News of the Rialto

So Miss Peters is set to succeed Miss Midler as Mrs. Levi.  It seems a fully respectable, but somehow deflatingly predictable, sort of choice.

Project Runaway

I don't know about you, but I think that sounds like a perfectly capital idea...

Journal Entry

Well, here's a gent who's clearly taken to heart the old saying - one variously attributed to a formidable trio of ladies, either Margot Asquith, Lillie Langtry, or no less than Mae West herself - "Keep a diary, my dear, and someday perhaps the diary will keep you." I don't know about you, but I'd certainly keep him...

Birthday Geniuses

Two of American music's most towering figures celebrated birthdays this week; let's hear one perform the other, just about as perfectly as can be imagined.

Twilight of the Clamstrips

Oh, dear - here's one that I wish were in fact an April Fool's joke...

Even a Lifetime

Some days - like this one, O Best Beloveds - are such that what you need at the end of them is a moment or two of truth and beauty.  Like this.

The Shutterbug and the Underworld Empress

The entirely New York phenomenon that was Weegee was born on this day in 1899.  Just to be clear, this is not he.

And Now, a Word From Our Sponsor

Featuring birthday girl Miss Charlotte Rae!

Trip Report

Portrait of the blogger as a young monarch...

So our little jaunt to New York was a great success.

Helluva Town

Road trip!

Two Gentlemen of Manhattan

39 years ago this very day, photographer Gjon Mili caught this intense moment at a rehearsal in New York City.  The work being considered by these two august gentlemen* is the ballet Dybbuk.  Then in preparation for its Lincoln Center premiere, the piece featured the choreography of Jerome Robbins set to the music of Leonard Bernstein.  As a piece of art, let's be tactful and just say it turned out to be not quite West Side Story.  But what is?

Note the discreet and studious presence of one of Mr. Robbins's Nice Young Men.  Unlike some, I'm guessing he was not hired because he could type.  The dance world's funny that way.  As was Robbins, from most accounts for that matter.  Add him, by the bye, to the very short list of Great Names I've encountered (in his case, thankfully, only second hand) about whom I've never heard a nice word.  His collaborator was something of a handful, of course, but generally, and justifiably, I think, considered a far pleasanter gent.  It's some measure of Robbins's force of character that Bernstein looks almost - not quite - cowed.

There are some shows, in all media, that you know you'd far rather be at rehearsals than the final product, and this is one.  Unless, I'm guessing, you were working for Jerome Robbins.  In that case, I suppose you'd far rather be at the St. Marks Baths (well, it was 1974)...

* It took all the strength I have not to to title this post "When Ladies Meet."

Rockbird Superstar

If the photo evidence is to be believed, much of the fashion worn by the preening guests at last night's annual Metropolitan Museum gala was pretty woeful.  Even so, the organizers of the celebration - in honor of the Costume Institute's new "Punk: from Chaos to Couture" show - certainly got one thing right: they hired Blondie as the evening's headliner, and it certainly looks like dear Miss Deborah Harry delivered.

I don't know about you, but I'm always touched by her presence, dear.  I bet Mrs. Vreeland would have been, too...

Birthday Girl: Hallelujah, Betty

Basya Cohen was born 96 years ago today, in Brooklyn.  Over the following nine decades, she turned herself into Betty Comden, one of the brightest lights of Broadway and one of a small handful of people - many of them, like her, self-created, smart, funny women of unconventional good looks - who can be considered quintessential New Yorkers.  And of all the strange and wonderful things I've gotten to do in my own five decades to date, knowing and working with her is one of the two or three things of which I'm proudest.  It wasn't for all that long - three or four projects over five or six years - but I had the incredible good fortune to watch her at work, in tandem, of course, with Adolph Green, and I did my best to make myself both useful and unobtrusive, both of which I think she appreciated.

