Savage Reflections

For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 103 and ABC Wednesday

2012-02-05T08:33:00.001-08:00

"D" is for "Discussion"
Berowne has been having another discussion with his muse.

Here is a rare picture of her – rare because she does not usually seek publicity. Berowne is a bit upset because his muse has been absent for quite a while.
Berowne: “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been waiting around for weeks for you.”
Muse: “Well, if you think about it, I wouldn’t have been anywhere – on earth. We muses, or musi, live not just in a separate world but in a separate universe.”
B: “Oh, come off it. Stop trying to make yourself into something special and supernatural. We all know you’re just a figment of my imagination, not someone of flesh and blood, and what that means is that you should show up when you’re needed. You don’t seem to know the rules.”
M: “True, I don’t. Are the rules printed out somewhere? And do they mention pay, benefits, vacations and so on?”
B: “That’s rich. You seem to have just been on vacation for almost a month. What is this, France? At times I just don't feel I have control. But let’s get down to work. Willow has just posted another enigmatic prompt; to answer it I need inspiration.”
M: “Inspiration? Ah, that’s an angry equine – a horse of a different choler.”
B: “H’mm. Good thing I don’t depend on you for puns.”
M: "One of these days it’s going to come out that you depend on me for everything. What I was going to say, before I was so boorishly interrupted, is that what I do is come up with ideas. Most of them are like the children up in Lake Woebegone – above average – but I have to admit that maybe some of the ideas are not that great. However, they’re just ideas. Inspiration is something else. As Jack Nicholson might have said in ‘A Few Good Men,’ you can’t handle inspiration!”
B: “Oh, I could handle it all right, if you’d just come up with it. Anyway, here’s this week’s prompt. What do you make of it?"

M: “Good heavens! Where did you get that?”
B: “I didn’t get it; it’s a prompt. You’re familiar with it?”
M: “Why of course. To us it’s famous. It’s a tribute to us, to me, to the literary muse! It powerfully exemplifies our lives, our struggles. Pushed down, kept in the background, often ignored, we nevertheless manage to bring forth gems – note the powerful symbol of an avant-garde ruby that represents the razor-sharp product of our labor.”
B: “I have to admit I’m impressed. It’s true, I haven’t been as appreciative as I could have been for your efforts. And I know I’ve been a bit churlish in the past…”
M: “A bit?”
B: “But this wonderful picture changes things. I’ll be properly grateful for the invaluable work of my muse in the future.”
M: “Good. Now, could we get back to that discussion of pay and benefits?”

Magpie 102, ABC Wednesday and Three-Word Wednesday

2012-01-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

"C" is for "Commentary"
Ah, free association - what a tool for a writer.
I took what clearly seemed to be an apple in an abstract work of art (above), thought about it for a bit, then combined that thought with all the political shenanigans going on these days, and suddenly remembered a phrase from the past:
“Politics is applesauce.”
Then I recalled who said it – Will Rogers, of course.
It’s kind of sad that there’s a generation of folks these days who don’t know who Will Rogers was.

Well, Will was a guy from Oklahoma who started out making a living as a sort of vaudeville cowboy doing rope tricks and other such cowboy-type stuff.
He came to learn that he got a much greater audience response when he talked, tossing off jokes and witty comment in a detached way, than when he relied on just action, trying to lasso something, for example. That’s when his career surged and took off.

He got on Broadway, then went off to Hollywood. He became a world-famous political wit, humorist and actor – he appeared in seventy-one movies. (!) In the thirties he was not only the highest-paid film star, he was loved by the American people.
I’m old enough to remember, back when Will was off on one of his round-the world flights – in a small aircraft; no 747s then – that it was quite a jolt for me and for the entire country to learn of his death when the plane crashed in Alaska.
I think it’s kind of amazing, and also funny, that Will – eighty years ago – knew all about our 2012 political scene. Here are some examples of his commentary:
"Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke."
“A fool and his money are soon elected.”
"Everybody says this here thing we're involved in ain't a real war. Congress says it ain't a war. 'Course the guys over there getting shot at say it's the best damned imitation they ever saw."
“If stupidity got us in this mess, why can't it get us out?"
“Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?”
And he could be serious too: "I hope there are some sane people who will appreciate dignity and not showmanship in their choice for the presidency"
Look out, Jon Stewart, Will’s gaining on you!
Free association; for a writer there’s nothing quite like it. It can turn Wassily Kandinsky into Will Rogers in a couple of minutes. :-)

For ABC Wednesday, Magpie 101a and Three-Word Wednesday

2012-01-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

I don't usually do reruns. But the prompt this week seems to demand re-posting the following from several years ago.
You see, I was once pleased to be given an interesting assignment: I was to make a movie about a top American corporation. The film would involve some shooting in Japan.

So I flew to Tokyo, ready to go to work. As I got off the plane, I believed that the Japanese were really taking this motion picture project seriously because they were giving me the finest welcome possible. I was surprised to see that I was being met at the airport by a large limo. And not just a limo; the car had a uniformed driver and another chap, also uniformed, who rode shotgun - though in Japan I suppose it would be shogun :-) - in the front passenger seat.
I was able to cruise through the world-famous Tokyo traffic jam in comfort. In fact, I had never had a job, of any kind, that started off so auspiciously. They drove me to their head office and I got to meet everyone. They were all friendly and welcoming; there was a lot of bowing, me doing my share, of course.

It was lunchtime, so they asked if I would prefer going to a steak-house or would I like to try some authentic Japanese food? Well, of course, we had steak-houses back in the Stytes and besides, I thought it would be a good political move to opt for the indigenous cuisine, so we headed off for what I would today recognize as a sushi place.

I say I would recognize it today; I didn’t recognize it then. Truth is, a few decades ago there weren’t many sushi joints in the U S of A, and you certainly didn’t see sushi for sale in just about any American grocery store. Most Yankees of that era didn’t know from sushi; the idea of eating raw fish was regarded as just sort of weird.
However I could see that this restaurant I was being taken to was elegant and upscale – i.e., expensive – so I looked forward to an excellent meal.
But there was a fly in the saki. Something had been worrying me, and it had nothing to do with raw fish. It had gradually dawned on me, as time went on, that I was inadvertently sailing under false colors.
The reason for the great welcome I had received? I came to realize that they thought that I, a humble artisan, a simple, rather impecunious documentary-maker, was actually one of the top executives of the American corporation in question. That explained the limo and its two charioteers.
That was bad enough. Just as bad was the question, how on earth do I go about bursting their bubble, telling them of the mistake? I had heard all about the importance of saving face in the Orient; would they think I had intentionally tried to trick them? Could it result in some sort of international train wreck? Would hara kiri knives be involved in any way?
At this point the waiter served the meal. I felt like I had just come into the big city from Mayberry; I recognized absolutely nothing that was being served. But one thing struck me forcibly. Among everything else on the plate there was a little creature there – who was walking around.
I had never gone in for ambulatory victuals. However, when in Rome… I took up my chopsticks and went after him. He valiantly fought off my preliminary attack. This was followed by a certain amount of thrusting and parrying. Fortunately, I remembered the rules of fencing from my college days. What was odd was that he seemed to know them too.
Then, while I sat there planning my next move, the little fellow climbed over the edge of the plate and lumbered off to the left. The Japanese are a polite people; the two guys with me were trying desperately not to laugh, but not succeeding. The waiter took pity on me and swooped the whatever-it-was away with a towel. In a way I was sorry to see the little chap leave; he had fought well, and with a certain panache.
Well, long story short – it’s been long enough – the gentlemen I was visiting took the explanation of the misconception well enough and, as that great Japanese playwright Shakespeare used to say, all was well that ended well.

For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 100 and ABC Wednesday

2012-01-15T09:36:00.003-08:00

"A" is for "AB"

It’s sort of astonishing that Tess Kincaid came up with the above prompt, which looks like it could well be titled “drowning,” at the same time that news of a spectacular shipwreck was filling the air waves and the newsprint.

I guess everyone is aware of the freak accident of the Costa Concordia during a Mediterranean cruise. The prompt this week hit me hard. You see, years ago I was involved in a shipwreck, and the reason I’ll never forget it is that I was the one who caused it.
To tell you about it, let me take you back to the days when I was just a kid, a humble able-bodied seaman, or AB.
I should also make a couple of points. One, a sailor who is steering a ship, the helmsman, no matter how able-bodied he may be, does not, can not, make even the sliver of an independent decision.
He’s there to steer the thing. He has been given the number of a course, which means he turns the steering wheel a little from time to time so the needle on the compass is constantly on that course heading.
That’s all he does. Turning the ship, even in an emergency, is not for him; that decision is to be made by the officer of the watch. That’s not just the ancient custom of the sea; it is the law.
I remember once I was at the wheel and I could see a small collection of fishing boats, five or six of them, up ahead in the distance just off our starboard bow. They were clustered together; maybe they were all going after the same fish. I believed that if we continued as we were heading we were going to plow into them. The second officer was out on the wing of the bridge; perhaps he hadn’t noticed this.
I could easily have twirled the wheel and swung our ship over to port and avoided the boats. But of course the law was the law; I had the right to call an officer’s attention to the situation but I couldn’t do anything about it.
So I shouted out to him about the collection of boats up ahead off our starboard bow. “I’m aware of it,” he replied.
He’s aware of it, I thought. But maybe he's too dumb to do anything about it.
Turned out, though, that he was smarter than I thought. He knew that the current, and the wind, were drifting from starboard to port. So he knew that by the time our ship got to that area, the little collection of fishing boats would have drifted across our bow and have wound up to the side, well out of harm’s way. So maybe the law made some sense.
Now. Quick segue to a different story.
Having had the sea-going experience, I wanted to try sailing on the Great Lakes.

The vessels on these bodies of water, many of ‘em, are known as “ore boats,” mainly because they carry ore – you see how logical things are in that part of the country?
As you may know, to a true seaman, there’s an important difference between the word “ship” and the word “boat.” It pains him to hear a ship called a boat. Generally, and very loosely speaking, a ship is something big and a boat is something that could be carried on a ship.

But still, they call those Great Lakers, though they may be as large as any ships, “ore boats.”
What can you do?

Anyway, to get to my shipwreck. It is quite tricky to steer one of these huge vessels among the rivers that lead to the Lakes, and to bring them “alongside” to tie up at all kinds of local docks and piers.
I was at the wheel one day while the captain was on the bridge with me. As far as I could see, everything was the same as with a ship at sea. But it wasn’t, as I was to find out.
I had been given a course to steer, but I suddenly noticed that the skipper had left the bridge. At sea, this would be a no-no; there has to be an officer on the bridge when under way. Again, the law.
So I was alone on the bridge and I had the feeling that everything was going downhill: the ship, or boat, or whatever it was, was heading right toward a dock.
I knew the law. I could do nothing but shout, in a kind of piteous cry, for the captain, or somebody, to get the hell up on the bridge or we were going to smash into that dock.
Which we did.
A large quantity of shouts and curses arose from all parts of our vessel. The skipper (finally) rushed up and asked me if I was crazy.
It turned out that things were much more relaxed on the Lakes. A helmsman could maneuver the ship if there was no officer around, and avoid trouble all by hisself.
Who knew?

My shipwreck wasn’t as big a deal, thankfully, as the wreck of the Costa Concordia, but I had destroyed quite a section of a dock, and it was decided that perhaps it would be better if I left the Great Lakes and got back to being an AB on seagoing boats – er, ships.

For Sunday Scribblings and Three-Word Wednesday

2012-01-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

(Also submitted to Magpie 99 and ABC Wednesday)

"Z" is for "Zenith"
A few decades ago, in Times Square, you could have seen a huge sign publicizing a musical starring one Yuliy Borisovich Bryner, known to film-goers around the world as Yul Brynner.
Then, glancing to the left, you could have viewed a true Broadway legend: an eight-foot bronze statue of George M. Cohan, the only statue, by the way, of an actor on Broadway.
They both reached the zenith, as far as their profession was concerned. But even though they belonged to the same show business tribe, they were a couple of very different guys. For years they and their diverse styles of production sort of summed up what the Great White Way was all about.

George M wasn’t just an actor-producer-director, he was also a singer, lyricist, dancer and playwright; he turned out some 500 songs in his career and he wrote, produced and starred in many musicals.
Way back there, before World War I, he was known as “the man who owned Broadway.”
George M’s songs, like George M himself, often tended toward a kind of super-heated patriotism: “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag…”

He’d been on the stage since he could first walk: for years he was one-fourth of the vaudeville act known as “The Four Cohans.” (The other three were his parents and his sister.) Cohan, by the way, was pronounced Co-han.
Then, glancing over to the right in Times Square you would have come upon the huge sign for Yul Brynner’s “The King and I.” Yuliy’s life story wasn’t much like George M’s. It was a life of almost incredible adventures, forced travel and the occasionally brutal necessity of doing whatever he could to make a living.
Born in Russia, in Vladivostok, the boy was taken to China and then, years later, to Paris. He got work as a trapeze artist with the local circus.

He was a Romani – a Gypsy -- on his mother’s side; when he became a star he was named President of the International Romani Union and he proudly kept that office till his death.

For a few years he had small parts in the Broadway theatre. It was Mary Martin who recommended him for the part he would forever be known for: the King in Rogers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I". It was a hit; he performed it almost 5,000 times on stage -- he must have gotten a bit sick of it. However, Brynner became an immediate sensation in the role, repeating it for film and winning the Oscar for Best Actor.

Yuliy was noted for his distinctive voice and for his shaven head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it for his initial role in “The King and I”. Right, Brynner with a cigarette (which is what would kill him).

For several decades Yuliy maintained a starring film career despite his exotic nature. As an actor, he could be trusted to perform with solid professionalism in a wide range of roles from sullen Egyptian pharaohs to Western gunfighters, almost all with the same shaved head and that indefinable accent.

By the way, here’s his naturalization form when he applied for U S citizenship. Note: he had hair. :-)

For Sunday Scribblings and Three-Word Wednesday

2012-01-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

(Also submitted to Magpie 98 and ABC Wednesday)
"Y" is for "Year"

It was on a riverbank just like the one above that there occurred one of the most tragic scenes in Shakespeare:
In the play "Hamlet," it was the year of Ophelia's death.
Not just a tragedy, it was a mystery.
She drowned, but was it an accident or was it suicide?
Surely you’re familiar with Ophelia. She was Hamlet’s true love – not that he really appreciated her.

A daughter of the Lord Chamberlain, she can hardly be said to have lived a normal life; she had been firmly sheltered.
Ophelia clings to the memory of the days when Prince Hamlet had treated her with respect and tenderness, and she defends him and loves him to the very end despite his harsh treatment of her. She is incapable of defending herself, but through her timid responses we see clearly her intense suffering.
Her innocence is not a tactic. She simply cannot cope with the unfolding of one traumatic event after another.
Hamlet causes her emotional pain throughout the play and when she learns he is responsible for her father's death, she has endured all that she is capable of enduring and goes insane.

There follows the scene when she, quite mad, appears before the King and Queen. Ophelia, the very symbol of innocence, sings naughty songs, ditties no one would have expected she would even have been familiar with. They may seem harmless to us, living our dissolute twenty-first century lives, but from Ophelia at that time they’re something of a shock.
For example, she sang:
“Then up he rose and donn’d his clothes,
And op’d the chamber door.
Let in the maid, that out a maid,
Never departed more.”
Her subsequent death by drowning is reported to the court by the Queen, whose announcement of Ophelia's death has been praised as a kind of literary zenith; it’s one of the most poetic reports of death in all literature.[9]

“There is a willow grows across the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name."

"Down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up, but long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch to muddy death.”
But there’s one thing that has always bothered me about this; it’s the mystery I mentioned earlier. The Queen makes the report as one who had been there, watching.
How could she have watched all this and done nothing to save the girl?
In addition, did Ophelia fall in or was it suicide?
Later, at her funeral, we see a sexton at the graveyard insisting she had killed herself and that the religious ceremony must be curtailed. Her brother Laertes is outraged by what the cleric says, and replies that Ophelia will be an angel in heaven when the cleric "lies howling in hell.”

For Sunday Scribblings and Three-Word Wednesday

2011-12-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

(Also submitted to Magpie 97 and ABC Wednesday.)
"X" is for "Xanax"

Since New Year’s eve is close upon us, my resolution is to tell the story of how I was once living on a Pacific isle with Marilyn Monroe.
How many bloggers can make that claim? :-)
I never thought of Norma Jeane Baker – which is what her real name was – as sexy.

She had such an incredibly miserable childhood, which later became a miserable adulthood, that I found I could feel only compassion and sympathy for her.
(Yes, she spelled it “Jeane,” with one “n.”)
As a child, she was bounced around from orphanage to various depressing foster homes and back again; her mother, Gladys, was, as the saying goes, mentally unstable. It might seem that she would have been a candidate for the drug Xanax, but it didn't exist at that time. (I had to work an "x" in here somewhere.)
When Norma Jeane was six, living with foster parents, Gladys showed up and insisted on taking her away. Since she was shouting and acting unhinged, the foster parents refused to turn Norma Jeane over to her.
Gladys ran into the house, stuffed the screaming kid into a duffel bag, zipped it up and tried to run away with her. The bag split open and the child fell to the ground.
In her autobiography, Norma Jeane wrote that it was not long after this that her mother, "screaming and laughing," was forcibly removed to the state hospital. All this pretty well demolished anything resembling a chance at a normal life for young Norma Jeane.

Somehow the girl lived through this dismal childhood; here she is getting ready to enter Van Nuys High School.

It was there that she met Jim Dougherty. They were married in ’42.

Quick segue to an entirely different story.
At about this time, soon after Pearl Harbor, young Berowne went down and patriotically enlisted, primarily because he had to. :-)
My boot camp was on Catalina Island, which had been transformed from a vacation paradise off the Southern California coast to a huge wartime training camp.
Turned out, Jim Dougherty had become a section leader there, training the boots, and I was one of the boots. He lived on the base with his wife, a very young Norma Jeane Dougherty.

There you have it: Marilyn Monroe and I were together on a Pacific island. Note her big smile: she’s possibly saying, “Wow! I’m going to be with Berowne on this Pacific isle!”
But then again, maybe not. :-)

She later, after Dougherty left, got into war work back on the mainland, spraying airplane parts with fire retardant. Long story short, a “Yank” magazine photographer took her picture; as a result she ultimately wound up with a 20th-Century Fox film contract at an impressive $125 a week.
Which was a helluva lot more than I was making at the time. :-)

For Three-Word Wednesday, ABC Wednesday and Magpie 96

2011-12-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

"W" is for "Whim"
In the old days, when my son was young, we tried home-schooling. A typical class would go like this…
“Did you find the play difficult?”
“Not really, Dad. I got through it okay.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, it’s about this couple, Lady Macbeth and her husband, Mister Macbeth.”
“That’s a good start. Go on.”
“They’ve got this friend – wait a minute, I’ve got his name here somewhere – yeah, it's Duncan; I knew it had something to do with donuts. Anyway, they’ve got this friend named Duncan who comes to visit. Didn’t turn out well. He sort of checked in and didn’t check out, if you see what I mean.”
“You mean he was killed?”
“You could put it that way.”
“And who did the killing?”
“Well, that’s the thing. They both were in on it, Lady MacB and her old man. Both of ‘em. At first it was just a whim; something they talked about, but then it got serious. Actually, MacB had a firm belief that you didn’t do stuff like that – kill your best friend -- but she egged him on. ‘You can do it! You de man!’ she’d yell at him, and like that.”
“So he went along and committed the murder?”
“Exactly. Here’s a picture of the couple after the killing.”

“H’mm. Some picture. She looks a bit rumpled, and he’s just a shadow.”
“You gotta remember that photography was very new in those days.”
“What about motive? Why did they kill Duncan?”
“Well, you see, Macbeth had a title; he was Thane of Cawdor. Now I guess Cawdor wasn’t much of a town so being Thane of it was sort of small potatoes, if you see what I mean. He wanted something better.”
“As did Lady Macbeth?”
“Oh, man, did she ever! She figured that if they offed Duncan she could wind up as First Lady. She’d be able to throw all the festive parties and so on. Which is exactly what happened.”
“But later she had a change of heart?”
“You’re assuming she had a heart to begin with. But yeah, after a while she began to feel pretty crummy about having liquidated their friend. In fact, it seems she was totally heading over to the unhinged side of town, if you follow my meaning.”
“You do have a novel way of putting things.”
“Show you how crazy she was, she had a dog named Spot. An indoors-type of pooch; never liked the outdoors. She’d yell at him: ‘Out, damned Spot!’ but he wouldn’t budge.”
“I see. A bit of humor.”
“Gotta do something to liven up these lessons.”
“What later happened to Macbeth?”
“Well, actually, I didn’t read any farther than this. As I get it, the dude wound up in a forest named Dunsinane, or something like that. Probably got lost in it. Things like that happened a lot in those days.”

For Three-Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday

2011-12-11T09:16:00.000-08:00

(Also for Magpie 95 and Sunday Scribblings)
"V" for "Victory"

The above picture might rather nicely, if surreally, suggest a war adventure ol’ Berowne had a few decades ago.
You see, truth is, ol’ Berowne is just that: ol’. He’s been on this earthly planet for an impressive number of years. He served, perhaps not as heroically as some of the others, but he nevertheless served in World War II.
And that war adventure took place in the South Pacific in 1943.

