our very own Newel Post!   

Okay, read Geek Love, then let’s pound on Katherine Dunne’s door until she writes us another book.  We’ll order out from Taco Bell.  (I’ll have a zesty chicken bowl, thanks.)

Then look for Lisa Austin’s new Taco Bell film, “Chalupa This!” in a theater right by you.

And call me. 

Friday we showed Bonnie and Clyde and put everyone to sleep. Sorry A., you were right, should have stuck with Redford and Newman.

M. and D. sent in their requests. Came over the wire late Thursday and confused me a bit. But then D. explained about the three bottles of wine, and how M. had misspelt things, “sangria” for instance. So now I’ve decoded it, and here we go — (if you fly out, M. and D., I’ll play them all, with accompaniments. Not on the same night, of course.)

M.’s list:

The Seventh Seal
Shoah
The Sorrow and the Pity
Schindler’s List
Xanadu
400 Blows

[M.'s list is screaming for comment, don't you think? Post one post haste!]

D. had these ideas, some of which I am bound to incorporate:

Almodovar night with Sangria and (or) gazpacho. (Wasn’t it Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown where I learned that ingenious trick of adding a bottle of vodka to the gazpacho?)

Fellini night with spaghetti and red wine.

Woody Allen night with egg creams, manhattans, and bagels and pastrami

Kurt Weill / Lotta Lenye night (show Cabaret and Russia with Love)

Martinis to go with Auntie Mame, Sunset Boulevard or any of the Thin Man movies

Still, this Friday is probably The Graduate (women wear black stockings and eyeliner, men act really young).  Saturday the Indiana Jones movie, the first one.  I forget the name.  Voyage something … Adventure of something.  Raiders of something … I know I’m close!

I’m going to go pick blueberries and think it all over.

Ellen Jenks, the main character in my book, has entomophobia. (Hmm, I wonder where she gets it?) So I have bugs on the brain, more than usual. We’ve had a rash of spiders, lately. And sugar ants. The ants keep popping up out of cracks, in whole colonies, like geysers. And the spiders …

Junior told me you’re never more than 3 feet away from a spider. Ever. For the past two days, though, they’ve been moving in closer. I’m catching them, scuttling down walls, sneaking across carpets, closer to the two foot range, sometimes one. Ellen (my character) hates them. She becomes frozen with fear, she becomes ill at the thought of them. I’m afraid of heights — which means I get those same feelings in tall buildings, which fortunately I’m not in very much, so I feel for her. She’s got to confront her terror every day. Well I guess she doesn’t. I could have put her in a nice bug-free house/yard, but that’s not interesting, I loaded her up.

And in return, now they’re cropping up all over my life. A giant bird-sized dragonfly spent the night batting around in the skylight in the only room of the house not torn up. It’s a small room with one couch, and the four of us squished onto it every night like The Simpsons — last night watching the giant dragonfly bang its head, smash its wings, carrying on and on with the drama.

Okay, let’s play dinner party.

To my imaginary dinner party tonight, I’m having the following:

Katherine Dunne. I’m reading Geek Love right now, thanks to a tip from a friend, and I’m stunned. I imagine her a bit crotchety and unafraid to burp. She’ll be sullen and bored out of her mind and she’ll drop a stark story on us right at the end when we’ve all given up on hearing her speak and it will frighten the daylight out of us for weeks. She’ll drive away laughing.

Lenny Bruce. I just read Michael Leonard’s (or Leonard Michael’s?) memoir Sylvia and there’s a scene where Michael/Leonard is watching Lenny Bruce perform at The Village Vanguard and the waiters are slow with the drinks because they’re laughing so hard, doubled over. I think Katherine and Lenny might hit it off.

Johanna Pfister. My exchange student in junior-high school (three different times), because I haven’t been to Guatemala in 20 years and we have things to catch up on.

Thelonius Monk. I don’t want him to sit at the table, though. I’ll have him hunched over my small white piano (I’ll set out food nearby), plinking out his odd little chords in scattershot beat.

Then A., of course, and the kids will run in and out, and M., you and D., too, because I think you’d like this crowd and we could all sort of exchange looks while they amused us.

I’ll serve Chicken Marbella because it’s got a beautiful name and because the Silver Palate Cookbook, which made it famous, is back in vogue. And I’ll have scotch on the table — I see Lenny and Katherine drinking scotch — but also a few bottles of a simple red table wine. Ashtrays, of course. Some sort of baked thing for dessert which I’ll forget about and burn and no one will care by then anyway.

There’s a movie tomorrow night, come watch.

It’s 152 degrees here today, I swear.  I stepped out to do important stuff, came back, and Jean-Jacques was in the pool. 

I’m meeting A. here today, 5:30 if you want to come.  It’s too hot to do much of anything but drink cold pinot gris.  I’ve lifted the 5:00 playing restriction on Wii.  Play all damn day, kids.  Crank up the air, guzzle kool-aid, have the time of your life. 

Crikey. 

M.’s going to Paris soon.  E.’s dating blind.  A.’s headed into a meeting for about 30 minutes.  All the news you need to know, all the time.