West Side Story Plus a Sock-Puppet Version of Emmanuel Goldstein.

I was making plans to max out my credit cards and liquidate all my worldly possessions in order to afford the expensive Meow Therapy Sybyl so obviously needed since she had not uttered a single “meow” since I’d gotten back from D.C.

I mean—she would open her mouth and look like she was meowing.

But nary a sound would issue forth from her adorable furry throat.

But then yesterday, Sybyl began meowing again!

So, you know. A Christmas Miracle!

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Also yesterday, I went to see West Side Story.



It’s a very entertaining film, and I’m a bit mystified as to why it isn’t doing better box office.

Various FB “friends” explain it thusly:

(1). Nobody under the age of 50 has the slightest interest in West Side Story

(2). People are avoiding movie theaters because of…. IT.

Reason #1 makes some sense to me: I’m not standing in line for any Drake or Rhianna concerts either if it comes to that. Entertainment tastes tend to be highly chronologically stratified.

But Reason # 2 continues to mystify. I’ve been going to more movies than ever, so I can tell you, movie theaters are practically empty! I’m usually one of maybe five people in the audience. Your chances of getting IT at a movie theater strike me as considerably less than your chances of getting IT on a beer run.

I go to movies partly because of the allure of $6 tickets, stale Raisinets, and heated Barcaloungers, but partly because I find movie-going highly therapeutic: As I’ve noted in these very pages a boring number of times before, seeing movies in a real, live movie theater induces a kind of fugue state in me that hits my mental reset button. No matter how anxious, depressed etc I may be when I walk into that movie theater, when I walk out, I’m inevitably in a great mood.

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Anyway, West Side Story is fabulous for its overall spectacle, particularly its production design.

I left New York City to go to college in California in 1968 when I was 16. (I skipped two years of school since you ask.) Why California? Because that put more than 3,000 miles between me and my mother.

When I tell people now I grew up on the Manhattan’s West Side, they invariably imagine the West Side as it is today—which is to say, overpriced, over-chi-chi’d, and filled with dog walkers.

The West Side I grew up in, though, was a hardscrabble, working-class neighborhood. A few blocks north of San Juan Hill, West Side Story’s ostensible setting. But still recognizably the same nabe.

I still mourn the original Donnell Library that had to be razed to make way for Lincoln Center.

So, West Side Story provided me with a nice nostalgia wallow.

The film’s weak points are the two actors who play Tony and Maria. Ansel Elgort, the male lead, has a kind of negative screen presence—meaning he seems to drain energy from the screen. You practically see the screen flicker and grow dim every time the camera focuses on Tony. Rachel Ziegler, the young actress who plays Maria has a lovely voice, a sprightly presence and a great future, but Spielberg directs her as though she'd just wandered in from the set of some Disney Princess movie.

But at least Timothee Chalumet, he of the abnormally small head and precision-tousled curls, was not West Side Story’s male lead, right?

So I'd say it was six bucks and two and a half hours well spent.

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In other news, I continue to be confused by the ever-louder beating of the omicron drum.

By all accounts, people who contract omicron do not get very sick.

Which to me means you’d want it to be the dominant strain.

I’m trying very hard to curb my innate cynicism here.

But I’m feeling enormous Red Alert Fatigue.

All those talking head shots of the merry Dr. Fauci?

They remind me more and more of some sort of sock-puppet Muppet version of 1984’s Emmanuel Goldstein.