My ship, which was heavily loaded with huge drums of aviation-octane gasoline, was scheduled to leave Australia for New Guinea, where large numbers of aircraft were waiting for us so they could get on with the war.
However, we had earlier on this assignment committed the faux pas of running smack into the Great Barrier Reef, leaving our vessel with an enormous hole in the bow that you could have driven a jeep into. This rendered us almost immobile; actually, it meant that we were forced to creep along at about three knots – about the speed of a tired man walking – to return back to our Australian port.
I was just a kid then and, along with the other crew members, we weren’t feeling all that bad about the hole in the bow. After all, it meant the ship would have to go down to Sydney into drydock while they fixed things, and that meant the crew could enjoy a week or two of Sydney high life while the war was put on hold.
However, an official, some sort of grand panjandrum who was in charge of things, came aboard with news. It seems, he said, they were so desperately in need of our drums of gas up there in New Guinea that authorities decided to send us anyway.
This seemed, to everyone on our ship, simply insane.

Not only did that hole in the bow slow us to three knots, but the Australian coast at that time was looked upon as a happy hunting ground for Japanese submarines. They were sinking ships there in '43 about as fast as they could be built.
And did this geezer realize what our cargo was? This was before jets; warplanes then used gasoline – and aviation-octane gasoline was one of the most volatile and dangerous substances on earth. A sub wouldn’t even have to use a torpedo; one well-placed machine gun bullet could easily blow up our ship.
Well, it seems he had thought of that.

They were going to provide us with our own personal Australian corvette. A corvette was like a small destroyer and its job was to hunt subs. Usually, since they were in short supply, they were restricted for use only with large convoys; however, in this special case – i.e., a ship with a vitally important cargo that could only limp along at three knots – they’d let us have one.
He thanked us all for volunteering for this dangerous mission. None of us could remember having volunteered, and we didn't quite know how to un-volunteer. :-) He made the V for Victory sign and left.
The plan was for the corvette to tightly circle our ship continuously, 24 hours a day, while we crept north. Having a corvette in such close proximity to our ship would hopefully discourage any ambitious Japanese sub commander from trying anything.
It seemed to work. We inched our way along without being attacked. How those Aussie corvette guys must have hated us: endlessly having to circle, circle, day after day.
Anyway, long story short, we finally arrived at the harbor in the New Guinea jungle and anchored. Our captain went ashore to report to the general. Loud shouting was heard from his office.
Seems the two-star guy was angry. Why did they keep sending him all that gasoline? He already had plenty and he didn’t have a fuel depot or any other way to keep more in the jungle. He ordered our skipper to turn around and take it all back to Australia.
The cap’n pointed out we had this big old hole in the bow, and the Aussie corvette had taken off in a hurry once we got there. The general wasn’t interested. “Take it back!” he said.
The skipper, pretty angry himself when he came back aboard, seemed to be bent on retribution. He had us take off the hatch covers and fire up the winches. He began to pick up the drums, one by one, and just dump them in the harbor. (Gasoline floats.) Once the army saw this happening they had a change of heart and sent ducks – the large amphibious trucks – and we loaded it all on to them.
The above may seem to be fiction, an old guy's fairy tale, but it's what happened.
At any rate, I didn’t get to Sydney on that trip but I did on several others. That city was then, I can personally assure you, paradise for an American serviceman. Ah, those beautiful Australian girls; they're grandmothers now. I’d like to think that a few of them look back and remember Berowne fondly, just as he fondly remembers them.

For Three-Word Wednesday

2011-12-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

(Also for ABC Wednesday and Magpie 94)
"U" is for "Unforgettable"

This week’s prompt illustrates beautifully how the custom of communal dining, which ideally should be a chance for people to come together to enjoy delicious food, good company and conversation, is so often merely the process known as eating.
A meal with others can be a communal event, a sharing of both time and space, something as old as the discovery of fire when presumably prehistoric types sat around the cave near the single heat source that was used to cook their food.
In other words, a shared meal can have meaning; a chance to strengthen bonds or perhaps get to know someone better. In this week’s prompt, possibly a hurried lunch, that meaning is lacking.
I suddenly remembered how important a meal was to one of William Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters, Shylock.
You see, when it came to communal dining, Shylock was against it.
This was not just because the food the Christians of his city ate was different from his Jewish fare; it was because he would go only so far in his relations with them.
He is blunt about it. “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, but I will not eat with you.”
I think it’s quite possible that Will Shakespeare never met a Jew, which is a bit odd when you realize that he created possibly the most famous Jew in all of English literature. For centuries, Jewish characters had appeared in various types of productions as villains, existing in Elizabethan England only as stereotypes and evil, mythical figures. These stereotypes were the playwright’s source for his play.
So the general understanding of that time was that Jews, first and foremost, hated all Christians, and might go to great lengths, if given the opportunity, to do harm to them.

So Shylock, though seemingly a passive man, was actually a cruel and miserly figure, and this would have fitted the usual, sereotypical view of a Jew of that era. But Shakespeare created a character who was also a devoted family man, a person of intelligence, someone even with a sense of humor – and someone who was not afraid to raise his flag against perceived enemies. Shylock was, in short, a human being whose behavior was the result of decades of cruelty by Venetian citizens. Above, Shylock with his daughter, Jessica.
As you undoubtedly know, in the play, during the famous trial sequence, Shylock is stymied when he tries to cut his pound of flesh from Antonio. The beautiful Portia, the play’s heroine, transmogrified into a lawyer, plays her ace: the contract didn't say anything about blood and it's against the law for a Christian's blood to be spilt.
As a result, because he had attempted murder, Shylock is stripped of all his wealth.
Then something interesting happens. The court, showing great magnanimity, will allow him to convert to Christianity.
No one of that time – and perhaps this was true of Shakespeare, too – seems to have realized that this great gift couldn’t have been regarded as such by Shylock.
He had lost his case, lost his fortune, even lost his daughter – who had married, to his disgrace, a Christian – and now he had nothing. He just wanted to get out of there.
“I pray you give me leave to go from hence,” he says. “I am not well.”

(By the way, I posted about Al Pacino’s “Merchant of Venice” a couple of months ago, but I thought I could refer to the play again because the character Shylock is one of Shakespeare’s most interesting, most complex and most challenging.)

For Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-11-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

(Also submitted to ABC Wednesday and Magpie 93)
"T" is for "Tape" - Audio Tape
Try to picture this scene. I was young – this was years ago - and I was working at a New York radio station.

At that time, audio tape was very new; it had just come on the scene. For the broadcasting business, audio tape’s ability to reproduce music and speech in high fidelity was a fantastic breakthrough.
And now our radio station had received one of the very first audio tape recorders that was portable. The word “portable” wasn’t exactly accurate; you couldn’t carry the thing. It was huge. It was, in fact, a kind of blunderbuss. But it had wheels so you could lug it around.
(Today, of course, you can record with a device about the size of a pinhead.)

A press agent learned our station had this remarkable portable machine. He phoned one of his clients, famed movie star Ginger Rogers, who was then living at the Waldorf-Astoria, and told her she wouldn’t have to go to radio stations any more to do interviews. She could sit at her leisure at home, or at her hotel, and an interviewer would come and record her, and what she had to say would be on the air the next day in excellent high fidelity.
She thought it was a fine idea and was all for it. Previously she had phoned in interviews to radio stations from time to time but the voice quality of a phone line was very poor.
At the station, I had learned as much as I could about this new tape recorder. I could take it apart and put it together without a problem. So, callow youth though I was, I received this important assignment.

As you may imagine, this was about the biggest thing that happened to me during my time as a beginner in radio. Ginger Rogers! True, she wasn’t the world-famous star she had been a decade or so earlier -- the Fred and Ginger whose marvelous dancing brought joy to millions around the world -- but she was still a major celebrity; she commanded an imperial suite in the Waldorf. It was a fantastic assignment for a young guy.
I showed up, bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, right on time, lugging the huge recorder behind me. She greeted me in a friendly way, obviously pleased to be taking part in this marvelous new technological adventure.
(I knew how to behave with celebrities; I didn’t want her to think I was just part of a mob of fans. And I made sure I didn’t commit the faux pas of saying I had been interested in her career since I was a little kid.)
I was a bit surprised that she had chosen, of the various rooms of her suite, the smallest one for our interview. I guess it was because it was where she felt the most relaxed.
The room was full, chock-full, of literally hundreds of knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, gewgaws, curios – evidently just about everything in the form of an award or memento she had ever been given. The items ranged from the obviously expensive to junk that would have been jettisoned except that it was probably kept for sentimental reasons.

This small room was not only jammed full of stuff; there was only one place to sit – on something that used to be known as a settee. This small sofa, very much like the one in the prompt, was evidently also a memento of some kind. It was not new, not in good condition; perhaps the reason she kept it was that it had been part of her youth, a reminder of her home back in Missouri, where she was raised.
At any rate, it was a strange situation. I was sitting with her on this small couch, trying to rig up the equipment for the interview.

No one had told her that the recording machine for her interview was, as far as she could see, as big as a small house. Or that it took quite a while to assemble before it could operate.
So I began the process of setting it up. She sat next to me, still trying to smile pleasantly, though I sensed that she was beginning to wonder if this was such a great idea after all.
Perspiring a bit, I took the whole contraption apart, got out my eleven-inch reels, installed them, threaded the tape in the intricate manner of that time, unpacked the mike, attached it to its stand, found the power supply, made all the connections, did a test or two, etc., etc.
As I say, this went on for quite a while. The smile disappeared from her face.
Anyway, we finally got to the interview. I asked the questions and she answered. She covered the usual celebrity topics: she talked about her film career, her travels, her friends, how in Rome Alfredo had invented a special sauce for her, etc.
I then began the lengthy process of closing the infernal machine up for travel.
After I finished this, finally, I bade her adieu – she didn’t seem all that sorry to see me go – and I headed out the door.
As I mentioned, her room was absolutely stuffed with all these gewgaws and mementos. It was a place where no one should ever enter if you were lugging a large blunderbuss with you. As careful as I was, a portion of the huge tape recorder managed to bump against a couple of the items on display and knock them off.
Disaster. At least two, possibly three, of these bric-a-brac pieces broke into – to use a technical scientific term – smithereens.
I felt terrible. I had no way of knowing if I had busted something of monetary or of sentimental value, or both. I apologized profusely.
You could see she was angry but was trying to hold it in. She didn’t start yelling at me, though I’m sure she felt like it. I got out of the place as fast as I could.
Years later, to show my grandkids their granddad had hobnobbed with the stars in his youth, I told them about my adventure with Ginger Rogers. They were impressed.
“Who’s Ginger Rogers?” they asked.

For Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-11-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

(Also submitted to ABC Wednesday and Magpie 92)
"S" is for "Special"

Me: You’re finally here? I thought you had forgotten all about me and gone off for good.
My Muse: No, no; I’ve just been busy. We had our national muse convention last week. You called about something?
Me: Well, it’s the usual. As you know, Tess K posts a prompt each week and I’m supposed to come up with some brilliant ideas, remarks, observations, bon mots, whatever, in response. So I could use your help.
MM: Ah, yes, the Magpie prompt. I see it’s about love this week. I have the feeling that’s a subject you don’t know much about, not being all that lovable yourself. (Laughs)
Me: Please, forget the jokes. You’re my muse; you should avoid wounding my ego, not to mention my amour propre.
MM: “Amour propre,” eh? If I’m not mistaken, that’s the only kind of amour you’ve been getting any of for the past few years.
Me: You really are annoying. How does one go about asking for a change of muse?
MM: Oh, it’s complicated. Wouldn’t do any good anyway. All the good muses are working for important people -- me, I wind up with someone like you.
Me: I’m warning you; one of these days I’m going to try writing without you.
MM: That’ll be the day. All right, I'll put you out of your misery; I’ll toss you some quotes and you see if you can do something with them.
Me: Fire away.
MM: How about this? “True love is like a ghost; everyone talks of it, few have seen it.”
Me: You made that up?
MM: Well, no. It’s by a buddy of mine, Frank. I call him that but his full name is Francois de la Rochefoucauld.
Me: Yes, but that’s so seventeenth century. You got anything a bit more modern?
MM: How’s this? “Love is an electric blanket with somebody else in control of the switch.”
Me: A bit hollow but I like it. However, this is the 21st century. I don’t mean to be shallow but have you anything with more emphasis on, say, carnality?
MM: You should like this. It’s Woody Allen’s. “The last time I was inside a woman was when I went to the Statue of Liberty.”
Me: Great. Now we’re really cooking.
MM: As usual, I do the cooking and you get the credit. But that’s what it means to be a muse.
Me: Right. If you don’t like it you can always go into some other line of work. Now, how about something special -- a sad quote for instance?
MM: Well, this is by another friend of mine, Anon. “The saddest thing in the world, is loving someone who used to love you.”
Me: That’s really fine. Actually, we seem to be getting along okay. Maybe I’ll vote to keep you as my muse.
MM: I’m overcome with gratitude.
Me: Now something appropriate for a closer?
MM: Well, this is by that ancient philosopher, F Sinatra:
“Who knows where the road will lead us
Only a fool would say,
But if you let me love you
I'm sure to love you…All the Way.”

For Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-11-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

(Also for ABC Wednesday and Magpie 91)
"R" is for "Revolutionary"

The prompt this week struck me with force. It’s as though it could easily serve as illustration of a famous event that happened on one hot July day in Russia back in 1918.
The girl stares about her, unable to comprehend the enormity of an incredible catastrophe. The empty chairs represent the members of her family, all slaughtered by revolutionary Bolsheviks. She alone survived.
For me, this provided the impetus to write the following story. Since it was posted almost two years ago, I thought folks might not mind if I submitted it again. Here ‘tis…

Victor: I’ve told you before, I don’t like doing this.
Mike: I know, but this is something special. I really need your help. An expert like you can tell me if this thing is worth real money. If so, well, there’s a big chunk of dough in it for you.
Victor: All right, let me have a look at it.

Mike: There. What do you think? Somethin’, isn’t it? Go ahead, take your time, no hurry. Look it over good.
Victor: I don’t need to look it over. I know exactly what it is.
Mike: You do? You mean it’s famous?
Victor: You could say that. How did you get this?
Mike: There are two young men who sort of work for me. They – er – acquired it.
Victor: You’re a fence, aren’t you, Mike? And the two young men are punks who steal stuff for you, right?
Mike: Now, wait a minute. How they got it or how it got here isn’t the question. All I want to know from you is, what’s it worth?
Victor: What did you pay for it?
Mike: Well, I figured I could always sell it for fifty dollars – a hundred if I’m lucky. So I gave them thirty-five bucks for it.
Victor: Thirty-five bucks. Unbelievable…
Mike: It’s worth more? A lot more?
Victor: To you it’s worth nothing. You wasted your thirty-five bucks.
Mike: What are you trying to pull? It’s gotta be worth something.

Victor: Let me give you a bit of history. Way back in 1918, the Russian royal family, the Romanoffs, may have begun the year thinking they were firmly established as rulers of Russia. But that year they were brutally voted out: the entire family was assassinated by revolutionary Bolshevik secret police. You’ve heard about this?
Mike: Sort of.

Victor: Then maybe you also heard that one of the daughters, Anastasia, managed to live through the assassination attempt and escaped. She later lived in Europe for years under the name of Anna Anderson. The word got around in recent years that she had moved to the States and spent the rest of her life here. Nobody could verify this; instead of seeking vindication, all she wanted was to avoid all publicity.
Mike: And this thing belonged to her?
Victor: You guessed it. She had this magnificent ceremonial Easter egg with her at all times as a kind of solace, and it was the only thing she had been able to save.
Mike: And you’re trying to tell me it isn’t worth anything?

Victor: It isn’t worth anything to you. That girl, just a teenager at the time of the assassination attempt, was a royal princess: the Grand Duchess Anastasia. If you could put this up for auction now I imagine the bidding would begin at around twenty million dollars.
Mike: Holy smoke!
Victor: But if you tried to sell it you’d have cops and FBI and Interpol and God knows who else after you. Your life would be in danger. And the law would learn a lot about your operations you’d just as soon they didn’t know.
Mike: You wouldn’t consider buying it, would you?
Victor: I would not. There’s never going to be anything but headaches with this. Way I see it, the person who owns it – or owned it before it was stolen from him – was keeping it very quiet, and probably for good reason.
Mike: So what am I supposed to do?
Victor: I’ll tell you what you should do. Pay the two hoodlums who stole this to carefully take it back to the home they stole it from. Leave it on the doorstep with a note saying “Easter egg. Happy Easter!”

For Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-11-06T11:19:00.001-08:00

(Also for ABC Wednesday and Magpie 90)
“Q” is for “Quotation”

This week’s Magpie prompt reminded me of a Shakespeare play, one I’m sure you’re familiar with. And of course when I think of Shakespeare I think of quotations.
Before we get to the quotation in question, let me set the scene.

The story really begins with a huge ball, an elegant party Old Man Capulet throws because he’s going to marry off his daughter Juliet to a man he has chosen for her.

But there’s a hitch: Juliet falls in love with another, a chap named Romeo, a Montague who showed up at the party uninvited.
The Capulets hate the Montagues and have for many decades. (No one alive remembers the reason for this feud; it just keeps rolling along under its own power.)
As you might imagine, everyone drank too much at the party, which happens at quite a few parties, I am informed. Old Man Capulet feels that life is good. However, he isn’t aware that his daughter has not only fallen in love with this Romeo fellow but is actually married to him.
Juliet knows her dad is going to insist she marry the other man; she’s despondent, wants to end it all. However, she is given a secret potion that will simulate death but allow her to regain consciousness later, and then she and Romeo can, hopefully, go off and live together.
She musters up the courage to drink the potion. The Capulets are overcome with grief at the news of what they believe is their daughter’s death and she is interred in the family’s burial vault.
A message is sent to Romeo to make sure he understands that the potion Juliet has taken will allow her to recover consciousness later. Unfortunately, tragically, he does not receive the message; he believes that Juliet has died and her body is in her family’s vault.
When he arrives he delivers these powerful lines (and this is the quotation I had in mind):
“Here lies Juliet,
And her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light.
O my love, O my wife,
Death, that has sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
I will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again.”

For Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-11-03T03:39:00.000-07:00

A few years ago a New York theatre critic wrote: “A snoozy Broadway season has been bolted wide awake by the arrival of a play drenched in juicy timeless issues -- racism, revenge and romance for dollars.”

“Forget that the work is 400 years old. The cause for cheers is the stirring version of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ starring Al Pacino, a supernova you already know, as the moneylender Shylock.”

No matter what you think of Al Pacino playing Shakespeare, “Merchant” is a fascinating play. But what the play means is even more interesting.
After all, the plot is fairly well known. Shylock is a Jewish moneylender who lends dough to a Christian, Antonio, setting the security at a pound of Antonio’s flesh if the loan isn’t repaid on time.

Later Antonio, bankrupt, can’t pay back the loan so Shylock, acting like what we today might call an awful jerk, demands his pound of flesh. At the trial, the beautiful leading lady of the play, Portia, switches gender to play a “doctor of law” who tries to save Antonio’s life, arguing for mercy in a famous speech:
“The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

Shylock, however, “wins” the case and gets set to collect his pound of flesh. But Portia, at the last minute, punctures his balloon; she points out that the contract only allows Shylock to remove the flesh, and not one drop of blood, so the carnage is avoided. Antonio’s life is saved and the money-lender is defeated.
(By the way, the actual “merchant” of Venice is Antonio, not Shylock.)
As I suggested, what the play “The Merchant of Venice” has meant to audiences throughout the past few centuries is kind of fascinating. Is it an anti-Semitic play? Does it reflect not only the general anti-Semitism of the Elizabethan age but Will Shakespeare’s own anti-Semitism?
Or is it Shakespeare’s plea for tolerance?
The history of the play’s productions is interesting. In some versions Shylock has been presented as a cruel caricature: heartless, hateful, greedy. In others, he is a more sympathetic character.
The Nazis, by the way, loved the play. At the beginning of World War II, “Merchant” was playing in numerous German cities. They changed it a bit: Shylock’s daughter, who was of course Jewish, did not marry a Christian, as Shakespeare had written.

A question that has often been asked is, what did Will Shakespeare feel about the character he created named Shylock? Will lived in a society – 16th-century England – that was, from our twenty-first century standpoint, almost incredibly anti-Semitic. So his Shylock was seemingly greedy and heartless, as his audiences would have expected, but it’s worth noting that the playwright created a character, the money-lender, who also had pride, energy, even a sense of humor. He could be seen as an omen, what happens to a person who is scarred by years of never-ending persecution and discrimination.
Shakespeare wrote some of his best-known lines for Shylock to deliver:
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
An anti-Semitic play or a plea for tolerance? What’s your opinion?

For ABC Wednesday and Magpie 89

2011-10-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

(Also for Three-Word Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings)
"P" is for Phone Conversation

I had sat at the typewriter for over an hour, trying to figure out what to write. (This happened back in the days before I got around to email.)
I had received an extraordinary letter. It was from a man up in Rhode Island, a man I had known in the old days.
It was a delicate matter; I had known him and also known his wife, back before they were married. I had known her, actually, rather well.
In his letter he said she had left him and he thought I might be able to help him find her. The problem of what to write was suddenly solved because the phone rang. Since he hadn’t received an answer to his letter he decided to call me directly. He got right to the point.
"Reason I wrote you, you went with her for a year or so back then, before we got married."
“A year or so? It was actually a few months. And ‘went with her’ isn’t really accurate; we were friends.”
“That ain’t what I heard.”
“So, well, anyway, how is Marilyn? Okay I hope.”
“Marilyn? You don’t even remember her name. It’s Maureen.”
“Oh, right. You know, it was a long time ago; I was just out of college. I don’t remember everyone I knew in those days.”
“Well, as I wrote you, she left. Just got up and left.”
“Yes, I was sorry to read that.”
“It got me upset; my whole family is upset. It even got her family upset. A married woman. My wife. Just up and leaves. Anyway, I thought you might help.”
“Sure, if I can.”
“Here’s the thing. If she should ever contact you – you know, call on the phone to talk over old times or whatever – could you tell her that what she really ought to do is go back to her husband. And then let me know where she’s staying. It’s important that I find out where she’s staying.”
“Why do you think she left?”
“Who knows? Maybe she just don’t like Rhode Island.”
“She told me, way back when she was first talking about getting married, that she felt vulnerable, that you weren’t – well – all that nice to her.”
“That’s baloney. If she said anything like that, it was a figment of her imagination. As her husband, I worked hard, fifty hours a week sometimes, to get her whatever she needed. You can’t be much nicer than that.”
“But, you never – I’m just trying to figure out why she left -- you never abused her, never hit her or anything like that?”
“What’re you -- a shrink or somethin’!? I didn’t call you to get a lecture! I’m a husband from the old school. My whole family, we know how to treat women.”
“Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of much help. But I'll go along with you in this operation; if I should ever hear from her, I’ll tell her to go back to her husband. Goodbye.”
I hung up the phone.
“Was that him?” she asked.
“Yes. I just hope he stays up there and doesn’t come down here to New York. As I remember, he was a pretty big guy. I’d be inclined to avoid a confrontation.”
“Yes, we’ve got to be careful. When I mentioned divorce, he said he’d kill me first.”
“And that would mean me second. I guess this is what they call living dangerously. But it’s worth it, Maureen – to have you with me again.”

