Every Place Is Enchanted

Ventured forth into deepest, darkest Rhinebeck to go to the movies.

(Movies are a mental health thing for me, so yeah, I am willing to risk omicron.)

Saw Licorice Pizza.

It did not disappoint.

Licorice Pizza is a movie about a 15-year-old boy who develops a crush on a 25-year-old woman, and the mad adventures they have together.

In today’s super-puritanical cultural climate, of course, that description makes it sound like a movie about pedophilia. Which it decidedly is not. What it is is a movie about That One Magic Summer.

This One Magic Summer took place in the San Fernando Valley sometime in the 1970s.

As a sidebar, I’ll note That One Magic Summer is something of a cinematic genre by now. It’s a great category because you can stuff both comedies and drama into it. Licorice Pizza falls into the former category—although, interestingly, I was one of the few people in the audience who was actually laughing at it.

Anyway, very appealing leads and fabulous cameos by Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper among others. (Bradley Cooper really should win a Supporting Actor Oscar for his impersonation of that venomous snake Jon Peters.)

And also, just that sense that every place is enchanted—yea, verily, even suburban housing developments and dying strip malls—if only you can open your eyes wide enough to catch the right wavelength.

I emerged from the theater in a much better mood than I’d been in for days.

###

This morning, we are being visited by freezing rain, something that happens when the ground is freezing but the air is warm. Various citizen meteorology sites are warning: Stay inside! And indeed, when I peer out my bedroom window, I see a thin coating on the driveway and the roads that looks something like the sheen on a glazed doughnut.