Yearbook, Chapter 2

 "I love root beer floats," said Bubbles, while we were sitting together in a booth at Whelan's Drugstore.

"Me, too.  My aunt turned me on to them years ago."

"So...what are we doing here?"

"I thought you were hungry."

"Yeah, but...why am I so lucky?"

"You mean...why did I invite YOU?"

"Yeah...exactly."

"Well...I guess it was my nose."

She started laughing hysterically.

"I'm not used to getting such compliments (I said); my brain, yeah, but not my looks."

"You must know you're a good-lookin' guy."

"I figure I'm not ugly, but...good-lookin'?"

"Half the girls in school are jealous of me right this minute...trust me."

"Ok!"

"You had a girlfriend almost all year.  Didn't that show you something?"

"No, she liked me for my brain.  We never talked about looks.  Now she found somebody she thinks is smarter."

"Well...she's the loser."

She finished her root beer float.  

"So...what are WE...now, Bennie?"

I thought for a moment.

"Are you busy Friday night?"

Jackie

 Jacqueline (Jackie) Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929 in Southampton, New York.  Her family resided in Manhattan.

Jackie attended grades 1-7 at the Chapin School in Manhattan.  One of her teachers described her as "a darling child, the prettiest little girl, very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil."

For 8th and 9th grades, Jackie attended the Holton-Arms School in Washington, D.C.  She finished high school at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, CT.

Jackie started her college career at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.  After spending her Junior year studying in France, she transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in French literature.

Washington Times-Herald editor Frank Waldrop hired Jackie as a part-time receptionist.  A week later she requested more challenging work, and Waldrop sent her to city editor Sidney Epstein, who hired her as an "Inquiring Camera Girl" despite her inexperience, paying her $25 a week.

Epstein recalled, "I remember her as this very attractive, cute-as-hell girl, and all the guys in the newsroom giving her a good look."  The position required Jackie to pose witty questions to individuals chosen at random on the street and take their pictures for publication in the newspaper alongside selected quotations from their responses.

In addition to the random "man on the street" vignettes, Jackie sometimes sought interviews with people of interest, such as six-year-old Tricia Nixon. She interviewed Tricia a few days after her father Richard Nixon was elected vice president of the United States in 1952.  Eight years later, Jackie would be married to the man who would defeat Nixon for the presidency of the United States.  

Jackie was briefly engaged to a young stockbroker named John Husted. After only a month of dating, the couple published the announcement in The New York Times in January 1952.  After three months, she called off the engagement because she had found him "immature and boring" once she got to know him better.

In December 1993, Jackie developed symptoms, including a stomach ache and swollen lymph nodes in her neck, and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  By the following March the cancer had spread to her spinal cord, brain and liver and by May it was deemed terminal.  Jackie died May 19, 1994 (30 years ago) in her sleep in her Manhattan apartment at age 64.

The Waitress

During spring break 1963, I was with my parents at a hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.  I was seventeen years old and anxious to start my new life by going away to college a few months later.

Which college?  I had been accepted at six universities as an engineering student:  Penn, Michigan, Cornell, Brandeis, Georgia Tech and Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve).

One morning at the hotel, I woke early (before my parents) and decided to have breakfast alone at its coffee shop.  

As I entered, I remember there being few customers.  Near the front was a table populated by a bunch of teenage girls.  I decided to eat at the counter with my back to the girls.  I was my waitress's only customer.

I avoided turning around.  I looked straight ahead, gave my order to the waitress and ate the food when she brought it to me.  I tried to ignore the girls behind me as I assumed they were ignoring me.

For no particular reason, the waitress decided to do me a favor.  From her vantage point, she could both see and hear the teenage girls behind me.

Before I left the coffee shop, the waitress told me the teenage girls had been looking at and almost exclusively talking about me.  Suffering at the time from a lack of social self-esteem, I didn't believe her.  Why should I?  She was a stranger.  

In retrospect (from more than sixty years later), I should have believed the waitress and taken advantage of the very useful information she provided.  Maybe I should have had the courage to join the teenage girls at their table.  I had much to gain...perhaps a boost in my social self-esteem.

Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde is a 1967 American biographical neo-noir crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The film also features Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons.

Bonnie and Clyde is considered a landmark picture. It broke many film taboos.  The movie's ending became iconic as "one of the bloodiest death scenes in cinematic history".

The film received Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Cinematography.  It was ranked 27th on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest American films of all time and 42nd on its 2007 list.

During the Great Depression, Clyde Barrow (Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Dunaway) of Texas meet when Clyde tries to steal Bonnie's mother's car. Bonnie, who is bored by her job as a waitress, is intrigued by Clyde and decides to take up with him and become his partner in crime.

Bonnie and Clyde pull off some holdups, but their amateur efforts, while exciting, are not very lucrative. They turn from small-time heists to bank robbing.

Bonnie and Clyde's crime spree shifts into high gear once they hook up with a dim-witted gas station attendant, C.W. Moss (Pollard). Their exploits also become more violent.