For ABC Wednesday

2011-10-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

(Also for Magpie 88 and Sunday Scribblings)

O Mannahatta!
"I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name:
Mannahatta!
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
musical, self-sufficient.
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see that word nested in an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded.
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong,
light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.
The down-town streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the houses
of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the
river-streets.
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week.
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft.
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river,
passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide.
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd,
beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.
Trottoirs throng'd, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
A million people--manners free and superb--open voices—-hospitality.
City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! Mannahatta, my city!"
Walt Whitman
(P. S. It's always been my backyard. --Berowne)

For Three-Word Wednesday

2011-10-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

(Also for Magpie 87, Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday)
"N" is for "Nice"

A few decades ago I had a great job, making motion pictures around the world for various national governments and American businesses.
One of the assignments was to make a film on Taiwan.

The island of Taiwan – (and, by the way, their preferred name is the Republic of China) – is a beautiful place, a perfect subject for a documentary film-maker.

I shot footage of the usual attractions, as might be expected. But the government agency I was working for wanted me to be sure to include a sequence on the food.
Because the food on Taiwan is really good.

There’s a solid historical reason for this. When the Communists took over mainland China, back in 1950, they closed down the great hotels and the fine restaurants; such things didn’t fit in with Marxist philosophy.

So the great Chinese chefs took off, along with everyone else who could get out, for Taiwan. Result: for many years the island had the best Chinese food on the planet.
My clients wanted me to show this in the film I was making for them, and especially to emphasize one of the great national dishes, Peking Duck.

I had heard about this dish, but I had never had a chance to taste it in its authentic form. It has been around for quite a while; some say almost a thousand years.

So I arranged for a sequence for my film, shot in a Taipei restaurant. During the shoot, I had a brilliant idea.
(Like so many of my brilliant ideas, it didn’t work out too well.)
My view was that preparing Peking Duck wasn’t all that difficult. You see, back home in New York I had always wanted to be considered, by admiring friends and relatives, as a competent amateur chef. How satisfying it would be if I used what I learned here to prepare a really nice dish: Peking Duck. I could imagine a large, full-color photograph of me as a champion Peking Duck chef, with a note reading: "You Are Here."
Again, it didn’t look too hard. You just had to have, first of all, a duck – which would be sort of a basic requirement – and such stuff as scallions, hoisin sauce, etc., etc.
A small, tentative voice within me said, you can do this!
You’d think I would have learned never to listen to that small, tentative voice.
It was back home in New York that I was forced to face the basic fact about cooking Peking Duck – it ain’t easy.
Of course, some of the steps weren’t too difficult. Completely cleaning and eviscerating, the bird? Okay, I could do that. I began to get an idea of what a project this would be when I learned that I was supposed to hang it to dry for 24 hours.
I tried to think of what to say if other members of my condominium association dropped in and saw this small carcass hanging in my apartment - surely that might be regarded as a breach of condo rules? But the next bit was even worse: you were supposed to actually blow air through the crevices between the skin and meat; this would remove excess fat.
The reaction of those same folks who dropped by if they saw me blowing air into a duck – well, that could only be imagined.
At one point a sentence in the recipe caught my eye: "Total preparation time 11 hours and 20 minutes." It was around then the flame of ambition I had to be a Peking Duck chef became a dying ember.
Some folks, as it turned out, did drop by and we had a fine meal. I had phoned for Chinese takeout home delivery -- General Tso's Chicken. :-)

For Three-Word Wednesday

2011-10-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

(Also submitted to ABC Wednesday and Magpie 86)
"M" is for "Monarch"

Finally – the news came with this morning’s paper.
I prepared to sit down to breakfast. My Ovaltine was at the ready, steaming hot and inviting.
(I gave up coffee some time back; trying to follow the current economic and political situation has just been too nerve-wracking.)
There could no longer be questions, arguments, accusations, disputes. The major question of the day had been answered and the answer was right there in the paper.
My political party, after months of submitting a seemingly endless list of potential candidates for the office of the Presidency – ranging from the barely acceptable through border-line deplorable, right on down to flat-out objectionable – had cut the Gordian knot and solved the problem.
It was an astonishing piece of news. Their decision: the person to be chosen at the next nominating convention would not be just someone people admire; the candidate would be something they desperately need:
A King.
After being nominated at the convention, our democratically-elected Monarch would be greeted everywhere throughout the land with great enthusiasm and with a cry similar to the one that has greeted royalty through the centuries:
“Vive le Roi des Etats-Unis! Vive le Roi!”

For Sunday Scribblings

2011-10-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

(Also submitted to Three-Word Wednesday, ABC Wednesday and Magpie 85)
"L" is for "Large-Eared"
Me: I didn’t think I could write something suitable for the Magpie 85 prompt this week.
My Muse: Why not?
Me: Well, it’s a picture of what appears to be an elephant that can fly. It’s a bit too obvious: a flying elephant? That means that other folks are going to be writing about that old Walt Disney movie “Dumbo.”

My Muse: Surely not everyone. But even if some do, you can come up with a different angle on the film. Write about the foreign situation at that time, World War II, the Great Depression…
Me: What does that have to do with a cartoon pachyderm that flies?
MM: A lot. Try to get people to imagine what it meant to be sitting in a movie theatre in October, 1941, watching that film. The film viewer doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself; a lot of people weren’t at that time. World War Two, the great conflict so many had feared for the past decade or so, had already begun.
Me: That’s true. In fact, in Europe it had been going on for two years. It depressed us in the States because it seemed inevitable that we were going to be drawn into it.
MM: And remember October, 1941, the date the movie opened. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just a few weeks away. What with the war going full blast overseas, it was a scary time for all. So it was natural that a lot of folks sought to relax at the movies – with a film about a cute little flying elephant named Dumbo.
Me: You may be right. Especially since the key fact about him was that he was – to use a technical scientific term – large-eared. The other animals made fun of him. He was afraid he might be ejected from the circus.
MM: But don’t forget, the fact that he was convinced he couldn’t do something – i.e., fly – and then it turned out that he could, well, it may have cheered some folks up who thought things were fairly hopeless then.
Me: Well, it cheered up Disney. Remember “Fantasia,” that blockbuster of the animation medium? It had opened the year before and didn’t come close to getting its investment back. You see, Walt Disney was tired of turning out nothing but short subjects of cute little cartoon animals; he felt a call to do something Important. So he went for broke with "Fantasia": it was for common folks of course, but with so much classical music and with numerous literate references, very unusual for a cartoon, it was also aimed at the intelligentsia.
MM: Right. And it was a techie breakthrough for the time. The sound track was recorded using multiple audio channels; it was the first commercial film ever to be shown in stereophonic sound, which had a great impact on movie-goers.
Me: But it meant that many theaters couldn’t play it. And of course the War cut out all foreign distribution, so the film lost a bundle. Disney then sought something much simpler to recoup his losses – enter “Dumbo.” I’ve always remembered that song in the movie about the little elephant flying. Most folks don’t realize that it was rendered by the Hall Johnson Choir, one of the finest choral groups of that time. It went like this:

I seen a peanut stand, heard a rubber band
I seen a needle that winked its eye.
But I be done seen 'bout ev'rythin’
When I see a elephant fly.

I seen a front porch swing, heard a diamond ring
I seen a polka-dot railroad tie.
But I be done seen 'bout ev'rythin’
When I see a elephant fly.

I heard a fireside chat, I saw a baseball bat
And I laughed till I thought I'd die.
But I be done seen 'bout ev'rythin’
When I see a elephant fly!

MM: There. So maybe there is something you could write about this week. And oh yes, don’t forget the Manhattan Bridge.

Me: Of course. Not every one knows that there’s an interesting neighborhood in New York City that came into being under the Manhattan Bridge. Above, the Brooklyn Bridge seen from under the Manhattan Bridge. The name of the neighborhood is Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, so everybody knows it as DUMBO. Many folks are proud to say they live in Dumbo.
MM: So the little pachyderm lives on, even today.

For Sunday Scribblings

2011-09-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

(Also submitted to Three-Word Wedneseday, ABC Wednesday and Magpie 84)

The woman in the picture above could very well be Violetta.
Violetta Valery was the lady’s full name and she was the star of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata,” perhaps the most-performed opera in history.
The prompt reminds us of her because it could well be a picture of someone who, like Violetta, is declaring her freedom. Other women were interested in such things as a guarantee of security -- marriage, family, home. Violetta was a person who wanted her independence. She lived a life that was a veritable kaleidoscope of adventures, a life dedicated to joy, beauty, pleasure and romance.

Above: Anna Netrebko, who's not just beautiful but is also one of the greatest sopranos of our present day -- she sang the role of Violetta.
In the opera she played what they used to call, a century and a half ago, a courtesan. It was not difficult to become a courtesan, actually. You just had to be extremely attractive, young, witty, charming, and you had to have a group of rich – and generous -- male friends who would cherish and support you.
Violetta had a life made up of all these and she gloried in that life. One of her best-known arias in the opera is titled “Always Free” – “Sempre Libera.”

Sempre libera degg'io
Folleggiare di gioia in gioia.
Always free, I frolic
From joy to joy.
Vo'che scorra il viver mio
Pei sentieri del piacer.
I run about to feel,
To taste every pleasure.
Nasca il giorno, o il giorno muoia,
Sempre lieta ne'ritrovi.
As the day is born, or as the day dies,
I’m always seeking gladness, happiness.

However, as you might expect, Violetta discovers true love; there’s a chap, a young nobleman named Alfredo Germont, who declares his love for her. At first she laughs him off. Serious love, commitment? She implies that she felt a tinge of nausea at the very thought of such a conventionsl, humdrum life. But of course she changes her mind (or there’d be no opera).

Today Giuseppe Verdi, one of the greatest composers who ever lived, would probably be surprised to learn that there are many women who also have lives dedicated to a kaleidoscope of happiness and beauty, as well as to home and family, and the key point is they have the freedom to do so.

For Sunday Scribblings

2011-09-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

(Also submitted to Three-Word Wednesday, ABC Wednesday and Magpie 83)

It took me a few moments before I realized just who that was in the above picture.
Why of course, it’s Caliban!
You remember Caliban, one of the “stars,” if I may so describe him, of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
There’s always been some question as to just who, or what, Caliban was.

You see, he had this unusual background. His mother, Sycorax, was sort of a – well, to come right out with it – a devil. Which means he was a kind of half-man/half-beast.
He existed on a beautiful island, living peacefully with the birds, the snakes, and all the other critters of the place. But his was a far from happy life because a man named Prospero had showed up, along with his daughter Miranda, on Caliban’s island. Prospero took charge, became master of the place -- and also master of Caliban.
Caliban, who had ruled the island almost as king before, soon became, in effect, Prospero’s slave. He was not treated well by his master.

Prospero explains his carefully thought-out judgment of Caliban by claiming that he had attempted to rape Miranda. Caliban confirms this gleefully, saying that if he hadn't been stopped he would have peopled the island with a race of little Calibans.
He seeks revenge, and he has a lot to say about it; life with Caliban was never dull.

“This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which you took from me! When you came first,
You stroked me and made much of me, would give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I lov'd you,
And show'd you all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
Curs'd be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse."

For someone whose English wasn’t the greatest, Caliban was nevertheless capable of poetic language:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”

For a couple of centuries, scholars, studying this play, have operated under several plans, as far as understanding Shakespeare's motivtions are concerned. Plan A: the playwright, with the character Caliban, was strongly attacking colonialism, racism, slavery – all of which were operating in full force in the playwright’s day.
But Plan B would have it differently. Shakespeare's reaction to such issues would actually have been just a big yawn. In other words, it could be that all he was doing was writing what he hoped would be a successful play.

For Sunday Scribblings

2011-09-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

(Also submitted to Three-Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday.)
“I” is for “Its”
I recently learned that I seem to be suffering from a terrible illness: Punctuational snobbery.
You see, years ago I learned – (I’m not sure how I learned it, but I learned it) – when to use “its” and when to use “it’s.”
So now whenever I see the writing of someone who is still in the dark its-wise, who obviously has no idea when “its” is right and “it’s” is wrong, I’m embarrassed to find that I sort of look down on that unfortunate character, as I would if at an elegant dinner party he was a guy who ate peas with a spoon.
After all, a person can be a fine, upstanding individual, a credit to his community, kind to his mother and good to his dad, and still not grasp the grammatical niceties. So smug punctuational snobs have no right to look down on him.
Somehow, however, even if only a tiny bit, we do. It’s – (there, I just used it) – it’s as though we want to whisper to him: “The fork, buddy, use the fork for peas.”
But you can get the thing right with ease, because the rule is easy:
You use an apostrophe with “it’s” when it is a contraction for “it is” or “it has.” Examples: “It’s a nice day” or “It’s been great getting to know you.”
Otherwise, run with an omission of the apostrophe and write “its”; you can’t go too far wrong.
Punctuation shouldn’t be all-important; there should be no punctuational snobbery, discrimination of a person because he/she is a bit -- punctuationally backward, shall we say? :-)
It’s – (that thing again) – it’s as though we look down on a person at a job interview because he shows up wearing socks of different colors. Shouldn’t really matter, after all.

You know the famous panda story, the one about the murderous gun-toting panda? Seems a wildlife book had described the panda as a “large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Just a misplaced comma, but it turned the peaceful panda into a wild gunslinger.

As you may be aware, Lynne Truss wrote a book about him, a book subtitled “the zero-tolerance approach to punctuation,” and it was a huge best-seller.
It’s – (there it is again) – it’s a fact that for a while she made punctuation popular. :-)

Magpie 82

2011-09-11T10:27:00.001-07:00

I imagine most Magpie posts this week will have the tragedy of 9/11 in mind. I hope that something a bit different, my rather lighthearted piece on ghosts generally, may also be permitted.

You think of ghosts, you think of Shakespeare.
Or you should.
Because Will S. packed so many of these phantoms in his plays it almost seems they came out of the woodwork.
Which of course is what many ghosts do.
Look at the lineup:

First there is the specter who’s probably the most famous of the Shakespearean ghosts, Hamlet’s father. (His dad, by wild coincidence, was also named Hamlet.)

Then there’s the ghoul who wrecked Macbeth’s elegant dinner party, Banquo.

Of course we should also mention Julius Caesar’s pervasive spirit, in the play of that name, who comes back to remind everyone that he’s pretty ticked off about his assassination – as who wouldn’t be?
And we’ve got to add to the list the play about Richard III, Shakespeare’s Bad Guy par excellence, who pretty well hated everyone and who everyone, by the end of the play, pretty well hated him.

He had a whole platoon of ghosts come to torment him. (I counted eleven of ‘em.)
Some of these ghosts had lines; they had things to say. But there’s always been a question in my mind about these phantoms: who saw them?
Because Shakespeare wasn’t consistent. Sometimes the ghosts were seen by just one person; other times they were seen by many.
For example, Banquo, at the dinner party, is seen only by Macbeth; none of the guests at the banquet see him at all. Even Mrs. M – Lady Macbeth – doesn’t see him, yet she’s just as guilty of murder as her husband.
Hamlet’s father, on the other hand, is seen by the night watch at Elsinore castle, who then call this rather bizarre apparition to the young Prince’s attention. They all see the ghost.

But later in his mother’s bedroom, while Hamlet is criticizing his mom for having had carnival knowledge of his uncle Claudius, the specter of his dad shows up again. What’s remarkable is that the old King’s ghost, this time, is seen (and heard) only by his son – his mother sees nothing.
All of which leads to an obvious question: Did Shakespeare believe in ghosts?
My guess (cries of “For what that’s worth!” are heard in the background), is no, he didn’t.
He wrote a lot about witches too, but scholars point out that this probably had a lot to do with the simple fact that Will’s king, James the One, who was the playwright’s patron -- and, let’s face it, his boss -- was very occupied with witches. So Our Will wrote a play that concentrated so heavily on witches it might as well have been titled “The Witches,” but wound up as “Macbeth.”
So I conclude Shakespeare didn’t believe in ghosts or witches or a number of other supernatural types. But truth is, no one knows, or will ever know, just what Will Shakespeare did believe in.

For Sunday Scribblings

2011-09-06T07:26:00.001-07:00

{Also submitted to Three-Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday)
“H” as in “Hong Kong”

A number of years ago I was shooting a film in Hong Kong.
The script called for a sequence with a Chinese farmer and his son, to be shot on a farm well outside the city. I had permission to shoot on the farm for only one day, Sunday, so we had to start early Sunday morning.
The actor playing the farmer was already at the location. With my crew I was waiting for the arrival of the boy who had been hired to play the part of the farmer’s son and who was to come with his mother. The mom, luckily, spoke good English. She would spend the day taking care of the boy while we worked.
But they were late.
We sat there and waited.
Whoever first said that time was money must have been thinking about film production. We waited some more. My confidence began to erode; it was already late, and it was getting later.
Finally, I could see the two of them hurrying toward us. The mother apologized profusely; the lad had slept late. Fine, I said, get in. Let’s go.
As we started off, the woman had a request. Her son had had no breakfast. Couldn’t we get something? He could eat it while we drove to the location.

If you’ve ever been in a position to observe an early Sunday morning in Hong Kong, you’d have the sensation that the place was closed up tight as a drum.
However, I did espy a small hole-in-the-wall sort of place that seemed to be open. It had a sign in front that read “Portuguese Cakes.”
I had no idea what those were but any port in a storm, as the saying goes. I didn’t have the heart to continue the drive without some kind of petit dejeuner for the youngster, so I gave some money to my assistant and told him to get something for the kid’s breakfast.
We waited some more.
When the assistant showed up I was startled to see that he had a large tray loaded with half-a-dozen containers of the aforesaid cakes. It seems that a Portuguese cake, at least in Hong Kong, was a variation on the cream-puff theme: each container had a sizable piece of cake on the bottom with a whopping amount of thick whipped cream on the top. It was difficult just to have to look at such rich food early in the morning.
But that kid had evidently never tasted anything like those “cakes” before; he ate them all, and with gusto.

To get back to our production, no one had told me that the farm, our location, was on top of a hill. Nor that the only way to get to it was on a small winding road – which zigged off to the left, then zagged off to the right, etc., etc.
The inevitable happened.
Our boy actor suddenly let loose with a monumental upchuck, probably of a dimension never before seen in that part of the Orient.
The rear seat of our vehicle – and unfortunately not just the rear seat – was covered with gobs of partially-digested gateaux portugais, which had somehow become transmogrified into something rather like Elmer’s Glue, except that the smell was worse.
As we continued toward the location, I could only wonder if Martin Scorsese ever had problems like this. :-)

Magpie 81

2011-09-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

Why did this week’s prompt hit me on such a personal level?
Because it’s about junk.
Worn-out, no longer used (and no longer usable) junk.
There was a time when the equipment in the photo was new and in excellent working condition. But old age set in, as it does with all mechanical equipment.
As it does, with all of us.
It was Robert Browning who wrote: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be!”
He could not have been more mistaken. :-)
You understand, I’m not complaining; I enjoy my life, even as a certified oldster. But I know that the best of life had to do with those earlier years.
Maxwell Anderson summed it up, in a magnificent, unforgettable lyric:

When I was a young man courting the girls
I played me a waiting game.
If a maid refused me with tossing curls,
I'd let the old Earth make a couple of whirls
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls,
And as time came around she came my way.
As time came around, she came.

But it's a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September.
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few,
September, November…
And these few precious days I'll spend with you.
These precious days I'll spend with you.

For ABC Wednesday and Magpie 80

2011-08-28T13:17:00.000-07:00

"G" is for "Genevieve"

This week’s Magpie prompt reminded me – the prompt always reminds me of something – of a highly unusual French film of a few decades ago. Perhaps you’ve seen it:

“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
What’s unusual about it? Well, the producer had the audacious idea of making a motion picture, a love story – all in song.
Might sound like a bad idea at first thought, but the combination of the music of Michel Legrand and the beautiful colors of the film, along with Catherine Deneuve when she was a young beauty, made it a hit.

Catherine Deneuve, of course, is one of the most famous French movie stars, having made over a hundred films. In "Umbrellas," she plays a young girl named Genevieve, who helps her mother run a chic umbrella shop.
The rather startling thing about this film is that all the dialog, even the most mundane, is sung. I got a kick out of the way the film begins: it’s a garage and a customer has come to claim his car.

