Saturday Stuff

By day, I write if I can. By night, I often have insomnia. So sometimes by day, I nap.

A lot of times, I think I DON’T nap; that I never dozed off. But the other day, when I heard the chime of an incoming text message, I picked up my phone and read a group text with Tim and Jim in which one of them said Abe Vigoda had died. After a pause, my mental response was, Wait. Hasn’t Abe Vigoda BEEN dead?

Abe Vigoda, among many other notable roles, played Tessio in The Godfather, which ranks high in my most beloved movies, along with The Godfather Part 2 (we rarely speak of the third movie).

Abe Vigoda died in 2016, but now I was truly awake and picked up my phone and it was a text from Debby and no one was dead, she just wondered if anyone was parked behind her in the driveway since she had to run an errand. Far less dramatic.

Later that day, or maybe the next, I walked into the office where Tom was working. I had on the wrong glasses for distance vision, and as I peered out the window, I thought I saw a possum at the back of the yard. I pushed up my glasses, and it was actually palm fronds. I told Tom this and said, “But if it HAD been a possum, I’d have named him Abe Vigoda.”

Stay with me here.

Two years ago, I asked Tom to record what was then a new TV show, “Yellowstone.” Two seasons passed, and the recordings piled up, because when the hell did I have time to watch TV? But now I’m laid off, so at night when we eat dinner, we began watching the recorded shows, and we’re up to the two-hour season finale. Then we can watch the second season, and the third season begins next month. I’m actually watching a TV show. It’s the most shocking thing ever.

Today, I had a blinding revelation, walked into the living room, and told Tom, “‘Yellowstone’ IS THE GODFATHER!”

“Of course it is,” he said. Like when you watch a show about cowboys in Montana, it’s just logical to understand it’s basically The Godfather.

Fuck. Maybe everything is The Godfather. Tom Hanks tried to tell us this in You’ve Got Mail.

The body count is high in both, but there are a LOT more dead animals in “Yellowstone” and I can only remember the horse in The Godfather.

If they ever make a true Godfather coloring book, they better leave out the horse and include Tessio (my version of “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”).

I bring up coloring books because these days, I color when I take a break from writing and color when I work out things I’m going to be writing. Since I spoke of steampunk earlier this week, here’s a page I colored out of a new coloring book.

I picked it because as I was flipping through pages, I named it “Tori: The Girl With the Gun,” which my beta readers should recognize. I didn’t realize until after I began it that I was doing the same page that was on the cover. Theirs is better.

Thanks to Marika, I now have three new coloring books to delve into. It’s possible she believes I need more “Think about writing!” time and less nap time. But more likely, it has something to do with llamas. Marika, can you please name one of your llamas Abe Vigoda?