The Christophers a (near) Masterpiece

 

 

THE CHRISTOPHERS (2025)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Neon Films, 100 minutes, R (for language)

★★★★ ½

 

There are more than two actors in The Christophers, but it’s really a pas de deux between Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel. This amazing British film sees director Steven Soderbergh turn in one of his most stellar efforts is quite a few years if, for no other reason, he allowed his actors to act with minimal interference.

 The film’s premise is deceptively simple. Two greedy siblings of famed cantankerous artist Julian Sklar (McKellen), Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning), are trying to get a jump start of their hoped-for inheritance. Julian was unapologetically bisexual, though his most passionate affair involved his gay lover, Christoper. He painted two series of Christopher portraits that wowed the art world and sold for fortunes in the 1990s.

 As Julian aged, though, his star waned, sales dried up, and now spends his days lounging about in his dressing robe, complaining about taxes–though he hasn’t actually paid property taxes in years–and belittling what he sees as the lack of talent of current popular artists. Barnaby and Sallie know there is a third set of Christopher canvases in the attic of his ramshackle London home that he has vowed never to finish. If they can get their hands on the Christophers and hire a forger to “finish” them, they can pay off debts as soon as their dying old man kicks the paint bucket. Alas for them, the only thing Julian despises more than taxes, his failing body, and other artists, it’s his shallow children.

Barnaby and Sallie turn to a former art school friend, Lori Butler (Coel) to “finish” the third set as she knows Julian’s work well and has worked as a legitimate commercial copyist of famous photos. (Think the person who paints the Monets, Vermeers, and Van Goghs that hang above the sofas of people who could never afford original masterpieces.) Lori doesn’t want any part of their scheming and she doesn’t particularly like the money-grubbing Sklar children either, but her own art career is in the doldrums and she needs money. (Not-so-) dear old dad is talked into hiring an assistant to help catalog his work and suggest Lori as an appropriate candidate. The “interview” consists of Sklar’s uninterruptible monologue of his own genius, venomous rants, and, we suspect, his realization that his offspring’s plotting is as obvious as a severed head on a pike. Lori’s first assignment is to destroy the Christophers in the attic, though Lori copies what Julian has done and destroys the copies while hiding the originals.

 Julian doesn’t fall for that dodge, fires Lori, and unleashes a tirade about her unworthiness to even attempt to duplicate his work. He also tells her that he might be old and dying, but he knows how to use Google and that her own work is awful. Lori fully admits her culpability, but as she is leaving, she delivers a learned dissection of why his second series of Christopher was inferior to the first. Julian has a change of heart, shows up at her apartment, and is stunned by her art when seeing it in person. He rehires her and enlists her help in humbling his children. They decide to make the new Christophers into unmarketable equivalents of Elvis on velvet. Julian attacks the canvas with feathers, glitter, glue, slashes, and thrown paint. To his chagrin, he’s incapable of making bad art! He doesn’t spring the trap right away, but, revenge is a dish best served (when the body’s) cold. 

 

Just sayin' 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 McKellen is among the greatest actors of his generation. He is magnificent in his rants, downright scary in his fury, and never breaks character. (He clearly grows fond of Lori, but do you reckon he’ll show it?) Even when he’s just chewing scenery, McKellen’s so good you’ll beg for seconds. Ms. Coel is nothing short of a revelation. She is British-born, but her parents’ Ghanian features– triangular face, high cheeks, and dark skin–look like Ashanti sculptures, and Coel borrows the ambiguous expressions of such pieces. She sees through Julian like he’s an open window, but hides her insights behind a fiery gaze that dissuades inquisitors. Watching her and McKellen on the screen at the same time is a master class in acting.

 The only thing that mars the film is that the parts of Barnaby and Sallie are underwritten. Though the film is a black comedy, Corden and Gunning are more cartoon-like than they need to be.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Did the Red Sox Err in Firing Alex Cora?

The answer to the above question is yes. I’m a Yankees fan, but even though Cora is a cheater who cost the Yankees a World Series bid in both 2017 when he skippered the Astros and again in 2018 with the Red Sox, but I’d trade Aaron Boone for Alex Cora any day of the week. What made Cora’s cheating all the more galling is that he’s a very good tactician who doesn’t need to cheat. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred chose to suspend Cora for the 2020 season. Personally, I believe he and several others who got off scot-free (hello Jose Altuve) damaged the reputation of the game and should have been banned for five years, but that wasn’t what MLB decided.

