This is the first half of the story. The second half will appear next week.

When anyone in town needed help, they contacted Rocky Germain.

This wasn’t for the faint-hearted or the foolish. Ol’ Rocky lived on the top of Gutter Mountain, which wasn’t so much a mountain as a very pissed-off hill. There were nine switchbacks until the road ended where the flood washed it out back in 2007, and they’d never rebuilt it on account of Rocky being the only one living up there in the first place. He’d built the stair path himself, dragging rocks into place with a wheelbarrow not worth its weight in rust. So when you needed Rocky Germain, you better have been serious. He’d amble down every couple of weeks for fresh groceries and Dawson’s patented jerky—best in nine counties—and tell folks he was “off the clock.”

Every Halloween, some teenagers would hatch a plan to egg Rocky’s house, but after two hundred and ninety-one stairs, all you had were a bunch of damn fool kids gasping for water at the end of his path before trudging back down, tails between their legs. Rocky would fix your washing machine, drive you to the airport and back, or chisel out a basement trench, but you had to get up the hill first. The only one crazy enough to go up more than once a summer was Jim Westerman, who once meandered up so Rocky could show him how to change his iPhone password. But really, Jim just needed someone to drink beers with. So yeah. When you climbed that hill, Rocky didn’t refuse you.

Unless you were me.

I took a break halfway up, my knees barking, a testament to those people who couldn’t hide their surprise when they found out my age. The bags under my eyes exceeded carry-on regulations, and I had a paunch impervious to smoothies and salads. Twenty-seven going on forty. An unseasonable early November snow had blown the maple branches bare.

Rocky lived in a stripped-down ski lodge that looked like an old woman had passed it over in favor of a shoe.

Twenty years ago, he looked like a photographer was lurking somewhere for a perfect shot. Now, time had worn paths of pain into his brow. I didn’t even get to ask.

“No dice, Finch.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t matter. It’s a no. Flat no.”

“But your rule. Anyone who makes it up the hill.”

“It’s more a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule.”

“So you got exceptions?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of exceptions?”

“As in I ain’t gonna help you.”

He shut the pine door. The wind shrieked through the bare trees, underlining my poor decision to go with my weather-beaten leather jacket this morning. A loon wailed, perhaps in solidarity. I hammered the door with the bottom of my fist. “Rocky, c’mon.”

The door swung wide. “We ain’t gonna have any trouble, are we?”

“It’s my dad.”

That stopped him. He pursed his lips. “What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

His nostrils flared, expelling the resentment. “Not for nothing, but . . . good.”

“I figured that’s what you’d say.”

He nodded, a granite façade. “And this is why you came up here?”

“I need you to help me bury him.”

“Dammit, Finch.” He looked me over, taking in my stooped posture and thinning hair. “You could have started with that.”

“I didn’t know about your exceptions and whatnot.”

“This is different. C’mon, wait in here.”

The interior was adorned with a couple of ancient snowshoes, a grinning plastic deer’s head done up like a hunting trophy, and a stately set of leather-bound classics, all of which Rocky had read. The room’s centerpiece was an old-school, black, round oak stove with a square front plate. It looked like it weighed ten thousand pounds.

Rocky came back with the six-foot tube that was his entire existence when he left the house. It was the Swiss army knife of walking sticks, fashioned from oak with hollowed-out compartments for matches, a utility knife, trail mix, first aid kit, and sanitizing wipes.

“He at the house?”

“Yeah.”

We set out for the stairs. Each time I planted my leg, my knees roared at me.

“You’re doing it wrong.” He hopped down a few stairs and turned. “Treat it like a real staircase. Would you plant your foot every time? No wonder you’re killing your knees. Just keep moving. Plot a course if you need.” That shit worked. Within fifteen minutes, we were at the road and all the switchbacks.

Soon as Rocky hit town, the hands came out, people of varying ages giving their local hero a quick wave and hello, time peeling back to his years as the friendliest man in town. Now, it was more superficial, save for the older ladies, who he treated like lost loves. “So good to see you, Rocky,” said one prune of a specimen, who he hugged so tightly I thought she’d break.

