Five points for Friday

1. I had a Marcel Proust moment tonight at dinner with the G.s. We were at an Italian restaurant that made its own gelato, and so for dessert I had a sundae that came topped with a perfectly thin, crispy Italian wafer, and it was just like the wafers that came with sundaes at Swensen’s where my dad and I went faithfully every Sunday afternoon for most of my adolescence. If I were writing this two years ago I would be launching here into some rhapsodic about all the people I knew in high school who worked there and how I wish I knew what became of them, but now I’m friends with pretty much all those people on Facebook and there is no mystery left.

2. My cat Lily’s life prior to living with me was notable for slipping out of her old family’s house one day when nobody thought she was even old enough to safely be neutered and giving birth to three kittens two months later. Tonight I learned that the three kittens–who are now almost a year old–are all boys, named Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. I want there to be a Disney movie, like maybe a contemporary retelling of “The Aristocats,” about a mama cat named Lily and her kittens Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. (Note: “The Aristocats” is pretty much the only Disney movie I can stand, except maybe the “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” sequences from “The Little Mermaid.”)

3. I watched “30 Rock” last night for maybe the third time ever and it was funnier than either of the other two episodes I’d watched. But now I’m foreseeing that the second time in my life is approaching for shame-facedly asking my hairdresser to cut my hair like that of a character in an NBC Thursday-night situation comedy. That third-
season-of-“Friends” Jennifer Aniston haircut was actually weirdly perfect for my facial shape!

4. Gary Coleman died. Allegedly he was 42, but I thought he was 42 in, like, 1991.

5. I wish I liked film festivals. They’re just too crowded to be enjoyable–I like seeing movies on Wednesday nights at 9:40 when I can have an entire row in the theater to myself and spread out, and having to hold my purse in my lap the whole time almost ruins the movie altogether. It’s not a prima-donna thing so much as it’s an ADD/OCD thing–having something in my lap for the duration of a movie is like having to go to the bathroom for the duration of a movie in terms of skull-pounding distraction.