 

Move the clock forward. Over the weekend the Red Sox fired Cora and six of his coaches. Cheating had nothing to do with it. Red Sox Director of Baseball Operations–a title to Red Sox use instead of General Manager–Craig Breslow made the call. At the time the Red Sox were in last place with a 10-17 record. To paraphrase an old baseball adage, no team on a long winning streak is as good as they look, nor is any as bad as they look when losing. Maybe you fire a good manager toward the end of the year, but Cora was just 27 games into a 162-game season. By my math he had 135 games to right the ship!

 

Exactly who was calling for Cora’s head on a platter? The Red Sox infamously went 86 years (1918-2004) without a World Series championship. Think of it. Some sources will tell you that the Red Sox have won 9 World Series championships, but that’s funny accounting. There was no American League team in Boston until 1901 and they were called the Americans when they won in 1903. They weren’t the Red Sox until 1908, and didn’t play in Fenway Park until 1912. (Note: Early Boston teams called the Bees, the Doves, Red Caps, Red Stockings, Rustlers, and Beaneaters played in the National League and eventually became the Braves.) During the “live ball” era from 1920 on, the Red Sox won zero World Series championships.

 

The Red Sox had considerable success in the dead ball era, but it was not until the 21^st century it mastered the baseball as we know it today. If we think of a World Series title as the ultimate measure of a manager’s worthiness, there are just three Red Sox managers who can boast such success: Terry Francona (2004, 2007), John Farrell (2013), and Alex Cora (2018). Only Joe Cronin (1071 wins in 13 years) and Francona (744) won more games as a Red Sox manager than Cora’s 621 over 8 years. It hasn’t escaped notice that during his 12-year pitching career Breslow was 23-30.

 

What did in Alex Cora? Not another cheating scandal; it was a relative lack of success with a flawed roster and Breslow’s quick trigger as he seeks to shape the team in his own image.  Thus, he handed over the reins to AAA manager Chad Tracey, the theory being that he managed many of the younger Red Sox players in the minors. To repeat a point I’ve made elsewhere, very few MLB teams (over-) hype their prospects like the Red Sox. They gave big contract extensions to several youngsters before they even made the team. Roman Anthony makes sense, but Wilyer Abreu, Brayan Bello, Kristian Campbell, Jarren Duran, Marcello Mayer, and Ceddane Rafaela? Maybe they will become good players but other than flash some good leather, none of them has yet justified a multi-million contract. Whose idea was it to throw $90 million over five years to Masataka Yoshido? Or to trade Rafael Devers, one of the few players on the roster with power? Who thinks that 5’6” Caleb Durbin is the answer at third? Not the Braves, Yankees, or Brewers who had him in their systems.

 

Don’t get me wrong. Payton Tolle and Connelly Early look like legitimate Sox prospects. Nor should anyone think Garrett Crochet will have a 6.30 ERA by the end of the 2026 season.  Or that the Yankees will continue to win at a .643 clip over the next 134 games. The firing of Alex Cora is a portrait of administrative ineptitude, not of Alex Cora’s ability.

 

Rob Weir

Good Ideas: The Wonder of Stars

When I was in grade school, my Aunt Evelyn took me to Philadelphia to see my great Uncle Dave and Aunt Pearl. My visit involved a trip to the Fels Planetarium. I was, so to speak, star-struck! We went into an old building–allegedly the second oldest planetarium in the US–the lights dimmed, and the only things visible was a projector and the only sound was that of our guide. He took us on a journey across the cosmos, which was decidedly smaller than the one we now know. (Only a few galaxies beyond our own, and no Big Bang, quarks, black holes, telescopes in space, or human space flights.) I was enthralled!

I never wanted to be an astronaut, but going to the Fels and perusing my Great Uncle Dave’s entire collection of National Geographic magazines for articles on outer space was an eye opener. At one point I could look into the sky and pick out a few constellations. (Full disclosure: I never did figure out how anyone could imagine Zodiac figures in the stars.) Many years later, my boyhood met my young adulthood. 

