I am Helene Hanff

Last night I downloaded "84 Charing Cross Road" from Netflix, a favorite movie I hadn't seen for a very long time, and it struck me that my life out here is very much like Helene Hanff's. I live in a too small apartment (though in the desert, not NYC), have a solitary job (not screenwriting, but tourism), have to be self-reliant, and tend to create vibrant niches for my time. For Helene, it was British Literature and her correspondence with the folks in the London bookstore. For me, I guess it is chronicling life out here on this blog. While I still carry some of Helene's scruffiness around the edges, I can clean up pretty well, just as Anne Bancroft did in the final minutes of the movie.

Everyone whines about there not being good scripts for middle-aged women. I'm a sucker for the good "little" story. Both the book and the movie satisfy quite nicely.