...a possibility that next weekend I may be at the beach with a certain green-eyed girl. I want to see her wrapped up in a white hotel bathrobe while I open a chilled bottle of Sofia Coppola champagne. And I want to kiss her with salt breeze flowing over us. Not quite the front steps of the Met, but that'll happen.

I finished Season 2 of "Mad Men" last night. The final episode happens during the Cuban Missile Crisis--- October 1962. The world very close to ending. I remember being a very small little long-eared desert hedgehog and seeing a couple of family friends' backyards where there were still bomb shelters--- yellow-painted cylinders with little stovepipe ventilation pipes and big hatches. One of them had been dug up and was canted over abandoned in a field. The other was still buried out behind a big old house near Mandeville and had been turned into a wine cellar. I remember, too, seeing basement rooms in the old State Library with big stacks of boxes full of survival gear left over from those days--- cans of emergency water, mostly. I can't recall if the yellow-and-black radiation trefoils marking fallout shelters ever seemed comforting. But I do wonder what it was like in New York during those days in October 1962. Were people reading Frank O'Hara in dive bars? Were there wordless hook-ups between strangers? Did people think about what they could just walk away from?

Yes, okay: Ultravox doing "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes". Remember the video to that? I wouldn't have left the city. I would've stayed with the city. Stayed with a lover. Danced on the terrace of the old Brevoort.

Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, wherever: not Montauk or Rehoboth Beach, not the Outer Banks. Not Mexique. But I'm looking forward to it, to a quick little mini-vacation with my opera girl. And a chance to see to see those green eyes across a hotel bed or over curry at a Thai place near the beach. And I would follow Miss Laura anywhere.

I do want my Birmingham co-ed to read Wm. Spackman's "An Armful of Warm Girl". I hope Alessandra at bel_ebat and Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo will read it, too. A wonderful, hilarious comedy of manners in 1959 NYC. "Mad Men" makes me think of it. A book I've wanted to see filmed since ever I first saw it at the old Atticus Books on Chapel St. in New Haven. And I want to see the Season 3 opener for "Mad Men" Sunday night.

Listening to Sleepthief right now... I'll watch "Charlie Bartlett" later--- a recommendation from Laura-Ashlee. Pinot grigio and a DVD--- not quite a midnight picnic. But that'll happen. Just like NYC will happen again this autumn.

My opera girl and I live inside our heads. We look up at the sky and dream of boarding passes and new cities. I want us to be maps for each other, guides to new worlds. Orange Beach, Vestavia Hills, the West Village, Vienna or Barcelona. It'll happen.