 

The Old Fels Planetarium*

 

My college had several courses for non-majors nicknamed “(fill in the black) for Poets.” To qualify for a teaching license, I had to take one called “Basic Physical Science,” that was divided into three four-week graded units: Biology, Physics, and Astronomy. I took the first two in high school, though I was such a right-brained guy that Mr. Science would have renounced me if I were his only son! The Bio part was boring, but I eked out a C. Physics was another matter. I loved the first week of Chem with my hippie/dippy prof, but then disaster hit in the form of an emergency appendectomy. I missed three weeks of school and flat-out flunked Chem. I needed to have at least a C to get credit for the course. Next up, Astronomy. My boyhood enthusiasm was rekindled and I aced it. My transcript has a C+ for the course, but I’m sure I would have gotten a B or B+ if my appendix hadn’t burst.

Forgive the long intro, but I smiled from ear-to-ear when I read about a local middle school program sponsored by the Northampton Education Foundation (NEF) to interest kids in astronomy. It’s a good idea on its own, but NEF contact [sic] Llama Maynard worked with the middle school’s Matt Heaney on a way to bring a Fels Planetarium-like experience to the kids. Who among us does not love a simple solution to a complex problem? Theirs was a pop-up planetarium!

 

Pop-Up Planetarium

 

A what? The idea was an inflatable dome fashioned from black opaque material. Once blown up it looks a bit like a Coleman tent crossed with a flat-bottomed Hostess Snowball. A slit on one side allows students to enter, take a chair, and enjoy a show like mine at the Fels, except it was brought up-to-date. Kids spoke of the excitement of seeing a supernova, learning how galaxies formed, and traveling through Saturn’s rings. They even witnessed a simulation of the Big Bang. Now that’s creative teaching for impressionable young folks.

Who knows what they will carry with them from the experience. An uptick in telescope sales? An obsession with star charts? Future space voyagers? I’m still not going up there until science builds something akin to the Star Trek Enterprise. But if the planetarium experience sticks and inspires some young “poet” to get a good grade in a college science class, the pop-up planetarium will have been a very good idea!

 

Rob Weir

 

* I may be wrong, but I believe the old Fels was abandoned and that the new one is inside of the Franklin Institute.  

 

 

 

Midnight Black: A Guilty Pleasure?

 

 

 

MIDNIGHT BLACK (2025)

By Mark Greaney

Berkley Publishing Group, 528 pages.

★★★

 

As a kid I devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. They resonated with the Cold War rhetoric that was in vogue back then, with the British Bond’s SPECTRE organization wearing the white hats and saving the world from the evil Russian SMERSH. Although SMERSH was once an actual Russian amalgam of three counterintelligence groups, in Fleming novels SMERSH was an organization of Russian spies and intelligence officers seeking to undermine global democracy. SPECTRE was analogous to MI-5, the British version of the CIA.

 

If you didn’t think about that kind of stuff as much as I did, it was essentially akin to “Spy vs. Spy” comic strips in Mad Magazine with the commies in black and the bumbling “good(ish)” guys in white. If I’m honest, fantasizing about Bond’s girlfriends had something to do with my love of Ian Fleming books. Oddly, though, I never cared for James Bond movies– beyond looking at the so-called Bond “girls”– as the films were too cheesy for me. When I hit high school, I put all that stuff behind me; the Vietnam War nudged me toward Quakerism and an embrace of pacifism.

 

I don’t talk about it much, but every now and then I’m like the reformed smoker who sneaks a cigarette in that I pick up a spy novel for the frisson of a cheap thrill. Midnight Black is Book # 14 of author Mark Greaney’s “Gray Man” series and the second book of his I’ve read. I despise all military jargon, weapons, and things war-related, but I have to give Greaney credit for being very good at what he does. Put another way, Midnight Black was a novel I hated to like. It’s cliched, a throwback to the hottest days of the Cold War, sexist, and so macho it makes Rambo seem like a sissy.

 

Greaney’s “Gray Man” is Court(land) Gentry, code named “Violator.” (Is there any bloody point to code names when both sides of a conflict know who you mean?) He is a decided Rambo-type, a rogue CIA agent who is in and out of the organization depending on who is responsible for reining in his multiple violations of protocol. His one-time handler Matthew Hanley has been demoted to a posting in Bogota and the new guy in the big leather chair keeps Court a veritable prisoner on a military compound, though Court is a manly man who is hard to contain. He’s impossible to do so once he’s told that “Anthem,” his Russian lover Zoya Zakharova, was executed. He simply refuses to believe it and makes plans to smuggle himself inside of Russia, find her, and bring her back to the United States. He continues in that planning even though he has no idea where to look and is told trying to get into Russia is a suicide mission. WWRD? (What Would Rambo Do?)

