May 24, 2020
The Return of Maurice
So I don’t know if this is a thing or not, but I am going to write it straight up and see if it is.
Today is Saturday April 25th. I am still in my winter home in Boca Raton, Florida. The state is on a stay-at-home lockdown and I only venture out of my house to run on the now closed golf course or to cycle around the block. I have ordered a wok from Amazon and have been making veggie stir fries. I have chicken in the freezer but have so far not been able to time the defrost. The transition from Uber Eats to making my own dinner has not been as smooth as it could have been, but the bar is so low that it does not take much to impress. I post a picture of a cheese omelette I have made and get multiple likes and a handful of ‘good job, Uncle Ronnie.’ Like I said, the bar is pretty low.
So, no chicken.
I Google, “do chick peas have protein?” and am pleased to find out they do.
Score.
I have opened previously untouched cupboards in the kitchen and discover a cheese grater, a can opener, two colanders, and Tupperware containers I don’t remember ever ordering.
I am also doing my own laundry. Most of the time I remember to take the Kleenex out of the pockets.
Most of the time.
It is a little lonely but I know I have it better than most. I have no trouble filling the day. Between Zoom and FaceTime and emails and texts. I have been exercising every day. I sometimes play online poker with friends back in Toronto.
I have also been working, rewriting and editing my first collection of stories: Almost the Truth. I am assuming you have read it. I can’t imagine why you would be reading this second collection otherwise. Not really sure why you read the first. Anyway, I’m not really crazy about rewrites. Seems like a lot of work. Maybe it shows. I hope not.
Today I receive notes from Jules, my editor, about a piece called Looking for Maurice. It is the second piece in the collection. Am not sure if you remember it, but it is about an imitation Maurice Utrillo painting which hung on the living room wall of my parent’s house in Montreal.
Jules doesn’t have many changes but wants me to paint a better picture of how I, as a young boy, first discovered the one-paragraph entry about Maurice Utrillo in the 1970 World Book Encyclopedia. It is a good note and I understand right away how it helps the story. I make the change and send it off to Heather Karbi, who is doing line edits, and she, in turn, sends it to Helen Prancic, who is designing the ePub and Kindle files. I have written all of these stories on my cracked iPhone. Jules wanted to send me redlined docs and had, and still has, trouble understanding how I don’t have Word. He is not wrong. Like I said in the intro, I’m a little weird.
Anyway, I made the changes, ran the back nine of the golf course, had leftover veggie stir fry from a Tupperware container I never knew I owned, had a half of an ice cream sandwich, loaded the dishwasher, and settled in for an evening of television.
My niece Rena had told me to watch a movie with Justin Long about a creative writing professor and his dysfunctional Jewish family, which she thought I would like. So I did, and I did.
I texted my friend Ellen and told her to watch it too but she said she was watching Coming to America, the Eddie Murphy Arsenio Hall 1988 movie. I thought it was an odd choice, but we were living in odd times, so I didn’t question it much. It is one of those movies I have started four or five times but don’t ever remember finishing. I don’t know why. After the Justin Long movie ended, I decided to try it one more time.
Or, at least the first 20 minutes or so, where, if memory served me well, there was some gratuitous nudity.
Like I said, we were on lockdown.
I texted Ellen to tell her I was going to watch it, and she said she and Becca, her daughter, got a late start and had just started too.
The Nubian nudity was more or less as I had remembered, Eddie Murphy was funny and I laughed a few times but I was multitasking and not really paying complete attention until I got to this scene.
This is the picture I took of my TV after rewinding and then pausing at this exact spot.
It is of a painting which hangs on the wall of the office of the character played by John Amos. The character, Cleo McDowell, owns a hamburger joint called McDowell’s, which, golden arches and all, is a bit of a rip-off of the behemoth bearing a similar name. It is a painting which the character had clearly commissioned because it is of the streets of Montmartre but includes yellow arches and a sign for the McDowell hamburger restaurant.
If you look closely, you can read the signature:
Mctrillo.
Well fuck me.
I checked my phone.
There was a text from Ellen.
‘Did you see the painting?’
I texted back.
‘Fuck yeah I saw the painting. So weird because I was working on the Utrillo story today.’
Ellen said, ‘That is fucking weird.’
I said, ‘It is fucking eerie.’
John Landis directed Coming to America. I don’t know if this was his doing. Maybe it was the set designer. Maybe it was the prop guy. But somebody on the movie decided to make an inside joke. A very obscure, sophisticated inside joke. He or she could have created an image of the McDowell arches in a painting from any number of paintings from any number of famous well-known painters. Painting that even the most casual of art admirers would maybe have recognized. Rembrandt. Monet. Gauguin. Van Gogh. Picasso. Even then, it would have been a bit of a laborious inside joke. One trying to portray a nouveaux rich wannabe artist trying to express his love of art in the most crass of ways. The shot of the painting, although there was a close-up, was fleeting.
Instead, the jokester decided to use a second-tier, though definitely not second-rate, relatively obscure, but not unknown, turn-of-the-century French artist that virtually nobody, and certainly not the denizens of mall theatres where the movie no doubt was shown in 1988, would get or understand.
But I take that back. Am being a bit of a snob and selling people short. The joke works at its base level. The arches are inserted in an old painting. In a place where they don’t belong. The joke is made. The owner of the painting is trying to make himself out to be a bit of a fancy pants.
But Landis, or whoever the prankster was, decided to use Utrillo. Which is fine. “Get me a painting of a Paris street scene,” someone would have said. “Then slap on those golden arches. Okay, yeah. That’s funny. We’ll do a quick close-up. It will be a funny statement on how crass the character is.”
But then they decided to take it one step further.
Alter the signature.
Change the Utrillo to Mctrillo.
Okay.
So yeah, maybe you don’t need to know Utrillo to get that slapping the ‘Mc’ in front of it is a bit.
But, I don’t know.
You kind of do.
Because, really, you can’t really see the signature unless you pause the movie.
And you don’t pause the movie unless you realize it is trying to portray a fake Utrillo.
Which, seriously. How many people do?
So, I still don’t if it is a thing. But I think it is a sign. I really do. I show it to some people and I can’t really get any consensus.
You can decide for yourselves.
Most people tell me it is probably not worth writing a story about.
Now you can figure out what I think of those people.
The end.