Nursey update

So yesterday was much better for Denys than the day before. I stayed home just as a precaution and to do some more work at making the house new-hip-friendly. I located a bath chair at the medical supply store on Stone Way, not far from us. Finding traction strips for the bath tub proved more elusive, and I ultimately traveled to the waste lands of north Aurora to find them. I got the phone in the livingroom moved to a place where Denys can get to it and sit by it easily, and later in the evening Glenn helped me move the comic book spin rack out of the way to make more room for that. One of the big problems continues to be that he doesn't have access to the phone when he's in bed or in most other parts of the house, so if anybody calls, it's pretty much impossible for him to answer. This has me thinking about cellphones again. Can you get cords to hang them around your neck?

Many blessings on kate_schaefer for offering to bring lunch to Denys for the next few days.

In between all of this nursery, I also watched the 1931 film, Night Nurse, appropriately enough. This is a fascinating pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck vehicle. It's renowned in some circles for the number of times that Stanwyck and Joan Blondell gratuitously strip down to their lingerie, but it's more pungent for it's sordid depiction of an apparently drug-abusing doctor and an alcoholic upper class mother who is conspiring (if only by neglect) with her brute of a chauffeur (played by Clark Gable) to murder her own children by starvation. The Depression-era class-consciousness is fascinating, with the street-wise Stanwyck coming to blows with the oblivious, feckless upper class. Also interesting is that her Prince Charming is a bootlegger who is clearly shown to be breaking the law, right down to arranging for somebody's murder, but is also clearly heroic. Stanwyck is more vulnerable in this movie than she would be later in her career, but she's still tough as nails too. She takes a punch to the jaw (from guess who) but also throws a couple of her own. She takes on the corrupt, uncaring system and gets her way, with a little help from her friends. This movie is now available on DVD in the second volume of Warner's Forbidden Hollywood collections of pre-Code movies.