Blank Screen Anxiety

I have discovered a new disease. Years from now, when people are agedly bent over their walking sticks in the park in the evenings and ask "Alzheimers'?" you'll be going, "No, GJ's" and shaking your head. It is not a very intellectual disease, which is what I suspect Alzheimer's to be, because I reckon if you don't have any you can't lose it and hence it probably might just pass me by... no, but this one strikes you in the middle of those conversations that are finally for you going well.
There are various kinds of cocktail parties. Those at which you have turned up over or under dressed and seem to have a piece of cellophane in your throat that deliberately garbles all the parts of speech that would have sounded oh so perfect if only it wasn't there. This party oftentimes ends with you reviewing Eliot's Cocktail Party in your head and convincing yourself that the reason you don't say much is because you mean so much more when you are not actually saying it.
But there are those parties, dinners, lunches that actually go well. You are dressed just right and the food is fine. You are the right level of drunk, and have just around enough money in your pocket to pay for it. You know how it is when friends sit around and chat over a meal or drinks? You're all picking at the peanuts, passing the celery sticks around, swigging at the beer, talking about everything from memories to dysfunctional families, to being the black sheep, etc etc, and suddenly some wise guy comes up with the stone in the puddle.
"Did you catch the Kurosawa retrospective at the Third Eye?"
There is invariably a split second of silence in which I catch my breath and hope someone else will burst out laughing the instant I do and go "Kuro WHAT...?". But that invariably never happens (please note my OCD word has moved on from quintessential to invariably). While I wait, those around quickly recover any damaged poise. They haul the keeling ship upright, look the dastardly conversationalist in the eye and say, "Oh, no, I've been too busy this time, but have you watched XYZ?"
The conversationalist will invariably say "Oh, not really. In fact, I haven't heard of that one... I wonder how...". And the Defender of the Fallen will say " Oh, that';s because it's one of his early films. Made underground, before he caught the critics' eye with UVW. Very few actually have.."
The Perpetrator and Defender then invariably have a long drawn out conversation that excludes most other gaping members even if they number not more than one (invariably me) in bold, striding tones of voice that include words such as 'angle', 'perspective', 'objective', 'protagonist', 'cultural metamorphosis' and 'fascinating' the latter spoken in at least three varying tones of voice.
Please note that during this large pause in time for the rest of us, these two by-now partners-in-crime will never make eye contact with the rest of the team, some of whom may have at various points weakly tried to join in the conversation and failed much like the last refugees in the camp trying to clamber into the by-now speeding truck. They fall back to the table and pick at the crumbs, wistfully thinking about and envious of the fantastic intellectual spread the rest of them will be enjoying by this point in time.
After this the dinner or round of drinks is effectively ruined, having set two of the team above the rest and their resumed jocularity a pathetic dry piece of bread tossed back at snarling humanity in sympathy. I hate this breed of interrupted intellectuals at the dinner table.
but the worst of such scenarios is yet to come. Having been thus humiliated at many an informal cocktail party, there is one lesson I still have failed to learn. I invariably return to my little den that night and vow never to not know Kurosawa again. I google him, I stalk him in the entertainment listings, I shemaroo him and sniff him out in friendly DVD home libraries, and arm myself with conversational tidbits that would stun the most stalworthy... but the topic just never comes up again. I wait, I tap my toes through time, but no one at any part since then brings up Kurosawa. Fed up with the load of brain luggage, I weakly attempt to introduce him into a party where they are discussing Warhol. A few glares and a couple of refugee like scrambles later, I am back in the tent, this time reading Warhol, and eternally waiting with blank screen anxiety in the midst of words beyond my depth, for the topic that never turns up.