Is that really Toulouse-Lautrec's "A La Mie" balanced on a chair in a publicity photo for Irving Stone, the Mirror's new art crtic? It most certainly is. Luckily, the painting is now in safer hands at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It's almost as bad as putting Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" on the pavement for a photo op at LAX–but not quite. I swear, it's amazing anything survived.

Confidential File

The Coates Abound in Antitogetherness

According
to no less an authority than the slick pages of Time magazine, the
entire country has been badly bitten by the boating bug. (And if that
ain't alliteration, you tell me).

This epidemic was brought on
by our nationally weakened condition as a result of a sudden,
compulsive urge for more "togetherness." And the word is out that
nothing clusters a family closer than a boat. The theory interests me,
because my own family is a classic study in "apartness."

I am
the nominal head of a household stocked with rugged individualists. The
only things we share in common are the same surname, the same rood and
fish on Friday. Other than that we veer off in separate directions.

My daughter, Joren,
is currently infatuated with the care and feeling of a saddle horse. My
youngest son, Timmy, raises pigeons in the back yard. My older boy,
Kevin, studies the saxophone and, to my complete dismay, can already
play a chorus of "Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair." Not only can he,
but he does. Interminably.

In a feeble attempt to draw us
together, I once suggested that my wife and I should take a course in
Spanish and that later the youngsters could study with us. We started.
But halfway through she switched to French, which, once again, leaves
me no one to talk to.

Consequently, in a final, desperate
effort, I allowed myself to be infected by the boat bug. The sickness
is upon me now. The symptoms are delirium, delusions of grandeur and a
general departure from reality.

At first, when the fever struck,
I though of a modest little dinghy. Then I graduated to a sloop. And
finally, within just hours, to a cabin cruiser with a full galley,
bunks and, you should excuse me, a head. As Time points out, "people
step up in boating."

I've stepped up without even stepping
aboard a boat. I'm in the cabin cruiser class already. But all I've
actually invested in anything is a dollar ninety-five for a yachting
cap.

The other evening I came home and gathered the family around me in a symbolic circle.

"I've decided," I announced, "to buy us a boat."

My bride looked ceiling-ward and said nasally: "Sacre bleu!"
Then she turned a withering glance on me, and added: "You're not
mechanically inclined enough to run a boat. You'll drown us all."

I
calmly lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift lazily through my left
nostril. (My right one has a deviated septum.) "You know," I told her.
"It's quite interesting. You must be plagued by a deep, unconscious
feeling of insecurity. And you compensate for it by constantly
deflating my ego."

"If you must talk like that," she snapped, "at least have the decency to do it when the children aren't around."

I turned my attention to the kids. "We could take week end trips on a boat," I told Timmy.

 "I can't take trips," he replied. "I have to stay home and feed the pigeons."

Won't Rock in Cradle of Deep

"We'll buy one with a foghorn on it," I appealed to Kevin.

"I already have a horn," he said.

"You could learn to water-ski," I suggested to Joren.

"I'm learning to ride side-saddle," she replied.

I looked at my wife. "And you?" I asked with a sigh.

She shrugged and informed me: "La plume de ma tante est sur la table de mon oncle."

"That's just your opinion," Isaid. "I'm still getting a boat for us. And I'll go out in it by myself."

And, I will. There'll be togetherness in my family, even if I have to do it alone.