We're going to Michigan, land of the lakes, where people know their state like the back of their hand because that's what it resembles, the left hand. Actually, you need to use the right hand, palm up, in order to illustrate (with the left two fingers) the Northern penninsula. So what's going on over there? How crowded can it be? Kim grew up there. Her family lived there for generations. It's so US American and yet so independent from New York. Even California consists of transplants from New York, plus it has a familiar coast mentality even if that's where the sun sets, so to speak

We learned a lot more about a state we visitted during our last trip, Louisiana, in a film that was almost the equivalent of a satire on the gulf oil subject, Robert Flaherty's last film, Louisiana Story. Naturally beautiful, even when the oil riggers set up their Christmas tree. They hit a steam hole, some 12 thousand feet underground, and manage to bypass it after spilling up gaseous fumes. The peace of the bayou, returns, after the riggers leave but a contortion of pipes, creating a natural fuel station for ships that pass... no meters to measure the removal of the "natural resource." Virgil Thompson provided the score for the film. Flaherty's final direction was for the naturalistic Nanook-like cast to KEEP SMILING, whatever you do, because that rig is nasty. Well, we've been down there and now, well, that's all their is on the Mississippi Delta. You won't be meeting any acadian swamp dwellers he met in 1948, only their children, working on the oil rigs... Oh Evangeline! What a gulf coast. What a hotbed of Western Civilization!

Kim is always up to something interesting, and the other film she pulled out of the library, which I know for Negulusco, the director, Astaire, the entertainer, and for Caron, the truly talented stand-in for the underaged ingenue, Kim pulled out for its status as a literary adaptation of a book, an epistolary book, told in letters by a young lady to her, yes that's right, Daddy Long Legs.... And to all you Spiders from Mars, remember, The Female of the Species is More Deadly Than the Male.