Customer (returning to the garage): "Finished yet?"
Mechanic (working on car): "Yep. The engine still rattles when it’s cold, but that's normal."
Customer: "Thanks."
Mechanic: "You bet."
Boss (in the background): "Hey, Foucher--could you stay an extra hour tonight?"
Mechanic: "Tonight would be a problem. But I think Pete’s free. Pete -- could you stay later tonight?"
Pete: “Okay."
Boss: "Fine. Check the ignition of this Mercedes."

There are not many scenes from opera or operetta like that; funny thing, it seems to work.
The love story: the 20-year-old garage mechanic has to leave for two years of military service in Algeria. He and his girl friend, Genevieve, are madly in love and swear to be true to each other. However, he doesn’t write (because he’s been wounded), so she, learning that she’s enceinte, as they say, winds up marrying a different guy.
So the film isn’t a happy-go-lucky romance; you can detect overtones of “Romeo and Juliet” in it, in spite of the bright colors of the umbrellas in the umbrella shop. It’s a tale of love unfulfilled, made very relevant for the time because the characters have to deal with the tragedy of the Algerian War, France’s civil war.

This struck home to me when I saw the film. I was in France in 1962, the year the civil war was at its peak. Right-wing generals of the French army had promised never to give up their treasured colony, Algeria, and vowed to invade to defeat the French government and assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. There was fear everywhere in the city of Paris at that time; people expected paratroopers to drop from the sky, kill the president and take over the country.
They especially feared plastic bombs; they were thought to be everywhere. I was shooting a film at that time and I dropped into a cafe for coffee. Without thinking, I stowed my camera equipment under a nearby table. The place suddenly emptied out and a couple of cops showed up on the double. I managed to convince them I was an innocent American who had nothing against de Gaulle. :-)
To get back to the film, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” has become a classic – probably because there aren’t many of its kind – and can be enjoyed today.

For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday

2011-08-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

“F” is for “Fish”

For those of us who belong to an older generation, today’s popular music is often difficult to appreciate. It doesn’t always seem to make sense.

How different, then, is an old song I heard recently on the radio. Way back in the late 1930s it was the top hit of the land, primarily because of its touching, beautifully nuanced lyrics, very unlike so much of the “music” of today. It was sung by the Andrews Sisters, whom you may have heard of because of their careers in grand opera.

With this song, the Andrews Sisters, aided by their muse, were able to bring out overtones of tenderness and sadness, of serenity and tranquility, as well as of deep psychological understanding.

Join with me now as we study their unforgettable lyric:

Hold tight, hold tight,
Foo-da-yacka-saki,
Want some sea food, Mama?

I like oysters, lobsters too,
And I like my tasty buttered fish, foo!
When I come home late at night
I. Get. My. Fav. Or. Ite. Dish:
FISH!!!

Hold tight, hold tight,
Foo-da-yacka-saki,
Want some seafood, Mama?

They just don’t write songs like that any more. :-)

Magpie 79

2011-08-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

It happened eighty years or so ago.
My grandfather, proudly driving his handsome 1928 Model A Ford – he was young in those days -- was paused at a stop sign in his home town.
A car pulled up alongside him, waiting at the same stoplight.

Grandad smiled and signaled “hello.” The folks in the other car smiled and responded. They could not have known how low he was in spirit.
Something had happened back in New York, down in lower Manhattan, on Wall Street. They called it the Great Crash of ’29. My grandfather’s business, the company he had founded a decade earlier, was wiped out, almost overnight. He suddenly found himself without a job.
Today, so many are experiencing what he experienced. It seems to me that there’s a song of our time that sums up how he must have felt as he waited at that stop light and regarded the smiling folks in the other car. Do you know the song?

I don't know who you are but
I’m with you,
I’m with you.

I’m looking for a place,
I’m searching for a face.
Is anybody here
I know?

Cause nothing's going right
And everything's a mess.
And no one likes to be
Alone.

I don't know who you are but
I’m with you,
I’m with you.

He had his trusty folding Kodak on the seat next to him; he grabbed it and caught a quick picture of the group in the other car, a photograph that remained hidden in an album somewhere for over eighty years.

I don’t know who you are but
I’m with you,
I’m with you.

For Sunday Scribbling and ABC Wednesday

2011-08-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

“E” is for “Major Eberhart”
(Summer, 1944)
“Come in, come in, Colonel. Sit down. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“The pleasure is mine, Ma’am. I hope you’re comfortable here in the hotel.”

“Oh, yes. The Forum is a fine hotel. By the way, we’ve known each other for quite a while; call me Anna.”
“Oh, no, Ma’am. I mean, the General’s wife…”
“Couldn’t we forget all that General’s wife thing for a while? I feel almost as though I was here on vacation. You see, Colonel, I know Bratislava well; I went to school here as a teenager. And now, here I am staying at the famous Hotel Forum.”
“Ma’am, I do apologize for bringing this up, but Major Eberhart has put out an official proclamation doing away with the old name of this city, Brato...”
“Bratislava.”
“Yes. Since March of ’39, this city has a new name, a proper German name: ‘Pressburg.’ That is the only name that we can use when referring to this city in either conversation or in writing.”
“And that is on the orders of – Major Eberhart?”
“Yes.”
“Colonel, I’m a little puzzled. My husband placed you in command here until he arrives next month. You certainly outrank a major. Why is this Eberhart giving orders?”
“Well, Ma’am, it’s a bit complicated. I realize you are new to the army and it must be confusing at times. It’s just that this is the way things are done”

“Is Major Eberhart SS?”
“Yes, but that has nothing to do…”
“I see. Don’t worry; I’ll say no more about it.”
“Perhaps that would be best.”

“Look at this picture, Colonel. Someone slipped it under my door back in Berlin. We were told that the Slovaks welcomed us when we came in ’39. Now here’s a picture of a woman who was forced to give the Nazi salute and she was crying as our troops marched in.”
“No, not at all, Ma’am. That’s a famous picture. Those are tears of joy. She is happy at the thought of her country becoming part of the Third Reich and that it will last for the next thousand years.”
“I see.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Ma’am?”
“Well, yes, Colonel. There is something; I wanted to ask a favor of you. I thought it wouldn’t be difficult – (she laughs) – but that’s before I heard about Major Eberhart! You see, I have a friend here in…uh…”
“Pressburg.”
“Yes. Her husband has been arrested and is being held somewhere here in the city; they won’t tell her where. She swears he has done nothing wrong. This woman is an old school friend of mine, a very close friend, Colonel. I wonder if you could allow the man to be released to go home to his wife and family.”
“I wish I could be of help, Ma’am.”
“It would certainly mean a lot to me. It’s why I made the trip here.”
“I’ll submit the request to the proper authority and we’ll see what can be done.”
“The proper authority – that would be Major Eberhart?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And that means there is little chance that this will happen?”
“Very little.”
“Perhaps there is a way that you could do this without having to bother friend Eberhart, without having to notify him of it?”
“Perhaps I should explain. I could easily do this. I could sign a paper and your friend’s husband would be home with her in a couple of hours. But Ma’am, I would be a dead man! Do you know how the SS handles people they regard as traitors?”
“I have tried not to think about it, actually.”
“Well, think about it for a moment. They use a hook, a huge sharp meat hook that they place here, see, right under the chin – and they HANG YOU LIKE MEAT!”
“Good heavens.”
“If I may offer some advice, Ma’am. Take the sightseeing tour of the city and then go back to Berlin and plan for what you might do when the war ends – and it looks like that might not be all that far in the future.”
“Back to Berlin? You don't know how bad things are back there now, Colonel. Everyone's running around like people in a shipwreck. Tell me the truth – do you think we might lose the war?”
“I bid you good day, Ma’am.”

Magpie 78

2011-08-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

Speaking of painting, and painters, I’ve always been fascinated by the life of Paul Gauguin.
An interesting story.

Picture a stockbroker, actually rather successful, who for years lived a conventional, fairly stuffy middle-class life. In his spare time he became a self-taught amateur artist – and he painted conventional pictures.
It was in the 1880s that he decided to pack it all in so that he could paint full time.

I’ve been to Arles in the south of France, where Gauguin spent nine weeks painting with his friend Vincent van Gogh, and I’ve visited the island of Martinique, where he hoped to find an idyllic landscape. Above, his self-portrait.

But it was in 1891 that he decided to sail to French Polynesia to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional".

His rejection of European urban values led him to Tahiti, where he found – some say he created -- an unspoiled culture, exotic and sensual.

Gauguin's greatest innovation was his use of color, which he used not for its ability to mimic nature but for its emotional impact.

The first artist to systematically use the effects of the art movement known as Primitivism and achieve broad public success was Paul Gauguin.

For ABC Wednesday

2011-08-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

“D” is for “Dead Leaves”

I know, I know. The title of the song is “Autumn Leaves.” But I wanted to go back to the French original, “Les Feuilles mortes,” or “Dead Leaves” – there’s a nuance of difference as far as meaning is concerned.
The song takes me back a few decades, back to the days when many Americans were fascinated by the work – the poetry and the films – of Jacques Prevert.

Students of the golden age of French cinema are familiar with Prevert's classic motion picture, “Les Enfants du paradis,” which many claim was the greatest French film ever made.

But what brings his work to the minds of some of us old-timers is of course Prevert’s famous song – especially as sung by Edith Piaf or Yves Montand. There were, of course, English versions, but I’ll stick with the original.

“C’est une chanson qui nous ressemble,
Toi, tu m’aimais et je t’aimais.”
It’s a song that resembles the two of us,
You who loved me and I who loved you.
“Et nous vivions tous deux ensemble,
Toi qui m’aimais, moi qui t’aimais.”
And the two of us lived together,
You who loved me and I who loved you.
“Mais la vie separe ceux qui s’aiment,
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit.
Et la mer efface sur le sable
Les pas des amants desunis.”
But life separates those who love,
Softly, making no noise.
And the sea erases on the sand
The footprints of lovers who are no longer together.

Magpie 77

2011-08-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

It’s a poignant scene, this week’s Magpie prompt. I imagined it as a couple breaking up.
And the words of the poet Lord Byron came flooding back:

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

In secret we met—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

What a man was Byron, what an incredible life. In the early years of the 19th century he was what can only be described as a scoundrel and a rake, running up huge debts and chasing women -- though all the while turning out the magnificent poetry that even today causes him to be regarded as one of the greatest British poets.
Lord Byron was not just a leading figure in the movement known as Romanticism, he was romanticism itself. He travelled, as an idealist, to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence.

But it’s his adventures with women that I find interesting. As far as I can see, he could not resist going after them, whatever their social status, married or single, and they, in so many cases – even those who despised him – often couldn’t resist him.

His mother wrote to a friend about her son: “He has no indisposition that I know of but love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion.”

After his well-publicized affairs with a number of ladies of high social position, he had an even more well-publicized affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb that shocked the British public.

She wrote: “He is mad, bad and dangerous to know.” He then broke off with her – (“When we two parted”?) -- to begin a relationship with Lady Oxford; Lady Caroline did not give up easily. She did what we today would call stalking. She would show up at his home dressed as a messenger boy just to get near him again.
Rubbing salt in the sore wound, Byron then went after Lady Caroline’s cousin, Anne Milbanke. She was something special. She was a beautiful, highly intelligent woman (some say she was a mathematical genius), and she was also an heiress. He of course treated her badly and the marriage was very unhappy. If any man today ever wonders why the movement known as feminism came into being, it’s surely because of stories like these.

After his disreputable adventures with members of the opposite sex, Byron left England. When he arrived in Greece, he assumed command of part of the army, even though he had no military experience. He had acquired an appropriately colorful uniform, above. Before the expedition could sail for the war in February of 1824, he fell ill. The usual remedy of bloodletting, along with the unsterilized medical instruments, were enough to kill him.
George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron, was indeed a scoundrel, but he was capable of some truly beautiful poetry.

For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday

2011-08-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

“C” is for “Cargo”

“The most important thing is, we must remain calm.”
“Remain calm? What is there to remain calm about?”
“Oh, there’s Mrs. Krumwieser. We wondered where you were.”
“I was checking out the boats.”
“You looked on the starboard side?”
“I don’t know which that is. Is that the side that’s on my left?”
“Depends on how you’re facing.”
“Well, the way I’m facing now.”
“Starboard is right, if you’re facing forward."
"Look, folks, that's all very interesting but to save precious time, did you see any boats?”
“No. There don’t seem to be any.”
“I coulda told you that. I looked earlier. The boats are gone.”
“Are we all here? All eight of us?”
“Yes. Have any of you realized what an incredible situation we’re in? I am steadily approaching a state of near-hysteria.”
“But we’ve got to stay calm.”
“I kept telling Mrs Krumwieser we should take a Norwegian or Royal Caribbean cruise. But no, she wanted a cruise on a freighter. The romance of life on a small cargo ship! Well, this is the romance – we’re stuck on a small cargo ship and the cargo’s on fire.”
“Read that note again.”
“’Emergency. Fire in hold. Gone for help.’ And it’s signed by – can’t make out the name. Maybe the captain.”
“And he and the crew went in the boats. Could be they know what the cargo is and it’s something that's gonna blow up so they just panicked and took off.”
“Good to know they had a reason. All this was going on while we were in our rooms recovering from that lunch. Migod, those canned Brussels sprouts!”
“Our problem at the moment is a bit more unpleasant than those, though they were unpleasant enough. I didn't know they even made canned Brussels sprouts. What have you got there, Bob?”
“Fire extinguisher. Only one I could find.”
“That looks older than this freighter, if that’s possible. You planning to go down into the hold and fight the fire with that?”
“You got any better ideas?”
“What we should do is get on the ship’s radio and call for help.”
“Who knows how to operate a ship’s radio? You don’t just dial 911.”
“I know how to send ‘SOS’ – three dots, three dashes, three dots.”
“Good. Get Marconi on the line and send it to him.”
“When I think that tonight was to be karaoke night. Frank was dying to do his ‘Moon River.’”
“Afraid we’ll miss out on that pleasure. We may need him to do ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ a bit later.”
“Look, when the skipper and the crew reach land they’ll report the situation, so the rescue helicopters should soon be here.”
“If we’re lucky, before this old bucket blows up.”
“Maybe we should go and see just what kind of cargo we’ve got down below. It could be something like wheat flour, so a fire wouldn’t be all that dangerous.”
“Yeah, we could be sitting on the world’s largest pancake.”
“Situations like this are difficult for Mr. Krumwieser. He has a tendency to suffer from acid reflux.”
“Now, Martha, I don’t want any special treatment. I avoided the canned Brussels sprouts so I’ll be all right.”

Magpie 76

2011-08-01T02:49:00.000-07:00

I’ll let Pete Seeger comment on this week’s Magpie prompt:

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace; I swear it's not too late.

For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday

2011-07-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

“B” is for “Best Man”

Here's a story for you. Let’s go back a number of decades, back to when I first entered the service. I had a friend in boot camp – let’s call him “Ed” because that wasn’t his name – and we hung out a lot, talking about what we might do in the future.
One day, after we had finished boot camp, he confessed something to me. He was very excited about it. He knew it should be kept secret, but he just had to tell someone and he felt he could trust me.
It was a plan Ed had been working on for quite a while. Well before he joined the Navy he had been visiting a small city located in the central part of our state. What was unusual about these visits is that he had managed to obtain a uniform of a Lieutenant-Commander, complete with service and combat ribbons, and he illegally wore this when he paid the visits.
In that community there weren’t many military types and very few Navy personnel – and no Shore Patrol. A Lieutenant-Commander, especially one with a couple of rows of ribbons, was welcomed everywhere. He received an invitation from one organization to address their group; he received a standing ovation. He had also visited some local church affairs and other such functions and had managed to meet a beautiful girl.
Quite unbelievably, after a number of dates he had proposed and the girl, undoubtedly a bit dazzled by this remarkable young naval officer, had accepted. Her folks had met him and had welcomed him enthusiastically into their well-to-do family. He had managed to convince everyone there that his folks were in Africa doing some sort of relief work, so they wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding.
Now that Ed was out of boot camp, he was actually going to go up in his fake uniform and marry her. He wanted me to be his Best Man.
It all seemed weird and unreal. I bowed out of the Best Man job; I didn’t want to have anything to do with this operation.
But then I wondered: perhaps morally there was something I should do.
A: Should I call this family on the phone (I knew their name so I thought I could get in touch with them) and tell them that their future son-in-law was no heroic naval commander but an ordinary sailor of the lowest rank?
Or B: Should I notify the military authorities that there’s a guy illegally roving about that area in a fake lieutenant-commander’s uniform?
Or C: Should I just ignore it all and try to forget about it?
After all, the marriage might turn out well; the couple might be happy together, even after it came out that his officer’s commission, and his ribbons, were phony, but that seemed highly unlikely.
The above is true; it actually happened. Ed and I received our assignments and we went off in different directions so I heard no more from him. As far as I know, the wedding took place on schedule; I have no idea how it turned out.
But what’s your opinion? What would you have done in such a situation?

Magpie 75

2011-07-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

The prompt this week, an ad for bicycles, got me to thinking about that wonderful part of French history known as the Belle Epoque…

The Beautiful Age, which lasted from about the 1870s to the beginning of World War I, 1914.

The Magpie prompt of the gal on the bike illustrates a fundamental difference between French ads of that day and ads in the U S. American advertising was designed to inform and persuade, as in the following. (Did you know they had portable typewriters in 1890?)

The American ad informs and perhaps even, just a bit, persuades. The French would have done it differently.

French women dressed appropriately for the time, which means the clothing they wore covered just about everything. But in the advertising, things were different. French ads of that day were made to seduce -- to attract, entice. Some of ‘em were pretty wild. Check out the following, an ad for gas. It’s an ad for gas!!!!!!!

Presumably if you bought this brand of gas for your home a magnificent young woman would come and dance about in the nude in your living-room.
Probably never happened. :-)

Whenever possible, it’s obvious that there would be an attempt to suggest the national pastime, l’amour. Above, a French beer ad from that era.

At the least, the ad should be suggestive. As in this ad for absinthe – you know, the stuff that makes the heart grow fonder. :-)
As one who labored in the advertising agency world for some years, I find this difference between American and French advertising of the Belle Epoque interesting.
Because, truth is, those same differences still exist. In our ads, we’re still trying to inform and persuade; the French ads are still trying to seduce.

For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday

2011-07-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

"A" is for "Abigail"

Cathy: “From the outside this place looks great, almost like a country inn. But inside! In the immortal words of Bette Davis: what a dump!”
Bob: “I know. It’s not the Hyatt-Regency. But it’s out of the way; no one’s going to know who we are.”
C: “Well, at the moment I’m not too certain who I am.”
B: “But I’m sure glad you’re here. When I first saw you, I thought you were the most attractive temp who ever came to work for our company. But you always seemed so distant. I thought I'd never get to know you."
C: “Well, Mr. Brock – I mean, Bob - here I am, already involved in a romantic interlude with one of the company’s executives. My business career is really taking off.”
B: “I love your sense of humor.”
C: “Good. Let’s see. What should we do? I suppose we can always sit on the couch and watch TV.”
B: “Oh, that. I tried it; doesn’t work. The wiring is faulty.”
C: “Ha. They should have named this place Faulty Towers. Look, I’m aware it’s a cliché, but I want you to know I don’t do this sort of thing oft – what in God’s name is that!?”
B: “Oh, that’s Abigail. My wife’s dog.”
C: “You brought your wife’s dog!?”
B: “Long story. The short version is this: the dog-sitter couldn’t make it today and my family is out of town – and I certainly didn’t want to cancel our little get-together – so I had to bring her. I hoped you’d understand.”
C: “Of course, no problem. Every time I’ve been to a motel with a guy in the past he has shown up with his wife’s dog.”

B: [Laughs] “I knew you’d take it the right way. She’s a wonderful pup. Look at her, lying there in the corner. Real good. She won’t cause any problems.”
[Phone rings]
B: “Yes?”
Motel Manager: “Mr. Brock, is it that you are with a dog in the motel?”
B: “Uh, yes, I’m here with the family pet.”
MM: “No dogs is permitted in the motel.”
B: “Don’t worry; she’s very quiet, doesn’t bark and that sort of thing.”
MM: “No dogs is permitted!”
B: “H’mm. Maybe we can work something out. Suppose I pay you an extra fifty dollars for the room.”
MM: “The dog must be gone – in three hours. That should give you enough time to… Anyway, I’ll add additional charge to your bill.”
B: “Thanks. [Hangs up] Well, that’s one hurdle I’ve jumped over.”
C: “I’m sorry, Bob, but a dog is a bit more than I bargained for.”
B: “Come now, look at her; you’d never know she’s there.”
C: “But that’s the problem; I do know she’s there. I don’t think I could, er, function with a dog in the room.”
B: “We’ll put her in another room, the bathroom.”
C: “Well, I’m no dog expert, no dog whisperer, but it seems to me if you lock up a pooch in a bathroom and close the door, she’s going to start howling.”
B: “No, no. She doesn’t howl; she’s no howler. At most, she might groan a little.”
C: “Howling, groaning. This is like when I was a kid in a fun house.”
[Knock on door]
B: “Who could that be? I didn’t want anyone to know I was here.”
C: “I don’t particularly want anyone to know I’m here. I’ll be hiding in the bathroom, case anyone needs me. If you hear any groaning, it’ll be me.”
[Door opens]
B: “Mrs. Hansen! What do you want?”
Secretary: “It’s a family emergency, Mr. Brock. I didn’t want to bother you; I know you must be busy…”
B: “Yes, I’m in the middle of a business meeting here, but what is it? What’s the emergency?”
S: “Well, your wife returned early from Chicago and Mrs. Brock found that your dog has escaped. She phoned me; she wants you to come home right now to search for the dog.”
B: “Oh well, that’s all right. Abigail is with me. I’d like you to phone Mrs. Brock and tell her that I’ve taken the pup for an afternoon romp in the park.”
S: “The dog is with you, here in the business meeting?”
B: “Yes, I’ll explain it all later. No need to mention the motel. Tell her I’ll be bringing the dog home, after our romp in the park, in three hours. The park closes in three hours. Thanks.”
[Door closes]
B: “Wow. Another hurdle I’ve jumped over. This is like a track meet.”
C: [Emerging from bathroom]: “Or a dog race.”
B: “Anyway, we can relax now. We’ve got everyone calmed down.”
C: “Except perhaps for me. Bob, I think we should chalk this up as a good try, but it didn’t work out. This is probably not what I should be doing anyway. Besides, there’s too much going on. I want to leave – before someone comes to check the whereabouts of your cat.”

