Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

            I was working in a museum where there were large windows around a gallery and I was fitting big wooden shutters over each one. Sitting at a desk behind one window and about two meters up was the museum director. I asked if he wanted me t cover his window as well, but he told me no, because he wanted to look inside. As I was walking away across the room, my ex-girlfriend, Dorita, whom I hadn’t seen for several years, suddenly came up and gave me a hug. She seemed very glad to see me and said, “We have something for you!” I never found out what that something was because I woke up.

On Tuesday morning the fresh snow on the sidewalks looked like a bad paint job.

            All the years when I used to take public transit there were so many times when I had to wait twenty minutes or more for the streetcar. Now all I have to do to make three come along in a row is try to tune my guitar.

            I spent the first part of the day catching up on my journal and then got back to working on my essay. At 18:00 I went dark just ploughed into writing my paper, only going online briefly that night to post my blog. I got sleepy early though and went to bed at around 20:30.

            On Wednesday I got up at 4:00, and after yoga I only practiced part of one song before jumping into the final stretch of writing my essay. I got sleepy again at 7:55 but after an hour and a half siesta I had the energy to push at it until it was done. I could have done more with more time but I didn’t want to be late for class, so at 15:30 I started working on the citations. That took me almost two hours because I had to look up the proper way to do it with a poetry anthology in Modern Language Association Style.

            I was only five minutes later for class than usual. Our instructor arrived almost on time for a change and immediately set up the projector for us to watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Scott told us that they made Elizabeth Taylor put on 13.6 kilograms for the film, which she never took off.  The play was written in 1962 and was set in a campus residence at a time when colleges were changing dramatically. It was up for a Pulitzer Prize but it was rejected by a committee that hadn’t even read it. The character, Martha was considered an offence to American women despite the fact that the play is more popular with women than men. The movie broke the motion picture code because of “Screw you!” and “Hump the hostess”.

            I saw the film about ten years ago but had forgotten that it was filmed in black and white. The play takes place entirely inside George and Martha’s house because it’s supposed to be claustrophobic but the picture has several scenes outside of the home, including an opening scene during the credits that shows George and Martha walking through the campus late at night on their way home from a party. The silent walk did not fit with Martha’s character because she would have been talking the whole time.

            Edward Albee didn’t think Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were right for the parts because Taylor was twenty years too young and Burton was a few years too old. He liked how it turned out but he always thought that Bette Davis and James Mason would have been better.

            I do think that Taylor and Burton were great as Martha and George. George Segal, with his New York accent wasn’t very convincing as a professor from the Midwest. Also, for some strange reason, they changed the age of George and Martha’s imaginary son from 21 to 16.

            The movie is two hours and twelve minutes long but it felt like we’d been watching it into the early morning by the time it was done. I handed in my essay and told Scott the story about how my late friend, William Baker had come to North America from England on a cruise ship. Parents would group the children together to keep them occupied and so it was arranged for young William to go to a little girl’s cabin and read to her. The little girl was Elizabeth Taylor.

            As usual, the temperature had dropped drastically from the time that I went to class to the time that I left. It was a cold ride home.

            I watched The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The story was about a man named John that writes a popular advice column called “Ask Uncle George”. One woman named Mrs. Weatherby writes that there is a married couple that she sees from her window in the building across from hers, but lately she sees the wife kissing another. John’s response is to tell her politely to mind her own business. But then his secretary tells him that the Mrs. Weatherby’s address is the building across from his. He calls his wife to tell her that he will be home late but he goes home early and finds that she has champagne on ice. He accuses her and she says she’s waiting for someone that may be a casual acquaintance or a lover but whatever he is it’s none of his business. Mad with jealousy he cracks her skull open with a statue of cupid, and then he wipes the prints and goes back to work. Since he had left and returned to his office through a back door, his secretary still thinks he’s been in his office the whole time, so he has a perfect alibi. The police call to tell him that his wife is dead. He goes home and they have a painter named Tom in custody. He says he had only come to paint John’s wife’s portrait, which was going to be a birthday present for her husband. Tom is convicted of murder but later John discovers that his wife’s lover was actually his editor, Simon. John tries to incriminate Simon and get Tom freed and arranges to have Mrs. Weatherby come to identify Simon to the police as the man that she’d seen through her window. She does so, but she also adds that she should have taken Uncle George’s advice. The police know that John is Uncle George and so they figure out that he was the killer.