Guilty Pleasures

Last night I was surfing the channels while getting ready for an evening out, and I chanced upon the movie 1776.

Have you ever seen this movie? Based on the Broadway stage production, it came out in 1972, as part of the hoop-la-la leading up to the Bicentennial. Its subject matter concerns the events culminating in the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It is, of all things, a musical comedy. Possibly the worst ever made.

I mean, it is really terrible. First of all, making a musical about the seminal event in American history is a treacherous exercise (no pun intended); one is treading on sacred ground. It is a great story, but some dignity should be applied to the project.

This movie, however, is so filled with silly songs using awkward metaphors ("...in this Congressional incubator...England owns the egg, we own what's inside") and goofy characterizations (John Adams and Ben Franklin dancing down the street, linked arm-in-arm) and questionable taste (Thomas Jefferson struggling to write the Declaration of Independence because he was, well, feeling amorous, shall we say) that it leaves you alternately gaping in amazement and cringing.

What were they thinking?

There was a good cast, too, who tried their darndest - William Daniels, Howard Da Silva and the gorgeous Blythe Danner - but oof!

And yet, I watch it every time it (infrequently) shows up on TCM or wherever because, well, it entertains me.

I say this is possibly the worst musical comedy ever made, because there is Grease 2 to reckon with.

Now, this is a bad movie. An attempt to carry on the legitimate magic made by the original Grease, it inverts the story, with the male lead a goody-goody pointy-headed British student intellectual, and the female lead a dimbo bad-girl biker chick.

The songs, when they are not inane, are totally forgettable, and the cast is laughable (but not in a good way). The male lead, a cutie-pie Brit named Maxwell Caufield (there's a household name for you) must have been chosen for his pulchritude, because he can't carry a tune in a bucket.

The only saving grace this movie has is Michelle Pfeiffer, who could actually deliver lines and was so stunning that you knew she had to go on to better things.

By the way, I watch this too, every chance I get.

To paraphrase John Collum's Edward Rutledge in a particularly bombastic 1776 song, "Molasses to Rum": Hail 1776! Hail Grease 2! - which stinketh the most?

Not all guilty pleasures are actually bad. One of my favorites is the movie The Quick and The Dead, a comic book of a western with an amazing cast - a very young Leonardo DiCaprio, a very young Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman as an Über-baddie, and - best of all - Sharon Stone as a female gunslinger.

It is worth the price of admission just to see her strut around in a big hat, long duster and leather pants with a gun stuck in the waist, delivering lines through her teeth like "the law is back in town" in a squinty-eyed Clint Eastwood drawl.

The plot is preposterous - a gunfighting competition in a small town run by evil Hackman - but it is a must-watch for the scenery-chewing that goes on, and the stylized camera stunts, like following a bullet on its flight.

My husband Norm hates this movie, as all reasonable persons should, but I just can't look away.

One of the rules of Guilty Pleasure viewing is that you can't own these movies. You can't plan to watch them. You may only watch them when you happen upon them.

Preferably when no one else is around.

Sacrifice

I would have written yesterday, but I was too busy stuffing doughnuts and pancakes into my mouth. Jelly and syrup, not to mention powdered sugar, would have been all over the keyboard.

Indeed, the keyboard already has so many crumbs on or in it, that if it were vacuumed, the resulting pile would be, well, really disgusting.

But I digress.

Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, also known as Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras or Fasnacht or Carnival (read "an excuse to behave badly for a day"). That would make today Ash Wednesday, or the start of Lent in the Christian calendar. The season of Lent commemorates the forty days that Jesus spent fasting in the desert enduring temptation, as recounted in the New Testament.

Fat Tuesday provides the opportunity to live it up and feel good about it before the coming privation of the Lenten season. In the British Isles, Shrove Tuesday is traditionally a day to eat rich foods, particularly ones larded with butter and eggs and sugar, so that these ingredients are not around to tempt you during Lenten fasting.

