Good Monday to you all. It's a gorgeous May so far - 86 on Saturday. Instant summer. The tulips out front made it up, which was a surprise. Usually the rabbits get them. Wife couldn't remember when she planted them. But here they are, like they own the place.

Ah, but they do! Nature itself surrounds the house, can reclaim it in time. We live at their forebearance.

Ah, but they don't. I do, and have the regular mortgage payments to show it.

Ah, crap: The left hooks and roundhouse kicks of karma continue. Daughter is not coming home to stay for the summer. I’d figured that would be something we’d face next year, but no, the pattern continues its parallel perfection: just as I had to leave home for the big city, she had to leave home for the big city; just as I could only take a brief stint in the childhood home after my second year, so has she opted to go to summer school.

Ah, you say, the ol’ “summer school” dodge. But it makes sense, completely: she lost a semester to COVID, can catch up and get out in four years, and besides, really: what would she do here, besides work at Target and pine for the new life? It’s what I did. I went back to Fargo after my second year and groused, miserable, cut off from everything that had possibilities. Every day, you inhabited the skin of your old life, a ghost drifting around the old environments, bound to it but not of it anymore, tied by itchy bonds of obligation. I understood her decision completely.

It still bites, and bites many wax tadpoles, from a personal - read, utterly selfish - standpoint. The good news is that she’ll be home for a month in between the end of the semester and the start of school. She wants to get a job in Boston, perhaps in a restaurant: hurrah for that as well. All these things are good and necessary. The problem is whether they impinge on a possible trip to Walberswick, which - once again - has become my sole goal in life.

Even more than getting back on the sea. Oh yes, I want to get on a cruise ship again, as soon as possible, and I might be working one again, this year, if we can sell the Peg Lynch lecture / skit performance show. (Our previous deal with Cunard fell apart hen COVID shut everything down.) I don’t care where the ship goes. I just want to do the deck walk after supper at sunset; I want to open the doors and stand on the balcony and hear the great commotion of our passing. I want to put on a suit and put on a show.

But more than anything, get to me to the Anchor.

This was the mantra in 2018, when Daughter vanished to Brazil, after which I went to England to do the shows. Just get me to the Anchor for a Ghost Ship Ale, let me walk in the familiar pub and be hailed by the publican: it’s the American! (This is probably arranged in advance.) Let me sample everything from the brewery across the river, sit in on a creaky bench, order the Coronation Chicken, and just . . . be there. One more time, and preferably with Daughter, and maybe a few more after that, until they stand her a hiskey because “she’s finally scattering his ashes, just a few granules in Potter’s Lane,”

I would be perfectly happy having a few granules of my incinerated remains dropped down the loo, which would allow you to get a little more traveling in.

The only other vacation possibility looming is a wedding in another state, which, as all men know, is not a vacation at all, but the equivalent of a theme park ride where you are strapped into a chair on rails and dragged through a choreographed experience.

Anyway. What matters is that she's home on Wednesday. And given the brevity of the stay, I think she’ll be delighted to be here.

Me, I'm ambivalent. I'll miss our text conversations.

KIDDING.

Generic crime shocker title:

It’s our cops, whom we’ll meet then forget about:

Yes, it’s Bela Oxmyx; there’s our Star Trek connection for today.

We start in Lovers Lane, where a couple - a respectable couple, they’re going to be married some day - are necking, unaware they’re observed by . . .

Hmm.

People forget how many bad guys he played; I’m hard-pressed to think of a sympathetic role in his 40s and 50s appearances, which makes the choice to run him as Perry Mason all the more interesting.

Short story shorter, he decks the guy and takes the girl:

But we soon realize he’s not a sex murderer. He’s . . . a bit slow, let’s say. Because it’s the 50s, there’s a bunch of BS about his Mother Complex.  He is sad. One of those immature Mamma's Boy conflicted sex-maniacs who makes with the sheep eyes . . .

 . . . but then gets Angry! when she doesn't understand and lies to him LIKE ALL THE OTHERS, THE ONES MOTHER TOLD ME ABOUT! I wonder if it was a cliche even then.

The girl he’s nabbed?

IMDB says that during the movie, Burr and Wood . . . dated.

Really. Let’s go to Wikipedia.

Burr died of cancer in 1993, and his personal life came into question, as many details of his biography appeared to be unverifiable.

Such as?

Burr was reportedly married at the beginning of World War II to a Scottish actress named Annette Sutherland —killed, Burr said, in the same 1943 plane crash that claimed the life of actor Leslie Howard. However, multiple sources have reported that no one by that name appears on any of the published passenger manifests from the flight.

A son supposedly born during this marriage, Michael Evan, was said to have died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of ten. Another marriage purportedly took place in the early 1950s to a Laura Andrina Morgan—who died of cancer, Burr said, in 1955. Yet no evidence exists of either marriage, nor of a son's birth, other than Burr's own claims.

As late as 1991, Burr stood by the account of this son's life and death. He told Parade Magazine that when he realized Michael was dying, he took him on a one-year tour of the United States. "Before my boy left, before his time was gone," he said, "I wanted him to see the beauty of his country and its people." After Burr's death, his publicist confirmed that Burr worked in Hollywood throughout the year that he was supposedly touring with his son.

Dude.

Also:

In the late 1950s, Burr was rumored to be romantically involved with Natalie Wood.[1] Wood's agent sent her on public dates so she could be noticed by directors and producers, and so the men she dated could present themselves in public as heterosexuals. The dates helped to disguise Wood's relationship with Robert Wagner, whom she later married.

Burr reportedly resented Warner Bros.' decision to promote her attachment to another gay actor, Tab Hunter, rather than him. Robert Benevides later said, "He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess.”

Ah well.

Natalie Wood’s father in the movie is Edmund O’Brien, who has a hollerin’ one-note performance that grates and wearies. IMDB notes a goof about his first appearance, and it’s beer-related. I include it here to show you how little I actually got out of this one.

I was so bored I zoomed in to study his beer-pouring technique.

That will suffice! Now, as ever, the Matchbooks.