Archives for May 2010

“The theatre exists to present a contest between good and evil. In both comedy and tragedy, good wins. In drama, it’s a tie. In film noir, evil wins.”
David Mamet, Theatre

A reader writes:

I went this weekend to Trinity College in Hartford to see my daughter in the musical Nine. She is double majoring in music and theatre/dance. I thought you would be interested in knowing that your book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is one of her required textbooks in a course she is taking this semester, “American Popular Music.” In fact, she has a paper due on it soon.

I’ve been in textbooks before, but I’ve never been one. Cool.

Readers of Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor will recall that he describes in the first chapter a 1932 Pathé newsreel in which the five-year-old O’Connor showed off a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The experience, she recalled years later in an essay called “King of the Birds,” “marked me for life.”
Sad to say, this newsreel has yet to make it to YouTube, but you can view it online by going here.
You will notice, incidentally, that the anonymous author of the program note for this clip, which is available on British Pathé’s Web site, clearly doesn’t know that the “Mary O’Connor” portrayed in the newsreel is the same person who grew up to be one of America’s greatest writers. O tempora!

“Is Porky Pig, a cartoon, a movie ‘persona’? Of course he is. If Cary Grant is a ‘person’ in the movies, then so is Porky. Grant is an entity who appears only in the movies and doesn’t exist in real life. He was drawn up and created by a system that used Archibald Leach as its material. Porky Pig is similarly drawn up–it’s just that the raw material was pen and ink, not a guy from Bristol, England.”
Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine

I arrived in Smalltown, U.S.A., yesterday afternoon, and am now contentedly ensconced in the bosom of my family. My brother turned fifty last week, and though I had to miss his surprise party–I was stuck in New York seeing shows–I mean to celebrate the great day belatedly during my brief trip home.
On Thursday I’ll be driving up to Kansas City to talk about Pops at the downtown library. The festivities begin with a reception at six p.m., followed a half-hour later by my lecture. Go here for more information if you’re in the vicinity and want to come hear me.
On Friday I’ll be flying to Chicago for a week of theatergoing, accompanied by Mrs. T and Our Girl.
I’m going to try to blog as often as possible during the first leg of my summer travels, but I’ll have to file my usual Wall Street Journal columns from the road, so things may be a bit sparse here from time to time. If that happens, don’t worry–I’ll be back sooner or later, probably the former.

I review the Broadway transfer of Sherie Rene Scott’s Everyday Rapture in the New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal–and, unlike my colleagues, I wasn’t impressed. Here’s an excerpt.
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The attractions of “Everyday Rapture” can be summed up in nine words: Ms. Scott is beautiful, sexy and a terrific singer. I loved her in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” and had I seen this show in a cabaret–minus the talk–I might have enjoyed it. Had I paid $116.50 to see it in a Broadway theater, on the other hand, I’d have gone home fuming, not because Ms. Scott sings less well or looks less fetching in front of an audience of 740 but because she has nothing to say that’s worth hearing and spends 90 minutes saying it. On the other hand, what Ms. Scott and Dick Scanlan (who co-wrote the book) tell us about her life and thought will be of considerable interest to those wishing to study the point of view of a fortysomething New Yorker who grew up in Kansas, was raised as a member of a fundamentalist religious sect, shook the prairie dirt from her feet as fast as she could and now looks back on her childhood and youth with a contempt that she fails to disguise as amused tolerance.
I may possibly be doing Ms. Scott a disservice, since the “Sherie Rene Scott” whom she plays in “Everyday Rapture” is a metafictional character who tells stories about her “past” that she and Mr. Scanlan may or may not have made up. “Only some are factual,” she says. “But all are true.” On the other hand, Ms. Scott’s coyness about the facts of her real life does nothing to conceal her feelings about the culture that she describes in “Everyday Rapture.” It was, to hear her tell it, a sewer of art-hating homophobes whose failure to share Ms. Scott’s appreciation for the genius of Judy Garland (“Torn between two lovers–Jesus and Judy”) was almost as odious as their belief that all homosexuals are headed for the hottest corner of hell. Somehow I doubt that absolutely everybody in Kansas feels that way, but Ms. Scott doesn’t seem to have met anyone there (except for her gay cousin) who begged to differ.
The trouble with “Everyday Rapture” is not its implicit belief system–I’m as much of a humanist as the next theater-loving Upper West Side aesthete–but the preening condescension with which Ms. Scott and her collaborator portray her own steady ascent to the heights of greeting-card enlightenment…
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Read the whole thing here.

“The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.”
P.J. O’Rourke, “A Plague of ‘A Students” (The Weekly Standard, May 3, 2010)