Absolutely Loved Her In So Many Works. Lovely Actress To Watch And So Many Memorable Roles.

Absolutely loved her in so many works. Lovely actress to watch and so many memorable roles.

Olympia Dukakis, June 20, 1931 – May 1, 2021.

Beautiful edit and a decade later I am still not over Matthew Crawley's death. Talk about timeless.

"Hundreds of years ago they fell in love like we did." TIMELESS by Taylor Swift

Independent Claws

Summary: You are lost in a cycle of avoidance caused by a painful past. Peter shepherds you towards a happier future.

Pairing: Peter Parker X Reader; written as mostly Fem!Reader

Warnings: Angst, Alcoholism (mention), Hurt/Comfort, Language, Mature situations, etc, etc Minors DNI

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Chapter One: Tense

Your skin appears orange under the glow of the street lamps as you chain the rusty bicycle to the fence railing and tread softly down the street. A mental image of black gloves, left sitting on a desk back home, taunts the only part of you uncovered. "Idiot," you mutter to yourself, looking down at your hands, balling them into fists. It isn't the weather for which the gloves are necessary, although your breath frosts in the night air. You need stealth. But at least the navy blue hoodie, t-shirt, and pants are dark so you keep on walking, head down, going over your plan in your mind. Going over it and over it as you had done ever since this afternoon when the devil of opportunity presented himself and then your stupid angel conscience sent by your late mother decided to make an appearance to even the score.

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You had been watching and crushing on Peter Parker since forever, and he often wore sweaters and hoodies back in high school, but over the last few years he seemed to grow warm so quickly and shed them as if he radiated thermal energy beyond what was normal. On the first day when he made eye contact, you'd given him a shy nod of recognition in the college class you shared, surprised he had even remembered the green-eyed classmate from long ago who hugged the walls and lockers always looking for a place to hide, to avoid interaction.

As the semester continued, you tried desperately to remain inconspicuous, unapproachable, but still watching him, wide eyed like a cat in the darkness under a bed. Peering up through your fingers while taking notes in class as he pulled a sweater over his head, watching his thick brown hair go awry and stand up as if he was touching a Van de Graaf Generator at the science museum. Yeah, it shocked you too because sometimes his t-shirt would ride up higher and made your own neck hairs stand up as straight as his hair. But the hoodies, Peter wore those hoodies the most often. They looked so soft, so touchable and when you heard the faint but crisp ziiiiip as he ran his hand down the front and shook his arms out of the sleeves it always made your head turn. Not too fast though. You had learned to be careful. Once, hearing the familiar sound you flicked your eyes up when he removed his navy blue hoodie, which happened to be your personal favorite hoodie, and caught his brown eyes staring straight at you. That was when you dropped your pen just so you could duck to the tile floor, missing his smirk and lifted eyebrow as he shrugged the hoodie over the back of his chair.

The disrobing, as you mentally termed it, became a regular habit and made worse by the quieter nature of the calculus course compared to the mayhem of high school. No class clowns making noise, no troublemakers. Just students watching the professor while taking notes, and you, despite the mental scolding you gave yourself, watching Peter. Any notes you took on him were seared to the back of your eyelids. You rarely spotted him outside of class, even though you had grown up not too far away from his street and you tried very hard not to see him outside of class anyway. What point was there to extend your martyrdom outside of the hour you spent within four walls? You were more than a little ashamed of yourself already. The devil on your shoulder often smiled and said just a little more time when you gazed at Peter's left ear and the brown hair that curled temptingly around it; but the angel on your right gave you that sad somber look that made it clear Peter Parker wasn't for the likes of you. Not when he had been in love with Gwen, who was an angel on earth and now an angel in heaven, and not now, with your feral attitude and your heart hardened against anyone who might try and lure you to comfort and safety. That was what that hoodie symbolized if you'd bothered to analyze it. Maybe you were aware of that in some remote way, but it was like the craft store heart-shaped cardboard box you had painted for your mother when you were a child. You kept those thoughts hidden away in a part of you that hurt too much to look at. Just like that paper scrap and photo filled box, the only thing you’d kept of your mom after she passed away. You couldn't touch either where you'd hidden them; you couldn't look at them, it kept everything remote and cold and manageable.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it was your mother sending an angel friend that placed the opportunity before you, although you scarcely believed in heaven, not anymore. Or maybe there was some cosmic electric charge that rearranged and short circuited Peter's brain so that he left the hoodie, the navy blue one, resting on the back of his chair when the class ended. You didn't notice at first, you were staring at the back of his head as he walked toward the door along with everyone else, while you were busy memorizing the muscles that ran across his shoulders. Shoulders and biceps that you just then realized you could see as his short t-shirt sleeves pulled tight across them. But most likely it was that wild devil that forced your eyes to cut to Peter's vacated chair and there was the hoodie, forgotten. A quick glance to the door of the classroom revealed he had disappeared.

Without a word, you snatched the hoodie to your chest and left quickly, searching around the building exit for Peter but with no sign of him, the choice was made with no regret. You scurried silently down the hallway and went straight into the restroom where you stuffed the hoodie into your backpack. Five minutes later you were on your bicycle pedaling home with a hoodie, a backpack, and a devil of a grin on your face.

