...and Russell Mulcahy's In Like Flynn, based on Errol Flynn's 1937 memoir Beam Ends.
Yesterday after finishing my lunch, I cracked open my fortune cookie and found...no fortune.
Now, I don't mean this in the annoying sense of too many modern fortune cookie fortunes: that they are advice rather than prophecy; a maxim or an aphorism instead of a prediction. No, what I found in my cookie was nothing at all, no slip of paper whatsoever with something written on it, however platitudinous. No fortune.
I am superstitious by lifelong habit of mind, and this didn't go over well with me. I crushed the empty cookie in my hand, took it outside and sprinkled the crumbs around a bush. I asked my server for another fortune cookie, was given one, and cracked it open. This time there was indeed a paper, and this is what it read: "A VIGOROUS HIKE AND FRESH AIR ARE JUST WHAT YOU NEED."
On the way to lunch, I had passed the "Hole in the Rock" in Papago Park...
...and reproved myself for not going there at lunch time to get at least a semblance of light exercise, instead of just stuffing my face. Now it appeared that the Fortune Cookie Gods were telling me the same thing: Get your ass outside and take a walk, or you have No Fortune.
So I stopped in Papago Park on the way back to The Day Gig, and trudged up and down the butte. Boy, am I out of shape.
RIP to Kaye Ballard, passed on at 93.
I had the good luck to see Ballard perform live once, in one of the strangest live shows I've ever seen, a tribute to Spike Jones at the lamented Sundome in Sun City; the bill also included Billy Barty, Adrienne Barbeau, and Buddy Ebsen, who recited the Gettysburg address, played the saxophone (throwing in a gibe at Bill Clinton) and danced offstage doing what he called "the shim-sham shimmy." Ballard, who had toured with Spike Jones early in her career, performed a flawless song-and-dance routine in tribute to Jimmy Durante, then finished by saying how much she had adored Durante, brandishing the cane she was using, and proclaiming "and this is his cane!"
The audience went wild.
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