Should men wield fingers, when tongues speak truer?

Dearest Muse,

If I may borrow a line from one of your movies and play around with it a little to come to your rescue (and have a little fun) after you were so rudely photographed and filmed during a recent luncheon in La La Land with some friends, I hope you'll forgive me.  While fingers and "swords" are sometimes interchangeable for some forms of recreation, I fear that you need a better substitute for this particular instance.

While you are not the first man (nor will you be the last) to enjoy your food, uninhibited by convention and heedless of Dorothy Manners or Emily Post,  it might behoove you to be a little more cautious where you let your lovely locks down when out and about.  I would like to make several suggestions in this regard.

Knowing that your every step is dogged by the paparazzi and being possessed of a very nice pink and agile tongue whose dexterity you have gone out of your way to display in photo and film alike, one would think you would put said agility to good use to dislodge food from your teeth, like the rest of us.

If that doesn't float your boat, how about hiding behind a napkin (as you've done before) while picking the troublesome debris from your pearly whites?

Failing that,  you could always take a drink and swish the water around a little.  That might do the trick, with no one the wiser.

I know, darling.  Talk about taking the fun out of life!  

I have to say it's a good thing you pushed your hair back (with a very familiar gesture) before you cleaned your teeth.  Good grooming is essential when you are always in the spotlight.

I am sure you are either laughing or mortified to find out they caught you again!  I hope it is a lot of the former and maybe just a little of the latter.  A little mortification is always good to keep us on our toes and remind us that the world is so bloody overcrowded, that when we are out in public, someone is always watching.

To make the point, I once caught one of your past movie co-stars very busily digging into his nose on my way to the movies.  He was driving a very jazzy white, late model Mercedes and I was patiently waiting for the arrow to turn into a parking garage  at the theater and just happened to look over as he passed by, window wide open.

I was embarrassed for him and won't mention any names.  That would be cruel.

I am writing this, not to laugh at you but to playfully tease you, because as you will undoubtedly know from much experience, Murphy's Law being what it is, there is always someone waiting  to expose celebrities as being human, like the rest of us, so they can bring them down from the pedestal some people mistakenly put them up on, thereby feeling better about themselves.   It's a world that you choose every day, so keep laughing in the face of adversity because what else can you do?

Besides, on a one to ten scale (like on the Richter), this temblor barely rates a 2.  Only the meanies will keep talking about it.

By the way, dear man.   You know all that crying and the emotional roller coaster you were on during the Machine Gun Preacher promotion blitz?  Did you ever stop to think that some of it was due to the Chantix you were using to get off the smokes?  Check the side effects, love!

In the meantime, keep doing good work and having fun at it because life is too bloody short to sweat the small stuff.  And this incident is small stuff, believe me...

Everyone will quickly forget it if and when they get to see Machine Gun Preacher or they watch Tullus Aufidius go mano a mano with Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus in the movie of the same name.

Although I must say, I almost like the scene where Aufidius shaves Coriolanus' head the best!

Stay warm and keep on watching out for the sharks!

Always fondly,

Zoni with a Z

Songs out of tune, the words always a little wrong...Canzoni Stonate