3 Illuminating Things from the weekend

1. It is pointless to ask me to bring anything to a dinner party besides alcohol, cheese or bread products. I walk into a grocery store and my mind simply goes blank.

2. Writer Dorothy Parker and I may have been intended as soul mates.

3. You needn't  have seen any of the movies to enjoy the Oscars. The awards show is a blockbuster movie unto itself, staged expertly to take advantage of some of the oldest tricks in the melodrama book: close-ups on knowing smiles between old friends, cutaways revealing assumed rivalries between well-dressed enemies, triumphant battle-cries ("Baby, you were so right!"), sardonic jabs ("I don't know if I earned this, or if I just wore you down") and, best of all, the weepy laughter of spouses in the stands, who never felt so proud of a life-lived in a shadow. Watching Sandra Bullock approach the stage like she had just walked through forty miles of desert to get there (weary, uncertain, but determined) was almost as powerful as Vivien Leigh's radish-spitting pledge to never go hungry again. Nobody makes movies like the movie-business.