Christmas Cheer

My cousin, Diana, came up for a short visit this weekend. In retrospect, it’s a good thing that the visit was short because we tend to view get-togethers as a mandate to replace our bodily fluids with wine, especially during the holidays. We tried three times to watch a movie called Dangerous Beauty (which I had seen before) about a famous Venetian courtesan and poet. The first night after much wine and some dine, I watched over half of it, but Diana fell asleep on the sofa, so the next night (under the same circumstances--hair of the dog) we tried again. This time I jostled her a few times and said, “This is an important part.” She mumbled that she was watching, but her eyes were closed which made that possibility unlikely, so I turned it off. The next morning I told my sleeping beauty cousin that I could now get a part in the stage play version of the movie because I had watched it enough to memorize the lines. She said, “Can we watch the rest of it this morning?”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you remember where you were when we turned it off?” (I meant at which point in the movie.)

“Yes,” she replied. “I was on the sofa.”