The Breakfast Table

Show Biz–One Way or Another

Hey Beam:

Funny you should mention books. I just returned from the emporium in the Square and got kind of excited seeing The World of Jewish Entertaining. I assumed it was a restaurant guide, but it had recipes! As for Ulysses at Brandeis, it was not assigned to me, but I knew it was considered difficult, so to seem intellectual I dropped it into conversations…only I was calling it Useless, having heard it wrong. (No need to wonder: I was blonde then, just like now.)

Aren’t you loving the Republicans duking it out in preparation for our gubernatorial primary? Pardon my schadenfreude, but Joe Malone’s harping on Paul Cellucci’s $700,000 personal credit card debt is a lot of fun. (Do you hear whinnying in the background?) Anyway, Cellucci is accusing Malone’s P.I. of illegally extracting bank information. The dick’s name is Bo Dietl. Isn’t that the best name you’ve heard all week?

And of course there’s the 79-year-old former farmer in Vermont who spent $16 on his campaign and WON his primary–which he entered as a lark–and now he’s the one to challenge Pat Leahy! The AP says the farmer, Fred Tuttle, got his celebrity status when a neighbor put him in a low-budget movie where he plays a nobody who beats the incumbent. The moviemaker neighbor asked him to run in the real primary to hype the movie. This is almost as good as the dead lady who won a primary in Oklahoma.

On a non-elective note, Boston’s cheeriest bow-tied minister is now Ambathador Stith. Sorry, Ambassador Stith. (Addressing him is gonna be hell on people in Tanzania who lisp.) Anyway, your paper printed his remarks upon being sworn in, and it seemed just perfect that he used the metaphor from A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times and the worst of times.

I don’t know if this qualifies as political or not, but billionaire Marvin Davis had a little dinner party where the guests were given Monica berets as well as stogies, proving, I guess, that money doesn’t care who has it. And the literati and fatwa people will be interested to know that Salmon Rushdie wants to act. (You’d think he’d want to direct.) The subject of movies reminds me that everybody is remembering the newly late Kurosawa. I did hear a fabulous story that John Landis tells. (He really is a director.) He went to London to direct Olivier in a filmed Shakespeare. They met in a restaurant to get acquainted. Olivier asked Landis what was his favorite filmed Shakespeare to date. Landis, not expecting the question, blurted out, “Kurosawa’s MacBeth.” Olivier rose from his chair, stood up and screamed, ”BUT IT WAS IN JAPANESE!” I love movie business stories. They are only outdone by those from the legit theatre.

xx Margo