Memories stirred up

The impending sit-down with my older brother raised memories of some other characters from my past, notably the kid -- he was in my grade but twice my size -- who bullied me all through elementary school. I googled him a couple of years ago and found only a reference to someone of the same name hosting a "Christian Businessmen's Bible Breakfast." Perfect, I thought -- he must be a shopkeeper or, at most, the owner of an auto dealership. But I googled him again last night, and guess what? The motherfucker is an architect -- and he went to fucking Princeton! Unbelievable. I was depressed for the rest of the day.

In more pleasant thoughts, I scanned the favorite movies page of my friend Marilyn -- she's now keeping a daily blog of her life as a romance book writer -- and saw that one of her faves is The Trouble with Angels, a Catholic girls-school comedy starring Hayley Mills as chief troublemaker and (inevitably) Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior. This was followed two years later by a sequel,Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, which was a road movie with the nuns taking their charges across the country in a yellow school bus. It's kind of fun -- in one scene, they stay overnight at a Catholic boys' school run by Van Johnson, and the boys throw a big party where the entertainment is -- stay with me here -- a band featuring Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, songwriters for the Monkees. Later Rosalind Russell single-handedly faces down a motorcycle gang.