Let’s see. It was my parents’ anniversary on Friday (it would have been 66 years) and my great-niece’s birthday on Saturday (she’s 12).

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I have a whole list of movies to watch that I’ve never seen, but I’ve also been building a library of classics on Blu-Ray and decided to watch “Wall Street” last night. I hadn’t seen it in a long time. Kind of surprised to learn with a little internet research that it’s actually not a ‘classic’ so much – it was the first movie to win both an Oscar and a Razzie. The only major Oscar it was up for was Best Actor (Michael Douglas), which he won.

I love rewatching movies that I haven’t seen since I moved to New York, because now I can pretty much recognize all the filming sites. Other pleasures – John C. McGinley has rather a large role as Bud’s co-worker, he’s fun and obnoxious. Bud (Charlie Sheen’s character) is kind of a blank cipher – and it’s interesting to watch him when you realize what a splash he (Sheen) made early on in high-profile moves, and then sort of frittered it away. Daryl Hannah plays the ‘sexy girl’ and she’s so vapid it makes you wonder what straight men find attractive in that. (However, I now get how hilarious it is that she’s an interior designer and the paintings she gets for her clients are the absolutely ugliest nightmare-inducing art you’ve ever seen.)

Also fun to see Saul Rubinek and cameos by Grant Shaud and Tamara Tunie and (an unfortunately mostly unused) Hal Holbrook. And seeing the 80’s high tech, like the incredibly heavy cell phone Gekko uses on the beach (like you’d be able to hear anything he’s saying on the other end). I enjoyed the rewatch.

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I’ve read two books in the last few months where I randomly stopped in the middle of a paragraph and stated out loud, “I want to write like that.” And both books are by Alexis Hall. So you may want to look into his work, if you haven’t read “Boyfriend Material” or any of them yet. Often very funny, often surprisingly deep. For the record, the two books are “10 Things That Never Happened”, which is an MM Christmas romance which I will want to reread as an audiobook next Xmas, and “Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot” (reading it now), which is an FF romance, the third in his British Baking Show series, all of which have been excellent.

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I had an anxiety dream last night where I had to sing a cabaret with no rehearsal and no set list. Not sure why I’m having anxiety dreams, nothing is looming. Also, my buddy Marisa was definitely part of this dream and I have full confidence that we could actually pull that off without much problem.