twitter-twatter of tiny tweets
non-sequitura
redundant shout-outs and momentary fancy

An op-ed column is generally between seven hundred and a thousand words. A blog post seldom exceeds four hundred. A tweet, and god how cutesy is that, how abysmally derivative, stupid… a tweet is limited to a mandatory 140 characters.

I suppose we could come up with 140 characters here, today…
Janet Shaw, Rosella Towne, Carol Landis, Peggy Moran, Eddie Anderson, Diana Lewis, Lois Lindsay, Poppy Wilde, Jack Mower, Spec O’Donnell, Murray Alper, Sam Ash, Andre Cheron, Pedro de Cordoba, Georges de Gombert, Charles de Ravenne, Carlos de Valdez, Rosemary Lane, Melville Cooper, Allen Jenkins, Mabel Todd, Fritz Feld, Curt Bois,Edward Brophy, Armand Caliz, Jerry Horwin, Jerry Wald, Richard MacCaulay, Maurice Leo, Earl Baldwin, Warren Duff, Felix Ferry, Sig Herzig, Peter Milne — how am I doing? This is starting to feel very Busby Berkeley, cast of thousands, SAG credit list longer than the book — have I mentioned Alphonse Martell? Leo White? Jeffrey Sayre? There’s a lot you can do with 140 characters. Consider “Waiting for Godot.” What have you got there? A scant half dozen, and that’s counting Godot. Heck, if we’re counting imaginary characters in our bounded creativity character count then who could forget Harvey? Who indeed! And Estrella, the fuzzy white sheep that was my cousin Vicki’s constant companion until she was dumped into a kindergarten class where the kids all made fun of her imagination and turned her toward a life of crime.

Miriam Colon, Angel Salazar, Gina Montana, Mel Bernstein, Ilke Payan, and all the women at the Babylon Club, from Angela Aames to Marcia Wolf…

If each of us puts 140 characters up on twitter, winds the clockwork and sets them free, imagine the stories they will tell. There are eight million stories in the naked city, but some of the links are of course broken.