05/20/05 FRI:
---Here today from Hippocampus:

Lovecraft, H.P.LETTERS TO RHEINHART KLEINER, Hippocampus ('05), 1st edn, (one of HPL’s earliest correspondents; meticulously edited by S.T. Joshi & David E. Schultz; continue’s publisher’s series of unabridged Lovecraft letters, with detailed notes and commentary), new 20.00

---Fun to see Gary Brown (billed as Garrett M. Brown in the credits), my eighth-grade classmate at Middlesex Junior High School, on last night’s The O.C. I don’t know if rehab doctor can become a recurring character on the show. Gary was a regular on a couple other shows I noticed--Sisters and What a Country (with Yatzov Smirnoff, or whoever, as the star). I first noticed Gary in a movie at the theater when he played a bit part as Woody Allen’s goy alter in Zelig. Since then it has been fun seeing him crop up in commercials and on various TV shows--most appearances I know I missed, because I don’t catch many shows. (The only regular ones I watch now are West Wing and The O.C. I checked out The O.C starting with episode one because I saw it had Peter Gallagher, who I thought was pretty good in a couple other things I saw him in, like an episode of the later Outer Limits--noticable and rememberable maybe on account of those eyebrows.) Back to Gary, I even noticed, checking the IMDB that he has been a camera operator (Alan Alda’s Four Seasons) as well as producer (Tom Hanks’ You’ve Got Mail).
In eighth grade Gary was easily the most popular kid in the class, a very affable and good-natured guy, more mature than the rest of us and somewhat bigger and taller. I most remember him in English class where we all sat in a big square with desks side by side. He was beside the teacher, across from me. The most harrowing time for me was every Friday when we had to in turns get up in front of the class and recite an at least twelve-line poem from memory, like: “Lars Porcena of Cluseum, by the nine gods he swore, that the great House of Tarquin, should suffer wrong no more; By the nine gods he swore it and named a trysting day, and bade his messengers ride forth, east and west and south and north, to summon his array.” Or: “Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall, we stopped by a mountain pasture to say, ‘Who’s colt?’ A little morgan had one forefoot on the wall and the other curled at his breast. He dipped his head and snorted at us, and then he had to bolt. We heard the miniature thunder when he fled, and saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray, like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes”; stuff like that--only those and a couple others still present even now in my forebrain; not to say that is where they were when I was standing up there in class with the pressure on. I’m sure Gary had no such trouble, perhaps why he became an actor, discovering there and then that he had the facility to remember lines and deliver them with authority. I might have noticed it if I wasn’t so self-preoccupied.
And I thought Gary did quite well with the few lines in his small part on The O.C. last night, although he’s looking a little grayer and softer around the edges--but aren’t we all? On the show maybe he can befriend Kirsten at the rehab center--fill the void left by her undear departed father--and become a show fixture. Less likely things have happened, especially there!