Mardi Gras and New Orleans are practically synonymous at this time of year. It would appear that the city of laissez les bon temps rouler has recovered enough to continue the celebration in traditional style.

The tradition of Carnival, celebrated in many Latin countries, goes back to medieval times, and reached its apotheosis in the Venetian celebration, which had its beginnings around 1268. In its heyday, the festival stretched all the way from December 26 until midnight on Shrove Tuesday.

The wearing of masks was always an integral part of the whole Carnival experience in Venice, because after all, isn't it much easier and more fun to get away with bad behavior if no one can identify you? No wonder the Venetians considered maskmakers or mascherari to be important citizens.

Even in modern times, some cultures have turned Carnival into a days-long bacchanale involving much feasting and immoderate partying. It would be nice if these cultures were not spending taxpayer money to eat, drink and listen to Sheryl Crow and Earth Wind and Fire. Too bad they have no masks to hide behind.

Of course, the party is over now. The season of austerity has come.

Traditionally, we in the Christian church are called on to sacrifice something during Lent, to prepare ourselves for Holy Week and Easter. The trick is not to sacrifice something that we really don't like anyway but is good for us, such as brussels sprouts or exercise, but to sacrifice something that is not particularly good for us but we enjoy, if somewhat guiltily, such as Monster Truck Jam, or a lavish corporate jet.

Sacrifice is good for the soul. Giving things up, particularly things that are not necessary but important to us, makes us feel righteous. And who doesn't enjoy being self-righteous every now and then?

I am going to sacrifice by (predictably) giving up chocolate. For one thing, as we all know if we read my post from last fall, I am a chocoholic. And even though recent studies have shown the health benefits of chocolate, eating a quarter-pound of it a day just can't be that good for you, or for your (that is to say, my) hips.

I am sure that you, Gentle Reader, would never behave in such an excessive, immoderate way.

Come Easter Sunday, however, my mask of self-righteousness comes off. I cannot guarantee that chocolate bunnies won't be hurt in the process.

Tied to the Past

Several years ago, Norm received a present of a battery-operated, rotating tie rack from his daughters.

Norm was delighted with the gift; as we all know (especially if we read my last post) men regard tools as essential to the achievement of an end. In this case, the end achieved was the organizing of the approximately 150 ties he owns (I may be exaggerating, but not by much.)

Before the tie rack entered his life, keeping the ties in order was somewhat problematical; his collection had long ago outgrown the wooden rack on the wall of his closet. That was sufficient to hold, perhaps, his prized Christmas tie collection, including the one with the cartoon Santa climbing out of the chimney.

The rotating rack worked beautifully, circling at the touch of a button to display solids, regimental stripes, checks, paisleys, and the occasional knitted tie. Norm used it every day.

Recently, however, the rack has taken to jumping off of its housing, spilling a profusion of colorful ties onto the floor of the closet and causing Norm much consternation. Several times lately he has emerged from his closet, fists full of ties, with a look of grim determination. This morning he sat down at the kitchen table, and resourceful man that he is, figured out a way to keep the carousel of ties spinning round.

All of which has led me to wonder why men wear ties in the first place. A piece of cloth, tied around the neck of a shirt? How did that come about?

It seems that adorning the neck with a piece of cloth goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, as a means of conveying status. Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang had himself buried with a life-sized terracotta army for protection after death; each intricately detailed clay soldier is depicted with a scarf around its neck, perhaps as a sign of honor. Ancient Roman statuary also depicted men with adornment resembling the modern necktie; orators covered their throats for protection, but soldiers generally did not (the poet Horace thought neck coverings effeminate, according to some sources.)

During the Thirty Years War, around 1660, Croatian mercenaries came to France, sporting colorful kerchiefs around their necks, which intrigued the Sun King, Louis XIV. He introduced the fashion of neckwear to the French court, which took the form of lace or embroidered silk. Some experts believe that the word "cravat" is a corruption of Croat. Of course, once the fashionistas of the court adopted a style, inevitably it spread to the poor as well, who wore cravats of a humbler cotton.

