Film festival gets delayed

It's going to be Plan B for us this week.

Plan A was to take a mini-vacation. It involved getting out of Dodge for a day or so and driving south a couple hours to visit my friend, S, and her husband.

Not that our plan was very ambitious ... or exciting, for that matter. Once we got there, we'd visit for a while, then go out to dinner. After that, we'd go back to their place and watch a few movies. The next morning, my wife and I would do a little shopping and then drive back home.

That was the plan, anyway. In the last few weeks, S told me she needed to have gallbladder surgery. That was scheduled for last week, and since she felt she would be back on her feet pretty quickly, we didn't change or delay our plan.

Until today, that is.

S sent me a note around noon today, asking that we delay the trip for a few weeks. "I'm not recovering as speedily as I had hoped," she wrote, explaining that she can't sit for more than 15 minutes without pain--and she wanted to enjoy our time together. This morning, she woke up feeling dizzy. If that persists, she will be seeing her doctor.

I wrote her back, telling her not to worry about us. We have been talking about a visit since November, so it's been delayed before and we all survived.

In any case, I went on, this is a busy time at work because we're working on a special (annual) business section. On top of that, the local sports schedule is ridiculously crazily busy. In late March or April, things will be much quieter, so I would be able to really relax and not have a thousand things on my mind--or waiting on my desk when I return.

In fact, my wife and I are talking about taking a drive out of town, anyway. Our destination is a U.P. town that still has a fabric store, like Marquette or Escanaba. I wanted to get to an OfficeMax or a Staples store, too.

I didn't tell S, but ever since I proposed that we make our visit on Feb. 5, I had been kicking myself. It only dawned on me a few days later that Feb. 5 is "Super Tuesday" in the U.S. presidential campaign. On such occasions I'm usually watching closely as the votes are tallied.

"Damn!" (or words to that effect) I said to myself when I realized what day my visit was planned for.

But then I put it out of my mind and never mentioned it to S. After all, I reasoned, I would be missing it because of something more special. Anyway, I could catch up on things later, while we driving back to the motel, and the motel room has a TV.

Anyway, it's plan B now. I'll watch the returns tomorrow night, and then on Wednesday afternoon I can take my wife fabric shopping.

I suppose I can tell you some of the movies I was planning to take along:

--"Yellow Submarine." Because S's husband is a big Beatles fan, and that movie is so colorful and clever--a real trip.

--"The Petrified Forest." From 1936. Humphrey Bogart's first big film, opposite Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. A great story about two people falling in love at a desert gas station--and then escaped prisoners take them hostage.

--"Strange Cargo." From the 1930s, also, with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Peter Lorre. It's about some escaped prisoners, but this time from Devil's Island off the South American coast. And one of them is a strange, spiritual presence.

--"The Razor's Edge." This is the Bill Murray version of the Somerset Maugham story from the 1980s. Murray plays it straight in this one, about a World War I veteran who goes to Tibet to look for a deeper meaning in life. It's a topic I can relate to.

--"Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Of all the Python films, this is the craziest and most surreal. Two years ago, when I visited S at "the crazy house," I took it along, and we tried to watch it. But everyone else just had too short an attention span on this night--too distracted.

--"Kundun," about the life of the current Dalai Lama, especially his younger years, how he was chosen, how and why he met the Communist Chinese government, which wanted to take over Tibet--and how he eventually fled to India.

--"Modern Times," the Charlie Chaplin film from the 1930s. A masterpiece about our modern age (as it was in the 1930s--wonder how Chaplin would do the story today).

There may be another film or two, but those are the main ones. Of course, I planned to take along more movies than we could possibly watch in two or three visits. But those are some of my favorites, and I wanted to share them.

The delay of the trip means, of course, I'll now have enough time to select a few more for my film festival! I'm still asking myself why I didn't include W.C. Fields' "It's a Gift."