New Year 2013

From "Raven Red"

.  . .apartment 4-C upstairs is home to a slightly different breed of pioneer. . .  . The elusive nightly bacchanals engender creative, pre-pubescent daydreams. . .  a scene straight out of the movie "Repeat Performance," where a dapper though dissolute Louis Heyward is about to welcome in the New Year with his lovely though murderously ticked off soul mate, Joan Leslie. As Lew stands frozen in fearful asymmetry, his wife whips out a dainty Saturday Night Special and plugs him real good.  She’s a gussied-up, slender female Shane in diaphanous evening apparel.  Here is a synopsis from Turner Classics for your enjoyment:

Brief Synopsis
Sheila Page, a Broadway star, shoots Barney, her murderous husband on New Year's Eve. She flees her apartment and goes to her Producer, John Friday. When she arrives, it is New Year's day, a year earlier. She has been given the chance to live life over and correct the errors of the past only to find that the end will be the same although the path will be different.

On the actual New Year's Eve however that the movie is being aired, it is Lila Mae who is being attacked, systematically punched, pummeled and pushed by Blood Brother for a prime viewing spot in front of the apartment’s sole, twelve inch, black and white TV.  Ineffectually she attempts to take retaliatory "shots" at him from behind a club chair. . . .  even as she is meticulously battered however, a miracle takes place on the small screen.  Louis and his gal get to relive the entire year exactly at the moment of truth— precisely at the stroke of midnight the clock mysteriously turns itself back twelve months and all the evil of the past is reversed!

This feat of noir film sorcery does not go unnoticed by Lila.   She too longs for the day when her lot will be vindicated and she'll be released from the odd mischance that has thus far ruined her young existence. She imagines it will ultimately come to light that she actually is residing within the wrong family because of a terrible mistake made on the day of her birth, when she and another infant are accidentally switched in their cradles by the well-meaning though harried nurses. These facts, when discovered, will prove that Selma and Frank are not her real parents, the dump she lives in cannot possibly be her rightful home and that Blood Brother is in no way a relation. The notion of clean slates and spontaneous transformations is very appealing because Lila realizes, even then, that no one is given a second chance. . . she dreams of deco palaces with breathtaking terraces overlooking glimmering city lights, closets bursting with filmy gowns, all in a scenario where Mother is unbelievably kind, Father filthy rich. . . sumptuous settings and exciting plot lines. . . . She has been left with no choice but to construct a perfect present from an imperfect setting. . . ."

Christmas Post

From “Daddy’s Little Girl and the Old Book”

. . . . I found a discarded Christmas tree on West Eighty-fourth on one of those metallic gray days late in January, and the overturned decoration was not a tree at all but something artificial, a fake cluster of branches no more than three feet high, and seriously, though somewhat unevenly, sprayed silver. It was the quintessential appearance of the appearance. When you touched the nettles on the piteously skinny though eternally glittery stems, random twigs and flecks of silver paint came off in your hands. I fell in love with it instantaneously and hauled this painted shard of simulated forest back to the apartment. Then I placed it on a dresser and kept it there until May, when most of the “foliage” had fallen onto the floor, creating a nostalgic, formless little carpet of bright needles. It made me feel good to do something my mother would not have dared. Once, at Christmas time, as a small child in Europe between the two wars, she had attempted to sneak into her house a tiny, toy evergreen, elaborately festooned and  no more than six inches high-  nonetheless it was the ultimate forbidden signifier of despised and feared Goy-dom next to all those nasty little crucifixes- and apparently it did not end well. . . .