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Home is where you should be right now, not in the shadows creeping down an alley by Peter Parker's house in an attempt to do the right thing. After sitting in your upstairs room while your dad was somewhere out drinking himself into a bitter and vengeful stupor, you had lost the battle with your conscience. Your dad's worldview had always been finders keep, losers weep. Even if he was never around any more now than he was when your mom got sick, somehow he hadn't been quite able to make his the world owes you something kid type of logic stick with you either, another disappointment that he never failed to point out.

No matter how you tried to justify it, no matter how much you wanted just some thing to hold, to wrap around you, never mind some one, you could not keep what was never yours. Stupid old hoodie you told yourself as you put your arms on your knees and breathed in the essence of Peter in the soft fabric. That scent almost broke you... almost. It felt like what home could be when there were warm hearts and hands that comfort each other. When tired eyes were allowed to close because there was no need for a wild-eyed wakefulness that danger downstairs had crossed the threshold drunk and delirious. That thought, the thought of a different disappointment, that the example of how to do the right thing had been forgotten was why you were tiptoeing past a run down garage to reach an old beat up car so that you could return Peter's hoodie. It may have been a stupid plan by someone who couldn't seem to muster the courage just to hand it to Peter the next time class met, but then again it was academic not emotional intelligence that was supposed to be your asset anyway. Your intelligence being the academic asset that was to get you a degree and take you far away from the warm memories and cold reality. Far away from watching what the one you could never have. At least that is what you told yourself as you stopped at Aunt May's car. You had only met her a few times, crossing paths at the store, picking up medicine for your mother. May had asked after her and your look of surprise at her knowledge didn't go unnoticed but her eyes were soft and kind, not unlike Peter's.

The lights were on in their house; maybe in the kitchen and an upstairs bedroom. You were confident from years of climbing up and down stairs silently in your own home that none of the neighbors had heard you in the alley, and perhaps that made you careless. The plan was to leave the hoodie in Aunt May's car, a place where anyone might forget a hoodie. Since the car was an older model it probably didn't have an alarm, at least you hoped it didn't. You also hoped it wasn't locked, but that hadn't occurred to you until just now. Too late. You stood there for a minute, just a minute; the brief thrill of having the coveted hoodie and its symbolic aura now fading as you pulled back the hood and tugged the zipper down, not thinking about the ziiiiip.

One last soothing stroke of the soft fabric and the hoodie was in your hand, ready to toss in the front seat. One tug on the driver's side handle and whew, it wasn't locked when...

"In the future, if you're going to steal cars, you really shouldn't dress like a car thief."

Out of the shadows stepped Spider-Man.

Shit. You are in trouble.

To be continued...

A/N: Please let me know if I left off any warnings you think would better serve readers.

Studio Sour Grapes

83 years ago, 20th Century Studios (now 20th Century Fox) released the masterpiece, Grapes Of Wrath, based upon the best selling novel by *John Steinbeck. Here is a reminder that the struggle for labor, for content creators, for artists, for writers, for all of us to be seen and valued as human has been a long one. Outright slavery was replaced with other institutions and legal methods designed to marginalize and control specific groups and socioeconomic classes and further divide labor based on race, gender, etc. Those in the arts who tried to call attention to this never ending struggle were (and in some cases still are) labeled with slurs, blacklists, and so on.

The point I am trying to make is that while highlighting the experiences of a downtrodden group of people resulted in some absolutely fantastic written, filmed, acted, and directed artistic endeavors, those endeavors resulted from the hardship and plight of ordinary people and their situation was the result of the greed and antipathy of the 'corporate' owners. Across a multitude of industries and types of labor, the many have been at the mercy of the few. It's easy to vilify the highest paid celebrities and writers in order to sow division and obfuscate the reality for most workers in America, whether within the art industry itself or any other form of labor.

The producers and owners have tried to say that the grapes are sour, that the writers don't make good wine, that the actors have plenty of money to pay for healthcare (not true), and so on.

Don't believe them: feed them the grapes of wrath. Feed them the truth.

*Without getting into the weeds regarding the controversy surrounding Steinbeck's novel & the novel by Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (do look it up on wiki; fascinating story), it serves as a tale and backdrop for some of the current topics being discussed right now with respect to appropriation, equal pay, gender, as well as the name, image, and likeness.

She shines in everything she does. What an artist.

Emma Stone

Please sir, I want some more...

When I hear the phrase "starving artist," I know exactly which word of the two I would like to make obsolete and it is not the writer, the painter, the actor, the costumer, the set designer, or any of the other workers and artists who labor to give us the material with which we can experience the range of human experience.

I want more of the original that comes from the human being with a beating heart and not an electrical plug; from eyes or ears that have seen, heard, and lived not from a metal and plastic box filled with phrases jumbled together all higglety-pigglety.

Technology has brought the world wonderful advancements but never lose sight of the human beings who arise each day to live, love, and labor together on this planet we call home.