Everyday Life and Observations

This past Tuesday, I was having lunch with my infinitely chic cousin B. at a little asian mangerie on the campus' border. If you know anything about the area, its very hilly terrain and the restaurant is at the bottom of a steep hill and parking is halfway up the hill. I had left something in the car and had to go back up to retrieve it. The day was was too warm, a dry 90 degrees, and the sun was ablaze and high in the noon sky. I was wearing creme colored pants and a tan button down, with bronze, tan and white embroidered dashed lines acroos the chest, and my ubiquitous oversized sunglasses.
As I was climbing back up the broken, uneven sidewalk, I had one of those frequent and vivid flashes of surrealism that adorn my daily life. I envisioned myself as the character Sebastien Venable in "Suddenly Last Summer". For those of you unfamiliar with the work, it is a brilliant, tragic, and morose play by Tennesse Williams set in last 1930's Louisiana and (in flashbacks) Spainish Riviera. The play was made into a 1959 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift. In the play and movie, there is a scene at the very end in which the trip to Spain is recounted by the character Catherine, where Sebastian is climbing up a steep hill, in the "white hot" heat of the sun, wearing a white exquisitely tailored linen suit. And as I climbed, I instantaneously thought of him and how in that very moment I was him; ever-chic, in the heat, ascending.
On my return trip back to the restaurant, I thought of yet another aesthetic imprint of a cinematic nature. I recalled another 1959 film of Brazilian origin called "Black Orpheus". The film was an adaptation of Greek tragedy Orpheus, set during Carnival in the favelas (ghettos) of Rio, and starring Breno Mello as Orpheus and Marpessa Dawn as Eurdice. The opening scene of the movie is iconic. Antonio Carlos Jobim is singing/playing the Bossa standard "Felicidade" as women work their way up and down the the infamous hills of Rio carrying their bundles, again in the white hot heat. As anyone who has ever tried to navigate their way down a path of questionable stability, while maintaining any measure of poise and wearing slick soles, knows there is a certain sway of the hips and shifting of weight in their walk that they must affect to make it down safely. Noticing my gait, I thought of Marpessa/Eurydice elegantly swaying downhill with her bundle diadem precipitously mounted upon her regal head. In that moment I was her; ever-chic, in the heat, descending.
Such are the scenes of my life. Snapshots of elegance emblazoned upon my memory, enhanced and insribed the mundanity of life as supreme and utter sophistication.

Semper Chic!