TROUSERS

We wonder what we used to do in the days before the internet. For instance, today we purchased a fine pair of trousers of crisp summerweight linen in a traditional royalty-derived plaid, the name of which completely escapes us. Is it a Duke of Windsor plaid? A Prince of Wales plaid? A Marquis of Sommerset plaid? We would like to tell you, our devoted readers, about the trousers, but we can’t recall what this damn pattern is called. Ordinarily, we’d flick over to Google and resolve the issue in seconds. But the Killer is hogging the internet tonight on her laptop, in a deep fever of homework as she negotiates the final stretch on her latest university degree, and she only growls when we suggest we might have Crucially Important Plaids to look up. Damn.

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HERE

Hold this for a sec: I’ll be right back.

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PSR-225GM

The keyboard. It’s a PSR-225GM by Yamaha. It rents for $22 a month, brand new outta the box. A toy, really. Sixty-one keys of all the usual digital noises, from accordion to zither. Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we tend to keep it tuned to grand piano, having worn out the novelty of the more novel sounds in fairly short order.

We have most recently been busting out some Ray-Charles-type shit as we diligently plink our way through the basic theory book. We’re on page 25. It’s a little old spiritual number called I’m Gonna Lay My Burden Down. We are playin’ it the way we think Uncle Ray would play it, if he were here, and if he were just starting out. We yelp and grunt.

We are learning to read notes, real notes on the grand staff. We are reverently, finally, ecstatically plugging in to the ancient language of balls and vines that epochs of musicians banged out over time to grasp this ungraspable river of sound that we started making the day we jumped down from the trees.

We, here at Mango Pudding Blues, punily contemplate the vast mystery of music.

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WOODY ALLEN

I got my first VCR when I was maybe 19 and I was eager to test it. Woody Allen’s Manhattan was the late show on TV the night I brought the thing home. This would be 1984 or so. All I knew about Woody Allen was that he was supposed to be funny, and that my geeky junior high school cronies and I had been upset in 1977 when his Annie Hall won the Oscar for best movie, when it was obvious to us that Star Wars was the best movie, not just of 1977, but ever.

Well, it was all that was on, so I set the timer for a test run and hopped into bed. The next day I was pleased to find that the VCR worked fine, but I was less enthusiastic about the nervous, overly talky black-and-white movie I’d recorded. I hated it. I didn’t get it. I thought it was annoying. But I sat through it, determined to enjoy my new electronic toy at any cost. Thinking back, I can’t even remember the moment when I stopped loathing it and became completely enchanted. But I fell in love with it, and with film and Gershwin and New York City and a whole lot of other things, all at once. It was the portal into adulthood for me, and in retrospect I’m pleased and proud that it was Manhattan, and not something else, and I’m getting all sentimental and teary-eyed thinking about it.

And anyway, there’s a whole genre of films that might as well be called Woody Allens, and some are good and some are not. A recent example of the not-so-good is Ed Burns’ Sidewalks of New York. And a very, very good Woody Allen, the thing that shoved me down this little memory lane, is Kissing Jessica Stein.

Very, very good.

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