The film Mahogany was released in 1975.

It was a melodrama of it’s time, a rags to riches story in which Diana Ross fought to become a great fashion icon before giving it all up for love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra71dvxOVX8

It was not a critical darling. It was a one-and-a-half stars kind of movie, an enterprise that revealed that although Diana Ross was a great diva, she was not destined to become a great actress, and ever since, the movie’s been slowly dissolving into the past. I bring this up just to say that if you missed it, there is little reason to want to go and find it.

Nevertheless, when a pair of friends asked if I’d like to see it with them last week, I jumped at the chance. I’ve known both these movie-going women for over thirty years now and the sheer improbability of that– that we would travel such great and impossible distances through time– and still be connected, was a kind of miracle to me and I would have gone anywhere they asked.

It feels important to note that when the movie was made the three of us were all just children. Not one of us would have yet reached the age of ten, and the worlds we inhabited then were as small, beautiful and mysterious as marbles lost in a forest. The movie, regardless of it’s failings or virtues, was an extraordinary time capsule that opened up all around us in the popcorn dark of the theatre. It was impossible not to see ghost-images of your own life as the frames passed by. Perhaps a snatch of music would summon my childhood cat, or the shape of a car would remind me of a family trip, a dress, a friend of my sister…And to be called back to those lost spaces and allowed to just float there for a few hours, to drift along this underground river free from the obstacles, complications and mortal apprehensions of the adult world, was a glowing, holy thing.

And then the movie was over. We chatted for a moment on the street, and then the three of us headed back into our current lives, each one likely marvelling at the forces that charted our days and brought us together again, compressing time on this autumn night so far from where we started.

You’re malevolent, like the sort of thing a Super Villain might keep in his utility belt.

When I bought you I thought of the aroma of pumpkin pie, I thought of the gentle touch of a mother, a soft and restorative healing force, but what I received was more like a radioactive explosion. What the fuck are you?!!

You gave me a THIRD degree burn!

That’s the Grizzly Bear of burns! Doctors and nurses were peeling back the bandage and looking at it like it was Two Girls One Cup! And these were medical professionals!

You FUCKER!

Your stupid blue, felt cover, which instantly pills– as if it was some fucking Blow Fish– just falls off like so much flesh from a THIRD DEGREE burn! It’s useless, nothing more than a deception! You would need to be encased in a one-foot thick case of lead—like a coffin—to protect your victims from your deadly Superheat Technology! What, were you some crazy experiment that the Soviets abandoned because it was too dangerous? I am thinking that you were, you bitch.

And listen Death Pad, I was using you exactly as you were designed and as I was instructed to use you. Was it my fault that I fell asleep while watching that excruciatingly boring movie about whales and that your Deception Cover vanished? No, it was not my fault! It was my misfortune! And then vulnerable while asleep, you heat raped me. You burned a fucking hole in my side! I thought I was having a nightmare about global warming, but no, when I was living a nightmare starring you, the evil kill pad!

My therapist tells me a have an abundance of displaced anger and that it’s up to me how I use it. I choose to use it to kill Super Villains.

I am coming after you, you cocksucker, and I am going to set you on goddamn fire. You will also have to pay me forty million dollars or something, because this fucking burn is disgusting and it kills. In fact, the pain is so great that I am now completely addicted to Percocet, which is the only reason this entire letter isn’t written in capitals.

Watch your back, motherfucker.

Michael Murray