Slowly I Turned

           

            On Sunday I spent the whole day preparing for my philosophy exam. I finished gathering Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas on the face from “Meaning and Sense” and put them into a file with his thoughts on the same topic from “Is Ontology Fundamental?” I did the same thing with my lecture notes on the face. I then went through my lecture notes on Jacques Derrida and put those that refer to proximity into the file I’d made from his “The Ends of Man”. The next step would be to read both of these files over again and see if I have something to say about what they say about the Face and Proximity.

            The face is naked and therefore abstract, whatever that means.

            I watched a funny episode of I Love Lucy in which she did the old “Slowly I Turned” Vaudeville skit in combination with a ballet performance. Ricky was going to have a ballet act in his nightclub show as well as a burlesque comedy act. She wanted to audition for the ballet because she’d taken some ballet in high school but she decided she needed to brush up. She went to a ballet school and her ballet rehearsal in which she got herself tangled up in the barre was hilarious. She decided then that she would get a partner to do a burlesque comedy act, but the guy she hired came to her place and did “Slowly I Turned”, though she wasn’t prepared to be attacked every time she said the name “Martha”. She resigned herself to not being in the show, but Ethel called her that night to tell her that one of the dancers had taken sick and for her to come down. But Lucy misunderstood and came prepared to do “Slowly I Turned”. She began dancing, but Ricky was singing a song that repeated the name “Martha” and so whenever Lucy heard it she started attacking the other dancers. I didn’t remember Lucy doing this skit but it was done in Abbot and Costello but it was probably done best by the Three Stooges.