Cold Light of Morning

In the cold light of morning I feel sort of bad about all the tweets I tweeted about Clint Eastwood's performance last night, cracking dirty jokes as he did to an imaginary President Obama represented by an empty chair. But it really was unexpected, and so striking and fascinating as it occurred, and I don't think it's going too far to compare it to something Andy Kaufman would have done back before we were all in on the joke, a tough era and sensation to recall. The only tweet I still like is one I tweeted after Mitt Romney, during his acceptance speech, said, "God bless Neil Armstrong" and I tweeted, "God bless Neil Armstrong... he's sitting right here in this chair." Get it? Because Neil Armstrong is dead. Yeah. Nor do I wish to imply that "Hot Stuff the Little Devil" was the only literary subject discussed by Megan Abbott and myself during our recent summit. We also talked about Richie Rich. I described Richie Rich's father as "epicene." Megan recalled how she used to draw pictures of faucets encrusted with diamonds, inspired by the palatial bathrooms of Richie Rich and the similarly opulent digs in the Shirley Temple movies she enjoyed as a child. Egged on and abetted by Dr. Theresa, she applied some of the Freudian technique she loves so much to uncover exactly when and how my youthful appreciation of the excessive lifestyle of Richie Rich turned to loathing and horror. It took up much of our lunch at Ajax. In the end there were certain things I could not say aloud, so I wrote them on a piece of paper, which Dr. Theresa and Megan Abbott passed back and forth for analysis.