Monday Memory

I woke up this morning with this memory from many years ago in my mind, and I was laughing all through coffee and breakfast. It is nothing, really, just one of those things. I have no idea if this if funny for anyone else but me who was there. But anyway, here we go, just a small anecdote.

I was sitting on a park bench with my friend Alessandro, the man who was in the habit of the nonchalant, pointed yawning when we were going out. This was some years later, and it was summer, and we were spending a leisurely afternoon in a city park. We were discussing Orson Welles, since you know, what else could we have possibly been talking about? Now before I go for the punchline, you have to understand that here is a fellow who is both funny and sensitive, and one of those guys who would never treat women with any kind of disrespect.

So, there we were, in broad daylight, talking movies. There had been an Orson Welles movie marathon on TV, and we were trying to bring to mind what titles had been shown and if we had caught any of them. Our discussion came in waves and was dotted with long intervals of comfortable silences, and after one of these long silences, he uttered a name that had just come into his head. He said the words with deliberately long vowels and a desultory tone that was almost like a yawn itself, alluding by that tone that he found the name silly and archaic.

At that exact moment, a young woman in a revealing dress happened to walk by our bench. It was one of those freaky moments that sometimes happen in life. She was very well endowed, cleavage-vise, and her Marilynesque proportions were sort of underlined by her lovely, bouncy walk.

It was a disaster.

The woman clearly heard him say the words and shot a look of such anger and contempt at him it could have frozen us both on the spot, and another one at me, the woman sitting next to the man acting like a chauvinistic pig. The look aimed at me was filled with such fury and blame for having such poor judgment I could not help but start laughing uncontrollably.

Whenever I think about the incident I hear clearly Alessandro utter those wide a's of the Finnish name of the film while crossing his hands behind his head in one pleasurable stretchy movement, quite innocently, totally unaware that he would be horribly misunderstood a nanosecond later. Part of me wanted to run after the woman, yelling that it was a movie title, nothing to do with you, don’t be mad. Also, sometimes I myself walk past park benches and people start laughing or say something funny right when I’m passing them. Having this memory of a misunderstanding in my own book of memories I always try to not take commentary or laughter into heart, thinking about poor Alessandro and his confusion right after the woman had passed us, and the embarrassed, almost mortified laugh fest that ensued when I told him she thought he was referring to her breasts.

The name of the Orson Welles movie that happened to come to Alessandro’s mind just before the woman came into view was The Magnificent Ambersons. Mahtavat Ambersonit in Finnish.