By the sea

In addition to their elegantly be-gardened Bauhaus-style house near the beach just south of Hua Hin, Simon and Poe also own a condo, and we stayed in it. It's on the eleventh floor of a South Miami Beach-like part-hotel called the Blue Wave. During our five days there, the place was crawling with repressed Swedish middle-aged couples and unrepressed Thai tour groups, a mix that works. Simon and Poe bought this place for "a song" and put few thousand more into bright, simple furnishings and redoing the bathroom. The big single room's chief attraction is the view from the balcony. Looking south along the Gulf of Thailand, there's a long arc of sandy beach ending in a rocky outcropping with a huge standing Buddha emerging from it. Inland along the beach is a sea of shimmering green that at first glance is a series of lovely paddie fields dotted with coconut palms, and on closer view turns into a Thai military officers' golf course. Simon and Poe plan to rent this place out next year; for now, friends use it, and we plan on returning for Songkran, the Buddhist New Year water festival, in mid-April. That's when Bangkok goes berserk for five days of water-tossing and -spraying mayhem and Hua Hin makes do with just one day.

Part of the Hua Hin fun for us is catching up with the ex-pats and their Thai boyfriends that we've met on our four previous visits. An old pal of Poe's whom I'll call Lek had an elderly Norwegian boyfriend who died last year and left Lek a lot of money. Now he gardens and looks after his investments. Lek's British boyfriend seems cool with all this; he arrives for a visit next month. Lek's Thai boyfriend, meanwhile, is envious; he is shopping the "silver daddy" websites for his own benefactor---one, Lek jokes, who "won't last long."

A couple of the Brits have had health scares---these are mostly men in their sixties---but they've come through these well enough. A Canadian, whose Thai boyfriend is an airport ground controller, thinks Thai politics are too uncertain, and he has hedged his bets with a second home in Bali. That somebody who knows the region believes Indonesia is stabler than Thailand is unnerving for those of us who want to keep coming back here. In Ethiopia, people used to say, "If and when Haile Selassie dies...." The doddering king here is a crucial part of the glue that holds Thailand together. After Bhumibole, it gets murky.

We dined out every night at one or another open air venue with food as varied as the people eating it. One night, Lek ordered "dancing river shrimp," tiny living creatures trying to jump out of the lime and chili sauce and back into the river. He ate these as a kid and is crazy about having them hop around in his mouth. Poe advised us against tasting them; he said we might get parasites. We did try the fried "duck's mouths"---they're like chicken wings, except not as meaty.

One of Simon and Poe's acquaintances who joined us for dinner one night was Jose Villaverde, who was visiting from Los Angeles. Jose is a 79-year-old semi-retired movie casting director. He's a small gentlemanly fellow in a white silk suit and many jewels who grew up in Shanghai with his Russian mother and Spanish diplomat father. Chased out of China by the communists in 1953, he landed in Rome and soon got involved in the movie business. Jose was casting director or dialogue coach for DeSica and Fellini on a number of films, including The Garden of the Finzi Continis.

Jose is a bottomless fount of wonderful stories. He told about a proposed joint filmmaking venture involving Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa. Jose was present when Fellini and Bergman met to talk about it. Kurosawa was to have been there, but he cancelled at the last minute. (I asked, "Was Abraham Lincoln also unable to make it?" But this story was one of Jose's dining-out set pieces, and he did not acknowledge my interruption.) Jose said, "I could tell when they embraced each other---'Federico!' 'Ingmar!'---that they loathed each other." The project never came off.

Jose also told about working on The Madwoman of Chaillot, with Katherine Hepburn, Edith Evans, Margaret Leighton and Giulietta Masina, among others, and directed by Bryan Forbes. Masina spoke barely any English, but she refused to be dubbed. She was fed her lines in English by Forbes. Whenever she froze in a scene and shouted "Yes!" Forbes would give her the line. Once Hepburn tried to help out with a line, and Masina barked at an uncharacteristically abashed Hepburn, "THAT man will tell me when to speak!"

Another night we dined with Al Roberge, a delightfully ebullient man who was a Broadway song and dance man and later a dealer in fine white pearls in Hawaii. He was a newsboy in Gypsy and later toured "for way too long" as Charlie Brown.

Is this sounding as if we are somewhere other than Thailand? We aren't. One night last week, while we were still in Bangkok, Joe went to a very Thai rave. He was interested in both the music and the visual projections, and, as an old club kid, the excitement. The event was called "Culture One-2011 Art and Music Become One-Bangkok International Dance & Music Festival." This happening was at a convention center and ran till four in the morning. About 5,000 people showed up. It seemed as though outrageous costumes would be appropriate, so Joe found a costume shop and bought a long scarlet coat with tails and a feathered hat that looked like Admiral Nelson's. He wore this with long pants and no shirt. As it happened, none of the young Thais wore get-ups, and they all wanted their pictures taken with Joe. Plainly, he was a star of some type. There was quite a lot of alcohol and "Koreans sniffing things," but it was all pretty mild, he said. He did manage to get into the VIP area with the "media" badge somebody stuck on him at some point. It all sounds like his Studio 54 days, when he was ushered promptly past every exclusive velvet rope in New York. It was a wonderful night of going back to his roots---not 1620, but 1979.