The house was down on a small road that was supposed to be a development until the county ran out of money, so it was one of just five on the block. One of the others had belonged to Rocky until he sold it twenty years ago. Ours was a nondescript white cottage with paint flaking off the columns and a used white Ford Bronco cockeyed in the driveway. Outside were a few perfunctory bushes that were probably jealous of the other gardens.

And quiet. Missing years of Rocky ambling over to listen to the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen while his son Jeffy and I played video games or kickball, before we were old enough to compare our dicks and talk about boobs. I stuck the key in the door to confront what I’d left a few hours earlier.

To be continued…

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This Substack is about life. About living.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of posts lately that talk about ways to get everything out of life. Shout-out to who did a post like this titled “52 Midlife Notes to Self” that I enjoyed.

Here’s one of mine:

See the opening band.

There are a lot of reasons to skip. You can get to the stadium later. Go have dinner at a restaurant. Dig in for a long late night.

But life is about stepping out of your comfort zone. And hell, if you bought tickets to the headliner, the opening band won’t be that far off!

Five good reasons to see the opening band—replete with examples.

1. Sometimes, the Olds Can Still Bring It.
   
   I took my father to see Earth, Wind & Fire in Newark, N.J. in 2017. They are, of course, sublime.
   
   But the opening act was Nile Rodgers—the guitar and producing great—with Chic. Not for nothing, but they blew the doors off the stage.
   
   Nile Rodgers has produced some of the best music anybody’s ever heard. He’s also got a unique guitar style—it has a name, “chucking”—and is immediately recognizable starting from the 1970s all the way through Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.”
   
   He’s been at the forefront of so much music that he rightly can lay claim on doing all of the Chic numbers, snippets of “Rapper’s Delight,” and ending with David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” which he produced (see video). Plus, he usually gives you a story of beating cancer, and he’s inspirational and danceable all at once.
   
   

   ---

2. Because openers have to deal with curveballs.
   
   There’s no being a diva as an opening act. The headliner can catch a fit if when things go sideways, but openers cannot. Brandi Carlisle had an artist named Amythyst Kiah open up in Forest Hills, Queens a few years back.
   
   The problem? Her band got waylaid, so instead of a full group it was just her, by herself, wailing on her guitar with her blues-and-Southern inflected sounds. All full of rage and heartbreak and yearning. But she had to do it! And she thrived. I don’t have a good video. Here’s one of her best songs.

3. The surprise factor.
   
   Saw a band named Low-Cut Connie out in Rockaway Park, Queens a couple years ago with friends. (For context, picture an angrier, sweatier, hornier version of Ben Folds Five.)
   
   Anyway: his opener were a bunch of ragged-looking dudes that call themselves Dogpark. Figured they, too, would be just kind of whatever and they’d slink off the (very tiny) stage at the Rockaway Park Hotel. But they rocked it out—and now they’re part of the regular Spotify rotation as I noted a few weeks back. You just never know what you’ll discover.
   

4. When the opener really belongs in the headlining band.
   
   We went to Brooklyn Bowl a summer ago to see the North Mississippi All-Stars, a gloriously laconic rock-and-blues band. The opener was a guy named Jontavious Willis. Suffice to say he’s a country guy from Georgia—a very “talking blues” kind of style that has a bit of Texas to it as well as the Delta.
   
   After seeing a few lackluster blues artists over the years, he’s a breath of joyful fresh air.
   
   Naturally, the North Mississippi All-Stars pulled him onstage for a few numbers, and hell if he couldn’t just slot into their band as a guitar player and vocalist. But this is during his opening act:
   

   ---

5. Family bands!
   
   A lot of opening bands can’t help but be people who are related to each other.
   
   I don’t know why this is.
   
   But there are a pair of sisters who front a really mean-sounding blues act named Larkin Poe—from Georgia by way of Nashville (or is it the other way around)—who trade licks and make a hell of a noise that’s a lot of Allman Bros, but heavier, honestly. They kick.

   

   
   On the other end of the spectrum? Lawrence. They’re a New York band fronted by a brother and sister who seem like in their spare time go to water parks together.
   
   A little Broadway, a little Billy Joel, a little blue-eyed soul. I’ve seen them three times, once as an opener at MetLife Stadium for the Rolling Stones.
   
