Begonia and Teenage Celebrity Crushes

Dave bought a begonia several months ago, and to our surprise it's now blooming. I don't know why we're surprised, exactly, because I know begonias bloom. I guess we bought it primarily for the leaves so we forgot to even consider flowers.

Dave is working part of each day this weekend, recording students who want to audition for Honor Band. This was an annual event before the pandemic, but there hasn't been an Honor Band for the past year or two -- a band composed of auditioning students from many different international schools, assembled through this organization. So it's nice that they're finally able to put one together again.

I, meanwhile, am working my way through yet another Newbery book -- "Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze," from 1932, which is OK but isn't exactly knocking my socks off. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and my goal is to finish it today. We'll see.

I also took the dog to the cemetery, where we saw:

...lots of dew on the grass...

...and the bright berries of wild arum blazing up like flaming, poisonous candles...

...and hawkweed still in bloom.

And then, while walking home, I found this (below).

It's a curious little drawing. I think it's a masked woman? Anyway, it's very small, and I'm not sure how I noticed it lying on the sidewalk, but I did.

Once home again, I watched "The Blue Lagoon," which we recorded from TV months ago. I hadn't seen it in many, many years and I remember it being quite controversial when it was first released -- Brooke Shields being 14 at the time. At least she had a body double for the nude scenes. (Her co-star Christopher Atkins was already 18.) It seems harmless enough -- mostly it made me want to visit Fiji -- but I wonder if it would be made in the same way nowadays. I suspect they'd cast an older actress, and rightly so.

I had quite a crush on Christopher Atkins when I was in high school (as did plenty of other people at that time). I remember sneaking off to the theater one afternoon in 1983 to see "A Night in Heaven," in which he played a male stripper -- it was a terrible movie but he made the ticket price worthwhile. (Plus it took place in my home state, Florida, on the so-called "Space Coast" near Titusville.) I wasn't out to anyone else back then and the whole excursion felt quite illicit. It's hard to believe he's 60 years old now. To employ a clichéd phrase, where does the time go?

I also had a teenage crush on Lance Kerwin. Remember him? And then he became an evangelical minister and had some legal problems. Can I pick 'em, or what?

Now he's also 60.

Christ!