The only person ever to discuss the weather with us in any detail was a despondent Hungarian innkeeper and a neighbor who kept asking cheerily, "So what do you think of our Irish weather?" We did once listen to about a dozen takes of Ella Fitzgerald singing "Stormy Weather" and thought the tape was stuck until we realized it was the restaurant's idea of a joke.
In "Lady in the Water," an unseen narrator (David Ogden Stiers) explains that while man once listened to "those in the water," he no longer does, which is why we have gone to hell in a handbasket or words to that effect.
Fannie Hurst once listened.
Ron Meyer, the quiet man who runs Universal Studios, only rarely speaks for an industry that once listened to his predecessors, Lew Wasserman and Sidney Sheinberg.
I once listened to a Carolina wren, the loudest noise the microphone was transmitting, during a Masters tournament in Augusta.
That drama, the film suggests, began way back in a Brooklyn basement, where a father once listened to the secrets of strangers.
The violinist Mischa Elman, renowned for his rich tone, once listened patiently to a backstage visitor's fulsome praise of his violin's sound.
I once listened attentively to a fellow student talk about his research, before he walked away within 30 seconds of me mentioning the "m word".
At Eaton Place, in drizzle, I half expected to run into Richard Bellamy, MP; and when I say that in Berkeley Square I once listened for a nightingale, I'm not joking.
(The head of the secret police, Nicolai Yezhov, once listened in as his unwitting wife got seduced by a prominent writer).
