Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach

Labor Day is here, ringing its depressing death knell for an imaginary sacred season. Summer has its nostalgic moments, tucked far away in my mind; though nowadays it no longer provides those idyllic scenarios of youth. The tan young girls and the cars, the beers and the joints, the juke box with its 45-rpm singles, the beach—eroded, gone, out of reach, littered with debris and obnoxious cats itching for a fight or demanding that I pay a bill. My beloved sun that I worshipped so has left behind roadmaps of wrinkles and patches of basal cell carcinoma. I'm beginning to resemble Robert Redford...today's Robert Redford.

Labor Day is also the harbinger of the term, suddenly last summer. For, suddenly, this Tuesday, what we're in right now will be ‘last summer.’ It’s also my all-time favorite title…not the film or the play, just the title. I’ve never seen a stage production of Tennessee Williams’s play, but the movie—which I last saw about thirty years ago—was too staid and dry. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz wasn’t sleazy or lecherous enough to appreciate the decadence of the material, its homosexuality, cannibalism, insanity. It needed, at the very least, Kazan or Huston (in his Night of the Iguana mode) or Mann (in his God’s Little Acre mode).

But the title haunts, implying all is transient except the memory…and even that, given a little age, slips away.

Below is lovely Liz on location for Suddenly Last Summer (click images to enlarge).