For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday

2011-07-12T07:36:00.002-07:00

You know the story of Scott and Zelda?
“Scott,” of course, was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in 1920 was poised to become one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Zelda Sayre was the beautiful -- not just beautiful, captivating -- Southern girl he wanted to marry.

But she wasn’t all that eager to marry Scott. At the time, he had a mediocre job in an advertising agency, making a mediocre twenty dollars a week.
In effect, Zelda said to Scott: Come back when you’re successful. Maybe then...

The novel Scott proceeded to write, This Side of Paradise, wasn’t just successful; it was a blockbuster. Three days after publication, the entire first printing was sold out. Seeing this, and realizing what this meant for his future, on the fourth day after publication he sent a wire to Zelda to come north to New York; they were going to be married. He promised her "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.”
After their marriage in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the young couple became instant celebrities.
What did you do in those days, if you found yourself suddenly rich and famous? You had a few drinks; you got drunk.

So Scott did, and stayed that way a good deal of the time. In the early days, Zelda matched him, drink for drink.
The newspapers of New York saw the couple as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, wealthy, beautiful, and energetic.
“Energetic” seems to have pretty well described them.
They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore and the Commodore hotels because of their drunken behavior. Zelda once jumped into the fountain at Union Square.
Another example of their behavior was when Dorothy Parker first met them; she wrote that Zelda and Scott were riding on the roof of a taxi.
When, in 1921, Zelda gave birth to their baby girl, Scott Fitzgerald carefully wrote what she said as she emerged from the anesthesia. He recorded Zelda saying, "Oh God, Goofo, I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool". Many of her words found their way into Scott's novels; in The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Buchanan expresses the same hope for her daughter.
Zelda was not dumb; she had wit and a sense of humor. When Harper & Brothers asked her to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women she wrote: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is, tell the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold will do if handy".
Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories and managed to publish a novel, Save Me the Waltz, in 1932.

But the days of rapture, excitement and world-iridescence faded: Scott and Zelda bickered and fought. The strain of her tempestuous, alcoholic marriage led to Zelda’s growing instability. She was admitted to a mental hospital in 1930. The end was a true tragedy. In 1948, the hospital in which she was a patient caught fire, causing her death.
Inscribed on her tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

For ABC Wednesday

2011-07-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

A “Y” Song (to the tune of “Yesterday”)

Yesterday…
All my troubles seemed so far away.
But problems then showed up, as if to stay.
Though I believed in --
Yesterday.

Suddenly…
Something came to live in my hard drive,
A nasty virus that was real, alive.
No word of warning, just about midday.
I never will forget that –
Yesterday.

I called my faithful old computer guy.
This time, it seems, he had an alibi:
He’d just left for his holiday.
In fact, he’d just left --
Yesterday.

I like to think I’m good as blogging host,
But then I couldn’t even send a post.
The virus knocked my ‘pewter for a loop;
My very blog began to sag and droop.
But that was –
Yesterday.

Today, the virus gone, my life is sweet.
I’m ready once again to meet and greet.
But I won’t soon forget the disarray
And all the mess that happened –
Yesterday.

For Magpie 72

2011-07-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

Studying this week’s prompt, a few lines from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” came back to me.

“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino
These pretty country folk would lie.

“This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
And therefore take the present time.
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.”

So the young country folk went out into the fields and – took the present time. What is so striking about the poem, and is suggested by Van Gogh’s painting, is that this seems to be the kind of field where the teenager named Shakespeare had carnival knowledge of his girl friend Anne Hathaway. :-)
But the light-hearted lines about young folk fooling around out in the fields signified something serious: Anne became pregnant and Will had to marry the girl.
So, a few years later, still a young man barely out of his teens, William Shakespeare found himself to be a solid pere-de-famille, a married man with three kids.
Had it been a forced wedding? Probably. The young lady would have been for it, but whether he liked the idea or not marriage was about the only option open to a decent young man of that time.
He may have been against getting hitched but, as James Joyce wrote:
“Shakespeare hath a Will,
But Anne Hathaway.”
:-)

For ABC Wednesday and Magpie 71

2011-06-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

"X" is for "Exiting"

Speaking of flying, suppose you were given the assignment of shooting film footage of Mont Saint Michel?
Well, that was the assignment I was given some years ago by the French Government Tourist Office.
First off, I could see a problem: it’s been done.
Mont Saint Michel, as you may know, is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Europe, a magnificent monument in Normandy that stands alone and rises dramatically from sand and waves. As a film-maker, one couldn’t just shoot straightforward footage; you’d have to do something a little different, approach it from an unusual angle. So I decided to go upstairs, so to speak. I’d rent a plane and do it from the sky.

A bit of history. This marvelous church, with its incredible situation on an island, has been around for 13 centuries or so. Seems that St. Michael the Archangel, during the 8th century, instructed the local bishop to build a church on this rocky isle. The bishop, who had a lot on his plate and other things to think about, didn’t get around to it. So St. Michael, according to the historical record, “burned a hole in the bishop’s skull with his finger.”
That did it. Mont St. Michel came into existence.

I asked around about airplane rental in a nearby city and was told there was a photographic plane I could rent. A photographic plane was just what was needed so I signed up for it.
The next day, when I got a good look at the aircraft, my heart sank. It was old; it looked a lot like a World War I single-engine French warplane, which had perhaps been shot down a time or two, then more or less rebuilt. The thing wasn’t even in an airport, just standing on a huge lawn, a kind of meadow. There was a kid who wss sort of guarding it; evidently the pilot hadn’t shown up yet.
My confidence in this operation didn’t improve when I learned that the kid, who was about twenty, was the pilot. He also served as stewardess; he made sure my seat belt was fastened.
At this point I began to “rouspeter” – gripe, complain – as they say in France. Photographic plane? They had to be kidding. There was a single tiny window next to my seat; I could barely see out. And I was supposed to shoot 35mm wide-screen motion picture footage through this thing?
The kid had evidently been through this before. He ignored my rouspetting.
He unscrewed a number of nuts and bolts and then proceeded to lift off the entire side of the aircraft. I had to admit I could now see out.
We then went through takeoff, different from just about any other I had experienced. The old crate went bumpety-bumpety on the lawn and somehow made it into the air. We then headed out toward Mont St Michel at what I figured was about 60 miles an hour.

However, it was a beautiful day and the view from above was terrific. As we approached it from a distance I thought I’d get great footage of the place as we sailed by it.
But the kid had another idea. Trouble was, he hadn’t told me about it.
As we approached the church directly overhead, he proceeded to suddenly tip the plane completely over on its side. I nearly lost my lunch. With the entire side of the plane gone, it was as though someone had taken me to the top of the Empire State building and then hung me by a belt over the madding crowd far below.
I am not overweight. But still, if you add to my avoirdupois the weight of a huge professional 35mm Arriflex motion picture camera, complete with a heavy magazine full of 35mm color negative, it added up. All I could think of was that seat belt, which was the only thing that kept me from exiting the plane. I hadn’t thought to check it carefully; now I couldn’t even see it because of the huge camera in my lap.
Well, I said to myself, this may be the last thing I do on this earth so I might as well get some good footage. I shot the incredibly beautiful Mont St. Michel from directly overhead.
My pilot then righted the plane and said, “I’m going over there to approach it from a different angle.”
“No!” I cried, hurriedly, “no, I got what I need! Don’t want to waste film. Let’s head back.”
The belt didn’t break, I’m happy to say, and the footage was spectacular.

For Sunday Scribbling and Bluebell Books

2011-06-23T03:38:00.000-07:00

“V” is for “Vinnie”
Sal: “Let’s go over this again. You gave the money to this guy – what’s his name again?”
Vinnie: “Joe. Joe Muriani.”
Sal: “You gave him the five grand? You realize that was Big Ed’s money, right?”
Vinnie: “Right. But Joe said he’d set the whole thing up – provide the boat, install the corpse, the whole deal.”
Sal: “Look at it, Vinnie. Look at the boat. It’s a rowboat, for God’s sake!”
Vinnie: “I know. When he said boat I naturally assumed it would have a motor. I think we got screwed.”
Sal: “No, Vinnie. We didn’t get screwed, you did. You bought a rowboat for five thousand dollars! If Big Ed ever hears about this…”
Vinnie: “Listen, Sal, it’s not all bad. At least we got a boat and the stiff is in it, there under the blanket. We can do what has to be done. No need to tell Big Ed about this.”
Sal: “Who is this Joe Muriani anyway?”
Vinnie: “He’s a guy I used to know years ago. From Secaucus.”
Sal: “What! You dimwit! Don’t you know we have nothin’ to do with nobody from the Secaucus family?”
Vinnie: “Look, Sal, I’ll do all the work. I’ll row the damn boat. I realize I may be partially to blame…”
Sal: “Partially! This is your show, Vinnie. The spotlight is on you. You’re gonna get full credit, believe me. If Big Ed ever hears about this…”
Vinnie: “Don’t keep saying that, Sal. Makes me nervous.”
Sal: “You got a lot to be nervous about.”
Vinnie: “Look, we row out to the spot in the harbor, tie the weight on the body and dump him in. He’ll sink right down to Danny Jones Locker without a hitch.
Sal: “Davy.”
Vinnie: “What?”
Sal: “Nothin'. What’s this, Vinnie? This is supposed to be the weight we’ll use?”
Vinnie: “Yeah, he said he was providing us with a weight that was a full kilogram. That’s – that’s heavy, right, Sal?”
Sal: “God you’re dumb! It’s nothin’; it’s a pound or two! This would be like tying a tiddleywink on the stiff and expecting that to cause him to sink. Don’t you get it, Vinnie? If this body pops back up and bobs about in the water out there for a day or two someone’s gonna spot it and it’ll get back to Big Ed. You wouldn’t like what would happen then!”
Vinnie: “I don’t like what’s happening now. Lemme look around for a big rock to use for the weight.”
Sal: “We’re supposed to be professionals, dammit! We finally got an important assignment, a real opportunity, and we’re expected to handle it like we know what the hell we’re doing. And you, you buy a crummy rowboat for five grand of Big Ed’s money and now you’re gonna look around for a big rock! I’m tellin’ ya – if Big Ed ever hears about this…!”

For ABC Wednesday

2011-06-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

“W” is for “Worry”
Today I’d like to tell you about my problem.
I’ve been fortunate to have made quite a few friends here in Bloggoland, but in what I’ve written over the past year or two I’ve usually kept my problems to myself.
Truth is, other people’s difficulties may be amusing for a time – the famous “schadenfreude” in action – but after a while they tend to be annoying, so I keep the dark stuff (and we all have dark stuff, right, Congressman Weiner?) to myself.
But I can’t resist telling you about my recent medical problem.

It all began with my usual checkup with my physician, Dr. Watson (the names have been changed to protect the indigent).
I later thought it was odd that the Doc suddenly seemed very interested in making sure that he had the phone numbers of my son and daughter, and that he wondered if I wanted a “DNR” sign – for “Do Not Resuscitate” – hung on the bed in case I wound up in a coma.
Now why, I wondered, would he ask such questions? Is my general practitioner practitioning generally by subtly preparing me for really bad news?
I had just had a session of “blood work” at the lab, so the study of my circulatory fluid had probably revealed something potentially catastrophic, not to mention awful. Also, the Doc mumbled something about “protein in the blood” that I hadn’t quite understood.
So I did what a good many patients do these days. I rushed to Google and looked up “protein in the blood.” Boiling down the technical medical jargon of the internet, I got the impression that this is a disastrous condition, the only known treatment for which is to tell the patient to enjoy the next three months because that’s going to be about it.
Well, “W” is for “Worry,” and that’s what I did for the next week or so.
At my next medical exam, il dottore showed me a huge spreadsheet of arcane letters and figures, all of which had digitally popped up as a result of my recent blood examination and all of which, of course, were incomprehensible to me.
He pointed to one of the numbers and triumphantly exclaimed, “That’s it! That’s the important one!”
“Give it to me straight, Doc,” I said, showing great courage. “How much time do I have left?”
“What?” he replied. “Oh no, no, nothing like that. It’s just that you don’t have enough protein in the blood. Not enough iron. Have you stopped eating red meat?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “You know, they say to stay away from it so I’ve switched to a pretty well vegetarian diet.”
“Well, it’s an easy problem to solve. You’re anemic. Just eat a steak or a few chops each week; that’ll take care of it.”
In my car, as I prepared to drive away, I thought of the horrible fatal disease I had been sure I was suffering from. And what had my doctor prescribed? A steak or a few chops.
I started to laugh and it was quite a while before I could stop.
Somebody put it this way once: “Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.”

Magpie 70

2011-06-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

As I looked over this week’s Magpie prompt, a thought flashed through my mind:
Why, she could be the Dark Lady…
As you may know, Will Shakespeare wrote, in addition to the plays, a number of sonnets.
Quite a number – 154 of ‘em, in fact.
The sonnets were brief poems that touched upon just about everything: life, love, death, the passage of time, etc. By studying them, scholars over the years became convinced they could learn a lot about Shakespeare the man – his personal life and loves.

As one example, two dozen of the sonnets are devoted to a young woman who has come to be known as the Dark Lady. No one knows who she was but we know what she was: she was vivacious. tempestuous, witty, and very attractive. She’s called Dark because she had black hair and perhaps dusky complexion.
Our Will was crazy about her.
They evidently had a passionate relationship for a while, then she found another. To put it in modern terms, Shakespeare was dumped.
His girl had not only found another man, but it appears the new guy was a member of the nobility. What this meant, of course, in those days when social position was all-important, was that Will, a commoner, had not the slightest chance, not the slightest, of winning her back.
Why, he wondered, did I have to be what I am?
“I look upon myself and curse my fate.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possessed.”
He wrote that he once saw the two of them together; his jealousy had boiled over. He began to write about his Dark Lady as though he could convince himself that she was a person it was good to be rid of.
In one of his most famous sonnets, he wrote a strange love poem, quite possibly unlike any other ever written.
The body of the poem is devoted to all the things wrong with his lady love – and there’s a lot.
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips red.
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks.
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.”
But then, in the rhyming couplet that ends the sonnet, he goes on to emphasize just how crazy he still is about her.

For ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings

2011-06-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

“V” is for “Vinnie”
Sal: “Let’s go over this again. You gave the money to this guy – what’s his name again?”
Vinnie: “Joe. Joe Muriani.”
Sal: “You gave him the five grand? You realize that was Big Ed’s money, right?”
Vinnie: “Right. But Joe said he’d set the whole thing up – provide the boat, install the corpse, the whole deal.”
Sal: “Look at it, Vinnie. Look at the boat. It’s a rowboat, for God’s sake!”
Vinnie: “I know. When he said boat I naturally assumed it would have a motor. I think we got screwed.”
Sal: “No, Vinnie. We didn’t get screwed, you did. You bought a rowboat for five thousand dollars! If Big Ed ever hears about this…”
Vinnie: “Listen, Sal, it’s not all bad. At least we got a boat and the stiff is in it, there under the blanket. We can do what has to be done. No need to tell Big Ed about this.”
Sal: “Who is this Joe Muriani anyway?”
Vinnie: “He’s a guy I used to know years ago. From Secaucus.”
Sal: “What! You dimwit! Don’t you know we have nothin’ to do with nobody from the Secaucus family?”
Vinnie: “Look, Sal, I’ll do all the work. I’ll row the damn boat. I realize I may be partially to blame…”
Sal: “Partially! This is your show, Vinnie. The spotlight is on you. You’re gonna get full credit, believe me. If Big Ed ever hears about this…”
Vinnie: “Don’t keep saying that, Sal. Makes me nervous.”
Sal: “You got a lot to be nervous about.”
Vinnie: “Look, we row out to the spot in the harbor, tie the weight on the body and dump him in. He’ll sink right down to Danny Jones Locker.”
Sal: “Davy.”
Vinnie: “What?”
Sal: “Nothin'. What’s this, Vinnie? This is supposed to be the weight we’ll use?”
Vinnie: “Yeah, he said he was providing us with a weight that was a full kilogram. That’s – that’s heavy, right, Sal?”
Sal: “God you’re dumb! It’s nothin’; it’s a pound or two! This would be like tying a tiddleywink on the stiff and expecting that to cause him to sink. Don’t you get it, Vinnie? If this body pops back up and bobs about in the water out there for a day or two someone’s gonna spot it and it’ll get back to Big Ed. You wouldn’t like what would happen then!”
Vinnie: “I don’t like what’s happening now. Lemme look around for a big rock to use for the weight.”
Sal: “We’re supposed to be professionals, dammit! We finally got an important assignment, a real opportunity, and we’re expected to handle it like we know what the hell we’re doing. And you, you buy a crummy rowboat for five grand of Big Ed’s money and now you’re gonna look around for a big rock! I’m tellin’ ya – if Big Ed ever hears about this…!”

Magpie 69

2011-06-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

A few decades ago, back when I was but a callow youth, I often thought about traveling to France.
My knowledge of the language then was -- 'ow you say? -- rudimentary. (Later I was to work in France and live in France and I became reasonably fluent, though I still manage to make my share of grammatical errors, I assure you.)
Anyway, in those days one of the things that fascinated me about that country was its cuisine. For example, I was especially interested in the dish the French called “Coquilles St. Jacques.” For some reason, the local restaurant in my American home town, although it had such gourmet specialties as cheeseburgers, didn’t have this particular item on their menu so I could only imagine what it must be like.
I began to read up on it. (Many years before Google, of course.)
“St. Jacques” is the way the French spell “St. James.” (They always had trouble with spelling. :-))

For centuries, it seems that pilgrims would make their way to the shrine of St. James in Spain, and they’d usually have a scallop shell symbol on their hat or clothes. Note the shell on St. Jim’s chest, above. There’s a legend that he had rescued a knight who had fallen into the water and who emerged covered with scallop shells.
From this came a classic French dish: St. Jim’s Shells, or Coquilles St. Jacques.
I read about this dish with great interest. I decided that when I finally got to make my trip to France I’d order it as my first authentic French meal. I learned that in its classic version some sea scallops would squat in their own half-shell, added and abetted by mushrooms and shallots and of course some white wine, all swimming in a delicious bechamel sauce and topped with bread crumbs that would brown in the oven.
I couldn’t of course be sure, but it seemed to me it might almost taste as good as a cheeseburger.

Anyway, I finally arrived in Paris: on the very first day, knowing very little French, I went to a restaurant. I was starving. I was ready to say to the waiter: “Coquilles St. Jacques – lay it on me!” I stared at the menu. I was surprised to see that it appeared nowhere on the sheet. That place offered fifty different dishes, but my favorite was definitely not there. Disappointed, I then didn’t know what to order. I wanted something typically French but I had literally no idea what any of the dishes were that were listed on that menu.
I decided to go with one of the items that seemed to be perhaps more French than anything else listed. It was "choucroute." It had such a Gallic feel to it. I could pronounce it okay, even if I didn't know what it was. I was sure it was a classic example of gourmet cuisine, a piece, as they say over there, of resistance.
When the waiter brought it to me I nearly fell off my chair. My first day in France, my first meal in a fine, expensive French restaurant, and I had not only not been able to have my St. Jim’s Shells, I had ordered -- SAUERKRAUT!
Took a few days to get over that experience. :-)

2011-06-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

[For Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings]
“U” is for “Unblemished.”
(As in an unblemished record.)
Good morning.
Our European History class will begin by studying the country of Spain, and we’ll start with the era before the Spanish-American War.
Take notes; this will be an important part of the final exam.
I thought that a good way to start off is with a certain musical work, an opera, something that, even if you don’t much like opera, I’m sure you’re all familiar with. The reason I’m using it for this class is that the particular musical work I have in mind says a lot about the customs, traditions and moral attitudes of that time.

It’s a story of an army man who was not just putting in his time before being released back into civilian society, but of a young career soldier who believed he had a great future in the Spanish Army.

When he wore the uniform and saluted his flag, he stood for centuries of tradition; he was constantly reminded of the glory days of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Army of Spain was the most powerful and prestigious in Europe.

Let’s say his name was Don Jose. He was of course a young man of good family, all-important in those days, a capable, serious junior officer whose unblemished record unfortunately became – well, blemished. And all because of his love for a woman.

She was a Spanish Gypsy. The story of the Gypsies is the story of a persecuted minority. For centuries they had known discrimination, and this helped to create the powerful emotions – of tragedy, sadness, joy and love – found in their music and dance.

All of which ultimately led to the well-known flamenco of today.

The soldier named Don Jose had fallen hard for a beautiful, tempestuous Gypsy girl who had danced for him; he was even ready to take the next step, to leave his promising military career to be with her.
The punishment for this was severe; he was jailed. While he was behind bars a strange thing happened.

As he stood at the window of his cell she threw a flower to him. He caught it and was fascinated by the flower’s fragrance. Though the flower, as flowers do, wilted and became dry, the fragrance remained, and it was to keep alive for him the memory of the beautiful, incomparable girl for whom he had sacrificed so much.