When Charles II returned to England in 1660 to begin the Restoration, he and the nobility who flocked after him brought the cravat to the British Isles. During the next two hundred years, fabric was wrapped around the neck in various ways; in America in the 1800s, the bandanna became a casual alternative to the fussy silks and laces of the past, although dandies such as Beau Brummel (who designed the forerunner of the modern man's suit) still felt that a properly tied cravat was crucial to one's sartorial elegance.

Men's attire became standardized during the Industrial Revolution, when the exigencies of the workplace demanded a less fussy style, and the long thin tie of today started to appear courtesy of Oxford University oarsmen, who removed the striped bands from their straw boaters and tied them around their necks. This practice led to the creation of the striped "school" tie.

Bow ties originated from a French ready-to-wear cravat called a "jabot". The tuxedo was introduced as formal wear, along with its black bow tie, by Pierre Lorillard in Tuxedo Park, New York, an uppercrust enclave developed in 1885.

The British army began using striped ties to indicate the regiment to which a soldier belonged. World War I exposed America and the rest of the world to the long, narrow regimental stripe tie. The man's necktie (and its cousin the bow tie) became established parts of American fashion.

The 20th century saw periodic changes in width and length, but the tie remained a standard part of dressy male plumage until the last two decades started to loosen things up, and casual attitudes to dress seeped into workplaces.

Recently, in New York City, a necktie tradition fell when the 79-year-old "21 Club" stopped requiring male diners to wear ties.

One wonders if the tie has become the vestigial tail of menswear, and is doomed by the process of evolutionary elimination. Somehow it is hard to imagine millennials wanting to master the Windsor Knot.

Until it completely disappears, however, the necktie still makes a good Father's Day present.

The Object of Desire

Every now and then, scientists come up with an insight so staggering, so unexpected, that our worldview shifts, and nothing is ever the same again.

But not this time.

There is another category of research, the kind wherein considerable amounts of time, effort and money are spent proving something so blatantly obvious, so intuitively known, that you can't believe that the project was ever green-lighted.

This was the type of research presented in an article that I saw on CNN today. It said, in effect, that science has proven that men look at women in bikinis as objects, not people.

Really. Who would have guessed?

The research, which was done at Princeton University, was presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Really Unnecessary but Fun Science.

OK, I made that name up.

The participants in the study were 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton, and the research was performed on the beach at Daytona, Florida during Spring Break Week. All of the participants had to be holding a beer at all times, and were scored based on the number of times they said the phrase "Dude, she's hot" during the week.

OK, I made that part up too.

The research actually involved the 21 heterosexual male undergraduates, but they filled out the usual questionnaires, and, of course, saw pictures of women in bikinis (something tells me that there was a long line of applicants for this study). The results showed that when men were shown pictures of young ladies in tiny bathing suits, the areas of their brains that lit up were the same as when guys get out their tools, intending to go fix that broken drawer in the kitchen. Hence, women as objects, viewed by men with a mission.

One of the ideas behind the study was to prove that "men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal."

No kidding.

Clearly the researchers had been raised in a cloister and had never been in the company of men between the ages of fourteen and, well, there really is no upper limit.

Apparently, this area of research has been fruitful before. A previous study showed that, while subjects showed signs of avoidance when confronted with homeless people or drug addicts, the opposite was true when confronted by scantily clad women.

You just can't make this stuff up.

I'll bet that somewhere, Einstein is kicking himself for wasting time pursuing that "theory of relativity" stuff, when he could have been studying the effect of hot babes on the brain.

It is interesting to see that something that one has always suspected is, in fact, verifiable by science. Kind of depressing, though.