 

Midnight Black takes us all over Eastern and Northern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Finland…) and places Court and all those he contacts in extreme jeopardy. He connects with “Romantic,” Zack Hightower, a sometime partner, sometime rival, as well as various contacts seeking to undermine the Russian Federation, CIA folks working on the sly without permission, and seafaring folk who might get him into Russia or might sell him out for a song. Just like Rambo, Court decides a small team is all that’s needed to take out huge military units. And, of course, Anthem is not dead; she’s in a Russian gulag in Mordovia, as is a popular dissident, Nadai Yarovaya who the West wants to spring from prison but won’t go unless her husband is also freed from a nearby gulag. I guess if you’re going to take out three separate gulags you want to keep things small.  

 

Court is resourceful and exploits splits within the Russian intelligence community. Frankly, the plot line is absurd, with one impossible obstacle piled upon another a The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight fashion. I can’t really assess all of the hardware, explosives, tactics, and military alignments mentioned in the book as I know nothing about such matters. Again, though, the novel is akin to Fleming’s James Bond in that it’s all about the kill, the thrill, and the kiss, not plausibility. Keep a towel handy to wipe up the testosterone.

 

Rob Weir

(Code Name: Shamefaced)

 

 

  

 

Witches and Relics in the Time of Plague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE STONE WITCH OF FLORENCE (2024)

By Anna Rasche

Park Row, 368 pages

★★★★

 

If you’ve ever studied medieval history, there’s much to like about The Stone Witch of Florence. If you’re a serious scholar of the period, there much that might annoy you. As a recovering medievalist it had elements that made me grab it: witchcraft, the Black Death, church corruption, and just enough accuracy to dissuade me from screaming, “Rubbish!” and hurling it across the room.

 

This is a historical novel written by a gemmologist that flirts with fantasy, folklore, and feminist wish fulfilment in blurring the rare with the customary. As modern Wiccans remind us, the word “witch” is often defined by whatever eyes are looking at it. What word would you attribute to a woman who uses gemstones to heal? Is she a folk physician, a heretic, a rock-wielding mesmerist, a threat to public health?

 

In her debut novel Anna Rache juxtaposes her beleaguered heroine Ginevra de Gasparo with church beliefs in the efficacy of relics. It is 1348, the year the Plague begins to ravage the Italian peninsula. (Think medieval; there’s no such thing as a unified Italian nation-state.) Prior to the outbreak of the Plague, Ginevra’s great ambition was to become a member of the physician’s guild of Florence, which got her banned from the city. Some women were allowed to join guilds, but not many. But let’s not romanticize a medieval physician whose practices of using leeches, bleedings, blistering, and unguents in ways that often differed from the “cures” of witches only in the gender of the applicant. 

 

The terms Plague and Black Death are often used interchangeably though they were not the same thing. The Beath Death looked scarier, with the patient’s body growing pus-filed buboes. Yet it was the most-survivable form of plague; the highly contagious airborne pneumonic plague had a death rate of close to 100 percent. Patients went from health to death in less than a day. (Shades of the early days of Covid, anyone?) Depending on where you were, the Plague carried off between 30-60 percent of the entire population between 1348-51. So were “stone witches” such as Ginevra blamed and burned at the stake? No; witch killings gathered steam between the 15^th-17^th centuries.  In the mid-14^th, it was often the case that only heretics believed in witches at all. Ginevra was allowed back to an increasingly-empty Florence with a vague promise from Inquisitor Michele (male) that he might support her application to the guild.

 

There is a catch, of course. Ginevra is also drawn into what is more of a crisis of public faith than of public health. Michele wants Ginevra’s aid in finding out who is stealing relics from local churches. It is a matter of urgency. After all, if what remains of the populace concludes that faith can’t save them, what need is there for the church, priests, or inquisitors? As Rache writes, “Florentines were not exactly known known as the most pious of peoples.” Pre-Plague Florence was as much a city of bankers, merchants, and luxury, despite its fame for holding numerous important relics. One by one they disappear–the left arm of San Filippo Apostolo, the leg of the martyr Miniato, the skull of San Zenobio, and other items deemed sacred and miraculous? What is to be made of vials of colored water left in their place?

