It’s Tuesday So We Must Get Happy!

Here’s your registration link for Bette’s Happy Hour, today, noon PT <3

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I am chipper this morning despite day-two of the Whirring of the Wood Chipper outside my window, depriving me of my necessary dose of wild birdsong and depriving the wild birds of cover for their crooning. It’s tree trimming week in ye olde hood and blech.

Nevertheless, she persisted… in being joyful. It’s simply because periodically I wake up and realize I have made all my deadlines. I’m caught up. In a writer’s life those moments are few and far between as there is always some deadline - longterm, short-term - still staring at me with a “what about me” look. Ya ya, I’ll get to you, I say back.

But yesterday morning, after a marathon week, I walked into my ‘office’ shadow boxing to the tune of LL Cool J in my head, ‘Mama Said Knock You Out.’ I fired up my pink vintage-style typer and blazed off my final project deadline. Then I got a note from the editor: “Got time for a sidebar?” Hell yes, I got time for a sidebar. I’m just getting warm, lol.

No hike, no Monday night meeting, but after I fired off the last bit of copy, I finally cued up one of the two Jean-Paul Belmondo films on my bed as a reward, and watched ‘Weekend at Dunkirk’. As with many French directors, Henri Verneuil takes us through darkness, despair, comedy, exquisite moments, surreality, brutality - think ‘The Longest Day’ except with Belmondo walking the beaches of Dunkirk, as the Fritzes drop bomb all around. The film opens with propaganda leaflets dropping on soldiers, and I thought how much I feel like Belmondo when I open Twitter, the propaganda bombs dropping all around, minds getting picked off to disinformation which we learned is always an operation.

So along with telling some bird stories, I’ll also share a few insights I gleaned from the film, which pertains to our multi-front war today.

With love,

Heidi 💘

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