on "Waiting for the Moon"

It's a lovely little film (that just happened to win the 1987 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Drama) directed by Jill Godmilow about the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  The booklet that comes with the movie traces down which scenes and people are fictional -- or have been toyed with -- and which bits of the story are facts.  The film looks over a period of about three months in (roughly) 1936, with Stein and Toklas moving between Rue de Fleurus in Paris and their country house, in Bilignin. The women who play Stein and Toklas are tender and wonderful... Linda Hunt plays an agreeable (but buttoned-up) Toklas, and Linda Bassett a smiling, patient but rather private Stein. Both actors ease you into their portrayals and invite you into this very inventive, quirky, writer-and-editor's world.  The film is for sale at the Contemporary Jewish Museum ("Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories" is there until September 6).  Definitely worth an evening! And we have, just for today, my photograph of the house in Bilignin, in the Department of the Ain, rented for all those years by Stein and Toklas, photographed from below:

And now, for "Waiting," a small Bilignin-inspired sketch: