All the cool people (all 4.5 of them) know about my annual posting tradition on my ex-blog, The Hesperado. To grace each one, I quickly developed a habit of gracing them with a pic of some celebrity with panache: The first was Frank Sinatra -- followed by Dean Martin, Robert Blake, Lee Marvin, Albert Camus, Patrick McGoohan, and last year,Jean-Paul Belmondo.
My first instinct was to continue the implicit trend I'd set, of selecting only masculine icons whose persona exudes a cynically studied and jaded joie de verve. The next one I had loaded up was Clint Eastwood, kicked back in a chair out in the desert with a beer.
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The only thing that gave me pause, however, was the likely fact that
most of the people who know me from Paltalk chat would have seen that,
as I had used it for the room before. This ever so slight misgiving
helped to trigger a change of mind in the groove of my thought process.
I then hit on calling the annual posting "Shut up and deal" with a
picture of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine from the 1960 movie The Apartment.
However, once again, my Paltalk room intervened, in that I chose those
for a new room name. I then recalled another phrase, also spoken by
Shirley, from that winsomely effervescent movie: "That's the way it
crumbles -- cookie-wise, that is." Nevertheless, my brain was still on
auto-pilot, and I was prepared to use the same picture. Then it hit me:
I should rummage around for a better one. And I found a wonderful one,
where Jack expresses a priceless synthesis of existential resignation
and dogged integrity (a paradoxical fusion he embodied exquisitely ten
years later in the 1970 movie The Out-of-Towners). A perfect pic for those of us who feel like out-of-towners in our own West.
