Greetings from the kitchen table!

It’s looking like I’ll be able to post today, after all.

All the many cats are in their closed-up bedrooms upstairs.

I’ve got the world of Marilyn’s Room transported down here to the kitchen table. A sort of piping-hot cup o’ Joe next to me.

I have about 45 minutes before the electrician arrives, and once the power goes out, I’ll still have a full battery charge on the laptop.

So we shall see!

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First off!

Happy heavenly birthday to Jack Kerouac. He would have been 104 today.

Let’s all just say “the hell with it!” and become really creative at last… free, basking, wandering, idly stopping here and there, tasting, enjoying.”

— Jack Kerouac
(From Outlaw Poets substack post today.)

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Before I forget!

If you saw my post yesterday about the Franz Kafka House Museum in Prague, and then the (fake) news about my own house becoming a museum here in Crazeysburg…

I believe I’ve posted here before that the house my favorite 95-year-old Japanese man grew up in in Tokyo, really has become a house museum.

His father designed it and a famous architect built it, back in 1934, after they’d moved back to Tokyo from Ocean City, NJ.

While I was with my favorite 95-year-old Japanese man yesterday, I decided to take a photo for you of the front of the brochure from his House Museum. Some neighbors of his went to Tokyo recently and took a tour of the museum and brought him back the brochure. (Well, they also took actual photos, but I thought it would seem kind of weird if his home health aide knocked on their door and asked to take pictures of their photos in order to post them to her blog…)

Anyway. Here it is!

My favorite 95-year-old Japanese man has many very old photos of the house from the 1930s and 1940s, when he was still living there as a boy. It is a really beautiful house. (And it was often occupied by various military officers during the war, while he and his family were still living in it.)

And I find this next bit astounding. Literally, astounding.

I knew that when he was living back in NYC in the 1950s, he had seen the original version of “South Pacific,” starring the legendary Mary Martin, on Broadway.

Mary Martin on Broadway in “South Pacific”

I would have loved to have seen Mary Martin onstage in anything she did.

I also knew that he and his wife had seen “My Fair Lady” on Broadway, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews!! I had the record of that musical and I played it over and over and over, on the record player down in our playroom, when I was a wee bonny lass in Cleveland.

But yesterday, I found out that he had also seen the original “The King & I” on Broadway, too!

ME: ” You mean, with Yul Brynner???”

HE: “Yes.”

ME: “He was right there, live, on the stage??”

HE: “Yes.”

ME: “Was he incredible??”

HE (pausing a moment, remembering, then smiling): “Yes. Very powerful.”

Wow, gang. I would have loved to have seen that!!

(From the movie version)

It really just blew me away.

And as I have said here before, my favorite 95-year-old Japanese man has very little short term memory left, but his long term memory is flawless, which is why we never run out of things to talk about when I can get him focused on the past.

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Okay!

Here’s this!

The Rolling Stones at some point in 1968!! (Honestly, I wonder what Keith is thinking about here.)

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And here’s this!!

Nick Cave, with grace beside him, outside somewhere, smoking!

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From Ross K. Nichols’ Sunday School this past Sunday:

Iran and Israel: The Ancient Persian Prophecies (1 hr 27 mins):

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And last night, I started re-watching the “Archer” cartoon series. It is now on Tubi. It is so wonderfully politically incorrect, filthy dirty, and so funny. I can’t believe we have come so far from these days. It was not that long ago... (2 mins):