Kiss first,                   
           then flower    

DEVELOPMENT IN PORTUGAL 

          Fluff, feathers, bubbles, cotton, dust bunnies. 
Use any of these words, and it'll be descriptive of how much 
this story would weigh on an honest bathroom scale. 
But...  what if you were to use a heartless laboratory scale, 
one not swayed by spring and sun and sex? 
          Doubtless, any Sorbonneful of chefs 
would judge 'Development in Portugal' to be an air basket 
of whipped egg whites, nothing more. 
There's a guy, the guy has a buddy who narrates the story, 
there's a girl, the girl has a suitor with a pronounced accent 
(guess what radio actor is most likely to appear with an accent), 
and there are the standard two bit roles with less annoying accents. 
The plot as it develops has to do with love developing 
between the guy and girl, a news story developing 
about the annoying accent being exposed as a jewel thief, 
and the guy being a newspaper photographer (get that title now?). 
          Okay, so it all sounds like the lightest of comedies. 
          But let's get back to measuring this story clinically, 
although you never know when a scientist might be infected 
with romance and be secretly in love with Kathleen Hite. 
If s/he sifts meticulously and uses a keen eye and the thickest glass, 
a tiny embryo of an idea might become visible 
and very well be surrounded by yolk. 
The girl, you see, claims to be a reporter, a fact 
doubted by the guy and his buddy, and if she did merit 
the title, they then doubt her worth as romancer & romancee 
(this is the kind of assessment being practiced by two guys 
at a Lisbon airport in the 1950s). 
Will the girl prove herself as a reporter and a woman? 
(If you like the female reporter angle, 
chase down a more affecting story by Hite called 'The Old Itch,'
an episode of Nightbeat which aired on July 3, 1952.) 
It musn't be revealed who scoops whom on the news story— 
the girl reporter or the guy photographer— 
but this being after all an episode developed by Kathleen Hite, 
it is the girl—she, the woman—who kisses the guy, 
and sends him flowers in the morning for being so forward. 



May 31, 2006  


Copyright © 2006-2011 E. A. Villafranca, Jr.  
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