Mildred Pukes

I like those green tiles.

I have never read Mildred Pierce, though I’ve always admired the paperback with the cover by Robert Jonas, one of my favorite last-century illustrators. He did another version, as well.

So, I didn’t know the story line and wasn’t expecting part one of the HBO miniseries to end with a vomit scene (business done tastefully off-camera). I guess it’s traumatic to realize you’ll have to work for a living to support yourself? If I thought about it too much, I might throw up daily, myself. Mildred was forced to take a job at a diner after being told there were no jobs for telephone operators and being humiliated at a live-in maid interview, and after admitting as much to her friend, she threw up.

Also, I did not know that chicken and waffles were a popular thing to eat in Depression-era LA. Roscoe's didn't even open until the '70s and I think they were appropriating a dish found in Harlem.

I threw up numerous times last night, four times at a bar called Molly's (no, I had not even been drinking–it was near the restaurant I had reservations for that I had to cancel and seemed like the kind of place where vomit in the bathroom wouldn't cause a stir) and then held more the 40 minutes home by subway (a cab wouldn't take us to Brooklyn druing rush hour) and made it safely to my own bathroom by some miracle. I only ate clementines, almonds, butternut squash soup and crackers yesterday, hardly items one would associate with potential to poison. I still have a headache and am not dressed (it is 4pm). Definitely not a bout of emotionally induced vomiting. I will never come to understand how it works.

I also some some nice seeing-dead-people-induced barfing while watching part one of The Stand on Netflix the ohter night, but was too tired (I ended up staying up till 2:30 watching that crap and the really kind of good, What Alice Found, even though I already saw it on TV when it first came to cable. IFC gives away the whole twist in its synopsis, though that transgression is almost made up for by the appearnce of Rainbow in the film) to take a picture.