Trudy,

I despair of ever truly hearing your dulcet voice again. Only the constantly thudding jackhammer outside my window reminds me of your delicate way with a quip.

And speaking of despair. Deep despair. Unrelenting, grim, grisly despair... I saw Moon Over Buffalo. Goodness gracious me - that Ken Ludwig! Where does he get his idea(!) Poor Carol Burnett and even poorer Philip Bosco have been left at sea by Mr. L's positively astonishing lack of wit, humor, style, invention - well, you name it, and if a comedy is supposed to have it - Moon Over Buffalo doesn't.

To call it a meretricious piece of filth - well, that just about does it justice. Everyone speaks of the play as a sort of extended Carol Burnett Show sketch - of only it rose to the height of those mediocre things. (Look at them today and you'll find the only real laughs come from watching these character actors doing everything in their power to bust each other up. I digress.)

Needles to say, You-Know-Who hooted and howled, as did most of the heavily papered audience (even for free I couldn't bring myself to smile at anything other than the lovely act curtain). Laughing and giggling and smiling they greeted the hoariest of rotten jokes and annoyingly improbable plot turns. Farces should make their own rules and live by them. Fair enough. But those rules are more fun if they are based in some recognizable reality. It is simply impossible to imagine that one of America's venerable leading actresses should be unable to recognize Frank Capra - confusing some poor twenty-eight year old schnook with a man who won the 1934 Academy Award for best director. She laughs about how young he looks, as of that would defuse the improbability of the moment - but its patently witless falseness made my bowels rumble. (These days just about everything does!)

I do go on and I shouldn't. It wasn't that the play was rotten - though it was - but that it was greeted with such gaiety and mirth. Ersatz humor, to the fifth generation, isn't funny, and to reward it with laughs and money only insures the further degradation of our collective level of wit. Or is it too late.

But You-Know-Who loved it. (I must see about altering his medication level, I think.)

Enough on this hateful drivel - A Flintstones rerun is about to come - and I believe it's a Great Gazoo episode - how I love Harvey Korman.

Give any passing stray coyotes a kiss from me.