Eventually I made the decision to leave New York, and that meant leaving behind Miss Comden and the others of her extended circle with (who am I kidding? for) whom I worked.  I decided that as tempting as it was, being the Nice Young Man who helps out in a pinch was not a long-term career strategy, and that all the exciting opening nights and terrific travel, the enviable Rolodex and the easy familiarity with people whom I was raised from earliest childhood to revere, wasn't a trade-off, long term, for one's own life.  It was a wrench, and it's been sad ever since to watch them go, one by one, while I've been on the other side of the world.

Not long ago, though, I ran into someone from those days, a man who is now a Power to Reckon With, in fact, in rarefied circles of High Kultcha.  He was surprised to find me, a former Nice Young Man, way out in the Sandlands, and we had a long and surprisingly philosophical chat over drinks, at one of the silly places here sixty-odd stories up looking out at the sand and dust and distant water.  I told him that, wonderful as it had been, I had seen too many too-old people still trying to be Nice Young Men, and I thought it might be soul-killing.  He looked at me thoughtfully, a look you've seen in the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section, and told me something very nice:  he remembered me, he said, because he was backstage at some rehearsal once, when I was working for a friend of Miss Comden's, a very great figure indeed who was revered for his art and notorious for his fondness for the young and handsome.  He was standing with a couple of the hard-boiled old timers who do the heavy lifting of making art look easy - lawyers, producers, managers, the unsung backstagers - and one said to the other, watching me be a Nice Young Man to, at the moment, a very tetchy and impatient legend, "well, if nothing else, I'm glad he finally hired one who could type."  Meaning, he said, one who wasn't pretty and useless and in it for the room at the Four Seasons or the table at Le Cirque.  "I thought," he said, "You'd probably do fine."

I have.  I still regret Miss Comden, though, and I hope that she had, through those later years, a Nice Young Man to keep things humming for her.  She deserved it.  "Make someone happy," she wrote, "Just one someone happy."  As far as that goes, that's me.

(Hmmmm.  I just checked, and apparently I used the self-same title for a birthday post for Miss C. in 2009.  I stand by it, though, both as a little play on one of her lesser shows and as a fine expression of how I feel about her.)

Birthday Girl: She's Hip

If nothing else, perhaps we can consider a few moments spent considering this lovely artist a corrective to yesterday's rather, I suppose, heavy-handed musical interlude.  Nothing, I think, could be less like that than the sophisticated magic of Miss Blossom Dearie, who had she not returned to Fabulon four years ago would be an I'm sure still girlish 89.

I still can't quite conceive that Manhattan no longer boasts the kinds of rooms in which Dearie and her fellow spirits once flourished, nor that she is no longer at the helm of some amusing boite on one side of town, while uptown a few dozen blocks one could find the likes of Bobby Short or Barbara Carroll and downtown somewhere warm and cosy hosting Karen Akers or Anne Francine.  I was lucky enough to live there in the waning days of cabaret, when going to see Blossom was just something one could do of a weekend; she tended to play in places that might have a cover charge, but not the kind the one had to save and plan for (as we did for the Rainbow Room or the Café Carlyle).

And don't be deceived:  her music may seem featherlike, but her lilting voice was still an instrument of remarkable suppleness and range, and her singing boasts a diction matched only by that of Mabel Mercer.  On top of that, she was a formidable pianist, able not merely, as here, to swing out a standard or two en français, but also wholly to reinterpret a number you think set in stone.  Don't believe me?  Check out her "Ladies Who Lunch."   It's eons away from Stritch - who does, admittedly, own the song outright, and never more so than in this sad week when she leaves New York behind - but in its own way equally implacable.

While she was around, Dearie was too often dismissed as just another fixture of the scene, a singer of knowing little novelty numbers like "Peel Me a Grape" and "My Attorney Bernie." She did them superbly, of course, but listening to her now, we know how much more there is to the kinds of songs she used sing in late-night clubs and can appreciate, now that they're all but gone, how singers, musicians like Blossom Dearie brought them to life.  C'est vraiment ça:  c'est le printemps.  Et je l'embrasse, toujours...

