Roberta in the Russian Tea Room

Met up with the delightful katestine for high tea and gossip at the Russian Tea Room.

The Russian Tea Room is where George Miles used to bring Roberta and me half a century ago so he could get sloshed and we could pretend we were characters in children’s books.

I remembered – or, at least, thought I remembered – that very strange portrait of a demented Shirley Temple clutching some sort of animal. But didn’t the bar used to be on the right? Otherwise, the red leather banquets and brass samovars seemed exactly the same, as was that strange exhibit of nested Russian dolls in glass cabinets near the restrooms.

If I didn’t turn my head to the back of the room, I could almost pretend Roberta and I were still there. Children frozen in their preternatural innocence. Like one of those tableaux in that eerie, beautiful Christopher Priest short story, An Infinite Summer.

Long time readers may remember that Roberta was my Very Best Friend, a child actress with parents who were such lushes that neither was employable, which meant they lived entirely off Roberta’s earnings. While George Miles got drunk, Roberta and I would sip a variety of non-alcoholic concoctions invented for Roberta (I was definitely an afterthought) by the bartenders. The bartenders loved Roberta. Most adults loved Roberta, although not those who’d survived any sort of misadventure with the Third Reich since Roberta looked like a Nazi poster child with her big blue eyes, milk white skin, and long blonde hair. In the early sixties, there were quite a few Third Reich survivors in and around New York City.

Roberta came to a Sad End, which I know I’ve written about somewhere, and if I haven’t, I’m much too lazy to write about today, it being a bleak grey day and me being entirely preoccupied by wrathful thoughts about the current political mishegoss.

Because as far as I can tell, America’s going to war because of fuckin’ Youtube.

I mean, I do feel bad for the journalists who got beheaded, but you know what? That’s an occupational hazard. Journalists who insist on infiltrating war zones are always getting offed in horrifying ways. That’s the risk they’re taking. The U.S. has never before gone to war over it.

The fact that we got to see the horrifying way two recent journalists got knocked off thanks to the all-pervasive power of social media – if a picture is worth a thousand words, I guess a Youtube video is worth several libraries – does not change my mind here.

Let the fucking Saudis fight their own goddamn war.

I don’t understand how any intelligent human being can buy into the messianic delusion that the United States should somehow be the world’s 911 call.

Different thing entirely if the U.S. gets attacked on its own soil.