THE BELL CURVE:’Nice to know that we’re both still around’

Thoughts while resisting writing once more about my most memorable Thanksgiving or the year of the great Thanksgiving snow in northern Indiana or giving thanks during the Great Depression:

One of the more painful lessons I learned during many years of writing about entertainment celebrities was to not set myself up by thinking I’d gained a new friend after a day — sometimes several days — of provocative and often highly personal conversation under varied circumstances with the likes of Paul Newman or Lucille Ball or Jane Fonda to drop a few names. Frequently I would see such people in social situations soon after lengthy interviews and discover they were digging rather industriously through their short memory to remember who I was. After several such occasions, I stopped having any such expectations. When they did remember, I was pleasantly surprised.

I always found the stories about journalists who made out with movie stars they interviewed highly suspect. The closest I ever came was a swath of flowers Dinah Shore sent me after a day of interviewing. My wife told me they were probably intended for Burt Reynolds who was then living in Newport Beach. And I believed her.

All of these musings bring me to Laughlin, Nev., where I spent three days last week with several friends, who — like me — enjoy gambling and were fed up with the excesses of people and prices in Las Vegas. Laughlin is a kind of blue collar Vegas, full of bad restaurants and down-home blackjack dealers. It was symbolic to me that the Riverside Hotel — where we were staying — had only one nonsmoking blackjack table, and it shut down at 10 p.m.

It also had Debbie Reynolds, who was scheduled to entertain there on our final night in Laughlin. I had last met up with her in Reno almost 30 years ago, interviewing her for several days for a lengthy magazine profile while she was working at a nightclub there that was at least one de classe cut above Riverside.

When my companions heard about my long-ago connection with Reynolds, they urged me to try to contact her, envisioning complimentary seats at her performance. I didn’t want to be stiffed, but they were persuasive and I was bemused, so I wrote her a note, recalling our long-ago connection and expressing a desire to say hello. I left the note at the hotel entertainment office, with my room number and the cellphone number of a companion.

We spent the day gambling at Harrah’s and eating a late dinner. No call from Debbie. But when I finally went to my room, the message light was blinking. And damned if it wasn’t her with a lengthy message. It was all pretty routine stuff, but it was delivered with warmth. She said it was nice to hear from me, and she was sorry we were leaving the following morning because she was involved that night in an autograph session and then taking her crew to dinner between shows. And she signed off by saying: “It’s nice to know that we’re both still around. And that’s a good thing.”

It was, and it took a small edge off the cynicism of many years. I might even risk this again.

We have to get our Christmas package off to our friends in France before Thanksgiving in order to get it there by surface before Christmas. So I spent a half day last week wrapping and packaging this year’s Christmas French connection. Before I closed it up, I wanted to include an appropriate card. Something plain and simple. Like “Merry Christmas.”

So I went to the newly designed drug store and the gift shop in our local shopping center. An hour later, I left empty handed. Both stores had hundreds of Christmas cards. There were cards directly addressed to stepmothers and cousins and fellow workers and every possible human contact one might make. There were Mickey Mouse and reindeer and Wise Men cards. There was bad poetry and smarmy sentiment and embarrassing jokes. But nothing aimed at no one in particular that just said “Merry Christmas” and left some room to write a note.

I’ve been having this problem with greeting cards for a long time. I’ve spent hours trying to find birthday and graduation and anniversary and get well cards that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to send. All of them seem to subscribe to the more-is-better syndrome or a terminal case of the cutes. Either this suggests that most of the people who buy greeting cards are morons or the card people aren’t in touch with their potential customers.

I went to see the British movie about the assassination of a U.S. president in which George W. Bush’s face was dubbed on the victim. There were only seven people in the audience on a Sunday afternoon at the Lido Theater, but the manager assured me that it had been doing a brisk enough business to hold it over. This is the film that the censors in the Regal chain decided was too inflammatory for us to see and so held it out of their theaters as a protection to us all.

The movie had been made for British television and was marketed to theaters when the fuss about its propriety generated an audience. It was made like a documentary and plays at about the level it was originally intended. But if the Regal people who pretty much decide what we see or don’t see in our local theaters consider “Death of a President” so toxic we must be protected from it, we should begin to ask what other films have been withheld from us by the same people.