Later, an operatic composer, Georges Bizet, was attracted by this romantic tale and composed a work that was to become a masterpiece, one of the most famous operas of all time. Among its best-known arias was one that had to do with the moment when the Gypsy girl threw the flower to the prisoner. (You’ve been able to figure out by now which opera we’re talking about?)
Here’s the scene:
Aria: “La fleur que tu m’avais jetee dans ma prison me’etait restee.”
“The flower you threw to me stayed with me in prison. It withered and dried, but it kept all the while its sweet fragrance, and I became intoxicated – because during the night I saw you!
“At times I took to cursing you, to cry out that I detested you. Why did destiny put you there, in my path?
“But then I realized that this was a kind of blasphemy because the only real feeling I had was a strong desire, a kind of desperate hope – to see you again, oh Carmen! To see you again!”

Magpie 68

2011-05-31T05:59:00.000-07:00

Prosecutor Sawyer: “Your name, please?”
Witness: “My name is Edna Emice. I’m the only Emice this side of the Mississippi.”
Sawyer.: “Well, that’s quite a distinction. Now, let’s see. Where were you on the afternoon of March fourth last?”
Witness: “I was parked across the street from that poor murdered girl’s apartment.”
Sawyer.: “And how did you happen to be parked there?”
Witness: “Well, I saw Mr Hartley leaving her apartment. That was quite a shock, so I parked my car and watched.”
Sawyer.: “Now I want to remind you, Miss Emice, that you are under oath and your testimony is very important. You know Mr. Hartley well, don’t you?”
Witness: “I sure do.”
Sawyer.: “And you are certain that it was Mr. Hartley that you saw there?”
Witness: “Absolutely.”
Sawyer.: “Your witness.”
Miss Wylie: “You used to work for Mr. Hartley, didn’t you, Miss Emice? For how long?”
Witness: “For twelve years.”
Wylie: “And then you were unfortunately -- let go, weren’t you?”
Witness: “I was fired, if you want me to spell it out for you.”
Wylie: “And it was Mr. Hartley who fired you?”
Witness: “Yes.”
Wylie: “So you really don’t like Mr. Hartley very much, do you?”
Sawyer.: “Objection, your Honor. Approach the bench?”
Judge: “Yes.”
Sawyer.: “Judge, you can see what’s happening here. The defense is trying to suggest that Hartley canned Emice, she got sore and she decided to get back at him by inventing his presence at a crime scene. A wild story. They’ve made all this up.”
Wylie: “No, that’s just what happened, your Honor.”
Judge: “We’re going to need something more solid than a suggestion, Miss Wylie.”
Wylie: “That will be provided, during cross examination.”
Judge: “All right; let’s get on with it.”
Wylie: “I understand you have some interesting hobbies, Miss Emice?”
Sawyer.: “What!? I object! Relevance?”
Judge: “Good point. How are the witness’s hobbies relevant, Miss Wylie?”
Wylie: “That’s what I intend to show, Judge, if I’m permitted to continue.”
Judge: “Well, I guess so, contingent upon you providing the relevance. Objection overruled.”
Wylie: “And you have a special interest in astronomy, don’t you?”
Witness: “Yes. But I don’t like to talk about it much; people usually laugh.”
Wylie: “Why?”
Witness: “Well, you know—people think I’m just a sweet little old lady without any advanced degrees and such. It is believed that only the PhDs know about such things as astronomy.”
Wylie: “But you have special knowledge, don’t you, something the PhDs don’t have? Especially about the planet Jupiter?”
Sawyer.: “That’s it! That’s enough! I object. Soon we’ll be hearing about Miss Emice’s hobby of building small ships in bottles. There’s only one point at issue, Judge. Did Miss Emice see Mr. Hartley at the crime scene or not? I realize that Miss Wylie is new to the legal profession; in fact, I believe this is her first trial as a defense attorney, so we should be tolerant and understanding and all that. But there’s a limit.”
Judge: “Yes, you haven’t shown relevance, Miss Wylie. Sustained.”
Wylie: “But she went there!”
Judge: “Sit down, Miss Wylie! I have just ruled against you. You should have learned at least that much in law school. Er—she went where?”
Wylie: “She went to Jupiter!”
Judge: “She went to..? Continue with your cross examination.”

Wylie: “How did you make that trip to the planet Jupiter, Miss Emice? Was it on a flying saucer?”
Witness: “No, not a saucer. It was more like a spaceship.”
Wylie: “And what happened when you got to the planet Jupiter?”
Witness: “Well, there was a wonderful welcome; everybody was friendly. I got to see the King.”
Wylie: “Really? You saw the King of Jupiter, with your very own eyes? Could you see him clearly?”
Witness: “Oh, yes. Very clearly.”
Wylie: “As clearly as you saw Mr. Hartley at the crime scene?”
Witness: “Yes, exactly.”
Sawyer.: “Your Honor…”
Wylie: “Move for dismissal, your Honor.”
[Submitted also to Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings]

2011-05-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

[For ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings]
"S" is for "Shoes"

ANNOUNCER (VOICE OVER): The “Judge Phyllis” show, one of cable television’s most successful programs, is already under way as we join it...
(FADE IN ON...)
GLINDA: We had been staying together.
JUDGE PHYLLIS: For how long?
GLINDA: Three weeks, like.
JUDGE: So, Alberto, you were in a relationship with this young woman?
ALFREDO: We were, your honor; I mean I was. We both were, actually.
JUDGE: You were in love?
ALFREDO: I most certainly was.
GLINDA: Yet he stole my shoes!
JUDGE: Yes, that’s what this all boils down to. Why would you steal a lady’s shoes, Alberto?
ALFREDO: Judge, I am a philosopher. You see, the heart only knows what the yearning of the soul is aware of. Men may have scoffed through the centuries, but the truth is always there, always waiting to be found. You see, I am not one of the sheep; I stand out from the rest of the flock. This is what I have learned as I have wandered down through life’s path.
JUDGE: Unfortunately the network gives me just one hour for this program; otherwise I could take twenty minutes or so to try to figure out what you just said. In the meantime, how about you, Glinda? Why do you think he stole your shoes?
GLINDA: That’s easy! He found a new girl friend! He met her at work.
JUDGE: Where do you work, Alberto?
ALFREDO: Your honor, usually I take what comes my way. As a philosopher I learned long ago not to try to change the world, though deep inside all of us is the awareness that it certainly needs change. But, "Plus ca change," as they say at the Sorbonne. So I emphasize that I am not offended that you don’t seem to know my name, though it’s written right there on that paper in front of you. My name is “Alfredo,” not “Alberto.” Just think of the sauce, Sauce Alfredo – though they usually use too much butter in its preparation – and you’ll get it right every time.
JUDGE: Whatever. Let’s get back to business. Where do you work?
GLINDA: Go on, tell her. He works in the town dump, Judge.

ALFREDO: Actually, it is officially the municipal waste disposal division. I am a separation supervisor. As people come in with various types of material they wish to dispose of, I separate this into three parts: metal, wood and cardboard.
JUDGE: And you met this new girl friend at the town dump?
ALFREDO: She drove in with some things she wanted to throw away so I showed her how I was there to separate them. She appreciated my expertise and life philosophy. We sort of got to know each other. Her name is Eunice.
GLINDA: It would be something like Eunice. Look at him, Judge. He’s not much to look at but believe it or not he has a kind of mysterious charm that appeals to women.
JUDGE: That definitely is mysterious. So you decided to go after this new girl and dump the old one – speaking of the town dump.
ALFREDO: I would certainly not put it that way. I saw immediately that I could be of help to this young woman. Her shoes, your honor. Her shoes were all wrong for her – boring, utilitarian, unattractive. But I knew where there was a pair that was just right for her, made for her you might say.

JUDGE: I’m beginning to figure this out. So you went back and stole Glinda’s shoes to give to your new girl friend?
ALFREDO: I stole nothing. They were given to me.
JUDGE: And you, Glinda, Good Witch of the North, you gave him the shoes? Why on earth would you do that?
GLINDA: Well, I thought he was a freak, a bit of a pervert. You know, a “footishist” or whatever they call it. He wanted the shoes so I figured it would do no harm for him to have a little fun with them. I certainly didn’t know he planned to give them to another woman.
JUDGE: That’s it. You’ve got to give them back, Alberto.
ALFREDO: I don’t have them. They now belong to Eunice.
GLINDA: But you stole them!
ALFREDO: Again, Your Honor, I stole nothing. They were given to me, which means, according to our ancient Anglo-Saxon legal code, that I could do with them as I wished.
JUDGE: I’m afraid he’s got something there.
GLINDA: But isn’t there some kind of law against inalienations of affections?
JUDGE: Not really. At least not with that pronunciation. You know, Glinda, there’s an opera song titled “La donna e mobile”: women are fickle. But so often it’s men who are the fickle ones. You’ll see. Alberto will stick with this current girl friend till he meets someone new – or maybe comes across an enticing new pair of ladies’ shoes. Then he’ll be gone like a shot.
Bailiff, next case!

Magpie 67

2011-05-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

The Tournier banquet reminds us of one of Shakespeare’s most famous scenes: the banquet that Macbeth throws to celebrate his splendid new Kingship.
All the nobility and accompanying VIPs have been invited. Lady Macbeth, very experienced in such social occasions, is gracious to everyone.
There is actually an element of farce in this scene. It’s the kind of thing usually played for comedy: the elegant supper party where everything goes wrong. But the play’s audience is aware that the background of the scene is far from funny. The Macbeths have committed regicide; they have murdered Duncan, the previous King, though no one at the banquet is aware of this.
Macbeth’s second murder is to be of Banquo, a colleague, a friend. He doesn’t actually commit the murder; he has a hired killer do the deed. When he asks the murderer, “Banquo’s safe?” the man knows just what is meant. “Aye, my good lord, safe in a ditch he lies.”
And the banquet goes on, an event everyone is enjoying. Lady M. is in her element, charming all with her social poise.
But the pleasant occasion is wrecked beyond retrieval; Banquo shows up. He is, of course, a ghost, but Macbeth sees the real Banquo, sitting there in his chair. No one else sees him, of course.
The new King is visibly shaken, distraught; he cries out to his wife: “Can such things be?”
Lady M shifts into damage control mode. She tells the guests that the King is suffering a bit from an old illness, nothing to worry about.
Macbeth then cries out to the ghost: “Avaunt! And quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!”
Lady M. decides that it would perhaps be better if everyone just left. “Good night! Stand not upon the order of your going but go at once.”

2011-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

(For Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings)
“R” is for “Rewrite”
I always enjoyed reading “Winnie the Pooh” to my kids; it gave me a chance to act out the parts.
They’ve grown past Winnie the Pooh age now and would no longer be interested, but when they were small they got a kick out of such readings. Eeyore was easy; you just dropped your voice an octave or so and added overtones of melancholia and weltschmerz. Pooh, humble and naïve, wasn’t difficult either. Piglet’s lines were delivered in a higher register as he was lively and full of spirit.
So I was interested indeed to read that A A Milne has published a new book of the series: “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.”
Seemed a bit odd since A A Milne died a half-century or so ago.

Turns out that it’s a new book in the series all right, but it’s by someone else, David Benedictus. If you’ve got to do a rewrite of a classic, his is the way to do it. He has done a remarkable job of capturing the tone, the voice, the spirit of the original work; he doesn't try to jazz it up or put some sizzle into the style. And the new illustrator does the same. You’d swear the pictures in the new book are by Ernest Shepard, the original artist who turned Milne’s creatures into world-famous icons.
But there’s a question.

Does a great classic need a rewrite? Why? After all, the original stories are available to today’s youngest generation. True, today's kids get interested early on in all kinds of digital gadgets and gizmos; they probably get around to the real Pooh characters a little later than we did, but better late than never, ss the saying goes.
The only change in the new version is this: there’s a Pooh Corner newcomer. Lottie the Otter tries to fit in with the other critters.
They’ve done all kinds of rewrites over the years. “Peter Pan” was recreated in this way, and of course there was a kerfuffle when a rewrite of “Gone With the Wind” was published.
What’s your opinion? Should they have left the “Hundred-Acre Wood” alone, or is it a good idea to come up with a new, well-done rewrite of the stories?

Magpie 66

2011-05-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

Polonius, the Lord Chancellor, can’t figure out just what’s the matter with the young prince.
He should be content; the country has a new king, a queen who is obviously very happy – all Denmark is celebrating.
But moody young Hamlet just sits with his nose in a book.
Polonius is determined to find out what is wrong. Shakespeare’s famous scene in Act Two beautifully sums up what happens when a stodgy, tedious old bureaucrat tries to deal with, or even understand, a young guy who is astute and sharp-witted.
The Lord Chancellor approaches the Prince.
Polonius: Do you know me, my lord?
Hamlet: Excellent well; you are a fishmonger.
Polonius: Not I, my lord.
Hamlet: Then I would you were so honest a man.
Polonius: What are you reading, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir. Though I most powerfully and potently believe that you could grow as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
Polonius: My lord, I will take my leave of you.
Hamlet: You could not take from me anything I would not more willingly part with – except my life, except my life, except my life.

2011-05-10T04:52:00.000-07:00

(For Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings)
“Q” is for “Queen.”

As you may have heard, William Shakespeare was the top dog in the playwright trade.
And Elizabeth I was unsurpassed in the queen business.
So here’s something interesting.
Both Will and Liz lived in the same town, at the same time, and they knew each other. Thus a natural question would be, what kind of relationship did they have?
The answer appears to be, not much.
Queen Elizabeth was one of the greatest, and most powerful, sovereigns in the history of England.

Will Shakespeare, even though he may have been a genius, was a commoner. Sovereigns did not hang out with commoners.
Unlike today? :-)
But the Queen enjoyed the playwright’s plays and we can almost say that, without her, there would have been no Shakespeare.
It’s difficult for us today to understand the position of the theatre and theatre folk at that time. As you may know, in the seventeenth century a great many people let superstition govern their lives: there was a general belief in such things as witches, ghosts and omens. Another general belief on the part of many was that there was something "wrong" with the very idea of players and playhouses. Those in authority would have closed the theatres, torn them down, and forbidden anything except works of a religious nature - which was pretty well all that English drama had consisted of before the Shakespearean era.
There would have been no point in Will S. trying to fight local authorities; he would have had to surrender.
But they had a problem: Elizabeth.
She enjoyed plays as much as she loved music and dancing (she loved to dance). Whenever those in power tried to close down theatres, they were reminded that such an action would make the Queen unhappy. And they had learned early on that making the Queen unhappy was to be avoided, to say the least.

So William Shakespeare and his theatrical company flourished. They often performed before her at court. She so loved the character Falstaff in “Henry IV” that she let it be known to the playwright that she’d like to see him in another play. So Will S. sat down and speedily turned out “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” loading it with Falstaff and Falstaffian humor.
Elizabeth was gifted in a number of areas, but her knowledge of languages was amazing. She spoke English and Latin with equal fluency, Italian almost as well, and had a fair knowledge of French, Spanish and Greek. Since Latin was the language of diplomacy at that time, she could converse fluently with diplomats visiting England from just about anywhere, even if they spoke no English.
There’s a wonderful story – I’d like to think it’s true – that the Queen had invited the Russian ambassador and his entourage at court to see a Shakespeare play. As the actors performed, she kept up a running translation, in Latin, of what was going on.

Magpie 65

2011-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Charles Baudelaire:
“To be a great man and a saint
FOR ONESELF,
That is the one important thing.”
(“Avant tout, être un grand homme et un saint -- pour soi-même.”)

2011-05-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

[For Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday and Sunday Scribblings]
The famous song is "April in Paris," but when I think of the City of Light I think of the month of May a few decades ago, when I was making a film in France.
It was hard, arduous, tough work, traveling first-class (paid for by the films' budgets), eating almost every day at Michelin 3-star restaurants, staying in the best Paris hotels; I don't know how I lived through it. :-)
The documentary had to do with the American expatriates; it was a famous time back in the 1920s when an entire season -- (a number of seasons, actually) -- was given over to Yankee writers making the trip to Paris. Since the franc was weak and the dollar was strong, it was the ideal spot for any American artist.
One of the places I wanted in the film was Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus.
Her home had been a place of pilgrimage for so many young writers. You could make the case – oh, you’d get arguments – but you could make the case that this is where modern American literature began, because Gertrude Stein attracted the greatest writers of that time: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, among others.
They had told me that I probably couldn’t get in to the apartment; it wasn’t open to the public. But I was able to get a few strings pulled at the French Government Tourist Office and I was ultimately allowed entrance into the famous home of Gertrude Stein.

As I walked about the place I remembered seeing pictures of it as it had once been when, much earlier, the walls were covered with avant-garde paintings as Stein discussed art with guys most people then had never heard of, young chaps named Picasso, Braque and Matisse.
It was said of Gertrude in the early years: “She knew where art was going.”
What attracted the American writers? Well, she was a sort of literary guru. As a writer, she was often difficult to understand – she certainly wasn’t much as an author of best-sellers – but her gift was for analysis and criticism; to many her judgment in literature was infallible.
When he met Stein, young Ernest Hemingway realized he had found a guide, even a tutor, and he took what she had to say very seriously. He thought so much of her he asked her to be the godmother of his child.
In “The American Tradition in Literature,” the editors state: “Hemingway created a revolution in language.” I believe the revolution was at least partially created by someone else. Long before she met Ernest H., Gertrude Stein wrote: “I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again.” To the young Hemingway, she pointed out this phenomenon, emphasizing as well the importance of writing in a new way, simply and directly, and of developing a forceful prose style with few adverbs or adjectives.
Ernest listened and learned; what he learned became the famous Hemingway style that influenced the narrative and dialogue of a couple of generations of novelists.
When Ernest, age 22, came to that apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, he would sit by the fire as Gertrude spoke to him about writing. He paid her a great compliment: “Writing used to be easy before I met you.”

Years later, when he became Papa Hemingway and very successful, when he became a
legend in his own lifetime, he would downplay Stein’s influence on his writing. But decades earlier he had felt differently: “Ezra (Pound) was right half the time,” he wrote, “and when he was wrong you were never in any doubt of it. Gertrude was always right.”
When you shot a film in those days, a small crowd would always gather. Among the people watching while I worked in the courtyard of Stein’s apartment building was an elderly lady who seemed to be very interested in all that was going on. I spoke to her and was surprised to learn that she had been Gertrude Stein’s concierge, going all the way back to the old days. This was quite a shock.
I was actually speaking with someone who had known them all as young people – Picasso, Braque, Matisse, as well as the American expats Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and the rest. She assured me that they had not only been friends of Miss Stein, but her friends too. I believed her.
The documentary that resulted from all this, “One Man’s Paris,” was distributed by Universal-International throughout the country after opening at the Palace on Broadway in Manhattan. Making it was an unforgettable experience for me.

Magpie 64

2011-05-02T12:21:00.001-07:00

As I checked out this week’s Magpie prompt, I wondered how many others would be reminded of the Bertolt Brecht play, “Mother Courage.”
Throughout human history there have been wars, and there have always been innocent victims. Victims who may never have believed in fighting in the first place, but were nonetheless caught up in it. Brecht’s play is a powerful reminder of the thousands of mothers with children who have, over the centuries, suffered due to violent human conflict.
Quite a number of highly qualified scholars claim that “Mother Courage” was the best play of the last century. But as I see it, there’s a problem…

Bertolt Brecht was deeply schooled in Marxism and Soviet aesthetic theory. He received the “Stalin Peace Prize” in 1954. His view of life was simple: the problem was capitalism. Capitalism wasn’t just evil; it was the evil. Everything bad, including war, stemmed from that and from that alone. That is the main theme of Brecht’s play.

Today, a half-century or so later, this seems woefully simplistic. We now know that wars can be caused by a half-dozen other reasons in addition to the profit motive: ideologies, religions, expansionism, etc. So I think this week’s Magpie prompt is summed up beautifully by the title “Mother Courage,” but not many of us today would be able to go along with Brecht in his belief that peace would ensue if the world just adopted Stalin’s Soviet system.
Today it’s possible to present this play so that the audience will leave the theater with the impression that an indefatigable woman has endured the worst and has still come through -- her aim of "living through the war" has been achieved.

2011-04-25T09:05:00.001-07:00

(For ABC Wednesday, Magpie 63 and Sunday Scribblings.)
"O" is for "Obedient"
“All I’m saying is, we follow the rule book. No deviations.”
“But the rules aren’t clear for everything. That means that sometimes we can decide ourselves what to do.”
“No, we can't. If any rule isn’t clear, we’re supposed to go to – you know who.”
“The Exalted.”
“Exactly. And when it comes to orders from the Exalted, we are one thing: obedient! Keep that word in mind! Trouble with you young guys, you want to see things happen. You get bored. Well, a lot of our work is boring – get used to it.”
“Excuse me, but this is the PDA, right? The Planet Destruction Agency?”
“Sure, but we destroy only the ‘U’ planets, the uninhabited ones. According to the Exalted, we leave the ‘I’ planets, the inhabited ones, alone. It’s all in the rule book.”
“Yeah, but what you seem to have missed is the section that says it’s okay to destroy an ‘I’ planet if it’s on the way to self-destruction on its own. In fact, technically speaking, eliminating an "I" planet is easy -- it's a piece of cake."
“You’re referring to Earth again, aren’t you? You keep bringing that up like a broken record. Listen. Our job is to find which ‘U’ planets are old, unable to keep up, and destroy them. That does not include Earth. I realize that you think you have all kinds of new, innovative ideas, but the PDA has been around for a long time and doesn’t need new ideas.”
“You know what it was like, where I was stationed before? I was in Universe Seven and let me tell you, it was a different world. They didn’t destroy old, useless planets the way you do, just turn them off the way you’d turn off a light bulb. They blew ‘em up! This made for a spectacular son et lumiere event that not only made an exciting show for everyone but served as a lesson for all the other planets.”
“The Exalted – he permitted that?”
“Permitted it? He loved it! Here, we’ve got tape; let me put it up on the screen.”

