“If you need any help with the coffin, call me.”

Thus spoke the scary butler guy in white gloves as the gloomy mansion spread its dark wings around Joe Gillis for the first time. He had just entered the dim expanse of Norma Desmond’s lair, the surroundings that had haunted and imprisoned her since losing her stardom and fame a couple of decades ago. Shades of Miss Havisham inhabited the place, and a dusty dryness left everything feeling a bit brittle and broken. He expected to find doll limbs or the remnants of tattered crinoline on the closet floors. Instead, a newly-dead monkey lay on macabre display – a monkey that the doyenne of the establishment was clearly upset about.

She set about planning its funeral, plotting what color the coffin lining should be: “Bright flaming red, let’s make it gay!” but her grief, even over a monkey, was palpable. Gillis sensed it had been her only friend. There was an unspeakable tragedy in that, a loneliness that public adoration, especially in its fleeting, temporal form, could never combat.

“Any laws against burying him in the garden?” ~ Norma Desmond

In the movie version of ‘Sunset Boulevard’, the scene is harsher, less sympathetic. Billy Wilder’s acerbic cynicism overrode any vulnerability, the comic relief played in uncomfortable silence. The musical gives Norma a bit more heart. She weeps openly over her lost friend. She sings a song of Surrender. She uses her sunglasses, even in the darkness of the mansion, to hide swollen, wet eyes. It is but a moment.

The survivors – and despite some of her efforts Norma Desmond is a survivor – always get over their pain. Whether they bury it or display it, crumble under it or rally around it, they take their pain and transform it into something that serves their purposes. Sometimes the goal is merely to live for another day.

Though she may have survived, she never thrived. The declining years of fading celebrity must feel like a ghostly winter that never ends. Still, the heart beats, and the heart wants, and the heart carries the only thing that can truly hurt itself: hope.

“And then there was something else: the chimp’s last rites, as if she were laying a child to rest. Was her life really as empty as that?” ~ Joe Gillis

Another Christmas has come and gone, and with it George Michael. Another great musician is taken by 2016. Please watch over Madonna because that will just be too much. On with the recap, because I want this year to be over and done ASAP.

Mercury is in retrograde until after the New Year. Good luck to us all.

Zac Efron took his shirt off, so some things are still sacred.

Shades of gray.

Florida recall.

A glorious pair.

Flashing my booty in a red union suit.

River.

Kids are stupid.

Holiday hunks: Simon & Jake.

The Madonna Holiday Effect.

The 2nd Annual Children’s Holiday Hour in Boston.

Get merry.

Cute.

All anyone saw was my bulge.

And my ball. (Perverts.)

Now let’s shoot this awful year out of the water.

As much as I enjoy the anticipation and build-up to Christmas, I find an equal sense of enjoyment from the peace and let-down that follows. Much as I was in my childhood, I’d rather be left alone to play with my toys. Part of it is due to my social anxiety – the holidays are one party or gathering after another, and that can get extremely draining for those of us who, in our heart of hearts, shy away from such interactions. There’s still New Year’s Eve and Day ahead, but once you’ve run the gauntlet of Thanksgiving to Christmas, the hardest parts are done.

Now it’s time to relax, to refocus and get back to basics. One more week to the wretchedness of 2016. We will ride into 2017 on the wings of Mercury in retrograde, but rather than allow it to wreak havoc, I will work to harness its energy and use it to glide higher. Are you with me?

It invariably happens that our Christmas wad gets blown way too soon, and everything from this point on, rather than being the start of something miraculous, is just the let-down at the end of it all. Seems at odds with what Jesus reportedly did with His life in the years after he was actually born.

For the rest of us mere mortals, we snuggle into our robes and long underwear, we hunker down and enjoy a day or two off from work, but mostly we just exist in a sort of holding pattern until life begins again, until work or school resumes, until we can pretend we’re not alive by doing all the things that deaden us to what really matters.

That got a bit too dark a bit too quickly.

But so do the nights at this time of the year.

Still, they are getting shorter. Hang on my friends, hang on.