It all has to do with that ol' devil evolution, and the desire for nacent homo sapiens to find fertile females with whom to propagate the species. So, the objectification of women is somewhat uncontrollable, say the researchers.

They also talked about the possibility of the same study being done with pictures of wives and girlfriends in bathing suits. Can't wait for the results of that one to come out.

Coming up - a study proving that men show signs of avoidance when asked to clean the gutters.

The Shape of Love

Since today is Valentine's Day, I am pondering the heart.


The health of that particular organ has loomed large in my life (actually, the heart in question is my husband's). But since his cardiovascular system seems to be doing well at the moment, I am going to go all metaphorical, and not dwell on his particular fist-sized muscle weighing about 11 ounces.

Phew. There's a romantic phrase for you.

The physical human heart does not resemble the heart symbol, really, or only vaguely; bumpy at the top, kind of pointy at the bottom. Lots of vessels going in and out. Not particularly pretty.

It would not work well on valentines. Just imagine trying to cut out around the aorta, or the vena cava.

So, the symbol.

♥

It is nicely symmetrical. Fold a piece of paper in half, cut out one half with a point on the bottom and a round top, open the paper and voilá.

There is something innately beautiful in the shape; its origins are lost in the mists of time. But for hundreds of years, it has been the icon of romantic love.

Heart-shaped things do appear in nature. Morning glories, for example, have heart-shaped leaves; so do wild violets. Bleeding hearts, or dicentra, those shade-loving perennials, have flowers that look like, well, hearts dripping blood.

Two swans standing nose-to-nose create a heart shape with their necks.

♥

How did the heart become associated with love?

The heart is in the center of the body, more or less, protected by a cage of bone. It must have been clear to the ancients how important it was. Aristotle thought that the heart was the central sense organ through which all of the sensations we receive from our other sense organs, our eyes and fingers and tongues and ears and noses, are rendered comprehensible. It was the seat of the emotions, and rational thought.

♥

Perhaps, 3,000 years or so ago, a young woman met a young man. Perhaps she encountered him in the street, or at a friend's home, or at a temple. Perhaps they spoke, exchanged a few words, and she liked the light in his green eyes when he looked at her, or the way his hair fell over his forehead, or his laugh.

And from then on, whenever she saw this young man, a curious thing happened. Her heart, the fist-sized muscle in the cage of bone, which beat regularly without her awareness, began to pound, hammering against the the bars of the cage so hard that she thought everyone would be able to see it burst out of its prison, and she felt faint.

Perhaps he felt the same way.

It would have been natural to think that the heart is where the emotions are located.

♥

Now, of course, we know more about biology and physiology, and we tend to regard the heart as just a pump, a machine that can be replaced, and repaired. The brain is the organ wherein emotions are conceived, as far as we can tell.

But the images of the heart as emotional core persist, when we speak of heartache, or a broken heart. And studies have apparently shown that bad relationships can damage the physical heart.

♥

So maybe Aristotle was on to something, after all.

I do know that once a year, it is nice to celebrate love, whatever its shape, and wherever it lives.

The Dark Fruits

As I surfed the airways last night, looking for something to watch that did not include scantily dressed, bosomy, peroxided women fistfighting over something or someone, I chanced upon a commercial for Northland Dark Fruit Juice.

Dark fruit. Just the name conjures up something mystical, poetic, ominous, to wit: "the current economic crisis is the dark fruit of our labour in the fields of greed" or some such (feel free to use this sentence. I will charge only $1.00 per use, a very reasonable fee).

Apparently, the Big Wheel of Food Fads has spun and landed upon fruits with deep pigmentation as the most recent panacea for what ails us, fighting cancer by slowing the growth of colon cancer cells by as much as 80%, according to studies. And then there are all of those free-radical fighting, antioxidant benefits that will make us look better, live longer, and be debt-free in six months (well, maybe not that last one.)

We certainly are living in the Dark Ages. Last year's big movie The Dark Knight, dark fruit (you know, dark is one of those words that if you repeat it a lot it starts to look weird), dark economic times.