After C.W. botches parking their getaway car during a bank robbery and delays their escape, Clyde shoots the bank manager in the face when he jumps onto the slow-moving car's running board.  Clyde's older brother Buck (Hackman) and his wife, Blanche (Parsons), also join them.

C.W. takes Bonnie and Clyde to hide out at his father's house, who thinks the couple have corrupted his son.  The father makes a deal with the police: in exchange for leniency for C.W.

The police set a trap for the outlaws.  When Bonnie and Clyde stop on the side of the road to help C. W.'s father fix a flat tire, the posse in the bushes riddle the couple with bullets. 

Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first films to feature extensive use of squibs—small explosive charges, often mounted with bags of stage blood, that detonate inside an actor's clothes to simulate bullet hits. Released in an era when film shootings were generally depicted as bloodless and painless, the Bonnie and Clyde death scene was one of the first in mainstream American cinema to be depicted with graphic realism.

 

Yearbook, Chapter 1

She wrote the following in my 1963 high school yearbook. "To a smart boy who I wish I had half of his brains.  Be good and don't keep your nose in a book.  It's too cute to be in there.  Lot's of luck at college.  Love, Bubbles"

Immediately after reading it a second time, I chased after her down the high school corridor.  She hadn't gotten far. Perhaps she was holding back to give me time to catch up.

Hey, I said.  "Where're you going?"

"Home.  I'm done for the day.  What about you?"

I noticed her nose as well.  It was definitely pretty cute.  For a second, a cold chill went up my spine.  My ex-girlfriend had broken up with me a couple of weeks ago, but perhaps she still felt I was off limits.  I would hate for Bubbles's nose to be on the receiving end of a punch.

"What a coincidence.  I am, too.  (I cut my last class.)  Let me walk you home."

"Sure!"

We walked out the nearest exit together and headed towards West Second Street.  

"So...what're you doing after graduation?"

"Well...my girlfriends and I are planning on going to the closest bar and drinking beer.  I just turned eighteen."

"Can I join your group?"

"Why not?"

"Are you hungry?"

"I'm always hungry."

"Wanna grab something to eat at Whalen's (drug store lunch counter)?"

"Good idea, Bennie!"

Erin Burnett

Erin Burnett of CNN interviewed Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson yesterday (April 24, 2024) on the Columbia University campus in New York City.

She asked him the following question:  How is Free Palestine anti-Semitic?  The tone of her question gave me the distinct impression that she didn't believe it was.

Is she ignorant or biased?

Free Palestine (From the River to the Sea) calls for the elimination of the State of Israel.  Such State of Israel represents the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, just as other people around the world have theirs.

The Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank have been offered a state of their own multiple time in the last 100 years and each time they rejected it?  Why?  Because they do not accept the existence of a Jewish state or Jewish people in that part of the world where Jews have been for thousands of years.

Now, impressionable young American college students are taking up the cause of a people (Hamas is the government of Gaza) who don't believe in democracy, don't believe in women's rights, don't believe in gay rights, don't believe in freedom of speech and don't believe in the right of protest.    

These young college students don't distinguish between Israelis and American Jews.  They demand freedom of speech and assembly to denounce Israel while at the same time denying basic freedoms for Jewish students through various forms of intimidation.

A Jew doesn't have to live in Israel, but without Israel, Jews in the diaspora would be in a much more precarious position.  Remember the Holocaust.  The Jews in Europe had no where to go to escape.

In 1939, the German liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg with about 900 Jewish refugees.  They were denied entry into Cuba, the United States and Canada.  The ship and its passengers were forced to return to Europe.  Israel would have welcomed them with open arms.  Unfortunately, Israel didn't exist in 1939.  

Brasilia

Brasilia is the federal capital of Brazil. The city is located in the Brazilian highlands in the country's Central-West region and is not part of any state.

Brasilia was founded by President Juscelino Kubitschek on the 21st of April, 1960 (64 years ago today), to serve as the new national capital. It is estimated to be Brazil's third-most populous city after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the former capital).

Brasília was a planned city developed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in 1956 in a scheme to move the capital to a more central location. The landscape architect was Roberto Burle Marx.

The city's design divides it into numbered blocks as well as sectors for specified activities, such as the Hotel Sector, the Banking Sector, and the Embassy Sector. 

Brasília was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 due to its modernist architecture and uniquely artistic urban planning.

All three branches of Brazil's federal government are located in the city: executive, legislative and judiciary. Brasília also hosts 124 foreign embassies.

The city's international airport connects it to all other major Brazilian cities and some international destinations.  Many years ago, on a trip to the city of Sao Luis in Brazil, my flight from Sao Paulo stopped at the airport in Brasilia.

Laid out in the shape of an airplane, its "fuselage" is the Monumental Axis, a pair of wide avenues flanking a large park. In the "cockpit" is Praça dos Três Poderes, named for the 3 branches of government surrounding it.

It can be stated that Brazil followed the example of the USA in that 170 years before Brasilia was founded, the city of Washington was founded for the same reason: to create a centrally located capital not part of any state.  Washington, in the USA of 1790, was centrally located between New Hampshire to the north and Georgia to the south.