Never Gonna Dance

Who's it gonna be girls, Fred Astaire or Cary Grant? Or is it Clark Gable? Or the Marlon Brando of the 1950s? William Holden? Steve McQueen?

Who here thinks that the most manly of these men is Clark Gable?

Who can hear the voice of the morning dawn in the chorus of birds at the end of the portrait?

Who hears and knows it's the voice of Helen Forrest?

(Possibly the greatest of the Helens though the competition is stiff: Ward, O'Connell, and Merrill to name three.)

And she who is abducted by the Trojans returns in the pocket of a man who never uses a condom, the red-haired champion of Sparta.

Could Helen have been happy following a spartan diet?

The warriors of Sparta were the heroes of the day. Just look what they did to the Persians.

Yet the magnificence of a man for a woman rests not in his proud display of manhood but in the subtler arts: the brain and the heart trump the sheer joy of muscular prowess.

Look at it this way. Each orgasm lasted forever. But the act really approached the act of love in its recklessness and greed when no contraception was used and it was the will of god biology whether you got pregnant or not.

Such strange couplings resulted from that initial attraction, evidently irresistible, that caused the male to enter the chamber of the female and to deposit his seed.

Yet the knowledge that Molly could cause a steep rise in a man of years, a handsome man, charismatic, complicated, accomplished, made her feel pretty damn fucking fine.

O morning on a drop of few an ode to the morning spreading itself for you.