Billboard, Wilshire Blvd and Wilton, a couple months ago. 

Vivien Dayrell-Browning Greene (1905-2003), was the Catholic wife of Graham Greene (1904-1991) and noted expert on dolls and doll houses.  "At a local auction [in Oxford, where VIvien had moved from London with the children because of the war and the bombing] she was charmed by an old dolls' house; she bought it and took it home on the bus with her. As the war dragged on and her marriage disintegrated, she devoted herself to restoring and furnishing the dollhouse. Materials were scarce; she recalled scraping off old paint and wallpaper with shards of broken glass. 'I needed a hobby, the wartime evenings in the black-out were long and dark, so I started to furnish the house, to make carpets and curtains for it.' She then began seeking out other antique dollhouses and furnishings, researching their history, and restoring the houses, filling the Greenes' rented home with her miniature world." [Source: Wikipedia]. 

The writer Denton Welch found escape in a doll house too.

Then there's Ibsen, which is of course another story.  And then there's Joss's new show with Eliza.  I watched a recent episode which began with an impressively long single-take steadi-cam walk-and-talk with two characters, and I was reminded -- I think I was supposed to be reminded -- of the first time Joss did a single-take steadi-cam walk-and-talk on Buffy that started exterior and tracked right through to the interior sets because they had dressed the outside of the stage to look like a street entrance to the school -- no cuts!  The camera started on Buffy and picked up and dropped her friends and series regulars along the way, culminating in that soon-to-be iconic push through the famous library doors and into the sanctum of sanctums, Giles' Lair, the Library, smack dab on top of the Hell Mouth, all in one perfectly executed and unbelievably well-performed take.  Whoops and high-fives when that episode aired, I can tell you.  No, not because long single-take steadi-cam or tracking shots were unique in television -- X-Files did it with Scully and Mulder, and E.R. had them and West Wing would take them to new heights -- and speed up the dialogue while they were at it.  That is to say, shows with budgets to build the requisite miles of FBI corridors and hospital hallways, or entire White House replicas, those shows did it if they felt like it.  But this was Buffy, the greatest TV nobody was watching, the little show that could and would make history in spite of the network and studio execs who would have changed the title, changed the casting, tried to do pretty much anything they could to put their mark on a show the way cats do if you know what I mean, who would have gone and smothered it in its crib if they'd had the chance and yet mercifully failed to do so.  But this, of course, you all know.  

As you are also aware, I like to tie things together; I like to show you the way Everything is Connected.  Not because I'm special but because we are all looking for patterns. We are all seeking to uncover and discover the unifying theme, structure, the key, the magic number, the combination that repeats and unlocks it all.  And I guess that it's also to some extent about trying to do the same thing we did before with the same result.  Or, chasing the first time that whatever it was we did or experienced worked and trying every time after that to get it to do the same thing and have the same effect.  That first kiss, say, by which all future kisses are measured.  That first drink or that first high by which all subsequent will pale in comparison, that initial kick glimpse of ecstasy or bliss that will provide the impetus for endless futile ghostly pursuits to have it again, feel the buzz again, do it again, an endless chase.  Who said that the real trick in life was not to succeed but to succeed again?  That's what I'm talking about.

Now I'm off track, of course.  There was a point here I was trying to make.  But someone out there knows.  Someone else I bet understands why I wanted to post an otherwise ordinary photograph of a billboard.  Someone else remembers.  Some other mutant enemy.  

Anyway, I don't know about you, but if bombs were falling and my marriage was falling apart, I might find solace in something small and manageable like a doll's house.  Something I could focus on.  A world just big enough for me to order and control and fix to my liking.  Scraping and picking away at little bits of wallpaper in the dark while the bombs fall.  And if I were a sometimes bedridden and strange young man like Denton who wrote novels?  Ditto.   But my life's never been anywhere near so tragic, and although there are things here and there I can identify with, that I can connect to, I also know that what I'm trying to say is not quite all holding together.  There's too much else going on right now. 

Still, I have to say it anyway: I get it.  I see the point.  And it's interesting, if to nobody else but me and you.  And right now, that's all that really matters.