The view this morning.  See the jacarandas?  You should scroll down and see yesterday's.

I could just stay up here and be Emily Dickinson, couldn't I; never leave my room and take pictures from the window.  Lower a basket on a rope to the garden so the maid could put my lunch in it and sit here and write poems you would find stored away in a shoebox when I'm gone.  

Except there's no garden down below and no maid and no one to send up lunch and I gave up poetry a very long time ago.  Still, blogging is the equivalent of a shoebox full of scribblings and snapshots, right?  Meanwhile, the view...

Last night Jim and I went to the Egyptian for a screening of "Vertigo" by the American Cinematheque.  Believe it or not, I'd never seen it. 

"Go up the stairs, Judy.  Go up the stairs."

Seeing Jimmy Stewart driving a DeSoto around San Francisco fifty years ago shadowing a blond Kim Novak was certainly worth the price of admission.  Plus it's so rare you get to be delighted by something this old.  Like the very first time you watched Lassie dash into a burning barn and you really don't know if she'll be able to save Timmy who's been knocked out unconscious and ... 

As with so many of life's experiences, the suspense can be almost unbearable.  The first time.  

Then we came out onto Hollywood Boulevard where neither of us would normally dream of venturing on a Saturday night, and it was both colorful and terrifying.  The bright lights.  The tourists.  The young girls all dressed up to look like cheap whores and the boys with their pants falling down and looking like hungry juvenile delinquents, which many of them doubtless are.  "Do you want to buy a Bong?" Jim asked as we stood before a garish window full of them, swirly Venetian blown glass erotically shaped.  We had frozen yogurt instead from a PinkBerry knock-off next door.  Teenaged girls lounged out front with bleached blond hair and way too much mascara and rhinestone jewelry and miniskirts, smoking and chewing gum and making polite conversation with the older guy who swayed nearby, drinking out of a paper bag and leering.  All I could think was, somewhere in Ohio or Indiana there are mothers who are lying awake, who haven't slept in years, hoping against hope against this very scene.   Praying like Judy's mother back in Kansas that it would all work out, that she'd get a job in a department store and meet a nice man and even if she dyed her hair and let him buy her clothes, it wouldn't end badly.  

"Hitchcock sort of hated women," I observe to Jim.  "Marnie, Judy/Madeleine, chasing Tippi around with all those birds..."

"It's more complicated than that," he replies. 

"Still, there's something going on.  Sean Connery roughhandling Marnie, Jimmy forcing this transformation on Judy..."  I think of that moment when Bernard Hermann borrows from Wagner and Kim emerges from the bathroom in a mist, the swelling of the orchestra toward that final Liebestod crescendo as she walks into her closeup...

"And are you trying to say you've never been there, never done that?" my friend Jim asks.  "Never pursued someone who looks like someone else, or requested special outfits," he continues.  "Or how about a certain look?  A particular haircut?  Maybe even specially scripted dialogue?"

Unfortunately, Jim knows I have not always been Emily Dickinson locked in my room.  And of course he has a point, and there just might be something important here, about desire, or managing desire, the nature of desire, if we only had all the pieces.  

But we're just wandering, like the characters in "Vertigo" keep saying when people ask.  We return to his car, which is parked under a jacaranda tree.  I brush at the fallen lavendar blooms.  "It's more complicated than that," I explain.