The Breakfast Table

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Trap you? Trap you? Not possible, I don’t think. And anyhow I’m not inclined. Encourage, cajole, charmingly trick, but never trap. Speaking of which, sort of, you never answered my excited, ingenuous question yesterday about the Larry McMurtry movie you are reportedly going to direct, or the question about Imaginary Friends, your Lillian Hellman-Mary McCarthy play.

For you it was Martin and Lewis. For me it was Desi and Lucy. I still remember hearing about about their divorce on the radio, and it didn’t so much shock as completely bewilder me: I didn’t know that divorce existed or what it was, and not because I was too young to know or overprotected. Until I was 16 or so, I believe I knew exactly one kid whose parents had divorced and one who lived in an apartment—the same kid. But then came the ‘70s, when all bets were suddenly off.

Speaking of divorce: It had never fully dawned on me until I read Paul Slansky’s long piece about Eminem in the New York Observer this week that kids’ anger over divorce informs a lot of the pop cultural output of people now in their 20s. Including, of course, Eminem’s. (And I want to be a middle-aged hipster who likes Eminem’s music—Slansky’s premise—but I’m not at all sure I can pull it off. You?)

Woody: Interesting that he thought good-natured jive was still in order in the don’t-make-me-sue-you note to Jean Doumanian—in the screwball comedy he suggested they were living out, he warned her, “I’m Fred Astaire.”

Yes, plagiarism is like shoplifting—didn’t I say that yesterday? Around the time the crush of paparazzi in L.A. was causing Wynona Ryder’s arm to break. I guess she breaks easy. On top of the general humiliation of the last year, I feel she has now more than paid her debt to society for (allegedly) stealing the clothes from Saks.

Blog should probably be rendered as ‘blog. It’s a diminutive of Web log. Just like we are, here.