Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Saturday, March 10, 2018
FAN MAIL I NEVER SENT
by Tom Fillion
I’m having a teenage crush again on the most beautiful woman in the world. Olivia Hussey. It started fifty years ago. I still have it. The home fires are still burning for her. Fifty years ago she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Hands down. She has never aged for me. She remains that same symbol of pure beauty and innocence in my ravaged heart of teenage angst. Doesn’t that sweet nostalgic pain of rattled emotions ever go away?
I’m neither a Capulet nor a Montague. I’m neither a Shark nor a Jet. I am sixty
five years old with teenage palpitations.
I’ve never written a fan letter to a movie star. Only pussies and douche
bags did that. I wanted to send one to
her after seeing her in Romeo and Juliet, but I never did. It was at a
multiplex in Springfield, Virginia. I went with my cousin. I encouraged him to
write her a fan letter for both of us. I adored her like millions of others
after I saw her in Franco Zeffirelli’s iconic
adaption of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Through the miracle of modern technology I follow her on Twitter. I send her comments on her Twitter
posts. She is an animal rights activist,
probably a vegan, and a definite He’s Not My President, Resistance, anti-Trump
advocate. Through her tweets I have seen
humans’ cruelty to animals. I never knew there were dog- meat festivals on the
Korean peninsula.
Our relationship started with my 140 character or less
response to her likes, dislikes, and retweets.
Within the day, I received NOTICES on my Twitter page. In each notice was a picture of my beloved Olivia
and a heart. My own heart responded with
the memory of first seeing her and Leonard Whiting as the tragic, ill-fated
couple of fair Verona on the wide screen movie theater in Springfield,
Virginia.
She posted more tweets, likes, dislikes, retweets, and pictures
of herself from Romeo and Juliet and said it was a Happy Memory. It was for me too. I told her in a tweet that very few of us
achieve such beauty, innocence, and perfection in this life. It was my teenage heart speaking to her. I waited anxiously throughout the day for a
NOTICE. She rewarded my patience with
another heart!
So far she hadn’t graced me with 140 characters, typed
with fingers that had touched Hollywood royalty over the last half
century. Nothing came but Notices and
hearts. I began to suspect that I was a
foolish teenager again and wasn’t speaking to Olivia at all but to a publicity
underling or worse yet, a bot that chirped with hollow hearts and imoges of
thumbs up and hands in prayer.
“Do you know what you meant to all us 65 year old
teenagers?” I tweeted.
I got another notice and a heart from that.
I awoke in the night with a panic attack. All my tweets were going to a Twitter age
dead letter file that some programmer rigged up to trigger a heart or a thumbs
up.
I was crushed. I
was living in the blithers-sphere.
The next day I had to find out for sure if I was
communicating with a bot or one of the most beautiful women in the world. I strip-mined the internet for information about
her. She had married three times. She had been in many movies. I was freeze framed on Romeo and Juliet
though. There was no mention of an
autobiography in everything I read.
“Have you written a memoir? When does it come out?”
“Yes. It comes out
in 2018,” she replied.
It came with the hearts and thumbs up but more
importantly it convinced me that I wasn’t communicating with the most beautiful
bot in the world, but with one of the most beautiful women in the last half
century.
I was doing it far away from the RED CARPET of Hollywood
too! What an amazing age we live in! How sweet of her to respond to me!
I knew of her distaste for the Bungler-in-Chief in the
White House.
“You should send an autographed copy to the President,” I
typed.
I thought she would get a laugh out of that. I waited for
the NOTICE and a heart. Maybe she would
throw in a thumbs-up and a couple praying hands. The President really did need to try prayer
because everything else didn’t seem to working for him and his deconstruction
administration .
“I would never give that man anything. EVER!”
Shit! I pissed her off.
I’ll never hear from her again.
No notices or hearts! And I
didn’t. No matter what I said there were
no more hearts or thumbs up. That
destroyed me. I was like a crushed
teenager. My heart ached.
A few days later she posted a picture of her with Honor
Blackmon from ‘The Cat and The Canary.’
Honor was one of the first James Bond ‘girls.’ She was ‘Pussy Galore’ in “Goldfinger.”
“Two Babes!!” I tweeted.
Later that day, I
received my heart’s desire from Olivia.
I got a notice and a heart that she liked it!
I had a follow up reply to her.
“Keep the Douche-Bag-In Chief away from Honor. He likes to grab a woman’s galore!”
I haven’t heard back from Olivia on that, but I’m used to
unrequited teenage love at my age.
At the end of Romeo and Juliet, the Prince declared that
the Capulets and the Montagues were “all punish-ED.” In 50 years I still remember his
pronunciation with the accent on the third syllable. William Shakespeare would be so proud of the
production and agree whole-heartedly with the Prince. But I would disagree in a sense. In Zeffirelli’s production of Romeo and
Juliet, we were all blessed with the truth and beauty and the closest to
perfection many of us will ever achieve, and above all, as her consummate and
adoring fan, we are blessed with OLIVIA!
Saturday, January 9, 2016
Saturday, October 26, 2013
READING
POETRY
By
Tom Fillion
Is like a cab ride at four in the morning in Mexico City in a cab with one headlight, no seat belts or door locks and stop lights and road signs are punctuation ignored from the last earthquake
Or a drive
from Heathrow in the inside- out, right handed driver’s seat, left handed stick
shift rental car on left-handed roads with counter-clockwise roundabouts to
Oxford where the roads bear the imprint of the designers of Stonehenge and
human sacrifice
Or a boat
ride on the Rhine listening to a band play Beatles songs while we sipped wine
and beer and medieval castles and vineyards filled the landscape to the Lorelei
where lay the dead of misguided sailors and Teutonic myth
Or walking
the streets of Dublin where umbrellas bloom on every sidewalk and wither when
the sun makes a brief appearance before dashing into another pub or museum with
the Book of Hours
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