   They got a bit swallowed up by that stage—they’re better headlining at smaller venues where they can bring out guests like Paul Schaffer or Mrs. Met (true story).

   
   But the love you get from people who were kids together (!) who went all-in on music cannot be discounted.

   ---

That’s not to say all openers are gems.

Sometimes, the opening band definitively stinks!

Beck had a one-man band open for him once, one of those novelty acts where he’s playing all kinds of pads strapped to his body.

Not only was he awful, he was so thirsty he felt the need to show up in the crowd after when Beck got going just so he could get some flowers from the people standing near him. Then someone set off a stink bomb, and I think it was him.

So you can’t win ‘em all. But you never know what you get out of life if you don’t try to experience it, right?

If anyone here has opening bands they really loved, put it in the comments. Or send feedback! I love hearing from you all.

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As always, L’Chaim.

Cinema has a number of iconic moments that people can’t help but want to recreate.

My father went out and bought a big wooden stained desk after seeing The Godfather. I’ve been wearing a thigh-length leather jacket for years thanks to Get Shorty. And I’ve run into more than a few people of late with the “I Am Kennough” hoodie.

Then there’s my wife, who dreams of “Lost in Translation,” released in 2003, the year we were married. 🥂

We had a December trip to Japan planned. Which means we were going to visit the bar at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Park Hyatt hotel, just to recreate that scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannsen’s characters commiserate.

Movies are a romantic ideal. They present a world we want to live in, even for a few moments. So of course we wanted this. To dress fabulously, to order overpriced drinks, and let ourselves be swallowed up in the fantasy.

If we could get to the damned bar in the first place.

Because it is not easy to get to the New York Bar & Grill.

The Shinjuku Park Tower is a long trek from any subway station, and this is Tokyo, where there are more subway stations than convenience stores.

You enter the Park Hyatt Tower’s brutalist, antiseptic atrium that feels like the wrong location. After some wandering, finally, we found an escalator. That led to an elevator.

From there, one more giant elevator before we finally emerged on the fifty-second floor. After a bit of exploring we made our way through a narrow corridor to the hostess stand, expecting to end up at a bar six people deep all around. 🍷

After all, the New York Bar & Grill only reopened on December 9 after months of being closed, and this was Christmas.

But a table was there, waiting for us. 🍸

You walk in and it transforms you into the most debonair, rakish version of yourself. As if the coat check has a separate hanger for your awkwardness and insecurity, and gives you instead a sheen of elegance. The room vibrates with sensuality.

The design is doing a lot of the work.

Walnut-and-ebony interiors. Gigantic Valerio Adami murals depicting scenes from New York. Sophisticated and graceful, even if a bit ostentatious. Expansive windows that overlook all of Tokyo.

Tokyo’s garrulous well-dressed drape the bar, all angular postures and studied gazes. Sumptuous and minimalist at once. You’re drawn into its romance.

The room could easily slip into highbrow cliché without a bit of grounding.

Which it had — in the form of a chanteuse singing the Great American Songbook.

Originally from the U.S. South, she had been in Asia for roughly thirty years, and had a smooth, creamy voice that time hadn’t scratched like an ancient LP. Witness her lovely rendition of “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”

I sat across from my wife, who was determined to make this happen, and let the serenity of having decided to marry her twenty-plus years earlier soak through my bloodstream — along with the alcohol — and breathed in that moment, just the two of us.

Sure, we were recreating a cinematic experience.

But this is life. First as viewed and then lived.

L’Chaim.

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People like to say someone is their “mother’s daughter,” their “father’s son,” et cetera. Its usually meant as a way to get underneath surface characteristics to a person’s demeanor, worldview, or how they carry themselves.

Loretta Castorini-Clark (Cher) in 1987’s Moonstruck is her father’s daughter. She and her father Cosmo Castorini (Vincent Gardenia) share the same pathology: holding their loved ones at arm’s length (in his case, his wife, in hers, the lover that shows up on her doorstep), their cynicism and their penchant for romantic self-sabotage.

It’s to her father’s credit that he recognizes it in his daughter despite his own infidelity and penchant for self-pity.

