For Sunday Scribblings and Three-Word Wednesday

(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

(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

(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

"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

(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

(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

(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

(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.”