On a perfect fall day last Sunday friends and I went to Wave Hill. One of my friends is a keen gardener and had planned the day so we’d go to a lecture in Wave Hill House (1843) being given by her friends and then walk around the 28-acre Riverdale estate. It has horticultural gardens and overlooks the Hudson. 

The next evening at the National Arts Club friends and I celebrated two birthdays and reproached one friend for returning to Florida.. Over drinks and dinner we had lots of good conversation and laughs.

I belong to Stubbs, a free service of the AMC movie chain. The purpose is to lure in customers. Every Tuesday in any AMC movie house you can see any movie for $6. Even at that low price, I want to warn you. Ad Astra is a ghastly movie. I went, noble me, because a gay pal has a crush on Brad Pitt. It’s a guy movie: lots of wheels, lots of futurist jeeps plowing across Mars or was it Saturn. Poor Brad, loaded down in his immaculate astronaut suit was searching for his father, a boring old duffer who had disappeared in space. Brad Pitt was the main and practically only character and producer. It’s a  film with lots of special effects and Hollywood profound thoughts.

Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder. 

Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a  dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed ? His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?