The Loretta we meet at the beginning of the film has given up. It’s not subtle that the flowers she’s offered in the opening scene come from a florist making deliveries to a funeral director — she’s dead as far as romance is concerned.

So when she announces her engagement to her father in their dimly lit fluorescent kitchen, her voice drops, she half-smiles, and says it in a resigned tone similar to the day last month when I had to tell my wife our car was towed.

That’s because Johnny Cammareri, played gloriously by Danny Aiello, who specialized in thugs rather than schnooks, is a consolation prize, and not a particularly good one.

Her father’s reaction is what you’d expect. He raises the temperature immediately — and she immediately barks back, which makes it clear she came in geared up for an argument. Simply put, this is most desultory engagement announcement ever committed to film.

Gardenia is sublime. The way his words run together: “I don’t like his face, Loretta. I don’t like his lips. When he smiles you can’t see his teeth, what is he hiding?”

She protests his skepticism — that to get married again after her first husband was hit by a bus — was bad luck. She retorts by noting that if she’d been married in front of her family, instead of strangers, and had a reception, she wouldn’t have had the bad luck that resulted in her first husband’s death.

Cosmo relents, a bit.

“Maybe.”

The Pivotal Line

Then, in the words of George Costanza, she gets greedy. “Johnny got down on his knees and proposed to me at the Grand Ticino*,” she pouts.

“That don’t sound like Johnny,” her father mutters.

That’s because he’s right — it isn’t Johnny. Loretta goaded him into that proposal in the restaurant, and Cosmo sniffs out the lie. “Where’s the ring?” he demands.

Johnny wasn’t prepared — she pushed him to give up his pinky ring.

“It looks stupid, it’s a pinky ring, it’s a baby-it’s a man’s ring!”

Of course, it’s ridiculous. A better man would have planned better. Bought an actual ring. But Johnny doesn’t have a plan for the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with — because he cannot take control of his own life.

Later, when we meet Johnny’s brother, Ronny (Nicholas Cage), he figures it out as well. “Why you wanna sell your life short?” he demands (after they’ve slept together).

Cosmo’s wife is a good woman played by Olympia Dukakis, but at the moment we meet Cosmo, we don’t know he’s cheating on her. Cosmo is lying to himself, but is perceptive enough to see Loretta is headed down the same unsatisfying path.

(It’s no coincidence that Loretta and Cosmo later discover each other’s affairs simultaneously. Again, her father’s daughter.)

Cosmo and Loretta live as if they believe the life they have is not fair nor deserved, when it’s the one they created for themselves. In Cosmo’s case, it’s a very good one that he selfishly dismisses; for Loretta, she’s come to accept less. She slaps Nic Cage later — but she’s the one who has to “snap out of it.” Which she does.

(Next month: Training Day ain’t got shit on us.)

L’Chaim.

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Audra’s chest tensed. Her shoulder twitched.

After nine years of marriage, she’d pegged Kyle as a boring dad.

“You have nice hair,” he told the babysitter, Denise, a little too loudly. Complimented her handbag. He ran his fingers through his hair, dimples pinched from the oversized smile on his face.

“Cole loves when you sit — more than any of the other girls,” he said.

Audra used to hate the boring dads.

They’d drive her home after she was done babysitting in one of those Ford or Buick station wagons that infested the suburbs in the 1990s. Cloth seats, AM radio stuck between two stations.

Needle-thin hair, tight to the scalp. Pants — they called them slacks — which were baggy in the wrong places.

Hands at the ten and two on the wheel.

Exhaling audibly from their nostrils, mumbling platitudes.

“It’s important to do well in school.” “The kids always have fun with you.”

Her answers were two words. Maybe three.

She’d walk up her front path, illuminated by the moon, the particulars of these conversations lost to the nighttime air by the time she turned the knob on her front door.

Except Mr. Woods.

Almost six feet tall. Sandy hair. Two days of stubble, no matter what time of day. The only dad who wasn’t a fashion disaster. Even stylish.

He told her parents — in front of her — how smart she was. Ask her how she’d developed a like for engineering. How he’d love to help her if she did have an interest.

Cole was in his footy PJs, arms outstretched, new Lego set in his hands. Denise brushed aside her auburn hair and said she was “sooooo excited” to help him put it together.

