LETTERS FROM HOME: AIR CONDITIONING WON'T ALWAYS KEEP YOU COOL

July 31, 1995

Dear Leslie,

The miserable Midwestern heat you've been hearing about has been only slightly less extreme here. A few merciful rains have cooled the temperatures, but the humidity has been frightful. DC and I stay in our den and our bedroom, the only air-conditioned rooms in the house, waiting for fall.

Actually, I arise twice a week at 6 a.m. to be on the golf course as early as possible because it's too hot to start playing any later. By mid-morning steam is rising from the greens and the golfers.

My mother who couldn't get me out of bed for school and bosses who were big on the so-called relationship between snoozing and losing couldn't have known that the combination of heat and golf would forge a morning person in no time.

We've been staying cool with entertainments. You know what kind. Finally saw "Ready to Wear." All that falderol and an international cast to tell us the fashion business is self-absorbed?

Liked "The Last Seduction." Linda Fiorentino makes black widows look good.

My vote for summer movie of the year so far goes to "Clueless." Teen queen who coordinates her outfits by computer and lives to give other people make overs turns out to be a human being.

Amy Heckerling, long-ago director of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," nails cool popular culture with a fly swatter once again. As the movie critics say, you'll laugh out loud.

Maybe not people who laugh at everything or at the wrong time, or people who laugh at others but not themselves, or people who've clamped down so hard on life that laughter is a foreign language. They'll go, "Ha ha."

It's the belly laughers who'll go for "Clueless," the saps who give a mile instead of an inch and couldn't care less about it.

Despite what you've heard about abs of steel, nobody really pays bellies the attention they deserve. They are the seat of our emotions. They protect themselves with layers of fat, signal hungers, swell up in anticipation of giving life to a new being, and involuntarily quake when a sight or sound or taste or touch or smell plugs into the circuits that connect all humanity and says, "I know how that feels."

I know a woman whose laugh fills whatever room she's in. I like hearing it, being around it, because it comes from that place where we all know the joy of being alive.

DC and I went to St. Louis with the Sedalia nieces and their mom last weekend to see "The Phantom of the Opera" in a beautiful old theater with lots of air conditioning. Everybody was wearing their special dresses. Except me, of course.

But when the lights came up, 11-year-old Devon looked like someone in blackface. She'd been rubbing the cover of the program against her chin during the performance and the ink came off.

Devon didn't appreciate the humor of the situation or our laughter at that moment. The fact that we all had experienced that kind of embarrassment didn't stop her from wanting to hide under the seat.

"Now you know how the Phantom felt," I said hopefully as she slowly turned to burn a hole through my brain.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.