Authority figures need to play it firm but cool.  Always.  Even if some kid is giving them toxic attitude. I know this because I was that kid in my teens. Toxic, defiant — a serious animus toward authority. One spring day in my senior year the vice-principal grabbed my arm in order to…I forget but probably take me to his office for some kind of disciplinary session. And I snapped and shoved him away — a major infraction, grounds for possible expulsion. I was suspended that day and the next but the day after I was told I could return to class. The vice-principal, bless him, had decided to forgive and forget. When I realized he’d cut me a break I felt more respect and affection for that guy than I’d ever felt for my dad, at least up to that point. That God for compassion. Comment:  I’ve no idea what that 16 year-old girl did to piss off Officer Ben Fields, but it probably wasn’t much. She probably told him to go fuck himself, and he saw red. Officer Fields, in any event, is getting schooled right now by the Twitterverse, and is now the newest member of the Famous Racists With A Badge Club.

During her promotional rounds for Supergirl, which premiered last night on CBS, Melissa Benoist has been introduced to audiences as Melissa “Ben-oh-wist,” a yokel mispronouncing of her French name.  Not to be outdone, Melissa pronounces it “Ben-oyst.”  In a hipper, more cultivated realm it would be pronounced “Ben-whah.” Benoist is a close relation of Benoit, a Catholic French male name which means “blessed” in old French. Calling her Melissa “Ben-oh-wist” is roughly analogous to pronouncing Alain Delon‘s last name (pronounced “Deh-lawhn”) so that it rhymes with “felon” or pronouncing Maurice Chevalier‘s last name as “Chevahleer” or Isabelle Huppert (pronounced “Hoohpair’) as Isabelle Hupmobile. How hard is it to say “Ben-whah”? Too hard if you’re from Texas, which is where Benoist, 27, hails from. But it’s not just Southerners — most Americans are total rubes when it comes to respecting foreign pronunications.

I took a six-hour stroll last night — U-Street corridor, Georgetown (including Georgetown University, the gated, two-story brick home in which Chris and Regan McNeil lived during The Exorcist plus the Exorcist steps plus a self-guided tour of Georgetown homes that JFK lived in between ’46 and January ’61), across the bridge into Virginia, down to the Arlington cemetery and back across.

I walked down and back up the Exorcist steps last night. You can’t leap out of Regan McNeil’s second-story bedroom window and onto the steps — way too far.

3307 N Street in Georgetown, where JFK lived from ’57 through January ’61.