interesting day....

yesterday, still feeling tired from Monday's marathon, nevertheless, walked from home to CPW and 81st in order to get to library on time. What else..? Well, read A Memory of Two Mondays, the Miller play that at one point served as the curtain raiser to the original A View From the Bridge. I never gave it much thought, but amazingly, it happens to be a beautifully written play. A complete contrast (with a few exceptions) to the play taking place in Red Hook  that is performed after it, there is no one central character, rather it is about the comings and goings in an automobile manufacturing plant in Chelsea in early 1933. A big cast, with a lot of interesting character sketches. Interesting to contrast the casting in this one with the casting in View. Van Heflin, who played the original Eddie Carbone in View plays a harried married man who is underpaid at the factory, and who has a brief affair with the young sexy woman worker in the piece, who, of course plays Catherine in View. But most amazingly, there is Gus, a 68 year old mad man, full of angry energy, his id almost uncontrolled, chasing all the women, and who comes the closest to challenging the authority of the warehouse. The actor who played him is the actor playing Alfieri in View---so one goes from the id to the super ego. What is amazing is the A Memory of Two Mondays should run about an hour---it really takes it time. So the evening of the two plays must have been at least two hours and 45 minutes long. Would have loved to have seen it--of course, I was only twelve when it opened, and could not.
   Returning from 145 street, felt tired, but had to see something---too tired to travel, and the two  movies most interesting to me at this point, Brooklyn and Spotlight---seemed too intense. First tried to see The Mirror, by Tcharkovsky, but sold out at Reade, did not want to wait on stand by line, next tried Philharmonic but was told, kind of abruptly, that no senior tickets for this Rachmaninoff concert were available. Since that is the only way I will go, that was out. Went to Lincoln Plaza where Ingrid Bergman bio was playing, started right at the moment I arrived, I did not think twice and bought a ticket. Not deep but interesting movie, took the time and I am very familiar with the territory, Bergman emerges as a sincere woman who could not understand that leaving her children to make a movie might be upsetting to them. She was a woman of complete duality, she needed a family, but thrived on rejecting them when she was at work. Interesting conundrum, but that aspect of the art---who the artist bonds with and how much of the art they share, has always fascinated me. Extremely tired when I returned home, went to sleep immediately---leak did not return until around 2 A.M.
By the way, did not attend Thanksgiving Assembly at Friends, at the moment I was too zonked to get on the subway and go there. Will definitely attend Christmas Assembly, as I always do, work or not.
    Today, after library will see Incident At Vichy, then maybe to La Flaca for Thanksgiving party, maybe somewhere else. Tomorrow at the Schwarz-Baum's for the annual Thanksgiving---maybe a movie in the morning. That is all for now...