Mort and I occupied a small airless shed down the far end of the yard. Scantily clad women from Playboy Magazine, Gals and Gags, and butcher’s calendars covered the walls and ceiling like wallpaper. Almost every day Mort would arrive with a new exhibit, assiduously select a place on the wall where she could be displayed without obscuring the strategic areas of the incumbents, and gently glue her down. All of them had names, some provided by the magazine editors, the others by Mort himself. The latter names, I learned, belonged to young ladies of Mort’s acquaintance, and who, Mort declared, looked sufficiently similar to their allotted pictures ‘if you put a bag over their heads.’

 

Uttering those words, he clapped spurs to Rozinante, without heeding the cries of his squire Sancho, who warned him he was not going to attack giants but windmills. But so convinced was he that they were giants that he neither heard his squire’s shouts nor did he notice what they were though he was very near them. Instead, he rushed on, shouting in a loud voice : “Fly not, cowards and vile caitiffs : one knight alone attacks you !” At that moment, a slight breeze arose, and the great sails began to move. When Don Quixote saw this he shouted again : “Although ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye shall pay for your insolence !”
    Saying thus, and commending himself most devoutly to his Lady Dulcinea, whom he begged help in his peril, he covered himself with his buckler, couched his lance, charging at Rosinante’s full gallop and rammed the first mill in this way. He ran his lance into the sail, but the wind twisted it with such violence that it shivered the spear to pieces, dragging him and his horse after it and rolling him over and over on the ground, sorely damaged.
    The greatest scene in what is often regarded as one of the greatest books in literature. I found Cervante’s Don Quixote repetitious and under-done, as I think this scene is, and I really struggled to get to the end. It is amusing for a while, but all the famous bits are in the first few chapters. Quixote is a great character idea, but he becomes tedious after a while. Whenever someone extols its greatness, I’m always inclined to doubt that they’ve read it. They certainly didn’t read the second half. And it isn’t a novel anyway, but a series of escapades. Still, it has the reputation of being the first ever novel, and I really don’t want to get into an argument about that.
   An oddity is that the title of the ballet is always pronounced in phonetic English Kwix-ote, as in the word quixotic. Like Lord Byron, who demanded his poem Don Juan be pronounced Jew-arn, it’s because the author despised all things Spanish.
    Then it became a Broadway musical Man of La Mancha which, like so many others, had one great song-The Impossible Dream- and was otherwise dross. This became an utterly dreadful movie which even Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren were powerless to save. One great idea pushed way too far.