Any Resemblance to Actual Persons Read Online Free

place, it was impossible not to think of the proverbial fly trapped in amber. True, that might have been because the window shades cast the room in a distinctlyamber light, and there were a few dozen flies buzzing about, but I think the metaphor is still apt. On the mantel was our father’s Emmy (Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, 1956, its like-new shine a reminder that it was a replacement), flanked by framed black-and-white photos of him tuxedoed and shaking hands with various luminaries of midcentury Hollywood, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, Rampart creator and star Jack Hale. Hale was probably the only guy whom our father actually knew; the rest were just handshake photo ops at various award shows and fund-raising galas. You can tell from the pictures themselves: With Kazan and Welles, he’s shaking their hands, his body “cheating out,” to use stage-direction parlance, eager to show the camera his momentary acquaintance, his smile betraying excitement, theirs betraying tolerance. What I doubt Aunt Paige ever really saw here was that these photos do not reveal a Hollywood insider, but a fan, just like any of us, who beat his moth wings against someone else’s light for a fleeting, annoying moment. With Hale, however, he’s different. They are facing each other, clearly sharing an inside joke or pride in some mutual accomplishment. Here it is the camera that is intruding, not my father. The George McWeeney in these photos is short, a little paunchy, his cummerbund appearing more girdle-like in the way it restrains a burgeoning belly, but his face retains the thinness of his youth, his chin pointed in a way that gives his head a crescent-moon quality. Jack Hale, that familiar face, looks in this photo as he always did on TV: small, wiry, but with features that seem drawn in charcoal, both precise and smeared.
    â€œOh, man,” Edie said. “I remember this furniture. Oh, the days when couches were stiff and scratchy. Really made standing up seem appealing, huh?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “It actually had a lot to do with the furniture industry combating postwar complacency. You know, ‘Stand up, mobilize.’ The Red Scare and all that. Domestic props have always been fascinating in how they reveal deep-seated sociopolitical anxieties.”
    â€œJesus, Paulie, I was exaggerating. When did you become such a—whatever. It’s not like you’re a real professor, you know, so don’t try to impress me. You wanna impress me? Loan me some walking-around money. Show me your opulence.”
    â€œWell. It was a real thing. That guy Eames, the chair-maker, he was a total Trotskyite.”
    â€œEither way,” Edie said, examining the clay ashtrays on the coffee table. She was already barefoot. “I don’t think real comfort was invented until the eighties. Gimme a fuckin’ La-Z-Boy. Poor Paige—her life was frozen in 1964. Like the Amish. Only, you know, a century later.”
    I bit my tongue. She was clearly baiting me—with her subtle and knowing allusion to how Reagan’s revision of American notions of comfort was in fact an ideological countering to a deeply politicized asceticism, of which the Amish were part and parcel—clearly baiting me to further my very valid point about domestic space being a theater of political conflict, baiting me only so she could accuse me of being a fraud.
    â€œI’m a little short on lending money these days,” I said.
    Then I turned back to the pictures on the mantel, as I now turn back to my train of thought about Jack Hale, since this is relevant information that Edie does not cover in her book, despite the large role Hale plays in her utterly fantastical narrative.
    Jack Hale’s voice is probably one of the most unintentionally impersonated in America. I say “unintentionally” because his voiceis so ingrained in our national psyche as what a cop is supposed to sound like that