Guys and Dolls

As you may or may not know, there’s a new production on Broadway–currently in previews and opening March 1st–of the classic musical, Guys and Dolls, starring Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham.  The advance word thus far has been good.

Now some may wonder why they should give a crap.  Isn’t this, after all, just another musical?  Not really.  In a part of theater that is generally the province of gay men and straight women, Guys and Dolls is a straight man’s paradise.  In fact, it is legendary in my family because it is the first show my mother ever persuaded my father to see.    How did she do it?  She let him know that it involved horse racing and gambling.  He still had his doubts, but, by the end of the opening number, “Fugue for Tinhorns,” he was hooked.   Here’s the number from the so-so 1955 movie (although still a great number):

That’s not to be confused with “The Hills Are Alive” from The Sound of Music.

Now for a couple of numbers from the 1992 Broadway production.  First, Nathan Lane and the priceless Faith Prince as the lovers who have been dating for 14 years, Nathan Detroit and his girl Adelaide:

That’s two great performers working together with skill and panache.

Finally, here’s a performance on the Tony broadcast for 1992, featuring two songs with extraordinary lyrics, “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” featuring Walter Bobbie and “Guys and Dolls” with the entire cast:

Lyric writing just doesn’t get any better than “And the devil will drag you under/By the sharp lapels of your checkered coat” or “When you spot a John waiting out in the rain/Chances are he’s insane as only a John can be for a Jane./When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent/For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal./Call it sad, call it funny./But it’s better than even money/That the guy’s only doing it for some doll.” And composers for American musical theater don’t get much better than Frank Loesser.

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

He’s Italian, His Name’s Frank, and He’s Not Sinatra

I write a lot, like many expatriate writers, about my original home.  I was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, and I spent about 20 out of my 49 years in the state.  I’ve lived in Warwick (very briefly as a baby), East Greenwich, Pawtucket, North Kingstown, Providence, East Providence, and Bristol.  Since I do write things set in Rhode Island so often, I have a need to burrow through my past for usable material and bits and pieces I can use.  In some recent work, I have reason to refer to the venerable Rhode Island broadcaster Frank Coletta.  It’s hard to not like Frank.  He has a sly smile that that just gets to a person.  Here’s the tribute that was done for Frank’s 30th anniversary with the station.  And, Frank, salud!

The Joke’s on You

As I’ve noted before, I keep tabs on the A Prairie Home Companion website the way that a boy keep tabs on the girl who broke his heart, and a Post to the Host there has gotten me thinking about practical jokes.  Apparently, on a recent show, Garrison Keillor revealed that Buddy Holly hadn’t died in that plane crash on the winter of 1959 and that he was now a minister with the Church of Christ working the lower westside of Manhattan.  One listener, confused, posted to the host and asked for clarification.  Mr Keillor thereupon took the opportunity to expand on his story, and even threw in that Holly now went by the name of the Reverend Charles Holley, with an “e,” which is the way his family spelled his true, nonstage name.  Now, a cursory Google search revealed that the named church, the Manhattan Church of Christ,  was not on W. 12th Street, but rather on on E. 80th Street, and that there was no Charles Holley ministering there.  So, the whole thing is a spoof.

And that’s fine, except that it makes me uncomfortable in the way that almost all practical jokes make me uncomfortable.  There is something fundamentally cruel and heartless about practical jokes.  The basic premise of these attempts at humor is to make one person look like a jerk for the amusement of others.  And while such an activity is certainly legal and Constitutional in the most trivial possible sense of the word, is it, in fact, civil?  Is this a way for a well known radio performer, humorist, and novelist to be acting?  And does this suckering of a listener–and most of his loyal listeners are nothing short of adoring–betray a well hidden contempt for the very people who make him a success?  Doesn’t Mr Keillor make a very nice living from the attentions of people like our unfortunate Thad and other hapless listeners like Carla, who posted a comment begging for clarification?

Personally, I’m not big on playing people for suckers, especially people who (and they are few in number) would look up to me and who would support my projects and celebrate my creativity.  As I was rereading Of Mice and Men over the weekend, I was struck by a passage in which George tells Slim why he stopped playing practical jokes on Lennie.  He says,

Tell you what made me stop that.  One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River.  I was feelin’ pretty smart.  I turns to Lennie and says, “Jump in.”  An’ he jumps.  Couldn’t swim a stroke.  He damn near drowned before we could get him.  An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out.  Clean forgot I told him to jump in.  Well, I ain’t done nothin’ like that no more.

That, of course, is a small parable on compassion.  When we see people as suckers, we see them as objects.  We shield ourselves from their humanity so that we can feel a tiny bit superior and so that we can “have a little fun.”  And yet, you can never tell where your “little bit of fun” ends and someone else drowning begins.  It doesn’t hurt to err on the side of compassion, especially when a person occupies a higher, more powerful social position.  And perhaps it is a good trait in an artist to see in his readers and listeners fully formed human beings rather mere suckers.

Reading (The Activity, Not the Railroad)

A while back, I announced a rather ambitious project in these–not pages, exactly, perhaps–pixels.  I had intended to make a reading pilgrammage across a shelf of one of our bookshelves of fiction in an attempt to educate myself better about current writing and the state of fiction.  In other words, I was attempting to carve away a tiny chip from the great block of ignorance that I call a brain.  Now, I started out in good faith.  I was rereading Travels with Charley then, and I did just fine with that book.  The reading project started to fall to pieces when I set myself to reread the next book, Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  Everything that had delighted me on my first reading grated on me the second time, so I put it aside. Next, I picked up The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which I had never read before.  By the end of Chapter Three, I had set it aside as well.