Kyle was still staring.

Audra whipped her keys into her purse and motioned for him to get the coats.

Mr. Woods used to stare.

Audra was full-figured like Denise, what they used to call “bubbly.”

He’d let her in on jokes, like the time he pranked his co-workers by switching the labels on their leftover lunches. And he drove a silver Acura with leather seats that smelled brand new, even though it was three years old, because it was “not for the kiddos.”

She’d laugh, loudly. Her father never even made her chuckle.

It was three months before college, and she’d laughed all the way on the ride home.

He repeated how much he’d love to help her if she was looking for an internship.

He knew people, he said, as he pulled to the curb, leaned over, and put his hand on her inner thigh. All of her muscles clenched. Her hands trembled. The car door was still locked.

Mr. Woods kissed her just to the left of her mouth, holding his lips on her cheek, smelling faintly of cloves.

“Goodbye, Mr. Woods,” she whispered.

As she edged out of the car, his hand drifted across her leg and grazed her rear end.

She walked faster than normal, eyes watering, and slammed the door behind her. She cancelled the rest of her babysitting appointments that night, and didn’t tell her parents.

“Ready?” Kyle said, as he started the car.

She nodded. For dinner, she would put it out of her head.

But they were going to talk on the ride home.

He was going to be a boring dad. Audra would make goddamned sure of that.

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I have an ever-changing writing mix specifically designed to get the synapses firing. I’m all about a groove, except for this - where I’m letting lyrics worm their way through my head as I walk the dog and think through my next scene or two before writing.

Because this substack is about life, and trying to interpret it, I like to look to others doing the same. Here’s some of what’s on the playlist now:

“Relationships,” HAIM

The sonic texture of this one is wondrous. The shouts in the back of “goes like,” the drum beat recalling Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way” (listen to it again), Danielle Haim up front, switching tempos with her lyrics. The lament of how short flings turn into “seventeen days” speaks to an angst that’s in my past, but one I remember.

“Code of Silence,” Bruce Springsteen

People, fair warning. If I do this every season, Bruce is gonna end up on all of them. This is an obscure track. Bruce opened in New Jersey on the 2000 E Street Band reunion tour with this several times. It features deceptively simple, straightforward lyrics about the ways in which we’re unable to be fully honest with people we’re circling around, deciding if we’re in or out. So, vintage Bruce in that way.

With a bit more sheen, it could have ended up on the Tunnel of Love album, but its a grungier sound; he wrote it with his Pittsburgh friend Joe Grushecky.

“Crazy Cryin’,” Tedeschi Trucks Band

The most supple voice in music today belongs to Susan Tedeschi, who has been plying away with her partner Derek Trucks for a good long while now. This one’s off their new joint; it’s got a Rufus-style chugging beat behind it, and of course Tedeschi soars with every word. I had to let this marinate for a while, to really get at these lyrics, about someone who went all-in on a lover and came out alone.

“Every Ghetto, Every City,” Lauryn Hill

Good lord, did I wear out this CD. There’s not a skippable track on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and she dives into her Jersey past in this stemwinder. Nostalgia tracks can be very hit-or-miss, because it depends on the specificity. This one’s got it in gobs, with references to Slick Rick, Mongoose bikes, coco bread and the “bomb leather” from Frelinghuysen - a Colonial Era New Jersey name that’s on every school and block in the Garden State. A longing, loving look at where you came from.

“Baby Don’t Leave Me Alone with My Thoughts,” Lake Street Dive

Lake Street Dive is a New York-based combo with a jazzy groove and a lead singer, Rachael Price, who could melt the polar ice caps with her sonorous voice. The title sounds like it could be about writing, but it's yet another number about the need for connection — in this case, physical — if only to find the courage to get through another day, another night, without thinking too much about our regrets, disappointments, and past desires.

“Washington Square Park,” Dogpark

Someday I’m going to write a life advice post called “Go See The Opening Band.” Saw these guys out at Rockaway Beach a couple years back — figured they were a bunch of randos, and, well, nope, they’re a thing. The restlessness of youth is smudged all this song, nights of stumbling home in the dark, not knowing where you’re going or where you’re supposed to be, the impermanence of early adult years surfacing before needing to deal with reality.

