Housewife

I'm laying about on the living room sofa all this beautiful, sunny day, eating chocolate (okay, a chocolate peanut Zone Bar), watching Bonfire of the Vanities on cable while the little one sits on the playroom couch watching the Cartoon Network and coughing. I gave him my cold. Bad mummy. Throughout the house, there's the moist, clammy smell of a sick room, as if a humidifier's been running down all night. The air feels heavy on my limbs. Even the dog is looking like a lump, sleeping curled up in a furry, hound-colored ball in the crook of a softly upholstered chair.

Such a depressing tableau.

I don't normally watch daytime television. A movie is a little more highbrow than a daytime soap or talkshow, but still. Daytime television advertises to its appropriate demographic: shut-ins, and so you have the commercials for infant diapers and asthma inhalers and chemotherapy-boosters like Neupogen and the lawyers! Oh! The lawyers with the 800 numbers that want you to call them if you've been injured or malpracticed upon or if you ever took this drug or that drug and are now stuck at home with a heart condition.

I hope to practice later and to pull myself out of this self-imposed funk.

I want to highly recommend Bonfire because even though it sucked ass in 1990, before anyone could become nostalgic for the big hair, big shoulders, big money and teeny-tiny values of the 80's, before enough time had passed between the publication of Tom Wolf's critically acclaimed book so that comparisons would not be so fresh and raw, this movie is damn sharp, funny and highly entertaining from where I sit in 2006. Hard to believe it is a Brian DePalma flick, farcical as the movie translates 16 years after its making.

I must go now. Time to mope and sulk for no apparent reason.

YC