At that point I began to suspect that the problem lay more with me than with the texts.  And the problem was that I now, being a novelist myself, approached the works of other living novelists as competitors, almost as enemies.  I couldn’t read a sentence without recasting it in my mind, without searching it for flaws, without scoffing at its techniques and meanings.  All of which is patently unfair to these authors and their works.  What a dreadful world it would be if everyone wrote the way that I did, and how much harder still would it be for me to progress in my chosen profession if my works were no more unique than a paperclip or a house in a subdivision.

And so, I have decided to lay off living authors.  They’ve got a right, and reading somebody’s work in that way does me no good either.  There’s just no percentage in it at all.

All of which has led me to come up with a new plan.  I will, from now on, concentrate on the works of the dead.  The classics.  All those books that I should have read and, with depressing frequency, haven’t.  I’ve begun by rereading another book of Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men.  In part, I am reading it because my son just finished it.  In part, I am reading it because I haven’t read it since I was 14, and I wanted to make its acquaintance again.  He’s currently reading The Red Badge of Courage, which I’ve never read, so that will be next on the list.  Beyond that, I’m not sure.  We’ve picked out some of the shorter classics for him, so I may just continue, as the suckerfish to his shark, to shadow his reading and survive on his crumbs.

But we’ll see.  Plans have a strange way of evolving.

Brian Blessed on Have I Got News for You

I can’t seem to get my brain together enough to write a cogent post today, so instead I’ve posted, below, a compilation of clips of the appearance Brian Blessed made last year on the BBC comedy quiz show, Have I Got News for You.  My favorite part is the story he tells concerning John Gielgud, but it all makes me laugh.  Enjoy.

Hiding in Plain Sight

This post is dedicated, warmly, to my friend RGM, for reasons that are no one’s business but our own.

This past Saturday, my wife made mention of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon posted on gocomics.com on Saturday in regards to it reminding her of me.  And I had to agree with her.  Here’s the strip:

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterston

The reason why it reminded both of us of me was because Calvin’s ploy was similar to strategy I employed when I was in junior high school.

I have always had a problematic relationship with large institutions. I don’t mind that they exist. I can even appreciate their function. However, whenever I find myself inside one, I get claustrophobic and combative and start looking for any and every means of escape, much like the late Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.  Conversely, large institutions rarely know what to make of or do with me.  I am the ipecac in the belly of the beast, generally speaking.

Back when I was in 8th grade, my relationship with the large institution called “School” took somthing of a turn for the worse, and I got in the habit of not showing up much of the time.  Frankly, about a third of the time.  Goff Junior High was a mere three blocks away, an easy walk for anyone.  You could just about see the school from our window.  And, one morning out of about every three, I would collect the lunch my mother had made for me, time-step my way down the stairs from our flat to the street, and take off for parts unknown.

In Rhode Island, this is called “bunking.”

I went many places over the course of that year.  Slater Park, the Ten-Mile River.  When I could get away with it (my parents both worked), I’d just stay home and watch TV.  My most ingenious destination, though, the one that I never saw another student replicate, the one that I never told my friends about when we’d bunk in small groups, was the Deborah Cook Sayles Memorial Library in downtown Pawtucket.  I spent many a day there browsing the shelves and sticking my nose into whatever books struck my fancy.  I was particularly enamored of the history section, which was upstairs on a mezzanine level, and I would immerse myself in wars Civil and Napoleonic.  I also made the acquaintance of several comedians and comedy writers whose works have meant a great deal to me over the years, especially Fred Allen, George S. Kaufman, and the One, the Only Groucho.

These sorts of sheanigans are more difficult in these days, but I doubt that they are impossible.  And I am not recommending any of these activities to the youth of today.  No, sir.  Stay in school!  Just say “No” to drugs.  Remember the Alamo!  And every other cliche you can think of.  What I can warn young people is that you will inevitably get caught.  I was.  A couple of times.  I can remember the city’s truant officer, a washed-up pitcher for the Red Sox called Lefty Lefebvre, leaning out the window of his Ford Granada and saying to me, “Len, I’m going to get you!”  And I guess he did.  But whenever that day was, I know he didn’t catch me at the library.

Apprentice Work, Part 2

My twenties were a fallow time for me as a writer.  From the time that I moved out of my parents’ home in 1983 until I started working for Ernst & Young when I lived in the DC area in 1988, as I recall it, my total output was three short stories, each quirky and experimental in its own way.  The most conventional of them was a story I wrote in 1986 called “Dreg of the Wildebeest.”  The story of a Neanderthal who has a midlife crisis, it was inspired by my reading of about a page-and-a-half of the second book of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, Valley of the Horses.  The scene in question featured the heroine of the piece, a young and beautiful (they’re always young and beautiful in melodrama) Cro Magnon, who is about to be deflowered by a Neanderthal whose band she has fallen in with.  (And don’t chicks, even paolithic ones, always go for guys in bands?)  Now, this ever-expanding pool of absurdity was instantaneously metastasized when the Neanderthal’s thoughts were presented for our viewing pleasure.  It turned out that not only was getting it on with a hot chick–possibly of a related yet still different species–not his only concern, but it wasn’t even near the top.  His main concern, an absurdity written with such a straight face that my mind reeled when I read it in the file room at Fannie Mae, was that he be gentle with her since it was her first time.  In the 23 years that have elapsed since I read this revelation, I have still not been able to wrap my head around the idea of your average Neanderthal being a sort of neolithic Cary Grant, suavely seducing the ladies and always making sure that they finished first.

And so I wrote the story, almost in a fever.  And here it is, in pdf format that shows edits I made in pencil for a subsequent draft.

(Click on the link below and then click on the link on that page in order to get the pdf.  Thanks for making it so damn easy, WordPress.)

Dreg of the Wildebeest