Grasping at Straws: Finding a Cure for the Blues

Annamaria on Monday

I am having a lot of trouble hanging on to my reputation of the MIE neighborhood jejune and cockeyed optimist.  The news reports these day could make one despair.  Could make even an optimist like me terminally angry.

The news makes my heart hurt.

If your heart doesn’t hurt, go away now.  I don’t want to know you.

At times like these, I find consolation in music.  The Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem or  Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings can turn my anger or sadness into sound and somehow make it bearable. 

But not even that is enough to perk me up now that, here in the northern Hemisphere, the daylight is  dwindling away.  The cold is coming.  This is the wrong side of winter for me.  It’s no surprise that Seasonal Affective Disorder is abbreviated SAD.  

 I imagine we all need ways to cheer up.

My spirits are are so low that I am turning to my surefire cure: dancing!  So I present here my most cheering performances.  If you have a case if the blues, log on to these.  They are sure to make you smile.

My first two choices are pretty obvious, but nonetheless surefire hits.

First Fred, but not with not with Ginger Rogers.  In this case it’s Eleanor Powell.   Rival studio contracts kept Hollywood’s two best dancers apart until they finally got to team up in 1940. 

https://youtu.be/DWW6QeeVzDc

And then Travolta!

Here a great favorite you may not have seen.  Did you know the mega-talented Christopher Walken could do this?

I am smiling now.  I hope you are too.

Annamaria's Events

Dagger Awards Gala Dinner
Thursday 26th October
Grange City Hotel
London

Where our own Leye Adenle and our fellow HOT Writer Ovidia Yu are short listed for the short story Dagger Award.  Hooray for Sunshine Noir!

A Mysterious Affair in PrincetonSat, November 4, 2017
1:00 PM – 5:00
SOLLEY THEATERArts Council of Princeton
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ 08540

The Time is Right for Dancing

Summertime!  Some of this dancing will be in the streets.  But not all.

I will start close to home--in Brooklyn.  This will get your dancin' genes riled up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUID0jSh2Ic

Here comes a fictional New York, and a performance that can only be described as magical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZYS2rKh01U

Heading west, let's stop in Chicago for a summertime parade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaIjYvIayj0

Now for small town Midwest, in a night spot of the past:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54iR0xFkEfQ

While we are in a nightclub, since this is a crime writing blog, let's have a noir ballet staring the dancer that Fred Astaire called the greatest ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDLykurJIMA

Okay, now for LA.  Lots of dancing there.  Let's end with the Beguine, and the pinnacle, starring a rare combination of the two best dancers in Hollywood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWW6QeeVzDc

I could go on and on.  There is lot of great dancing to choose from on YouTube.  And just in case you thought I posted this subject to save time, you would be wrong.   The research for this took hours.  I had to sit here and watch scores of movie clips.  Truth to tell, I needed cheering up.  Putting this together made me happy.  I hope this post has done the same for you.

Annamaria - Monday

Summer on Mykonos is HOT!!!

The Party is on.  It’s heating up over here in every way imaginable, and for the sake of our respective cultural futures, in many ways I hope no sane person possibly could.  Come September, a lot of summer time partiers will confront soul-baring reflections on more than a few moments of their time on Mykonos.   But for now it’s all about baring everything else. 

Here you’re overdressed if more than 12% of your body is hidden.  Okay, I’m exaggerating, it’s 12.5% and that measurement only applies if you’re human and between the ages of 18 and 25.

We, who represent multiples of that class, should be required by law to keep 125% covered at all times.  

The tough part of writing all this is getting photographs.  I’m uneasy about traipsing along the beach with a camera snapping photographs, especially with so many The Hulk-size folks likely to take offense.  And my surreptitious iPhone snapping technique requires work.  The last time I tried I ended up with a terrific collection of thumb shots.

So, I’ve settled on a different sort of plan:  Use someone else’s photos (thank you, Dimitris Koutsoukos, for a few) as representative of Mykonos’ hot summer life. Representative not just of the tourists who flock here, but of the extraordinarily accepting people who live on this glorious island. 

Hard to imagine anywhere in this world where locals are more willing to allow strangers to freely turn a basically conservative island society every which way but straight—that’s straight as in straight and narrow. 

And on that segue, permit me to make a brief observation on all the current tabloid talk about John Travolta’s recent visit here with his wife, Kelly Preston.

Mykonos is not a “gay island.”  Yes, the open nature of the Mykonian people and the island’s two dozen glorious beaches attract a sizeable international gay crowd—one to which the island openly acknowledges a debt of gratitude for much of its world class flair and style—but by far most of the boys and girls who party here are interested in cross-pollinating.

Now that I’ve hopefully offended all genders, let me put up a few more photographs to make sure I’ve effectively nailed my coffin snuggly shut, hopefully with the vodka inside.

Mykonians burning May wreaths at Summer Solstice

Jeff—Saturday