Joyce Pensato: This is the place where the juices are floating, where you feel comfortable to be who you are, and if I just want to lie on the lounge chair for a month or two, I can do it.
Kurt Vonnegut: Now it’s like a banana cream pie three feet in diameter dropped from a stepladder four feet high.
Pensato: It’s almost like a billboard.
Vonnegut: Well, of course. Very warm, very enthusiastic.
Pensato: We get the big fat Japanese brushes and splash on the paint.
•••
Vonnegut: For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.
Pensato: Well, you meditate and space out.
Vonnegut: Then nothing else matters.
Pensato: It’s like the Weegee photograph where somebody drowned and there’s this woman smiling at the camera.
Vonnegut: One good thing about TV is, if you die violently, God forbid, on camera, you will not have died in vain because you will be great entertainment.
•••
Pensato: Superman is too human, Superman has a real face—I like disguises; I like masks.
Vonnegut: I got to know him late in his life when he’d become a local CIO official.
Pensato: He [is] also very expressive: he can look angry, he can look very vulnerable …
Vonnegut: Yes, he did. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Pensato: Gena Rowlands with a gun and then De Niro, all bloody, they’re me, both of them.