-- Monday, February 7, 2000 --

3:00 a.m. Well, I have to admit I'm having a difficult time tonight. Thinking of plenty of things, discarding all of them. I'm feeling dull.

I have to blame it on that Mary Tyler Moore movie because I know that's where the fault lies. I will not, I solemnly promise, fly off into a rant. Really, I feel beaten down rather than incensed, so we should be safe.

It's just that Mary was so hard to look at. In real life, aging is a bowl of cherries. A barrel of monkey laughs, honest. I've got a better brain than I used to have. It just works better. Do you know what a pleasure it is to not make as many stupid mistakes of a day as I used to?

I mean, some days I'm practically competent. And I have a basis for comparison. I've screwed up in the past and I know how to do it right and many a day I do it right. I am smooth.

I know a lot of mental shorthand. I walk around smiling and cracking jokes. People my age wander through my life, getting the jokes. People younger than me wander through my life and sometimes I stare at them. But unlike the embarrassing scene I couldn't watch in tonight's movie, I would never engineer a situation to get a bunch of young people suddenly clapping for me -- just because I was -- God help me, feisty.

I hate feisty.

I'm going to fly into a rage. I must calm down. I wanted to watch the reunion movie just to say I did -- to answer for myself once again that immortal question: "How bad can it be?" Ooooh. Creepy bad.

So I flipped nervously back and forth, so help me, between skinny Mary and skinny Ally. (And then I had a potato pancake.) Skinny Mary with big thick breasts and skinny Ally with a sunken chest. And a V-neck sweatery thing. Mary with a scarf around her neck because her neck is wrinkly. Rhoda wearing a lot of purple, because she is a free spirit.

I don't know. I don't know why it makes me feel so sad. Maybe because the movie insists on dividing people by their age groups, instead of by their professions or predilections. Yeah, I guess that's what it is.

When a movie is low- (-class, -budget, -brow) it must divide the world into us and them so that us gets to feel good. In the case of this particular lousy movie, us was old. Them was young. If it's a typical Lifetime movie, us is often women and them is ... you know: the evil menfolk. You go, girls.

And yet if you flatten the other in order to make your point, you lose everything that's important -- your humanity, a chance for a hug or a handshake, discussion, enlightenment ... oh, no ... I'm not going to rant ...

But that was the secret behind the charm of the TV series Northern Exposure. No matter what the package looked like, no matter the heft or the hair color or the sex, as soon as the scene began and the dialogue started to flow, the person filled out and the stereotype husked away.

The Indian ran a multinational. The sweet young thing built airplanes. The fat old guy once flew to the stars. The guy in the trailer channeled Rilke.

You left that show with a sense of possibilities. You leave a bad show with a sense of strange anxious dread. You worry about a car crash or a mugging on the way home from a bad movie ... as if God knows you are wasting your precious time.

A great movie makes you feel as if you will live forever. Fly. Conquer the world.

Bad writing flattens me. It makes my own writing flat. It makes me mad and then sad and then ... just plain tired. It makes me want to eat potato pancakes.

And I don't even like potato pancakes*.