Today is Sunday, October 5, 2025. Yesterday was quite a busy day for Elliot and me, as we sallied forth early in the morning to meet “Seth” at Jax Inn Diner, in Jackson Heights. Originally, I was going to meet Seth alone, but I decided we could both go because I intended to go to Lincoln Center to purchase tickets for the Psycho concert on October 30. We could then drive to the nearest subway station together and park the car there and pick it up later, which is what we did. We then were going to see a new film at the Angelika Theater called The History of Sound, a gay romantic movie punctuated by the inevitable heartache and loss, much in the vein of Brokeback Mountain, made 20 years ago.

After having a very filling breakfast at the diner (I had a bowl of oatmeal and a short stack of pancakes, which is the diner’s specialty) which was so busy when we got there that we had to find parking on the street, Seth made the proclamation that he was going to Lincoln Center also in order to purchase tickets for Ragtime at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. We arranged a time where we would meet each other after everyone bought their tickets.

So we said our goodbyes outside the diner, while we got into our car and drove to 46th Street and Broadway to take the R train downtown. We got off at 57th Street and 7th Avenue and then walked to Lincoln Center. When we neared the David Geffen Hall where I had to buy the tickets, I left Elliot on a bench across the street from the performing hall.

I asked someone inside the cavernous lobby where the ticket booth was, and she pointed across the hall where the ticket station was. The line was nonexistent, so I waited briefly and stepped up to the ticket agent. I asked for two tickets, since I asked my newfound friend “Harvey” if he wanted to go with me, and he said yes. I interacted with a pleasant-looking agent who indulged my blathering on the new Netflix series on the inspiration for Anthony Perkins’ character in Psycho, Ed Gein. He didn’t hear of it and said he would investigate it.

A few moments later, I spotted Seth by the Lincoln Center fountain and I accompanied him into the next theater where he bought tickets for Ragtime. He also had no trouble buying tickets for a performance in November, I believe.

Before going to the Angelika together, Seth and I made one last-ditch attempt to get tickets for Oh, Mary at the Lincoln Center TKTS booth. By the time we got to the ticket booth, only one ticket was available for the 5 p.m. performance, but there weren’t two tickets available for the 7:30 performance. We exited the line and made plans then to see the film at the Angelika.

We took the subway down to Broadway-Lafayette Street on the F train and then purchased our tickets inside since there isn’t an agent outside anymore. We were a little shocked over the price ($17.50 for senior tickets. I was afraid to ask what the general adult price was).

The film, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, concerns itself with the brief but impactful relationship between two musical students at the Boston Conservatory in 1917. They are Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) who not only share an attraction to the same sex but also share a passion for folk music in particular. Lionel is the more withdrawn and shy of the two; he is from poor folk in rural Kentucky and has been endowed with a vivid aural style and natural vocal ability. At a bar in Boston, he is surprised to hear another student playing and singing a familiar tune from his childhood on the piano. The young man, David, is a charming composition major with a passion for “collecting songs.” This means he travels across remote regions to gather and learn people’s local songs. The two instantly bond over this shared interest, and that night they have sex in David’s sparsely decorated apartment. Their emotional bond grows progressively intimate as they continue to meet weekly, only for their affair to end abruptly when David leaves for Europe to fight in World War I. At that time, the U.S.’s entry in the war leads to the indefinite cancellation of classes, so Lionel reluctantly returns to the family farm.

After the war ends, Lionel hears from David who proposes that he accompany him on a song-collecting trip throughout Maine where they will record the songs of Maine’s villages and farms with a wax cylinder phonograph, and where they will spend their nights camping in the woods. The viewer realizes that this time between the two lovers/friends is truly a high mark in their association with one another, but towards the end of their song-collecting venture, it is David who is grows distant towards the end of the trip. It appears that the horrors of war has traumatized David to the point where he’s unable to give voice to what he has experienced. Lionel eventually leaves Kentucky to pursue a career in music which takes him to Rome eventually and to Oxford where he enters into a relationship with a woman.

The film progresses at a very slow pace and it is here where viewers might have a problem with identifying with the events described within. It is very apparent, however, that Lionel and David’s relationship is tender and endearing from the start, but as time progresses and a reunion becomes less plausible, the seismic impact of David on Lionel’s life becomes increasingly clear, and the weight of the loss grows heavier, until Lionel realizes that this brief episode of his youth has bestowed happiness on him that he will never feel again.

The two principals, Mescal and O’Connor, are quite convincing as very different people. Mescal is more reserved and withdrawn than O’Connor who had more of a worldly upbringing. He mentions that he was raised by an uncle in England after his parents both die. As already mentioned, Mescal is the only son of Kentucky farmers. In the film, he uses his pleasant voice to great effect. O’Connor, however, is more outgoing and charismatic, and emanates a low-level nervous energy through employing gestures like constantly fiddling with cigarettes and putting on amiable, yet somehow uncomfortable-seeming, smiles. His natural charm, however, serves to conceal a well of pain over his homosexuality and his experiences in the Great War.

In an epilogue, Lionel is portrayed as a much older man by Chris Cooper, who has achieved much success as a musicologist, lecturer, and writer living in Boston. It is his reaction to finally receiving those long-lost tapes of songs recorded by him and David in Maine’s hinterlands that should bring a tear to the most hardened among us watching in the audience.

After seeing the film, the three of us walked to Veselka Restaurant on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street where we met Seth’s husband, “Jerry.” He came into the city just to meet us for dinner. When we got to the Ukrainian eatery, he was waiting for us on the corner.

We waited on line for a short while before we were escorted to a table inside. The restaurant was quite busy. Everyone was bustling over us, but a waiter did approach our table within minutes and took our orders. The preferred dish at our table appeared to be pirogies, so we all delighted in having them. I also had mushroom and barley soup first.

This was the end of the ride. After dinner, we said our final goodbyes to Seth and Jerry who took an Uber back to Astoria, while we dealt with the subway. We had to remember to get off at 46th Street and Broadway to pick up our car, not to take the E or F back to Forest Hills. And we did!

I have good news concerning our television set: it’s going to be finally returned tomorrow by “Ernest” who has restored it to its former glory. We’ve only been without it for more than two weeks. There’s certainly more worse things than not having a TV for two weeks, that’s for sure.

As a corollary to seeing Hitchcock’s much-sanitized version of the nefarious doings of Ed Gein in Psycho, here renamed Norman Bates, on October 30, I’ve started watching the series on Netflix. It stars Charlie Hunnam as the “monster,” Ed Gein, living in the nondescript town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Hunnam plays the serial killer as a shy, withdrawn, mother-obsessed, simple man. He speaks in a very low whisper. As his religious fanatic of a mother, Augusta Gein, is Laura Metcalf who harangues poor Ed continuously with the wages of sin and having carnal relations with women. She is possibly the true monster in the whole grisly sequence of events that unfolded in that sleepy town more than 60 years ago.

The episodes veer from the past chronicling Ed’s descent into madness and to the present day (late 1950s through 1960s) when Hitchcock receives word of such a character from meeting with writer Robert Bloch, the creator of Psycho, to depictions of Anthony Perkins who would be cast as the Gein stand-in, Norman Bates. Here Perkins is wrestling with his own debilitating secret, the secret of homosexuality. He is shown in one scene in the bedroom with 1950s heartthrob, Tab Hunter. Alfred Hitchcock is here played by an anorexic Tom Hollander, who I don’t think looks or sounds like the real Hitch.

Anyway, I do intend to watch the series, which is eight episodes long.

Have a good week.

And so it went!