Skyfall

ne of the few things my Dad and I shared, one of the few things he passed on that I accepted whole-heartedly as a kid, was an affinity for James Bond. It didn't hurt that Bond stories surround the family; how Bond played on the waiting room TV as Pop waited for my birth; how the family who shared my mother's room during my sister's birth were the Goldfingers; how I got my middle name.

Daniel Craig has played Bond since my father's passing in 2007. Pop and I didn't like the look of him as Bond from the get-go. Stocky, brutish, blonde. Where once we had an outside chance of being mistaken for Bond if in a tux spotted at a distance by someone with the eyesight of a retired boxer, now we definitely didn't stand a chance. So it wasn't hard watching Bond movies after Pop passed because the visual connection was lost.

That is, until Skyfall...and the Aston Martin DB5.

I've heard audiences laugh, I've heard audiences scream, but I had never heard an audience oooh until the DB5 appeared to the surprise and delight of a packed house. Hell, I knew it was coming and it still got me. Sure, it took me back to the old Connery movies, but it also took me back to classic car shows Dad and I attended at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut where we'd take Polaroids of each other leaning up against someone else's Aston. When it appeared in Skyfall, I couldn't speak.

But after the movie, all I wanted to do was speak. For the first time in a long time I wanted to call my Dad. I wanted to talk to him about the movie. About what a great job they did bringing back classic characters, cars and the riff to the one song he ever learned how to play on the guitar. Talk to him about Scotland, the Bond exhibit we saw there, the Bond exhibit we missed in NYC the first time he ever took me into the city as a kid only to end up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibit on medieval chivalry. To hear his corny Connery impersonation. That's a Smith and Wesson and you've had your six. And to listen to the former mechanic tell me - once again - that for as beautiful a car as the DB5 was, my Mom's old early '90s Toyota Camry could out-handle it. (The DB5 had no power steering.)

With the exception of the occasional baseball post, I try not to veer too far from this blog's primary focus. But from one aspiring writer to the one who came before, consider this post an epistle in far more legible print than any of the letters either of us ever wrote to each other.

Project Update: Finishing up the third screenplay of the season (no, it's not a prequel to Citizen Kane). Will go for four before New Year's. Reviewing the final layout of Cookie-Wise Pablo.