Goodnight Mrs. Frankweiler, Wherever You Are...

Sad news in the New York Times this week (I'm just catching up):  E.L. Konigsburg, author of a longtime favorite children's book, the magical  (and magically titled) From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, has gone to spend her nights in a more celestial place even than the Metropolitan Museum.

Growing up in a Pennsylvania town, reading The Mixed-Up Files was a window into a world I fully intended someday to find my way into - if not as a runaway, like its heroes, at least some day, somehow.  And I did.  I first visited the Metropolitan Museum on my very first trip to New York, and while in one way it was a bitter disappointment - the Egyptian collection was closed, under wraps as part of a long-term renovation - otherwise it was all Mrs. Frankweiler promised.  When, years later, I moved to Manhattan, the Met was one of the anchors around which life revolved.  Of course, by that point it was an updated place, increasingly glitzy and retailized and not quite the slightly fusty, slightly eccentric sanctuary in the book.  Still, even today, it has its quiet corners and places where, if you stand still enough in some far corner, you can half fancy you, like Konigsburg's two runaways, might want to spend the night.

The offbeat story of Mrs. Frankweiler and her files appeals, I think, to children who already know they may be a shade eccentric themselves.  While for me she was a one-off author, known for only the Files, reading her obituary and learning of her other books confirms that that was a prime audience for her: children who would take naturally to stories about, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine narrating the story of her life from a comfortable seat in Heaven.  I like the the author's words about her own Pennsylvania childhood:  “Growing up in a small town,” she said, “gives you two things: a sense of place and a feeling of self-consciousness — self-consciousness about one’s education and exposure, both of which tend to be limited. On the other hand, limited possibilities also mean creating your own options.”  She also said, “I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that’s good because it makes you question things.”

The next time I go to the Met - skirting the crowds, defiantly refusing to pay the outrageous "suggested donation" (which you must remember is voluntary and quite contrary to the wishes of the founders of what is meant to be a museum open to all) - I'll climb the grand staircase and, as I've done before, thank the mysterious E.L. Konigsburg (E. for Elaine, it turns out - I don't think I had even ever really thought about her gender) for bringing me there.

On The Avenue...

On this date in 1951, the inconveniently Midtown course of the ticker-tape parade in honor Gen. MacArthur forces a couple of unlikely pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the street.  He looks rather put out, but isn't she reveling in the unexpected attention?  a one-woman parade all on her own, really.  Looks to be this close to just centering herself in the middle of the Avenue and starting to wave.

Funny, isn't it, how ever more difficult it gets, as time passes, to credit that theirs was considered a Great Romance?  Here they look more like they've hardly been introduced, and wouldn't have much in common (taste in overcoats aside) once they were...

She Goes Out Walking...

The woman who was for the last 20 years of her life Manhattan's most famous - if also most elusive - pedestrian would have celebrated her 107th birthday today.  For a while, I thought about putting together a book consisting entirely of New Yorkers' stories of encountering her on her daily constitutionals and calling it Garbo Walks.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: "The PineSol Scented Air..."

 

Herewith the too-little-shouted-about Miss Ellen Greene preserves on film one of the finer moments I ever saw in the theatre.  Actually, now that I think about it, the 1986 movie of Little Shop of Horrors isn't all that much shouted about anymore either, but I remember it in general as both great fun on its own and fairly true to the delightful stage version.

 

Greene has one of those trick voices that in the theatre can be uniquely thrilling - one minute a tiny, buzzy rasp and the next a bell-like clarion that raises the rafters and the hair on the back of your neck.  The first time I saw her sing this, way downtown at the old Orpheum Theatre, she made people cry, me among them. 

