The Alabama Legislature

As the leaves turn yellow/brown most of the smells and sights of winter/fall seem to mix the reality of the present with the memory of the past. The afternoon chill and rustle of the leaves turning in the wind as if making music to the great unseen conductor bring a feeling of nostalgia to me.

This feeling slips through me almost as a TV which can't quite decide what channel it wants to present. Present/Past fades in and out.

I choose to rotate the antenna toward the past for a clearer picture.

This picture is from 1961. My mother and her friend take us to the movies at the Norwood theater in Florence to see "Breakfast at Tiffany's". For company I invite my friend Leon and we take to the balcony as my mother and Jackie settle in to watch the movie directly below us.

Most of the movie was pretty boring to a couple of eight year olds but I recall spitting peanut hulls over the balcony rail without any thought of the people below. I recall the Tahitian Treat machine, the only talent of which was to take your nickle, dispense liquid directly into the drain then offer an empty four ounce paper cup. I put my nickle in and Leon laughed as my drink went down the drain. Then he put his nickle in and it did the same thing. I, standing there with an empty cup in my hands while Leon's red sugar water flowed down the drain. Leon immediately burst into uproarious laughter knowing his cup was to fall out after the fact. That is what I loved about Leon, his sense of irony was such that a good joke, even on himself, was always better than a cold drink.

Myself not so much.

We ran back upstairs looking for some string or ribbon to make a bit of use of our expensive paper cups and watched as the subtle nuance of Tracy Hepburn taking money from dirty old men in her apartment was completely lost upon us.

But not upon my mother.

The ride home was pretty quiet, Leon and I working out how we would use the treasured T-T cups and my mother's dry wit about it raining peanuts inside the theater. I do recall her saying that It was a pretty rough movie for us to be watching. Prostitutes and thieves - hummmp. Of course that caused Leon to burst into another fit of uncontrollable laughter.

It would be many years before I would learn that the film was written by Truman Capote about his own prostitute mother and the thief and charlatan transient that was his father. I suppose to spin something good from an otherwise intolerable childhood.

Turns out mother was right. Holly Golightly had to do some nasty off screen stuff for those fifty dollar tips. If in real life Holly the hooker had married Paul the thief/rentaboy, if in fact John McGiver had truly engraved their love on a plastic ring, what would their offspring have been?

Alabama Legislators?

Leon is rolling in his grave.