Northland's dark fruit juice includes juices of cranberry, blueberry, red grape and, my personal favorite, the pomegranate, the latest fruit to attain superstar status. I remember eating pomegranate seeds as a child, when my grandmother, that gustatory Magellan, introduced it into our diets on occasion. But then, it receded from my consciousness as a fruit to be regularly enjoyed.

It reappeared in a literary sense in one of my favorite Greek myths about Persephone, the goddess of earthly fertility, wherein the forbidden eating of four pomegranate seeds causes her to spend four months in the underworld every year, causing winter to descend upon the earth (kind of a parallel to the situation with Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden). Interestingly, the word pomegranate is from the Latin for "apple with seeds."

Pomegranates, obviously an ancient fruit, have a rich history in many cultures. The shrub that produces it is native to an area from Iran to Tibet, and has been grown throughout the Mediterranean and northern Africa. The fruit is particularly useful in arid areas because of the sacks of juice it holds. Pomegranates last a long time, and were carried on caravans to provide liquid sustenance.

In the U.S., pomegranates are grown in California and Arizona; you can find them in supermarkets throughout the country. There are a number of recipes that use the fruit in a variety of ways.

Grenadine syrup is actually thickened, sweetened pomegranate juice, which suggests that all of those Singapore Slings and Tequila Sunrises we children of the seventies drank in college may bode well for us in our later years (I guess that would be now). We didn't know it then, but we were ahead of the curve.

Pomegranate juice is being added to all kinds of unlikely items, like soda, or body washes. There is also pomegranate-flavored vodka. I am sure that pomegranate-flavored chewing tobacco is probably in the works.

Maybe just having one sit in a bowl on your table will bring you to health.

Of course, pomegranates may have had their day in the sun; the other day I heard that black raspberries are the latest go-to fruit for cancer prevention.

I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to the day when scientists discover that a large bowl of ice cream a day keeps cancer away. Or, perhaps, a piece of butter cake.

Until then, I think I will look for pomegranates, as well as the other dark fruits, the next time I go to the market; berries are great to add to cereal or yogurt or oatmeal anyway. In the meantime, I think there is a bottle of Grenadine in the back of the liquor cabinet. Bet it tastes great on ice cream.

Bin There, Done That

Let us contemplate, for a moment, in the midst of our overly busy and complicated lives, the miracle that is the storage bin.

That container of plastic or rubber or some unknown petroleum-based chemically produced substance, see-through or opaque, in festive colors or sensible green or gray, hopefully with a lid that fits.

It can be found in shapes and sizes ranging from shoebox to steamer trunk. Flat to fit under the bed. Deep and roomy for, well, whatever.

The miracle of the storage bin is that no matter how many of them you have, you always need more (sort of the opposite of the miracle of the loaves and fish.)

Or at least, I do. At least once a month, I make the ritual pilgrimage to Target, that temple of tasteful consumption, to contemplate the aisles of boxes and decide which one will best suit to store the offending item that needs to be contained, like radioactive waste, lest it get out of hand and overwhelm my household.

Most recently the item was Christmas decorations, which reproduce themselves frantically during the ten non-Christmas season months, and then emerge from their dark cave under the steps to festoon the tree and every flat surface in the house and still there are cardboard boxes of ornaments, or figurines, or whatever left over.

The process of un-decoration is painful and lengthy, and after all of the cardboard boxes have been filled to the uttermost with the miscellany of the season, inevitably there are Santa throws, or dorknob decorators, or wreath hangers still in need of a home in which to propagate themselves, unseen, until next fall.

Plastic storage bins, you say to yourself. Plastic storage bins are the answer. Plastic storage bins will discipline those unruly and fecund decorations.

And then there are the photos which must be removed from every surface, so that those surfaces can be covered in Christmas ephemera. What to do with the photos?

