Love, soft as an easy chair ....

It started with this ...

Seeing as I'm in a post-Christmas holiday mode, and kinda broke, I've not been out much since my return. I came back a bit traumatised by the festive season back home, and have decided to stay in and be a bit proactive about the job thing, spending most of my day sending out CV's, even if down deep inside I know that little will come out of it. Honestly. Good as everyone says it is, my CV has never lead to one single job. But I won't not go down that route... things have a way of falling into place, and I'm making sure they will. Nothing, but NOTHING is going to make me leave this city.

But what has that got to do with the 'A Star is Born' poster pasted above? Well nothing really, except for the fact that being home alone usually brings about the digging out of some long forgotten album or other (I say 'digging out an album', but what I really mean is looking into the mother of all musical hard drives and copying music which was created way before mp3s were ever dreamt of onto my iTunes), and only a few hours ago that album happened to be the soundtrack to one of my big growing-up movies, which I've had playing on a loop since. Right now, as La Streisand sings in the background of lethal black widows, I can just see myself as a nine or ten year old, waiting for his parents to leave the house so that I could put the (real) record on to what then used to be called a 'three-in-one' and singing my heart out to every single one of Esther Hoffman Howard's (Babs' character) songs. Gay? Moi? No kidding!!

There's a story to this. As a child, one of the highlights of my Saturday morning was going to the KRS offices on Zachary Street in Valletta (they were - and still are - the island's main film distributors) to look at posters of forthcoming movies. Whilst the cinemas displayed posters for current and pending releases, KRS would have the ones for films that would have been released a couple of months later. It kept me ahead of the game, you see, so since very few people knew about it, I could boast to all my friends that I'd already seen the poster for the big, upcoming movie ... not that any of them cared. But still, it made me feel smug and up-to-date ... ahead even. I really must have been a nightmare of a child!

Anyway, when I saw this poster, it was a case of love at first sight: a massive, jam packed stadium, topped  by a Francesco Scavullo (this I found out later) shot of  Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand, naked, looking into each other's eyes ... in sepia tones. Jesus did it blow my mind!

Within a week or so, I had bought the LP - that's a Long Play for those who were born in the days of CD - well, it was more of a case of "Mummy, mummy, you have to buy it for me!!"-  and knew all of the lyrics to Babs' songs by heart. I was good like that as a kid. Our then next door neighbour, who was like a second mother to me, always reminds me that I knew all the lyrics to Evita by heart age 7 or 8. Again, me gay??

When the film did finally make it to the screens, it was "Mummy, mummy, I want to go see it", which of course created a bit of a drama. The film was classified suitable for those over the age of sixteen and all my mother's friends advised her not to take me. But I was crafty. Having already been taken to see 'Hello Dolly' and 'Funny Girl', I pulled out the 'But you like Barbra Streisand' card, putting the onus on her. Being the angel then that she still is, she took no heed of her friends' warnings of eternal damntation if she took me to see it, and did. It was a Saturday afternoon, I remember that, and she took me only on the premise that I wouldn't tell anyone she'd taken me. Bless her!

Don't ask me how she got me into the cinema (it was the Embassy in Valletta) - she must have said that she didn't have anyone to leave me with or something like that - but she did, and it was heaven. The outfits (Barbra's white suit, her Navajo poncho, the baby's breathe in her hair), the music, the candle lit bubble bath, the everything ... oh, and probably, I must add, the hunk of man that was Kris Kristofferson, though I have to say, I don''t remember any particular, ehrm, shall we call them 'stirrings' then.

Anyway, it was all hunky dory throughout most of the film, until the unimaginable happened. The couple argued and KK drove off into his jeep, never to return again. That's the last Esther ( gets to see of him, with so much unsaid. Next thing I know, she's in her white suit, bathed in red light, singing his songs, tears rolling down her cheeks ... and even more on mine. You see I was a bit of a cry baby as a child, and would cry at anything, including the opening sequence of 'Little House on the Prairie' (because of the episode in which they had a baby brother who died).

And so my poor mother took me home all red-eyed and still sobbing (honest) only to find my father there, who of course wanted to know what the hell it was it was that had reduced me to that blubbering state. It seems like I wasn't very good at keeping promises then, (I'm a lot better now) because I proceeded to explain the whole film to him, landing my poor mother into a bit of a situation.

Needless to say, she was not very amused!