“How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?,” Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

I’m a bit hung up on ladies with soulful, lived-in voices. Sharon Jones sadly died ten years ago, but she and her group the Dap-Kings had a texture that hearkens to the 1960s and 1970s. This one thrives on the pleading repetition of the title of the song.

“Louisiana Rain,” Samantha Fish

I know, I’m going with a cover. This is one of Tom Petty’s greatest songs, and Samantha Fish takes her usual crunchy, feedback-fueled sound down a notch for her take. She gives it just enough of a twang to accentuate the longing without turning it into countrified nonsense. This is an all-timer, pairing atmosphere and mood with its lonely lyrics; you can almost feel the rain soaking through your shoes.

Back next week with more fiction. Until then…L’Chaim.

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Most of the streets are dirt; every third lot resembles a burned-out husk that, were it not an island town, you’d wonder what war left behind here.

We found the restaurant after wandering around on this sweaty night, hidden at the end of a sandy street, where the first sign it was an eating establishment were the bean bags that first appeared to be cleverly camouflaged seals.

My daughter and wife are lounging on hammocks while my eight-year-old son flits back and forth between us, restless as usual.

The woman who runs the joint is a chatty, gravel-poured-over-schnappes-voiced, permanently suntanned Argentine who pegged us as Jewish as soon as I told her my father-in-law grew up in the schmatte district in Buenos Aires.

She’s a refugee herself. Her family fled Paris in 1938 and ended up in Paraguay, in one room without running water, before eventually settling here. Thousands of miles from home, on an archipelago with barely thirty thousand people - and we’ve found someone whose family survived the Shoah.

🏝 When not attending to tables, she’s in the street, dragging on cigarettes and greeting other locals like the mayor. Her only competition for that unofficial title are the marine iguanas, as plentiful as pigeons in New York, who have their own crossing signs. (When an animal has its own crossing signs, it’s in charge.)

She greets the kids by declaring she used to hate babies — after having triplets that didn’t give her a moment to rest for years — so she intentionally had a fourth kid just so she could have a baby to nurture quietly, and change her own mind. 🏝

Maybe it’s the bias from being a captive audience in the middle of nowhere, but we polished off ceviche mixto, pulpo con ajillo, breaded shrimp, tuna in a shrimp-based sauce, and some surprisingly good fries.

Behind me a few young gangly dudes are trying to balance themselves on a taut cord acting as a tightrope, while two couples dance drunkenly at the bar, even though it is just 7:30 pm.

Everything here is an experiment in isolation - things that cannot exist elsewhere. The blue-footed booby. The elusive Galápagos penguin.

Earlier that day we trekked to Playa del Amor, a young beach - only about a million years old - covered in jagged layers of conches and sea urchin shells. Isolated, protected from the ocean’s waters. It hasn’t endured the ocean’s currents, nor have enough years passed, for those shells to grind down into fine sand.

But they will. All with the passage of time.

L’Chaim.

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My grandfather used to say you weren’t an adult until you figured out that your parents were dumb.

Not in the teenage way, but the adult way, when you see their frailties and foibles, the mistakes and the missteps that render them human.

Dirty Dancing, released in 1987, is a coming-of-age story known for the crackling chemistry between Patrick Swayze and the radiant Jennifer Grey, its nostalgic setting, and of course the iconic moments (“I carried a watermelon”/ “Nobody puts Baby in a corner”/ “The pachanga”. )

But Frances “Baby” Houseman’s relationship with her father, Dr. Jake Houseman, played by the great Broadway star Jerry Orbach, is the emotional center of the film. Her confrontation with him two-thirds of the way through, where she calls him out for his patrician snobbery is the linchpin upon which the movie turns.

Orbach never became a screen star - his most famous credits were as Martin Landau’s connected brother in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and the voice of Lumiere, the candelabra in Beauty and the Beast (he performed a memorable dance number of “Be Our Guest” at the 1992 Oscars).

He ruled musicals in the 1970s, winning a Tony for Promises, Promises, and had a rugged, urban handsomeness that served as theatre’s version of contemporary film stars like Elliot Gould and Al Pacino. He’d later achieve immortality as Lennie Brisco, the sardonic “Law & Order” cop who had a quip for every murder in New York.