“My God! That is spectacular!”
“Right. Look at those colors and stroboscopic lights and all that movement; it’s marvelous! We could do that with Earth! Because it’s a fact that an inhabited planet makes for a better show when it’s blown up.”
“But there’s this… In recent centuries, there have been more and more attempts on the part of its inhabitants to destroy Earth on their own. With their never-ending fighting and so on, they’re going to blow the place up themselves; they don’t need our help.”
“Well, give me a ring when it’s about to happen. I wouldn’t want to miss it!”

2011-04-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

(For Sunday Scribblings, ABC Wednesday and Magpie 62)
"N" as in "No, thank you."
This week’s Magpie prompt reminded me of a much-needed meal I nearly missed a few decades ago.
I was waiting about for a couple of weeks in Sydney, Australia, while they repaired a huge hole in my ship that resulted when my vessel ran smack-dab into the Great Barrier Reef.
Being young – yes, this was some time ago :-) – my main interest was in meeting a nice Australian girl. And I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of just the right person, an attractive and intelligent young lady named, IIRC, Mabel.
We got along well. So well that after a week or so she invited me home for a meal and to meet her mum and dad. I resolved to be on my best behavior.
Things didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who famously said that Britain and America are two nations separated by a single language. Well, Yanks and Aussies were separated in the same way and I imagine they still are. Mabel and her family spoke English, but they had their version and I had mine.
Here’s what happened.
As I sat in the living-room, attempting to look respectable, Mabel’s mom – er, mum – looked in from the kitchen and asked, “Will you take tea?”
I was hungry, but I don’t usually have tea with my meals, so I said, “No, thank you.”
I continued sitting there, like a lump on a bog, and as time went on the unmistakable sounds of people eating came from the next room. I couldn’t believe it. They were going ahead with the meal without me!
I gradually realized what had happened.

When we say “tea,” we picture something like the above.
But throughout greater Britain, “tea” often meant that kind of tea, yes, but it also meant a light afternoon or evening meal, usually served around four o’clock.

The above, for us, would be a couple of eggs, sunnyside, with toast, a breakfast. To Australians, perhaps more in those days than today, it could also be “tea.”
So when the lady of the house had looked in on me to ask, “Will you take tea?” she wasn’t asking if I liked a cup of tea with whatever I was going to eat; what she was actually saying was, “Please come in and sit down; we want you to join us for our afternoon meal.”
And I had said no. Here I thought I was going to shine with this family, but they probably were saying to themselves: h'mm -- another of those weird Americans they had heard about. Poor Mabel must have been embarrassed that she had brought home such a bone-head to meet her folks. I finally got up and went quietly in to sit at the table, trying not to look too foolish.
I am pleased to get a lot of friendly U K and Australian visitors to my blog, and I’m sure they all have their own stories about Americans and the English language that separates us. :-)

2011-04-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

[For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday]
“M” is for “Mamillius”
The little kid with the funny name…

He’s very much like other boys his age. He likes to horse around, play games, tell ghost stories, etc. He’s featured in the play, “The Winter’s Tale.”
But there’s something special about this youngster, one of the most appealing characters ever created by Will Shakespeare: he’s a prince. His mom and dad are the King and Queen (only not in that order.) 

As princeling, he has two ladies-in-waiting assigned to be in charge of him. Naturally, he stands up to them.
First Lady
“Come, my gracious lord,
Shall I be your playfellow?”
Mamillius
“No, I'll none of you.”
First Lady
Why, my sweet lord?”
Mamillius
“You'll kiss me and speak to me as if
I were a baby still.”
Like most other young dudes of his age, he didn’t much care to have everyone kissing him and treating him as though he was still a toddler.
But Mamillius’ story is really a tragedy.
His mom and dad are constantly fighting. The King has charged the Queen with adultery – of which she is entirely innocent. This is serious stuff. If a queen is guilty of adultery, she has by law committed treason, which is punishable by death.
His dysfunctional family, the constant rows, take their toll on the youngster. His health is affected.

By the way, we should add that his father, though certainly not much as a husband, dearly loves his son.
But when the King throws his wife in prison and refuses to let Mamillius see his dear mother, the young prince becomes ill and dies. The monarch laments his poor judgment and promises to grieve for his dead son every day for the rest of his life.
So, it’s a Shakespeare tragedy. But there’s something else that's probably there by design, something that makes the sad story of Mamillius fascinating.
We remember that Shakespeare’s own son also died as a child. We can’t help wondering if Our Will had his boy in mind when he wrote of the death of the young prince.
I have always felt he was thinking of his dead son when he wrote these heart-breaking lines:
“Grief
Fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed,
Walks up and down with me,
Repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
My fair son! My all the world!”

Magpie 61

2011-04-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

Willow's prompt this week reminded me of a saying I learned when I was working in Germany:

"'In vino veritas.'
In Bier ist auch etwas."

("In wine there is truth."
In beer there is also something.) :-)

2011-04-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

[For Sunday Scribblings and ABC Wednesday]
“L” is for “Lin” – Maya Lin.
The judges were guys, mostly old guys, who made the call.
The contest had 1,421 entrants, and the point was to determine who would design a Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the Mall in Washington, D C, back in 1981.
The judges were deliberately not told who the entrants were. All they knew was that Entry 1026 was the best, by far.

The Memorial design they chose avoided the usual conventional style of military statues. Instead, it was a kind of abstraction. It was to consist of two long walls, simple, graceful, of polished black granite, on which would be carved the names of all the more than 58,000 Americans dead and missing from that war.

I have to wonder if they would have chosen that design, Entry 1026, if they had known that the artist was a 21-year-old college student, a Chinese-American named Maya Lin, who had no degree, no backers, no experience.
As you might guess, once the idea for the Memorial was publicized, there was an outcry.
Many people had expected, had wanted, a conventional design, something more heroic, as it was thought military monuments should be. Politicians, befuddled as usual, soon had their say. Of those who were against, one of them was Ross Perot, a financial sponsor of the contest. Phyllis Schafly, of the Moral Majority, spoke out strongly. The secretary of the interior tried to withhold the necessary building permit.
The Memorial was referred to as “a black gash of shame” and “a black ditch.”
A compromise was reached when it was decided to build a different monument, “Three Fighting Men,” a “realistic” statue of three seven-foot bronze American Vietnam soldiers, by a different artist, which was placed in a different part of the Mall.

However today, Maya Lin’s Vietnam design is the most visited memorial in Washington. A structure of simple beauty and great emotional power, it is magnificent.

To many thousands of visitors, it conveys an almost unbearable sense of loss.

Earlier, when the judges had announced their selection, they said of this design: “All who come here can find it a place of healing.”

Magpie 60

2011-04-04T09:41:00.000-07:00

This week’s Magpie prompt got me to thinking of Feste.

In Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night,” there’s a jester of that name who sings, dances, plays instruments, tells jokes, etc. His most famous song is about rain.
“When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…”
Feste is attached to the household of the Countess Olivia. In those days, if you had a lot of money – and Olivia did – you had a permanent staff to provide entertainment. The television programs of the Elizabethan era were fairly primitive, to say the least, so after the evening meal all hands would sit back and enjoy whatever the staff tummlers could come up with in the way of amusement and distraction. The master – in this case the mistress – of the house would usually have a jester, fool, clown, whatever, on permanent call.
It was a tough gig. One wisecrack too many, one step over whatever imaginary line had been set up, and the joker would be out on the street. And he had to be prepared, no matter how he felt at the moment, to be funny.
“Here’s a man of jollity,
Jibe, joke, jollify!
Give us of your quality,
Come, Fool, follify!”

It’s understandable that the Jester of that era, a chap seemingly of such a playful and frivolous nature, occasionally had his moments of melancholy. Many artists, writers, operatic composers (“Rigoletto,” anyone?) have used this theme in their works.
And Will S. was no exception.
With all of Feste’s amusing shaggy-dog stories and pranks, the play’s audience realizes that there’s a darker and mysterious side to him. When he sings the famous line “The rain it raineth every day,” he’s saying that every day can bring some kind of misery. At the end of the play he sums it all up in a famous closing song:
“When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
The rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain, it raineth every day.”

He then comes right out and in effect makes a plea for applause:
“A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.”

2011-03-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

For ABC Wednesday: “K” is for Karen – Karen and Steve

[For Sunday Scribblings, see following post.]

Olga has a new job – maybe. But Steve has something else on his mind…
Olga: “I got it! I think I got it. Of course, I won’t know for a day or two; there were a couple of other actresses at the audition. One of them was really good. But I just have a feeling about this job – I think I got it.”
Steve: “Olga, calm down. We’ve got to talk.”
“Hey, enough with the ‘Olga’! Remember? I’m ‘Karen’ now. That’s important. The agency will be calling and won’t know who you’re talking about if you say ‘Olga’ isn’t here.”
“Olga Doubravka is a fine name; nothing wrong with it; it’s you. But we’ll go along with Karen if that’s what you want.”

“It’s not just what I want. There’s a whole new career out there for me. If I land this job I’ll be off to the races: I’ve got to have a suitable name. Who would have guessed that someday I’d be starring on TV!”
“I know. It’s exciting. But we have to talk about our – situation.”
“Ah, yes. The relationship. I thought we’d done enough talking about that.”
“Come on; some time soon I’d really appreciate an answer.”
“Sure. Of course. But asking me for an answer now, when I’ve just landed this great TV job, or just about landed it, is – well, this isn’t the time.”
“But by now you must know, deep down, if you want me as your husband.”
“Steve, listen. I have nothing against husbands. I imagine I’ll acquire one some day. And I admit, when I first met you I was impressed. You told me of your creativity, your artistic imagination, your dedication to original thinking, and how important these all were to you in your profession. So it was a bit of a letdown when I learned what your profession was.”
“Nothing wrong with my profession: the personal marketing of pre-owned vehicles.”
“Steve, you sell used cars!”
“Right. And that artistic imagination, that creativity, are extremely important in that type of work. I’m not just another salesman!”
“Anyway, there are other things…”
“You’re talking about that toothbrush, aren’t you?”
“That’s one of them, yes.”

“Look – um, Karen. That morning I had an urgent meeting with a customer and I couldn’t be late. For some reason my toothbrush wasn’t where I usually keep it, in the glass with yours. So just once, I used yours. I never thought it would bother you so much.”
“I thought it was disgusting. If that’s what life with you would be like, you using my toothbrush and maybe other personal things…”
“Wait a minute! It’s a gag, right? You saw that Seinfeld episode about a toothbrush and now you’re acting it out!”
“I’m acting nothing out. This is something I feel strongly about.”

“But it was just once! It was an emergency. And your brush looked really worn out anyway. God knows, we’ve done so many intimate things in so many ways I can’t see why my having your toothbrush in my mouth should be upsetting for you.”
“Well it is. Although… You know, this is kind of funny. This morning as I was rushing around getting ready for the audition, I couldn’t find my hair brush – so I used yours.”

“You used my new hair brush!? That brush is from the Mason Pearson Collection; it’s expensive! You got some of that sticky crap you use on your hair on my brush? Those are genuine boar bristles on that brush."
"I'm glad to hear they're genuine boar. There are so many fake boars running around these days."
"That hair brush has caused two different customers to tell me my hair looks like George Clooney’s”
“Well, speaking of Seinfeld, I would have said George Costanza’s. But anyway, I only used it once.”
“But it’s disgusting!”

2011-03-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

[Magpie 59 and Sunday Scribblings -- the word is "messenger."]
“Well, we had just had a fine meal at a French restaurant, which had come highly recommended – though they didn’t mention that lunch at that place cost about the same as a new BMW – so we figured, hey, we’re in Paris so let’s go visit the Louvre.”
“And once you were in the Louvre, you and Mom made sure to visit the lady with the enigmatic smile.”

“Exactly."
"And as you stood in the crowd looking at that famous painting, Dad, what message were you receiving?"

"Message? The message I received was, where's the smile? There really isn't a great smile. She's just a pleasant-looking woman sitting there, looking --er -- pleasant. Not much of a message, I admit, but of course I have a daughter who was an art history major so maybe she can serve as messenger.”
“Well, Dad, I can try. Reason I asked about a message is that so many have studied this portrait and have come up with a wide variety of theories as to its meaning. I believe that what's important is to first learn the facts."
"Which are..?"
"Well – you see, all that money spent on my art history classes wasn’t wasted – she’s the lady with the smile because that was her name.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Her name in Italian was sort of like ‘Mrs. Smile.’ You see, Dad, the woman was the wife of a rich guy named Francesco del Giocondo. He commissioned Leonardo – not DiCaprio, the other one – to paint a portrait of his wife because they had just had a son. When referring to her, they used the female form of Mrs Giocondo’s name, Gioconda, which is our English word ‘jocund’ – merry, jovial.”
“So she was Mona Smile.”
“Well, sort of. But Mona wasn’t her name; it was her title. ‘Ma donna’ meant ‘my lady’ and ‘Mona’ was a kind of slangy version of this: it meant, like, ‘ma’am’ or ‘madame.’ If today we were to refer to, say, Lisa Kudrow as 'Mrs. Lisa,' that would be the same deal. Anyway, the Italians call the painting ‘La Gioconda.”
“And that would translate as The Happy One.”
“Right, or something pretty close to it.”
“I wish you had been with us on that trip. You could have explained a lot of things.”
“Well, Dad, I wish I had been there too – especially for that lunch that cost as much as a new BMW.”

2011-03-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

(Magpie 58, ABC Wednesday, Writer's Island and Sunday Scribblings)
“J” is for “January.”
Hamlet is very excited.
It’s January and it’s a bitter cold night in Denmark. We’re on a battlement of Elsinore Castle, where the young Prince has just learned that his late father was murdered, murdered by his own brother, the present King.

And Hamlet learned this from his father himself, who has appeared in the form of a Ghost who begs his son to avenge his murder.
Hamlet’s mind ranges wildly: was that really his father? Or could it have been an evil spirit, a fiend trying to trick him into performing an evil deed – to kill his uncle?

And of course there’s the possibility that he had imagined the whole thing. He has got to find out the answers to his questions.
He comes upon his two friends, who had also previously seen the Ghost.
Hamlet: “Good friends, as you are friends, scholars and soldiers, give me one poor request.”
Horatio: “What is it, my lord. We will.”
Hamlet: “Never make known what you have seen tonight.”
Horatio and Marcellus: “My lord, we will not.”
Hamlet: “Nay, but swear it.”
Both his friends readily swear to it.
But that’s not nearly enough for the young Prince. An oath is all well and good, but this is serious business. It calls for a special kind of oath.

Hamlet: “Upon my sword.”
Marcellus: “We have sworn, my lord, already.”
Hamlet: “Indeed, upon my sword, indeed!”
Quite astonishingly, the Ghost calls out from beneath the stage: “Swear by his sword!”
They swear again. Horatio's amazement is unlimited.
Horatio: “O day and night! But this is wondrous strange!”
Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

2011-03-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

(For Writer's Island, ABC Wednesday, Magpie 57 and Sunday Scribblings)

Shure, and what with the celebration of the shamrock so close, I got to thinking of the Irish in Shakespeare.
For example, there’s Captain Macmorris.

You see, I’ve always thought that of all the kings Will Shakespeare wrote about, and he wrote about a lot of ‘em, Henry the Fifth was the one he admired most.
Hank the Cinq represented what our playwright thought a monarch should be: wise, courageous, patriotic, daring, you name it – and of course he was the hero of what was possibly then the greatest military success in the history of England, the Battle of Agincourt.

To change the subject for just a moment, you remember all those movies about World War II, whenever they showed the crew of, say, an American bomber, the crew would be made up of one guy from Brooklyn, one from the Deep South, one from way out West, along with maybe a stoic New Englander. The idea of course was to show that all these various types, though very different, were inseparable when it came to fighting for freedom.

Well, Our Will did the same thing in the play “Henry V.” He features a few soldiers on the field who represent the main groups who made up the King’s army. There’s Fluellen, from Wales; Jamy, from Scotland; Macmorris, from Ireland; and of course Gower, the Englishman.
They’re always arguing and disputing – they’re soldiers, after all – but Shakespeare makes sure they're also inseparable when it comes to the battle.
In the play, they’re engaged in the part of the great battle that had to do with mining. You see, when you were laying siege to a fortress or anything that was strongly held, for centuries a common military strategy would be to dig underneath to put an explosive device under the place and blow it up.
The device was called a “petard.” If it blew up before you got it in place, you were “hoist by your own petard,” which is where that phrase came from.
Well, it’s Captain Macmorris, of all the group, who’s upset that the mining work is not going well. He believes that everyone is standing around talking, arguing, and no one is really doing their job.
Macmorris: “By Chrish’ law, tis ill done! I could have blown it up in an hour! It is no time to discourse. The trumpets call us to the breach, and yet we talk, and be Chrish, do nothing!”
(Shakespeare was not noted for his accuracy as far as Irish brogues were concerned. :-) )
But it’s kind of interesting that it’s the Irisher who shows the real dedication and expertise in the operation they’re all involved in.
Top o’ the morn to ye, Captain Macmorris!

2011-03-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

[For ABC Wednesday, Magpie 56, Writer's Island and Sunday Scribblings]
“H” is for “Head Over Heels”
Think of a beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.
She falls in love with a guy who has the head, a big head, of a farm animal.
And she falls head over heels.
That’s the story of Queen Titania and Bottom the Weaver.
You remember him – he’s the chap in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” who has his head turned into that of a jassack. :-)

Nick Bottom – who knew he had a first name? – is a simple workman, with the emphasis on “simple.”
He and his fellow working stiffs are planning to put on a play for the Duke’s wedding day; if the presentation is successful each performer will be in line to receive sixpence a day for the rest of their lives. (Which would be pretty much like winning the national lottery as far as they’re concerned, so they’re all taking this production of theirs very seriously.)
But Puck, a crafty, not to mention cunning, little character with magical powers, a prankster par excellence, decides to have a little fun with them.
He does the deed with Bottom’s head and leaves him in the forest.

Along comes the spectacularly beautiful Titania, Queen of the Fairies. She is what Shakespeare would have described as a “looker,” if he had thought of it. :-) Check out those gossamer wings.
She has herself been enchanted by a love potion made from the juice of a rare flower – and you know how powerful that stuff can be – administered by her jealous husband, who has rigged things up so that she will fall for the first individual she sees after waking up.
He says: “Wake when some vile thing is near.”
The vile thing turns out to be our friend Bottom.

The Queen falls head over, to risk repeating myself, heels for this guy; they make a handsome couple. :-)
Titania orders her minions to treat him well:
"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."
And it's a tribute to Bottom that he can adapt to any situation; he takes all of this in stride -- he’s enjoying every minute.
Later, when he’s back to his true self, he tries to describe that adventure. He figures it must have been a dream:
“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say! The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, what my dream was!”
But now of course he’s aware they must all rehearse the play to be ready for the Duke’s wedding day.

(I knew, with a bit of luck, I’d be able to work this week’s Magpie prompt in here somewhere. :-))
Bottom: “Most important, fellow actors, eat no garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath, and I don’t doubt everyone will say, it is a sweet comedy!”

2011-03-01T11:07:00.000-08:00

(For ABC Wednesday, Writer's Island and Sunday Scribblings)
“G” is for “Gatsby.”
I’d like to tell you a story.
This happened way back in the twenties, soon after the end of World War I.
A young fellow named Scott fell in love with a girl, Zelda Sayre, whom he had met when he was stationed at an army post near her home town.

Scott was crazy about Zelda; she was the “golden girl” as far as he was concerned and he was determined to marry her.
Trouble was, Zelda was a wealthy, socially prominent young woman, living in Montgomery, Alabama, a part of the country where family and social position – and money – were extremely important, and it seemed that Scott had little to offer.
Back in his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was a raw, lower-middle-class youth who had a mediocre job in an advertising agency, making a fast twenty dollars a week; his father had just been fired from Procter and Gamble, and there was no family fortune. In addition, Scott hadn’t even finished college.

What Scott did have was this: he was a Writer.
So he came up with a Plan A. (There was no Plan B.) He would write a novel, and if it was a success perhaps the Sayre family, and Zelda, would take him seriously.
Rather a slim hope, it would seem. But, quite unbelievably, it happened.

His novel, “This Side of Paradise,” wasn’t just successful; it was a blockbuster. Three days after publication, the entire first printing was sold out. Seeing this, and realizing what this meant for his future, on the fourth day after publication he sent a wire to Zelda to come north to New York; they were going to be married.

She did, and they were. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities.
Overnight, the twenty-four year old F Scott Fitzgerald had become the most famous literary figure in the country. He wrote a number of other works, but his masterpiece, as any college English major could tell you, was “The Great Gatsby.”
After the War to End All Wars, and we know how that turned out, the country had Prohibition, which made millionaires out of bootleggers – and that was Jay Gatsby's secret.
Fitzgerald was an autobiographical writer. You can see his own recent history in the story of Gatsby, an outsider who longed to be accepted by the “old money” society of New York’s Long Island. (In the book, Gatsby has fallen in love with a golden girl whom he met when he was stationed in an army post near her home town.)

His big mistake was that he thought he could spend his way into that society – one way was by throwing big expensive parties in his big expensive home – though in reality they would never accept him.
This remarkable book evokes not only the ambiance of the jazz-age search for the American dream of wealth and happiness, but also the larger questions of fading traditional values.

Later Fitzgerald was to appropriate his wife Zelda's life in what turned out to be its tragic dimensions for use in his stories and novels.

