Next Stop, Miami Beach!

We may not have bacchanales on the scale of yesteryear on tap today, but I'm still indulging in a favorite Hallowe'en treat...

Redux: Decoration Day

I wrote this in 2012. Today, the quiet, green hillside is still there, but there are, I fear, no geraniums. When we went to bury my father last summer, the little blue cottage across the street still served as the landmark by which we found mother's side of the family. The cemetery may stay more or less the same, but life moves on; I suppose a day like this helps us appreciate both the sameness and the change.

This is a holiday that always makes me just a little blue.  If you've read Ask the Cool Cookie's excellent meditation on the subject, you'll more or less know why. 

Redux 2017: M is for...

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and has become my Mother's Day tradition. Once, again, Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

Redux: Mother of Exiles

Did we dream that it could all change so quickly? Has it ever felt so surreal? How did we get trapped in an Isherwood story? I'm horrified, frightened, angry, and sad. I feel far from home, not because I'm traveling now, but because I'm not sure, today, where my home can be.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 
With conquering limbs astride from land to land; 
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand 
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame 
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name 
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand 
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. 
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she 
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

- Emma Lazarus

Once Again - 'Tis the Season

Over the years, this little gem has become the way we usher in the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and while I'm still having a few doubts as to how wonderful this one's going to be, here goes.

Redux: From Ocean to Ocean

I first put this little number up on July 4, seven years ago. I still think it would make a nifty anthem, and today I kind of feel as if I need a dose of its solid, splendidly kitschy Klezmerische good cheer. 

Fifteen Years On: The Hour of Lead

All these years, and still I think Miss Barry, and Miss Dickinson, said it best. Fifteen years, remembered, if outlived.

Redux 2016: M is for...

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and has become my Mother's Day tradition. Once, again, Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

Redux: Thar She Blows!

In honor of today, the 132nd anniversary of the eruption of Krakatoa, a cataclysm that killed thousands and had repercussions as far away as Europe and the Americas, this admittedly only marginally related little gem (and accompanying favorite memory) that originally appeared here on August 4, 2012.

Redux: M is For...

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and appeared again in 2012, 2013, and 2014.  And yes, even as we head toward 15 years, I'm still getting over the surprise.  Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

After All These Years, Still Definitely Not a Fruitcake

Here at the Café, our Christmas holiday has started, so it seems appropriate to kick off the festive season in the way that's become something of a tradition hereabouts.

Redux: M is For...

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and appeared again in 2012 and 2013.  And yes, I'm still getting over the surprise.  Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

Redux: Freeze Tag

Stop time.  Have her remember why they need to leave.  Decide to fly out that night, back to the capital, fly back to the children.  Think of a reason.

Why Don't You...

...frame your entire approach to this year's Hallowe'en in the context of this sublime work, Sally Cruikshank's magnificent Face Like a Frog?  Even if it's only all in your mind.

Redux: Keep on Cooking

I first posted this a year ago today, when dear Miss Julia Child would have turned 100.  Today, when I'm distracted and a little sad, I find it has really cheered me up.

Oh, I know.  This one is all over the place and you've already seen it ten times today.  I don't care.  I think it's genius, and a fit and cheerful way to celebrate the centenary of someone whom I geniunely think a Great American, the late and so fondly remembered St. Julia of Child.  Gimmicky, I know, but catchy enough I can almost imagine it being performed in some other context - the lyric, for example, is both witty and, at least to me, oddly moving:

Freshness is essential;
That makes all the difference.
I like to smell something cooking -
It makes me feel at home!

Bring on the roasted potatoes!  Bring on the rosé! 
This is what good cooking is all about!

Cook and cook and keep on cooking!
This is the way to live!

Cook and cook and keep on cooking!
This is the way to eat!

Bon appétit!

Redux: M is for...

No, she's not my mother. Actually, we lost Mother Muscato almost ten years ago, and I'm still getting over the surprise.

Despite all she went through in her last couple of years - a familiar litany of complaints for women of her generation, the harsh follow-ons from everything that had seemed so au courant when they were girls, principally smoking - despite all that, I truly believed, on some level, that she was simply too strong-minded to let anything else, even cancer, have its way.

Until the end, she was a paean to the virtues of denial, stoutly maintaining that of course she was fine. Everything was fine. We didn't think all that much about it; her total distaste for bad news of any kind was an ingrained fact of life. When I moved away from home, after a few surprises I learned to phone home now and then for a rundown with her of elderly family and friends; "Oh," she'd admit grudgingly, "didn't I tell you? Cousin Adele died six months ago. Oh, come on, it's not all that sad - she was 87, for God's sake..."

I think, at the end, she must have thought a lot about just why she wasn't, in fact, a circus showgirl, or whatever it was that actually had been her dream a long ways back. I deeply suspect that where she ended up was pretty far from what she'd planned.

She married at the very tail end of the War and for more than half a century led a life that was was an almost entirely conventional blend of children, family, work, and church. In all that time, I don't think we ever, as you do, really thought all that much about her, if you know what I mean.

Until, of course, it was too late, which I didn't realize until we were clearing out her things. Having married into a family of packrats (just this side of Collyer-brother hoarding, really; Father Muscato has a warehouse he's never told the Evil Stepmother about), she went to the opposite extreme. Over time during her last couple years, she had pared her own possessions almost to nothing, easy enough to do when surrounded by her husband's and her children's plentiful detritus.

