A quiet weekend

We drove back to New York on Friday. The traffic was surprisingly light. Where was everyone? The highways on the Washington to Boston corridor on summer Fridays are usually a force to be reckoned with, but somehow we sailed up the 240 miles from Bethesda back to Riverdale without a single back-up.

We had a quiet Sabbath. Because of our uncertainties about the travel, we had prepared all we could before we left for Bethesda on Wednesday, and we did not invite any company lest we were unable to make it home. We went to synagogue in the morning and relaxed in the afternoon. We have a new tradition of playing the best two out of three games of Rummikub on Sabbath afternoon, and I won the first two we played.

We also read the New York Times review of the new Woody Allen movie, Blue Jasmine. Putting aside his personal life, we are huge fans of his movies. This one received a stellar review. So we decided to go on Sunday morning to the first (11:00 am) showing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side, where it is playing on two screens. It is also playing downtown at the Angelika, on three screens. We arrived at the theater at about 20 minutes before 11 and were shocked to find a long line of people waiting in line (outside, of course, this is Manhattan) to buy tickets. We ended up with tickets for the noon show, and did a little shopping in the half hour that was now unexpectedly open.

The movie did not disappoint. It is a story about money, corruption, love, and deceipt. Cate Blanchett plays a Park Avenue woman, Jasmine, married to a man (Alec Baldwin) who turns out not to be the wealthy businessman and devoted husband she thought he was, but a man who is cheating in both his personal and professional lives. The movie goes back and forth between flashbacks of better times and the present, as Jasmine becomes increasingly unable to accept or deal with her new, more humble, status. The cast includes an impressive group of actors: Sally Hawkins who had been terrific in the 2008 movie, “Happy Go Lucky,” Bobby Canavale, a fine actor who we first remember seeing in the 2003 film, “The Station Agent,” and Peter Sarsgaard, who played the newspaper editor in “Shattered Glass” among many other credits. It is definitely a movie worth seeing, maybe even more than once, when it comes your way.  

Tomorrow is a quiet day, and on Tuesday we head back to Memorial Sloan-Kettering for the first time in almost five months. I will definitely let you know how that goes.

Love,

Rebecca