 

All of this builds a strange symbiosis between Michele and Ginevra, though her strongest alliance is with the  wealthy Lucia, who supports her and aids in investigating the mystery of missing relics. As happened so often during the Plague, wealthy men fled the cities for the allegedly miasma-free air of the countryside. In an odd way, the rich were right about that. We now know that fleas hosted by black rats and bred in filthy medieval cities were big culprits in spreading the Plague.

 

The Stone Witch of Florence is an unusual novel. Does Rasche intend us to contrast the official veneration of magical relics with the presumed superstition of Ginerva’s Plague immunity with her pure crystal quartz, her energy with garnet, and her ability to drink men under the table with a piece of amethyst under her tongue? Probably. Are we to draw conclusions about power versus the poor? However you read this novel, rest assured it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

News of the World is Sweet–In a Good Way

 

 

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD (2020)

Directed by Paul Greenglass

Universal Pictures, 118 minutes, PG-13 (cowboy violence, a few swears)

★★★★

 

Say the name “Tom Hanks” and eyes will roll. For those who like movies with grit, snark, and a walk on the wild side, Hanks evokes Mr. Rogers (or, worse, Forrest Gump). But sometimes there is something to be said for wholesomeness. News of the World is one such movie. It is based on a successful novel of the same name by Paulette Giles in which director Paul Greenglass largely parallels Giles’ book, except that the latter was more successful than the money-losing movie.

 

News of the World is a Western that wears its heart on its tattered sleeve. By 1870, the American Civil War had been over for five years, though the South had a long way to go in terms of economic recovery. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) eeks out a meagre living by traveling from town to town with a stack of (semi-) recent newspapers. Literacy among white commoners was considerably lower than in the North. Kidd’s job involves reading random newspaper stories to anyone who pays ten cents to hear him. Like a good teacher, Kidd mixes humorous tales with hard news (economics, foreign rebellions, disaster stories) and his dry-wit delivery and public lecturing skills make him popular as long as he keeps moving and doesn’t draw often from the same well.  

 

After leaving Wichita Falls, he encounters a disturbing scene: an overturned wagon and a black man lynched from a tree. He hears rustling nearby and finds a young girl (Helena Zenger) in hiding. She speaks no English and when the U.S, occupying soldiers come by they advise him to take her to an Army fort in Castroville, some 400 miles out of his way. Kidd makes a stop in Dallas hoping that that some old friends will take the girl in, but she’s far too willful. He also stops at an inn run by a former lover, the widow Gannett (Elizabeth Marvel), who tells Kidd that the girl he calls “Johanna” speaks Kiowa and was taken in a raid six years earlier. By all looks and demeanor she is Kiowa, though an occasional German word pops out.

 

The movie is essentially a sojourn across dangerous lands in which Kidd and Johanna learn from each other. It would be hard to exaggerate exactly how dangerous their journey is. They encounter three ex-Confederate roughnecks who offer to “buy” Johanna, presumably for their sexual pleasure. They hightail it out of town pursued by the sleazy horndogs and have a classic shootout in which Kidd and his young charge hide out in a rocky hillside. Johanna’s ingenuous solution to how to compensate for running out of ammunition is a cool scene.

 

There are hostile Native tribes and In Erath County, Kidd sees firsthand how lawless Texas has become. A cattleman named Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy) has set up a rogue state within Texas in which his word, laws, and racist values prevail. In this case, Kidd’s intellect and silver tongue save the day and they leave with an acolyte named Calley (Fred Hechinger) in tow for a few life lessons before setting off on his own.

 

Kidd and Johanna arrive in Castroville only to learn that there won’t be a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in place for three months, so it’s off to a farming settlement where records indicate her German-speaking aunt and uncle live. To them, though, Johanna is expected to earn her keep on the farm. This sets the table for realizations and a happy ending. In the movie this comes a bit too fast to be completely believable, but it’s in keeping with the novel.

