Bravo Six Quotes

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?" Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. "Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined." "But surely there's something more to it than that." "It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once." De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?" The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next. "Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-" "No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling." De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise. "Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'" The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance. He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.

Manuel Bravo (Ecuador) Mi primera maratón fue en Nueva York, la competencia más famosa del mundo. Pero me gustaría compartirles lo que pensé al completarla: He conseguido lo que muy pocas personas en el mundo pueden lograr. He preguntado en todas partes: ¿Por qué la gente corre Maratones? Yo creo que es porque necesitamos probar nuestras facultades físicas, emocionales y espirituales. Después de todo, en nuestro diario vivir no hay ocasión de “dar todo lo que llevamos dentro”. No podemos tener alas para volar, no podemos cantar sin una buena voz, o bailar si no somos bailarines. La mayoría de nosotros nunca actuará en un escenario, pero tanto si eres un atleta de talla mundial o un corredor popular, el maratón es un escenario; un escenario de calles en las que actuamos y nos sentimos orgullosos mientras millones de personas aplauden, es como conseguir una prolongada ovación del público puesto en pie.

One evening, a haunting melody weaves through my dreams. I startle from sleep, calling Lenore Dove’s name. The television glows. On-screen, a girl in a rainbow of ruffles sings a familiar tune with unfamiliar words. It’s sooner than later that I’m six feet under. It’s sooner than later that you’ll be alone. So who will you turn to tomorrow, I wonder? For when the bell rings, lover, you’re on your own. She performs on a stage with a shabby backdrop before a Capitol audience in old-fashioned clothes. Great-Aunt Messalina and Great-Uncle Silius would fit right in. Her voice, that accent, the way those fingers command the guitar strings — a Covey girl, for sure. But not mine . . . And I am the one who you let see you weeping. I know the soul that you struggle to save. Too bad I’m the bet that you lost in the reaping. Now what will you do when I go to my grave? Sniffles from the audience. Someone shouts, “Bravo!” The crowd goes wild. The girl bows and extends her hand to a figure who’s standing just out of the spotlight. A silhouette of a man. Upright, trim. A crown of curls. He waits a moment, as if deciding whether or not to join her. Then takes a step forward as the screen goes black. The reaping, she said? Must be. Why else would a Covey girl be in the Capitol? Could this girl be District 12’s one and only victor? Suddenly, I’m sure she is. No wonder Lenore Dove never wants to talk about her. She knows the story, but it’s too secret, or perhaps too painful, to share even with me. I think about the bits of color Lenore Dove adds to her wardrobe, the bright blue, yellow, and pink. Are they scraps from this girl’s dress? A way to keep her memory alive? What color name did this rainbow girl carry to the Tenth Hunger Games? What happened to her after? Did she come home? Did she die in the nightmarish lab? What did she do to be erased so completely? Who was the guy she reached out to at the end of her number? Her district partner possibly, who’d have died in the arena. It was someone she cared about, from the look of it. Or perhaps it was someone else, someone hosting the show. An earlier Flickerman. They’d be forty years older now if they’re still alive.