 

This one may not do that, but it does evoke quite effectively both her character's and our nostalgia (false, reductive, seductive) for something simple, that seems clean and fine and worthwhile.  It's not something that Ellen/Audrey ever achieves (the character, after all, gets mauled to death by a killer begonia run amok)* or that we really want - but in the moment, it's beautiful - and that, my dears, is camp.  More calculated than some, perhaps; some would argue that calculation itself puts it beyond the pale of campery.  I disagree - by turning something inherently ridiculous into something moving, largely through the art of Miss Greene, it becomes the real, tinselly thing.

* In the stage version, that is; I've just been reminded that in the film's revised ending (released in place of an also-filmed and truly apocalyptic version of the stage's "Don't Feed the Plants," a great number), Audrey actually does achieve her Better Homes and Gardens dream.  Which kind of ruins it really; I'm with the fans who say they should have stuck with the real ending.

Helluva Town

So we had a lovely couple of days in the old stomping grounds, seeing the sights (including the clash of Beaux Arts and Moderne seen here) and meeting up with old pals inexplicably grown grayer and more, well, mature's perhaps not quite the word, but goodness aren't we all grown up?

My dear cousin, the Serious Architect, took us to a lovely, a quite entirely NewYorky sort of dinner, at the kind of restaurant against the windows of which we once we pressed our noses.  It's nice to know that rich people's food still consists, as wise old Truman Capote once noted, of "little fresh born things, scarcely out of the earth. Little baby corns, little baby peas, little lambs that have been ripped out of their mothers’ wombs..." not to mention meats primarily from parts of the body not normally stocked in supermarkets.  Still, we did enjoy ourselves immoderately.  Cousin SA is just about the only non-sibling who's known me from day one (we are six weeks apart); together, now, we are a walking illustration of the fact that after a certain age, you choose your face or your figure.

In a fit of nostalgia de la boue the following night we hied down to the West Village, where everyone seemed about 17, but where the cheap Chinese is still divine.  Am I the only one who remembers the way Westside low-end Chinese places used to offer free white wine from vast gallon jugs?  Sadly, that seems to have gone the way of Five Oaks and all the other other vanished destinations.  Still, we had cold sesame noodles (unobtainable in the Sandlands) and enjoyed the contrast with the previous evening's foams and artisanal parsleys...

Now we've wended out way up the East Coast a ways and are enjoying this holiday in dear old Sodom on the Sea, staring out at the bay in Provincetown.  We're occupying the ground-floor flat (always a good idea for a pair of portly types in an old wooden house) chez our friends the Stately Lesbians.  I write looking out at the water, as Mr. Muscato prepares one of his trademark elaborate salads, the Stately L's three dogs of various ages nap here and there, and the divine Dalida sings her heart out in the background.  Not the most traditional of Fourths of July, I suppose, but deeply, deeply pleasant.

A Happy Fourth, then, to those celebrating; a lovely Wednesday, to the rest of you.  I'm not normally the most outwardly patriotic of persons, but this morning, listening to NPR's annual recitation of the Declaration of Independence, I felt very grateful for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

Public Service Announcement: Mother Nature

Now, I'm admittedly not the most ultragreen person around.  Living in one of the most hellish climates on earth, we use way too much air-conditioning, and recycling is a concept that is, as yet, still a glimmer in local government's eye in these parts (we now have separate bins, one black, one pointedly green - but they both get dumped in the same trucks).  I'd be a flat-out liar if I said that I turn out every light, that I'm reconsidering my carbon footprtint, or that I have any intention of swearing off raspberries flown half-way 'round the world from New Zealand or worse just for my delectation.  Count it as yet another area in which I'm hopelessly spoiled.

Still, who better to start me and all of us on the path to more thoughtful living than the Divine Miss M.?  Her high-profile work over the past few years to re-green New York's blighted parks has been yet another reminder that I'm far too far from home - she even tweets about hanging out at the park café near my old place!   I could meet her while volunteering! (Even though, now that I'm hitched, it's something I'd no longer need to do - everyone knows that people in Manhattan only volunteer to either find a partner, spend time away from a partner, or find a new partner.  It's a rule.)

Drat.  Even trying to be all noble and altruistic can make me grumpy...