Bogart

    When I was in middle school and high school we lived in a trailer.
    (I know, I know... we like to call them "mobile homes" now and, if we're really being politically correct we call them "manufactured housing." That's all very nice but the simple fact is we lived in a trailer that we hooked up to a semi and pulled from place to place when my father took a new engineering job somewhere.)
    Because we did, and because there were a lot of us crammed into a 60-foot-long by 12-foot-wide space, I slept on the couch in the living room. Why? Simple: I had more brothers than we had beds and since the alternative was sharing a narrow bunk with one of them sleeping on the couch seemed like a good idea at the time.
   In fact, it was a very good idea because bedding down on the couch led to what has been a lifelong love affair with old movies. The reason: Sleeping in the living room meant I had unfettered access to the television in those dark days before cable when television stations, stuck for something cheap to fill in the late-night hours, showed old black-and-white movies.
    It was while using the couch as a bed that I first saw Gable and Colbert in "It Happened One Night" and first watched John Wayne fight his way across the Pacific. It was there that I watched "The Thin Man" and "The Invisible Man" and "The Wrong Man" on a screen that wasn't much larger than the one on my laptop.
    I enjoyed them all but, by far, my favorite late-night flicks were old Bogart movies.
    "The Maltese Falcon" was my first Bogart movie and something about his portrayal of Sam Spade struck a chord with me. I saw him in "The Petrified Forest" next and even though Bette Davis and Leslie Howard were the stars of that flick, Bogart's portrayal of gangster Duke Mantee stole the show as far as I was concerned. So many more great films followed: "To Have and Have Not" with Bacall, "Key Largo" and "The Big Sleep" and, of course, "Casablanca."
    Flash forward to a few days ago when, while I was maneuvering my way along a crowded sidewalk here in Reus, I looked up and there, staring me in the face, was Bogart.
    Well, anyway, it was a life-sized photo of Bogart wearing a classic trench coat and snap brim hat. I glanced at the store that posted the photo on its wall: Of course it's named "Casablanca."
    All of which explains why I'm now planning a Bogart marathon: I've got seven of his movies on DVD and all I need now is some popcorn, maybe some nachos and salsa, a generous amount of ice cream, some soda and a weekend when I'm not doing anything else.
    Oh yeah, and a couch.
    Gotta have a couch...

Bogart... here's looking at you  kid...