The scene is a one minute, uninterrupted monologue, Baby unleashing her pent-up anger at her father for his stifling worldview and his silent treatment after she bravely sticks her neck out by admitting to being in a sexual relationship with Swayze’s Johnny Castle.

The camera pans in on Dr. Houseman sitting on a porch, silhouetted by the light radiating off the lake. Baby intrudes on the camera, reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s slow walk down the hallway in The Godfather to hear his adopted son Tom Hagen tell him of the death of his biological son Santino.

She never raises her voice. She doesn’t need to. The blocking, the expressions, say it all. She stands. He sits. She stares directly at him; he looks away. The first shot of his face is of a man brought low by his hypocrisy, his worldview of his innocent daughter, of himself — shaken.

She accuses him of lying about saying everyone deserved a fair break. She holds his stare; he breaks it.

His brow is furrowed; he’s defiant, but inside, he knows she’s correct. The emotional dagger comes at the end, when she tearfully tells him how much she loves him — and then how he let her down.

He turns, eyes reddened — but his gaze is downward, because he knows there’s nothing he can say to the person who put him on a pedestal, only to be so disappointed. The camera retreats again as he ruminates over it, alone.

In the end? The resolution comes with her triumphal dance — and a simple “You looked wonderful out there” to his daughter. The acceptance doesn’t come with a big speech - just an acknowledgment that they’re equals now, in mistakes, in folly, and in life.

L’Chaim.

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Morrie Goldstein hadn’t pissed his pants since he was seven years old, and he vowed he wasn’t going to now, at the age of ninety-two.

But when you’re sprawled on the floor of an exorbitantly sized broom closet in the Boca Raton nursing home where he’d been residing - hard to call it living - your choices are limited.

He hadn’t fallen. He’d been left there by that troglodyte Andrews, a lackey for the owner, Richard Freemantle, after Morrie figured out why so many people had dropped dead at the home suddenly in the last several weeks.

His wheelchair was several feet away, tipped on its side. Even if Morrie could pull himself across the room, he’d never right the chair. The only object in reach was a bottle of Windex.

Morrie had been a detective for forty-six years and never really retired, even when he retired. He got curious after his new gal pal Rita died. Met her seven months ago, died out of nowhere a few weeks back. Late seventies, dishy. One day, a cough, the next, a fever and shortness of breath, three days later she was gone.

Four others before her the same way. “Old people die,” said Mrs. Blanks, the head nurse, after he chased her down the hall, her heavy legs buckling, unable to outrun his wheels thanks to those cheap-ass rubber things she claimed were shoes.

When he got the itch, it was worse than psoriasis. So he’d started snooping, and now he was on a frigid, cockeyed linoleum.

His mother would say he’d asked for it. “Ech, Morrie, yer a pest.” Then she’d feel bad, and bury his tiny head into her ample chest, famous as a resting place for the neighborhood’s babies. “Know why they sleep like that, Irv? Cause I got big boobs!” She’d cackle, her chest shaking.

It was the questions. “Why does the ice box stay cold? Where does the sound from the radio come from?” Once, he disappeared into the rabbit warren under his family’s porch in upstate New York with just a kid’s shovel, emerging four hours later, shell-shocked and covered in mud and rabbit turds.

That felt better than this cheap, shit-ass linoleum. Whoever installed it deserved to lose his license, get the firing squad, or both.

He retraced his steps. Freemantle. Nurse Blanks. And…no. The doctor. Sonovabitch. Morrie’s brain was working again, and he flexed his arms. He had to get to the wheelchair, somehow.

Because he had more questions. Because he never let anything go. Because he lived up to what his mother, the late Hilda Roslyn Resnick-Goldstein, said, even on her deathbed twenty-six years ago. “A pest, Morrie. You always were.”

What the hell, streaks are made to be broken. Nobody was coming to get him, and his bladder was ready to burst. He’d claw his way to the wheelchair, wet or not. The dribbling stream soaked his worthless khakis. At least he’d be warm for a few seconds, goddamn it.

(To be continued…)

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