Sunday, 7/1/18

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! (Google it) Today and the following three days Samina is working at the Venetian as a singing gondolier. She has muscles like an Amazon from paddling her gondola four days and evenings a week!

Last night we popped popcorn and watched a couple of movies: “The Boy,” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Alice was by far the most fun! The Boy was a scary psychological thriller with some surprising twists, but not exactly a fun flick.

Friday evening Samina showed me a DVD of her legendary father’s final nightclub performance, 4 months before he died on Dec. 4, 2016. His name was Carme Daniel Pitrello, but everyone knew him as simply Carme; his obituary says: “Italian singer, comic, impressionist and a 2012 inductee into the Las Vegas Entertainers Hall of Fame… With more than 10,000 performances during his over 40 years on the Strip, Carme was gifted with an outstanding baritone voice, flawless comedic timing and a special rapport with the audience.”

Samina was born and raised in show business, often on tour, performing onstage with her father when she was growing up. She showed me her photo scrapbook, full of 8”x10” glossy b&w autographed PR pics of her with dozens of famous performers. She’s a stage magician, singer, dancer, burlesque queen, showgirl, and all-around class act. She performed as “Jessica Rabbit” after the “Roger Rabbit” movie came out, and she really looked the part!

Samina turned me on to the thick “Course in Miracles” book (1,333 pages!), which I’m reading while she’s off at work. It claims to be channeled from Jesus, and as a Pagan I have to struggle a bit to translate from the Christian metaphors and the lack of any feminine/Goddess/Mother perspective. But there’s a lot I can relate to regarding “Thou art God,” interconnectedness, and Love…

The Introduction says, “The underlying premise of the work is the teaching that the greatest ‘miracle’ that one may achieve in one’s life is the act of simply gaining a full ‘awareness of love’s presence’ in one’s own life.”

According to Wikipedia, the book states that “everything involving time, space, and perception is illusory. It presents a nondualism which states that God is the only truth and reality: perfect, unchanging, unchangeable, extending only love, though not in time and space, which cannot really be comprehended from a dualistic perspective. The theory further states that all life as we perceive it is actually one life, dreaming of separation and fragmentation.” Ehh…could be.