OUCH! COPIOUS KANE

Travel broadens the mind, they say. Also the girth, it turns out. Last week in a report of an interview he gave, I came across a clue on how the chubby young Orson Wellles became the billowing balloon of his mature years .

He grew up in the country, he pointed out, where the heaviest meal  was in the middle of the day and continued that custom when he moved to the city. He then went to Europe where dinner was in the evening and he enjoyed that too, not as an alternative, but an addition.  Back in the US, as a man of the theater he kept to the tradition of a heavy meal after the show. Plus the other two. And plenty of liquor no doubt.

It’s not the prescription any health book — not even an unhealthy book — would recommend. But he also devoured life with the same relish — and in Citizen Kane made what many of us think is still, after all these years, the best movie ever made. How can we object if a legend like that occasionally kept the wolf from the door with an extra helping or two of carbohydrates between meals?

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