1) This morning’s commute, while nothing, nothing, like my three-hour journey home during the Great Winter of 2015, did take two hours, 15 minutes of which was spent walking timorously over the ice from my home to the station. At one moment of temporary despair, a Lady Older Than I appeared headed in the same direction - and we became each other’s moral support. I could just hear Julie Andrews saying “When God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.
1a) The other big moment was sitting for about 20 minutes or so in the cruelly windswept lower busway of Ruggles Station with a colleague who was drinking an iced coffee.
2) This evening I was surprised to learn of the death of comedienne Kaye Ballard, giving me another opportunity to quote the elderly extra in Sunset Boulevard: “Why, I thought she was dead!” Remembered most for two years with Eve Arden on television in a show I’ve never seen, The Mothers-in-Law, a couple years ago I discovered her as one of the evil stepsisters to the Cinderella of Julie Andrews. (This clip is ONLY scenes with Kaye Ballard.)
2a) Why yes, that is Alice Ghostley.
2b) The obituary did not include her uproarious appearance in that outlandish comedy of 1976, The Ritz, OR her little-known photo as one of the nurses on page 8 of First Lady: My Thirty Days Upstairs at the White House, by Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, as told to Patrick Dennis and with 172 Photographs by Cris Alexander.
3) The only other thing worth noting is that, in an actual FB update, I misspelled vocabulary with an A. And I now have a definition for it: Vacabulary: noun; va-ˈka-byə-ˌler-ē; plural: vacabularez. Definition: a collection of words destined to be misspelled by hurried and/or careless typists.