That’s Why Friends are Four. Gone.

A purported friend sent this to P this summer. I wish I had been in a situation in which “Charmed, I’m sure” would have been an appropriate response to meeting this person.

My very dear Peter!

How are things?! How’s ooo? How’s healthy summertime for you?

I wanted to tell you a whole big lot of things in a lengthy message, which I will do, but just not yet, for as right now, I've got only one directive for you:

Watch All That Jazz.

It contains genius script elements such as:

“Katie, I try to give you everything I can give”
“Oh you give alright—presents clothes—I just... wish... you weren’t so generous with your cock...”
(after a contemplative silence)
“That’s good... I can use that some time.”

And:

“Now don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Oh and from the wikipedia page:

“Without a daily dose of Vivaldi, Visine, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine and sex, he wouldn’t have the energy to keep up the biggest show of them all—his life.”

Now, I haven’t finished watching the film, but as I am only about half an hour in, I already feel pretty certain that you shall appreciate this movie.

Wish you all the very best!

With great friendship and admiration,
o|oo

To this I might up the class a little, up the ante fairly evenly:

Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare’s plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chap-fall’n. Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.