Debate Highlights

Remember  the famous Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which the cruise passenger jumps overboard thinking the person who he had been talking to will see him vanish before her eyes. It's not suicide that was being contemplated but money from a ship's lottery, a gamble on the boat's nautical position. The episode based on a Roald Dahl story has a clever denouement where the woman tells her companion that she was talking with a charming gentleman who mysteriously disappeared. O'Henry or one should say Roald Dahlesque shorts rarely furnish much in terms of back story. In fact their effectiveness derives from their simplicity, from the minimal set of components that create the suspense. The aura of reality or believability derives from a certain expeditiousness which moves the plot. What if The Mousetrap had the thickness of overdetermined reality? it would never have had the West End run that went on forever. Would that life were artifice rather than "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?"

read "MAGA and the Coronavirus" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Mother In Law" by Ernie K. Doe