Indeed, there are way too many photos on surfaces to begin with. You start out with a few iconic shots of the happy family, and graduation photos, and the next thing you know, the pictures are shoving each other off of the coffee table, or the mantel, or the piano. The photo of the family sitting on the beach is duking it out with the cute baby picture for primacy of tabletop real estate, and while they are preoccupied with the struggle, the happy grouping from the Christmas party is sidling over, ready to push both of them over the edge onto the floor.

So, you think to yourself, maybe there are too many photos out. Maybe some of them can be put away. Maybe I will rotate them on a monthly basis, arranging them tastefully, just so, so that they can be fully appreciated. And dusted.

Well, of course, that will never happen.

But you cull through the photos, promising them and yourself that someday they will again see the light of day. You group all of the winnowings together and then, the realization strikes you.

You need another storage bin.

Book Face

photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

My husband recently gave me a beautiful wooden plaque that reads: "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." It is a quote from Louisa May Alcott.

I have always been a reader. I started reading early, and was fairly indiscriminate in my choice of written materials - I read everything from soup cans, to cereal boxes, to instruction manuals, old National Geographics, all of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books, Cherry Ames, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Stetson, the Walton Boys, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Bulletin, Sports Illustrated, Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern comic books (also a great comic book version of David Copperfield, whose characters resembled the actors in the 1935 movie version) and that was before I turned nine.

By the time I was ten I had added Oliver Twist, The Lord of the Flies, Mary Poppins, Black Beauty, At the Back of the North Wind, Bambi, Heidi, East of the Sun and West of the Moon (a folktale collection) the Supernatural Omnibus (a collection of classic horror stories) Death of a President (about John F. Kennedy's assassination) and pretty much anything else that came into my hands.

At eleven I discovered Gone With The Wind, and my life has never been the same.

All of the Sherlock Holmes stories. All of the P.G. Woodhouse stories. Edgar Allen Poe. James Thurber.

More Dickens. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. The swashbucklers of Rafael Sabatini.

All of the Ellery Queen stories, going back to the twenties.

The Agony and the Ecstasy. Beau Geste. Ben Hur.

That medical encyclopedia that my dad had, with all of the pictures of the skin diseases (at the time he was a pharmaceutical sales rep). My brother Jim and I took turns showing each other the most disgusting photos.

Jim, who read many of the same novels I did but was also very athletic (unlike head-on-a-tripod here) couldn't believe some of the things he found me perusing. Like, for instance, the book he deems the most boring ever written - Age Cannot Wither by Bertita Harding, about the romance between Eleanora Duse, the great stage actress, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet laureate of Italy.

Jim used to say that just looking at the cover made him feel faint. Apparently, my threshold of ennui was so high, it was unreachable in this universe, and could only be measured by theoretical mathematics.

But we had at least three copies of this tome, so I read it one really dull week in June of 1968.

My face was always in a book.

Books were very important in our household. My dad is a serious bibliophile, and he bought an entire lot from Leary's, the legendary old book store in Philadelphia, when it closed its doors in the mid-60's. Since the books were sold in batches, we got duplicates of some.

We had about six copies of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Yes, I read that too.

Every summer from early childhood, Jim and I would scour the used book wagon at the Tinicum Art Festival in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for choice finds, like the old Hardy Boy books with the red covers, or old Ellery Queens. But we didn't always know what we had. One day we picked up Boccaccio's The Decameron (aka "Dirty Stories from the Middle Ages"), and were about to purchase it when my dad saw it and took it away, appalled.

And so it came that, one sunny July festival day, Jim and I were sitting quietly, looking at our finds, when a freckled older woman wearing a large hat came up and sat next to us. It must have been the unusual sight of two children aged approximately nine and eleven at an outdoor party with their heads down, totally absorbed, that called to her.

She asked us what we were reading and we showed her - one of our purchases was the Hardy Boys story The Mystery of the Chinese Junk. She told us that she had spent many years in China, and that she had a model of a Chinese junk in her home.