 

News of the World isn’t a classic, but it’s sweet and satisfying. Hanks is very good in the role of a man who saw enough violence to last him a lifetime and is driven to do the right thing, not the most convenient one. Learn the name Helena Zenger, a German-born actress now in her teens. Her translucent paleness serves to accentuate her vulnerability. When being stubborn or throwing a tantrum, her face flushes as if the underside of her skin is afire. Her acting chops are such that she communicates clearly though for much of the movie her words mean nothing to Hanks or the audience–unless you happen to speak Kiowa! Very few people saw this film, but give it a try.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Sandwich: Gynocentric but Funny and Poignant

 

 

 

 

SANDWICH (2024)

By Catherine Newman

Harper, 226 pages.

★★★

 

 

Sandwich is the most gynocentric novel I’ve read in years. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy this work from Catherine Newman, but sometimes it’s hard book for males to grasp. The novel’s central character, Rachel (aka/ Rocky) dwells on subjects such as childbirth, menopause, oral sex, her vagina, sagging breasts, and how much she misses pregnancy. Lest you think me insensitive, Sandwich is also very funny, touching, and poignant. Plus, Rocky is seriously neurotic, has few filters, and is blissfully unaware of how others within hearing range might squirm over her topics of conversation. Besides, ladies, how would you feel about a novel that dwelt upon urinary tract infections, distended testicles, varicose veins, sexual dysfunction, “war” stories, and passing gas?  Thought so!

 

For those who don’t live in New England, Sandwich is also a town on Cape Cod. If you think of Cape Cod as the flexing arm extending into the ocean, Sandwich is located atop the muscle after you cross the Sagamore Bridge onto the Cape. It’s where Rocky and her husband Nick have vacationed every summer for twenty years–always in the same cottage. Nick is the one who should bear the nickname Rocky, as he’s loyal, steady, handy, and as patient as Rachel is manic. He always listens, though he suspects he only understands about 65% of what Rocky says. We readers think he might be overestimating! They have two wonderful children, twenty-year-old Willa and her older brother Jamie. Both have flown the proverbial coop and Jamie arrives with his serious girlfriend Maya, though he and Willa often speak like a bonded pair despite the fact that Willa identifies as a lesbian and a vegetarian, though she eats seafood. Because. The Cape!  

 

Rocky and Nick are in their fifties, though you can be excused for thinking of them as older and refugees from Woodstock. They are incredibly laidback, not because their kids are grown, but because that’s just the way there were and are. One example of this is Rocky’s relief that her daughter is gay so she doesn’t have to worry about her getting pregnant. Or, at least he was relieved until Nick reminded her that lesbians can have children by choice! But Rocky always finds things to fret over, including worrying that her daughter might be menstruating in an ocean where sharks are sometimes present!

 

Rocky is a classic born-to-be-a-mom type and Nick has come to accept that he’ll always be number three to Jamie and Willa. We get a no-topics-barred look at family dynamics during a week at the beach. Even Grandma and Grandpa get into the act for a few days. Newman has a true gift for turning annoying moments into comedy. The first thing that happens when they enter their modest (and in need of upgrades) vacation house is that the toilet overflows. When Willa complains of the smell, Nick yells out that he’s “knee-deep in sewage.” Rocky insists that’s not true, but because Willa is a “Daddy’s girl” she’s more inclined to believe him! The fact that Maya adores Jamie and his entire family doesn’t leave much room for an outbreak of elegance. And who has visited the Cape that can’t relate to this visit to the local bakery? “Forty minutes later, we are walking back to the cottage with two lattes, four chocolate croissants, one scone, three baguettes, and a receipt for sixty-five dollars.”

 

More serious issues are discussed–abortion, feminism, anxiety, therapy, politics, still birth, grandpa’s dementia–but mostly we get Rocky’s memories of past trips to the Cape, Rocky’s worried thoughts, and the joy of people reveling in one another’s company. If laughter is the best therapy, Rocky’s neuroses don’t have a chance! When Jamie discovers toasted almond bars in the freezer left behind by the previous resident. Rocky has a “bad feeling” about eating any, but Jamie wins the day by a four-to-one vote: “… you feel like maybe the people who stayed here last week… [are] playing the long game of booking this place last October so that they could plant a poisoned ice-cream novelty and kill us.” Leave to Nick to remember a time when they were younger and Rocky baked a cake in a cat litter pan! As they prepare to leave and muse over their favorite things, Rocky thinks: “…the fact of us together and alive. The kids… are so grown! So young. Mine and not mine, as ever they have been. Maybe my grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding.”

 

Rob Weir