To put it briefly, “The Great Gatsby” is now regarded around the world as an American literary classic. It’s still a best-seller; half a million copies are sold every year. It is listed second on the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.
By the way, Baz Luhrmann’s film of the Gatsby story – in 3D, yet – will start shooting in Australia, in August, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby.

Magpie 55

2011-02-28T11:54:00.000-08:00

(To the tune of "Lemon Tree")
When I was just a lad of ten, my father said to me,
"Come here and take a lesson from the lovely lemon tree.
Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is cool.
But never use a lemon as a kind of killing tool.”

I learned that there were knives and guns and even strangling rope.
But lemon as a weapon? You’d have to be a dope.
Such killing would be messy and would leave a lot of blood.
Your new career as hit man would be nipped right in the bud.

With a huge and heavy grapefruit you’d have at least a chance.
But a “killer lemon”? Silly – it’s clear right at first glance.
“Take my advice,” said my old man, “and never join a mob.
Avoid all citrus slaughter – get a different kind of job!”

2011-02-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

(Magpie 54, ABC Wednesday, Writer's Island, Sunday Scribblings)
I don’t talk much about my wartime heroism.
Perhaps because there was so little of it. :-)
But the truth is, as far as war is concerned I’ll have you know I was there, a few decades ago, right in the thick of it, as the saying goes, enduring bombings and strafings -- fire from the right, fire from the left.

As a result I wound up in a miserable jungle hospital in the middle of a miserable jungle.
They had carefully placed huge Red Crosses on the hospital tents, but the enemy saw fit to ignore them. They had perhaps heard that I was laid up in one of those tents and were out to get me. :-)
Anyway, I learned the routine. I was given a bunk in a huge tent that was filled with other bunks and each poor wounded warrior had an insect net. That jungle had the most god-awful insects nature has yet created.

The rules for the patients were clear, there was no way to improvise. Most of the time we were to stay in our bunks, with the net carefully tucked in all around to keep out the insects, but when the bombing started – and it happened any time, day or night – we were, those of us who were ambulant, supposed to get to a series of slit trenches just outside.
When the bombing let up, assuming we were still more or less alive, we were to stagger back inside the tent to the comfort of the bunk. Trouble was, what with the desperate need to get to the slit trench as fast as we could we were usually unable to carefully tuck in the insect net, so when we returned there was a horrific assemblage of insects – large, loathsome creatures -- lying in wait on the bed.

They all seemed to be chortling among themselves: We made it! We got inside! Now the fun begins! It was a tossup which was worse, the bombs or the insects.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. I wouldn’t know.
During the time I spent in slit trenches – and a slit trench was just like a foxhole -- I was too busy trying to stay alive to think much about theology.
When my kids asked me about my experiences during the war, I was embarrassed to report that I hadn't done anything heroic; most of the time what I was experiencing was fear.

But the Magpie prompt of this week somehow captured one of those moments in the slit trench I’ll never forget, the moment when the bombardment was happening all around me – chunks of earth flying here and there.
Mother earth being chewed up, breaking into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

Leaving Home

2011-02-14T14:51:00.001-08:00

(Magpie 53, "E" is for "Exodus." Writer's Island and Sunday Scribblings)
When your community has broken the sacred laws, who can foretell what fate has in store for it?
“I don’t want to have to tell you again. You’ve got to get your things together now so we can get out of here!”
“This is all so strange...”
“It’s more than strange; it’s dangerous. We’ve only got another half-hour or so before the whole place blows up. Where are the girls?”
“Well, they’re trying to get their things together too. It’s awful that we have to leave; they’ve been doing so well in school and of course they have their friends here. And I've got a week's food in the pantry."
“You just don’t get it! This is a life and death situation! We should have been on the road an hour ago.”
“How did you learn about this – this emergency? Nobody else seems to know about it.”
“I haven’t explained it because it would take too much time, and you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. But did you see those two strange-looking men around here this morning?”
“They’re from out of town, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” (laughs) “You could certainly say that. From way out of town. They aren’t really men, you see; they’re angels.”
“Angels?!”
“Right. You know what’s been going on in this place, all the drinking and carousing and screwing around and God knows what else. Well, Yahweh sent these angels to see if there are a few righteous folks in our town.”
“Who sent them?”
“Yahweh – you know, God.”
“This is all very weird.”
“The idea was that if there were at least ten righteous men in this place it wouldn’t be destroyed. Well, these two fellows – er, angels – couldn’t find even ten, so the whole area is going to be blown sky high.”
“How will – er, you know, He – do the destruction?”
“Not sure. Something to do with fire and brimstone, I suppose.”
"I've never really understood just what brimstone is, actually."
"Well, let's not wait around to find out."
“Will it be all of Sodom?”
“Not just Sodom; Gomorrah too.”
“Oh, dear. I rather like Gomorrah.”
“Yeah. A real fun town – too much fun, as it turns out.”
“So where are we going?”
“I have been told that we can be safe if we get to Zoar; it’s outside Sodom’s city limits. Ah, here are the girls. Seriously, my dear, we've got to get started.”
“It’ll be sad to leave. In spite of its rather racy reputation, I’ve really enjoyed living here. There’s a hill on the road to Zoar. When we get to the top of that hill, I’m just going to have a good look back at our dear old town!”

For "Writer's Island" and "A Thousand Years"

2011-02-09T04:17:00.000-08:00

The Epiphany of Maschmeyer the Ordinary.

Herman Melville, above, the “Moby Dick” author, went to sea as a young man, so I figured, why shouldn’t I?
So I did. For almost four years.
And the internet gives me a chance to write about it.
This was a few decades ago. Since there was a war going on – when hasn’t there been? – they desperately needed personnel for American ships, so I rose rapidly up the ranks.

Though I didn’t look much like the guy in the above picture, I nevertheless started as a lowly deckhand and developed into a “90-day wonder” – which was the sarcastic way they had of describing a simple seaman who rapidly, too rapidly, made it to the rank of officer. I ultimately became the Second Officer of the ship, incredible as that may seem.
One night we had quite an adventure: my ship ran smack into a coral reef. (Not as a result of my navigation, I assure you.)
We had run at full speed onto a coral reef in the South Pacific in the middle of the night and our ship was stuck there, dead, as the saying goes, in the water.

The thing about reefs is that they don’t play fair. A coral reef is like a huge rock sticking up out of the water, except it doesn’t stick up out of the water; it hides just beneath the surface, waiting to get you.
Science tells us that coral reefs developed through biotic processes through much of the Phanerozoic period.
Good to know.
But all that means to the seafarer is simply that for a thousand years coral reefs have been lying in wait for ships, and they still are.
And what this indicated, even to the slowest-witted member of our crew, was that we probably had a hole in the bow, and that would mean that water was probably pouring in.
What you don’t want, as the Second Officer aboard the “Titanic” could have told you, is a hole in the ship, with water pouring in.
(Later, much later, when we got back to port, a diver went down and checked it out. He said the hole in the bow was big enough to drive a jeep into.)
In today’s ships I suppose they’ve got a little computer up on the bridge that tells the officer of the watch if he’s got a hole in the bow. “Oh, I say,” the computer will opine, “there’s a whopper of a hole in the bow. Just thought I’d mention it.”
The officer, who presumably would be better trained than I was, would know what to do.
We had nothing like that. As to what kind of hole we had in the bow, and whether or not we were sinking, we had to fall back on logic, guessing and a certain amount of hoping.
For me it was an unforgettable moment, standing there in the dead of night on the bridge with the captain – who I strongly suspected had been a 90-day wonder himself – desperately trying to figure out if we were sinking.
What was needed at that moment was the ship’s carpenter. Even steel vessels, not just wooden ones, needed a ship’s carpenter. One of his duties was to regularly “sound” the bilge, the lowest part of the ship.
Here’s how you “sound.” There’s a sounding tube that leads from the ship’s bottom up to the main deck. The carpenter takes a rope that has a weight on the end and drops it down the tube. He then pulls it up and checks to see if there’s water on it and if so, how much. Not very high-tech – nothing was in those days – but it did the job.
However, at this rather tense moment, no one could find the carpenter. I now believe he slept through the whole collision with the reef, even though it had sounded like a bomb going off in the general direction of the bow when we hit.
But not to worry. We had an ordinary seaman who was a deckhand on board – “Maschmeyer the Ordinary,” as he was known – whose job it had been to accompany the carpenter as he did his soundings, so he knew how to do it. The skipper sent him up to the bow on the double to sound the deep tank and see if we were taking on water, and if so how much.
We waited nervously on the bridge as Maschmeyer, quite a distance away up on the bow, did his work.
No report came back. He said nothing. I learned later that he had been unable to believe what the sounding line told him, so he had to go through the process again.
“Well, what is it?” shouted the captain, who was irascible even in the best of times, “For God’s sake, how much water is there down there?!”
You understand, any ship might have a little water sloshing around down in the bilge; that’s normal. So if the sounding line indicates an inch or two that would be okay. More than that and you’re in trouble.
“Fifteen feet, Captain,” called back Maschmeyer, in a kind of apologetic tone.
Fifteen feet! That meant that the ship’s hull was full of water and we were sinking fast; we would have about five minutes to get the boats over the side and abandon ship.
However, someone had gotten the carpenter out of his bunk and he was now up on the bow. He shouted back to us to relax. It was then that Maschmeyer had his epiphany: he realized he had sounded the fresh water tank, the tank that held the water we used for our showers!

So – we had a huge hole in the bow, and the sea had poured in, but the watertight bulkhead, placed up there for that very purpose when they built the ship, had kept the water from filling the rest of the hull.
We limped back to shore and the ship was put up on drydock and we all got a nice three-week’s shore leave while the damage was repaired.

Magpie 52

2011-02-07T15:55:00.000-08:00

That prompt, that house -- alone, silent, tucked away...
It reminded me of a visit I paid years ago to a house tucked away in a town in western Massachusetts.
Back in 1862 it had been the home of a fascinating 31-year-old woman, a recluse, shy, unknown to the world, but who was to become one of the great American poets. .
She wrote a great many poems, very few of which were published in her lifetime and none of which were published as she wrote them.
They were special.
Her poetry was too, well, different – strange, idiosyncratic, at times almost chaotic.
And the life she lived was almost as strange.

Her name, as you may well by now have guessed, was Emily Dickinson, and she spent years in that house without setting her foot outside her front door, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds.
In April 1862, a man named Thomas Higginson, a critic and editor, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in which he advised budding young writers. Dickinson sent a letter to him, enclosing four poems and asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
He was interested. His reply included gentle "surgery" (that is, criticism) of Dickinson's raw, odd verse, questions about her personal and literary background, and a request for more poems.
To the average reader, Dickinson’s work seemed then, and indeed to many seems today, to be merely the writing of an amateur, someone who has a lot to say but who doesn’t understand the rules of poetry.
She used dashes a lot, along with strange capitalization and bizarre subject matter. A famous example of her work:

“I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

“How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell one's name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog!”

In one of her early letters to Higginson, she wrote of herself: "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."
“Eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves...” Higginson realized he was dealing with an authentic Poet.
Fact is, Emily Dickinson was simply indifferent to conventional poetic rules, but she had a rigorous literary standard of her own and often altered a word many times to suit her difficult, demanding ear.
Look at these well-known lines of hers:

"Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.”

If you want to get technical, what she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a traditional form. She uses “tetrameter” for the first and third lines – four beats to the line – and “trimeter” for the second and fourth – three beats to the line.
In other words, she knew the rules of poetry, she just didn’t care all that much about them. She wanted to write in her own raw, idiosyncratic way and she wasn’t going to change.
It’s ironic that, after her death, many of her works – she left almost 2,000 poems – were published, and she would undoubtedly have been upset to see that they had all been “corrected” by editors, the syntax rearranged and everything rewritten in the conventional poetic style and approved grammar of that era.
It wasn’t till 1955 that one Thomas Johnson published Dickinson's poems for the first time in their original formats, thus displaying the creative genius and peculiarity of her poetry.
Emily Dickinson is now taught in college classes throughout the land as a powerful figure in American culture. Twentieth-century critic Harold Bloom placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and T S Eliot as a major American poet.
Some familiar Dickinson lines:
"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words."
"A wounded deer leaps the highest."
"Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate."
"I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven."
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

For "Writer's Island" and "Story"

2011-02-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

Surely there's a place this week for the story of one of the great writers -- poet, playwright -- in the history of our English literture: Ben Jonson.
To many scholars, he was the greatest dramatic genius of the Elizabethan theatre, after Shakespeare.
He is best known for his satirical plays and his lyric poems. He was a man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for getting into trouble.

What makes him interesting is this: he started out as a bricklayer.
Like most bricklayers of 400 years ago he was unable to go to university, so he decided to educate himself. He became one of the best-educated men in the country.

Ultimately, Oxford, which previously wouldn’t have allowed him to so much as deliver a pizza to the back door, granted him an MA.
He was also contentious and very argumentative. His story consisted of a rap sheet that was almost unbelievable. He had killed a soldier in man-to-man combat in the Low Countries, and he killed another man in a duel. He was locked up in prison from time to time for “leude and mutynous” behavior, which seemed to sort of sum up his life.
It’s worth pointing out that the report of his heroic man-to-man combat experience while he was in the army came from him; no one else ever mentioned it.
As for the duel, that actually happened, and Ben J. was in trouble; he could have been hanged for such a killing. He managed to get off by using a legal ploy, something that says a lot about Elizabethan life. He got off by pleading “benefit of clergy.”
It worked, even though there were few who would have described Ben Jonson as clergy, or even having much to do with clergy.
However, there were so few educated people in England at that time that authorities decided it would be best not to execute a person if he could prove he could read and write. In that case he would be considered to be “clergy.” Ben did well in this test: he aced the exam by reciting a Bible verse in Latin. He got off lightly: he was just branded with the mark of a felon.
This tough guy was capable of magnificent writing; how many bricklayers do you know who could beguile the reader with a poem as light and lovely as “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” which he did.
As for the profession of playwrighting, it was at that time a dangerous business. Write the wrong words in a script and your punishment could be severe. In Ben Jonson’s play “Eastward Ho!” he committed the fox pass of appearing to suggest that King James the One had accepted payment for creating knighthoods. That was a mistake. He not only wound up in jail but endured torture. Will Shakespeare was careful throughout his career to keep his nasal passages clean; he stayed out of trouble. Ben sort of stayed in trouble.

As an example of what could happen, the playwright Thomas Nashe wrote a play titled “The Isle of Dogs,” which the Privy Council did not, to say the least, like very much. Aware of the possible impending imprisonment and torture – everyone was aware that the horrible rack, among other such devices, could be waiting for them – Nashe hurriedly left town and hid out in the country. The Privy Council threatened to tear down all the theatres. That would have brought the Golden Age of Theatre to a grinding halt, not to mention Will Shakespeare’s career along with it. Fortunately, the Council never got around to actually carrying out its threat.
If Ben Jonson were around today, my guess is he would be a writer of plays for off-off-Broadway, and he would usually be dressed, even for formal occasions, in worn-out jeans and a dirty T-shirt with an offensive motto printed on the front, and he would be sporting a huge bushy beard, with bits of whatever he had for breakfast embedded in it.

Ben Jonson was William Shakespeare’s friend/competitor/nag and general pain in the neck. He regarded with amusement his pal Will’s efforts to turn himself into a gentleman. It would seem he especially got a kick out of the Shakespeare coat of arms, with its “Not Without Right” motto. We know this because Jonson proceeded to write a play that features a character who has received a coat of arms (which he got through bribery); the character, by the way, is a clown.
His coat of arms has a picture of a boar, with a three-word motto beneath: “Not Without Mustard.”
Everyone who was in any way connected with the theatre in London at that time undoubtedly found that hysterically funny. It’s probable that Our Will wasn’t as amused.

As a totally irrelevant side comment, Pocahontas – yes that Pocahontas – was in England and was actually in the audience for one of Ben’s productions.
Ben Jonson died on Aug. 6, 1637. His story ends in this way: once he was safely dead, the country decided that he was the foremost man of letters of his age and he was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
(He was one up on his friend Will; Shakespeare was not buried in Westminster Abbey.)

Ben was buried under a slab on which was carved the words, “O Rare Ben Jonson!”
He was rare; there were none rarer.

For ABC WEDNESDAY

2011-01-29T04:52:00.000-08:00

"C" is for "Charlie"
Charlie Chaplin, that is.

If you were around in the year 1915 – and it’s possible you weren’t :-) -- you would have been very familiar with a young guy named Charles Spencer Chaplin.
Because if you went to the motion pictures at all at that time, and just about everyone did, you would have been aware that the young guy wasn’t just a big movie star, he was gigantic – his films were known throughout the world.
In those early days, when you planked down your hard-earned fifteen cents to see a film you may have felt you were taking a risk, because motion pictures were still a fairly recent invention and a lot of the available "flicks" were amateurish and boring. But with Charlie Chaplin you knew you were safe; you were about to be entertained by a master.

(He was the little tramp known as “Charlie” to most folks, but he was “Charlot” in France and “Carlitos” in Latin America.)
It’s worth adding that very few world-famous motion picture celebrities ever started out as low on life’s ladder as young Charles Spencer did.
His father, who had little to do with him, was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis when Charlie was twelve; his mentally unstable mother was in an asylum. So the boy was raised literally in a London poorhouse.
But it’s obvious that he was a natural performer. At the age of eleven he wound up with a children’s theatrical troupe called “The Eight Lancashire Lads.”
For those vaudeville companies, you had to be able to sing, dance, act, do comedy and acrobatics and even pretend to be a Lancashire lad, along with anything else that might be needed.
Later Charlie graduated to another kid group, the Karno Company, and actually got to visit the U S; his roommate with the troupe was another young fellow, one Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later to become fairly well known as Stan Laurel.
Charlie’s act was caught by Mack Sennett of the Keystone Company, the Grand Panjandrum of movie comedy, and young Charlot found himself trying to adjust to the strange demands of the celluloid medium. It took a while, but soon the short films he made were a huge success – he became bigger than the Keystone Cops.

He created a character, the little tramp, who rapidly became world-famous. To audiences everywhere, the poor guy lived in abject poverty; they never got to see Charlie’s real home, a magnificent Southern California mansion.

For a full quarter-century, he specialized in illusion, turning out wagon-loads of movies, ranging from easily-forgotten slapstick stuff to a number of what many regard as among the best motion pictures ever made
As a person who made his living in the field of film production, I’ve always been fascinated by the way C. Chaplin worked. Once he had achieved his fabulous degree of success, he became king of the hill; as a writer-producer-director he could do whatever he wanted to do, work any way he liked, and he did. He was in a position to ignore financial problems and time constraints.

There’s an old saying: tragedy is easy, comedy is hard. It was hard for Chaplin, too. Watching him on the screen, he seems to create all the funny stuff with little effort. But there’s a fascinating documentary, “The Unknown Chaplin,” that reveals the secret of just what he went through when he created a motion picture.
His usual method was to start out with just an idea, a theme: “Charlie works in a pawn shop,” or some such thing, and then he’d improvise.
He begins without a script – there’s no executive producer to approve or reject it – and he starts production by having sets built and by hiring a large number of actors, sometimes as many as a hundred, and of course a large technical crew.
Chaplin then sets to work, which for him means he sits thinking. He may spend hours doing this. Some times a day will go by before he has worked out a suitable plot in his mind for a scene, complete with all the accompanying “business.”
The actors love this. They get hired and paid for doing nothing but play cards, talk sports with each other, and have a free lunch. And if they don’t get anything done today, that’s all to the good; they’ll be hired back tomorrow for another day’s “work.”
From time to time Charlie will assemble everyone and try out a scene to see if his latest idea will work. Then he’ll do it again. And again. He is known to have actually done a hundred different takes of a scene before he has one he feels is right.
No other writer-producer-director, as far as I know, ever worked like this.
If you’ve never seen “Modern Times” or “City Lights” or a couple of the other great ones, you should check them out. You’ll be seeing the work of one of the most remarkable film geniuses who ever lived.

(Also submitted to "Writer's Island" and "Sunday Scribblings")

Magpie 50

2011-01-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

Life in New England, January, 2011
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind makes moan.
Earth stands hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow has fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow.
In the bleak mid-winter
Snow is all we know.
(With my apologies to Christina Rossetti)

For ABC WEDNESDAY

2011-01-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

“B” is for “Bush.”

As you know, the word “Bush” has a number of meanings. For one thing, it’s the last name of a recent American president, George W, of happy memory – or perhaps not so happy, depending on your politics. :-)

It’s also a sort of woody plant that has a thick clump of branches, among other definitions – and we may get some ribald ones in the comments column. :-)
I came upon the word used in an odd way in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
The beautiful Rosalind, the star of the play, comes on stage at the end of the performance and gives a little “thank you” speech to the audience, during which she uses the phrase “A good wine needs no bush.”
I had to look that up. Turns out, Rosalind is making a comment about what we today call marketing.
Basically she’s saying, if you’ve got a product of good quality you don’t have to do a lot of promotion and advertising.

You see, in Shakespeare’s day wineshops would often have a branch of grapevine – Rosalind refers to it as a “bush” – hanging on the front door (the branch would usually be without the grapes), a way of letting the world know you can get wine there.
Her point is, if you sell great wine you won’t need the bush.

Of course, the really huge drink then was ale: everybody, including kids getting ready for school, drank ale – the water was dangerous. But wine was big for Elizabethans too. The famous Shakespearean comic character Falstaff practically lived on “sack,” a white wine.
“Sack,” in fack – er, in fact – was simply the French word “sec” (dry) translated into Elizabethan English.

Rosalind, of “As You Like It,” by the way, was one of Will Shakespeare’s most successful creations. She’s beautiful, intelligent, witty, charming – what more could you ask for?
Pass the wine please, I’m bushed. :-)