Also, in the spring of 1969 Kat and I went to see the movie “The Fixer” at the Avenue U theater in Brooklyn near our first apartment. The Fixer is a story of a Russian-Jewish handyman who is wrongly imprisoned in Tsarist Russia and is tortured to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. In the middle of the movie I feel Kat put her arms around my right arm and she is holding on to me. On the screen, the Jewish handyman character is being tortured. She begins to dig her right hand fingers into my arm and she is beginning to hurt me. She digs deeper and deeper as the scene goes on. I turn to her to ask her to stop and I see that she is crying. She stops digging her fingers into my arm and, in a minute or so, she stops crying. When we leave the movie I ask Kat why she was crying. She tells me she could not bear to see me tortured. I look at her in amazement and love. Something I would do many times over the years.
In August 1969 we were invited to a barbecue at a co-workers house in the Bronx. Sal was a fellow auditor at the bank I worked at. Sal lived near the Arthur Avenue train station in the Bronx. Arthur Avenue was in a heavily Italian neighborhood with a reputation for being populated by many mafioso. Sal was about 5:9 tall and weighed about 240 lbs. He was built like a fire hydrant and absolutely looked like a character in a Martin Scorcese movie. There were about a dozen people at the party, some co-workers and some of Sal’s neighborhood friends. Kat and I had a great time and Kat fit in fabulously as she would in any crowd except for snooty intellectuals and people who looked down at other people or downright nasty people. In our entire life together there were only one or two people who were not taken in by Kat’s personality. Many of the men were also taken in by her looks. We stayed overnight and took the long subway ride home back to Brooklyn at about noon on Sunday. I bought the New York Daily News to read on the way home. The screaming headlines was about the Sharon Tate murder by the crazed Manson “family”.
In November 1969 there were two happy events in our family. On November 2 cousin Steve married Alice Pressman. They would be married for almost 46 years and they had two children. Alice passed away about 16 days after Kat in 2015. One week later, on November 9, my sister Sheila married Steve Golz. They would have one child, my wonderful nephew Glenn, and their marriage would last about three years. Sheila was divorced when she was around 27 and she never remarried.