There were a few pieces of jewelry (charm bracelet, string of pearls, her mother's garnet set and her grandmother's jet mourning brooch...), a drawer full of neatly filed records (bills, taxes, mortgage) - and almost nothing else. She seems to have disposed of several generations worth of papers from her side of the family, from her great-grandparents' civil war letters to the correspondence her mother's mother had carried on with any number of interesting people she had met on long-distance freighter cruises (Great-grandmother Muscato shared a passion for penal reform with one, the gentleman who wrote 20,000 Years in Sing Sing; they had gotten to be chums somewhere between Shanghai and Juneau, and their letters had been numerous and voluble), and almost every scrap related to herself (this in a house that contained every Christmas card received since the Truman administration).

Except: in one dresser drawer, an unmarked envelope, large and faded yellow. In it were three or four magazines, story monthlies from the early 40s. There wasn't much to link them - they included a romance anthology, a "true confessions" format, and a Western, I believe. It was only as we passed them around, my siblings and I, that we noticed that each carried a story by an author whose name was an amalgam of our mother's mother's and her grandmother's maiden names.

We showed them to our father (already, although we didn't yet know it, trying to decide whether to wait until after the funeral to announce his engagement - but that's another story), and he said offhandedly that oh, yes, your mother had always wanted to be a writer. Those must be hers.

So maybe she didn't want to be a circus showgirl; maybe she dreamt of being Katherine Anne Porter or Taylor Caldwell or her favorite author, Mazo de la Roche. And on Mother's Day, each year, I sit a moment and wonder what else it is we don't know about the sharp-tongued, irritable, meanly funny suburban matron who raised us and, if nothing else, helped ensure we all got the hell out of Dodge even if she hadn't.

The stories? Never read them. My sister got hold of the envelope, and she's her mother's daughter.

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and appeared again in 2012.  And yes, I'm still getting over the surprise.  Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Gotta Dance!

"The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Today's SSCE is a bit of a Redux, as this treasure has for years been one of my very favorite YouTube finds and popped up way back in the Café's earliest days.

It reminds of the early '80s, the glory days of New York Public Access TV, when, any time the possibility arose, my pal Miss Rheba and the rest of us would hightail it up to Manhattan - not (or not only, I suppose) to run around the East Village, try to second-act Broadway shows, and desperately attempt to feel worldly and sophisticated, but to sit around as stoned as our budget allowed, watching the amazing cavalcade of humanity that had taken advantage of a system that, it seemed, allowed anyone with a half-hour to spare and a dream to get on television.

We watched Channel J, of course, the soft-porn outlet that made a (bigger) star of Robin Byrd and featured the creepiest and most terrifying escort and fetishy phone-sex ads imaginable (people d'un certain age who lived through that era will never forget - with a shudder - the phrase "the extra 'E' is for extra peeeee!"  But I digress.  As if that were something new...).  They were certainly something we didn't have in one of your better Philadelphia suburbs.  But it was the other channels that really grabbed us, the ones that featured kooks and cranks and well-meaning souls like the alarmingly enthusiastic lady here.  She is, by the way, apparently one Reverend Alecia, and more than that the Internet does not tell much, although there is a little info about her here.  If you like her style, but think you'd enjoy seeing her moves set to something even more authentically of the era, you might try this.  I have a feeling you won't forget it...

Redux: Birthday Goddess, After and Before

It's a big day at the Café, kids - the 105th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest showpeople who ever lived, the brass-lunged, foul-mouthed, great-hearted self-creation that was - deep breath - Ethel Merman. Let's give it up.

The stage was her medium and the movies didn't ever do her justice, but thank heaven we do have a record of what she was like in action. Here are two clips, separated by something just shy of half-a-century, both of which in very different ways give me goosebumps.

First up, the Great Lady herself, in full flight on the Tony Awards, reprising one of her numbers from Annie Get Your Gun:

That's the diva we all know and love.

It's easy, in watching her make it look so easy, to forget the incredible craft that she puts into a song she's sung a thousand times before. She's an old lady, never a subtle presence, pushing a voice that while still titanic is worn around the edges, and yet she brings a genuine pathos to the song; that little break between the last two words speaks volumes about a life that knew heartbreak as well as triumph.

Once upon a time, of course, even she was young, attractive if not drop-dead beautiful, and, from the moment she first stepped on stage, incomparable at putting across a song.

To prove it, here's "An Earful of Music", from the 1934 Eddie Cantor vehicle Kid Millions. Cantor shows, stage or screen, were all about Cantor, but the audience must have sat up and taken notice of this young sensation, just four years away from having been Queens stenographer Ethel Agnes Zimmerman:

Except for the dress, which definitively proves that Goldwyn's Omar Kiam was no Adrian, she's pretty believable as a girl song plugger in a sheet music store.*

Young or old, she's amazing, irreplaceable, and a very great artist. Merman had a career like no other, and while she suffered the occasional misstep and, especially toward the end, made herself a shade too easy to parody, few performers have ever had a greater hit-to-flop ratio in their favor, had such a hold on their audience for so long, or did more to spread the word about the genius of America's greatest mid-century songwriters. Like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jules Styne, we're in her debt. Happy Birthday, Merm!

* Now there's a line of work that's dead as the dodo.

First posted four years ago today, and amended only to update the year.  How time flies!

Get This [Holiday] Party Started

Well, if we have to have a Christmas, we might as well get it under way right.  This season, I think we'll look at some highlights of pop-cult seasonal celebrations, and of all of them, this, I believe, is the greatest and most demented.  For one brief, shining moment, this was mainstream American television (Saturday morning division).

For any gentle readers eager to relive the whole superb extravaganza (or those who just need a refresher on making potato-stamp Christmas cards), it's available here.

Redux: The Hour of Lead

I first posted this Emily Dickinson poem on September 11 in 2008.  We were at a crossroads then, waiting to see if the upcoming election would change anything at all about all the things that needed changing.  Now, some things have, but not enough, and again we're waiting.  And still on this day - perhaps always - the formal feeling comes.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs

The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --

First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

- Emily Dickinson, #341