Then she got up and left. My mom and my grandmother, who were nearby, rushed over to us and exclaimed,"Do you know who that was?"

We did not.

"That was Pearl Buck!"

A few years later, this name meant a little more to me after I read The Good Earth.

I don't read quite as much now as I did then. There are many more forms of media competing for attention these days, and I admit to being a Netflix junkie. Or, perhaps it is what virtual sister Leslie said recently about her own reading habits, that I reread the same books because I am afraid of being disappointed by a new one. It would be hard at this age to recapture the rapture of discovery that my childhood reading brought me.

Every now and then, however, I am beckoned by the lure of the written page, and I once again find worlds within words.

A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

On Saturday night (or rather, early on Sunday morning) I had a dream.

Of the many ways that people can be divided into two groups, those who dream and remember their dreams are one group, those who don't dream (or don't remember their dreams) are another. I fall into the former group.

Most vivid dreaming occurs during periods of REM sleep. Research has shown that creative people have more vivid dreams and better dream recall than people who are less creative. I can't say how this relates to me, but my dreams are extremely vivid and complex, and I can frequently remember them well enough to relate them to Norm later in the day.

I think of my dreams as entertainment during my sleeping hours.

So, back to the dream I had on Sunday morning.

I dreamt that I was on a tour with a lot of people, including Norm. The beginning of the dream is less well-formed, but at some point I was in a large building with glass around the sides, as if it were an airport or an observation tower. Norm was with me and we rounded a corner (along with a bunch of other people) and a cluster of skyscrapers came into view; they were very close, and we were level with some of their roofs, as if we were also in a skyscraper. Beyond and surrounded by more tall buildings I saw the dome of the Taj Mahal.

I was very excited to see, in the midst of all of the modern architecture, this Eastern masterpiece, even though all that was visible was the beautiful dome.

I wanted to take a picture, and I had a tiny round silver camera that came in a box of chocolates that I had (I remember being annoyed that the chocolates kept disapppearing when my back was turned). I raised the little camera to take the picture, but Norm said something and I turned to look at him, and when I turned back, the dome had been obscured by clouds or fog.

We decided to go down to the ground floor and see if we could go around the Taj Mahal to get a picture of the front. First we went to the back and into the Taj, and entered a room wherein there was a group undergoing guided meditation, lying on silken mats like gossamer. We tried to lie on the mats, but I really wanted the picture, and I wanted to use my regular camera, not the little silver one from the chocolates, so after a few minutes we got up and left.

I went around to the front of the Taj, and it was indeed magnificent, but before I could take a picture, I woke up.

Later in the day, I turned on the TV. I flipped through the movie channels, and landed on one called Last Dance, a movie I have never seen. It was the end of the movie, and the closing shot of the movie was a camera panning around to the front of - you guessed it - the Taj Mahal as the credits started to roll. It looked very much like it did in my dream.

The next day I had to call Microsoft about a software issue with my computer. The man I spoke to was in India. So, of course I had to ask him about the Taj Mahal. He said that he had seen it twice in his life, and the interior had once been covered with precious jewels, but that the jewels had been stolen throughout the ages.

Certainly there are no skyscrapers around the Taj Mahal. But such is the logic of dreams.

The complex of buildings is a monument to love built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (whose name in Persian meant "King of the World") as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal ("Chosen One of the Palace"), who died in 1631 during the birth of their 14th child (if you ask me, building the Taj was the least he could do). The Taj Mahal was started the following year but was not completed until around 1653.

Since then, it has become an iconic symbol of elegance and beauty, the ne plus ultra of Indian art.

Of all of the descriptions of the Taj that have been written throughout the ages, my favorite is by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian poet, who called the Taj Mahal "one teardrop on the cheek of time."

Maybe some day I will get to see it in my waking hours. Until then, I'll see it in my dreams.