A closer look at octopus and an insurrection; and La dolce Velveeta!

Did I see that commercial correctly? La Vida Velveeta! Whichever, it was definitely the “cheese” that was being pushed.

Federico Fellini? Formaggio? Marcelo Mastroianni? Anita Ekberg cavorting in la Fontana Trevi. Not a lot of men would not eschew their shoes, Ferragamo notwithstanding, and join her.  Even with Anouk Aimée in the wings.

(Fellini did a film “Intervista” years  later when Marcelo visits Anita at her villa outside Rome.  There’s a priceless shot when the two stars see each other after a very long time.  The expression from both as they realize what the ravages of time have done.  No more trysts in the Trevi, per favore.)

Well, a lot of us grew up on  the V. And we knew niente about la TreVi.

Other gastronomic oddities? How about, I was in my 20’s before I realized that peas were not gray. That was their color when they came out of the can.

And bread? We had Silvercup in Chicago which made Wonderbread taste like the best San Francisco sourdough.

Peanut butter? Skippy, of course. Could not get creamier; no chunky would cross our palates.

As I and several of my pals are barreling toward our Octo years, some having already completed the barreling over Niagara, how ever did we make it this far?

And do we recall the Fifties’ TV show, “Life Begins at 80”? Check it out.

And does an octopus have eight legs and do they live to be three score and 20, 10 past the Biblical allotment?

These and other weighty matters are bedeviling me of late, taking my mind off the RNC labeling the Jan. 6th insurrection as “legitimate political discourse”. That’s right up there with the Pentagon’s famous definition of peace as “temporary pre-hostility”.

George what’s his name, his surname lives on as an adjective, roiling in his grave. My friend the late great raconteur and novelist, Robert Terrall, entering his nonagenarian self, used to ask, “Now, what’s the name of that disease when you can’t remember things?”

Robert, who insisted on chopping his own wood, got Lyme disease and it did him in, or he would have lived to be a centenarian. Robert whose eidetic memory stretched to the writing of numerous detective novels, usually under pseudonyms, was at a holiday party at someone’s mansion nearby. A plutocratic blowhard, early in his cups, or was it always, was holding forth about a Broadway mystery he had just attended — the darnedest thing he had ever seen, you couldn’t possibly figure it out.

It was “Sleuth” by Anthony Shaffer. Robert said, “Tell me the first five minutes.” Blowhard Pluto did. Robert then told him the entire plot.

Orwell — see, I knew it all along — wrote of “doublespeak” and the “unperson”, the deliberate expunging of a person’s past, wrote the great “1984”, but before that, the equally great “Down and Out in Paris and London”.

It took the un-great Dan Quayle to talk ex-VP Pence off the cliff, Pence about to be declared an unperson by you know who.

Quayle? Really? The guy who couldn’t spell potato(e)?  Let’s hear it for the Hoosiers.

I’m reading a lot of these detective books nowadays, not only because it takes my mind off the awfulnesses for half a second, but also because I couldn’t possibly write them. No Robert Terrall or Anthony Shaffer am I. I get to the end of one when all is explained and I still don’t know what’s what.

One I’m at right now is “State of Terror” by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny and it does NOT take my mind off the awfulnesses. It plunges me right into them. I hate the phrase, but it is a page-turner.

I guess there is no escape. As Frederick Douglass reminds us, “There is no progress without struggle.”

If only Robert and Anthony and George, let alone Frederick, were here.

I’m pretty sure they’d get us to November and victory, but we’ll just have to step back from the cliff without them.

Lonnie Carter is a writer who lives in Falls Village. Email him at lonniety@comcast.net. or go to his website at www.lonniecarter.com.