Tap

We went to see a new musical tonight and since it was about Josephine Baker we were expecting tap dancing in a series of great routines whereas what we got for the most part was a series of tableaux in which shapely ladies in see through body suits with appropriate pasties at the proper places moved about langorously.  I suppose that if you wanted to call it dancing you could.  At one point two young men broke out into tap dancing, and our hearts leapt up.  But that moment was short lived.  What has happened to tap dancing?  I hope to see "Shuffle Along" in New York.  They have to do tap dancing in that if there is any attempt at historical accuracy.  Several years ago there was a magnificent musical pretty much devoted to tap dancing "Black and Blue" which opened at the end of 1989 and ran for six or seven hundred performances and garnered a host of awards.  It suggests that tap is a form of dancing for which there is an audience, and it is artistry which the gyrations we were treated to tonight could hardly really pass muster as choreography.  Two or three years ago we had one of the treats of a lifetime in London watching a staged musical version of the film "Top Hat," a concoction from decades ago starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.  As one would imagine there was a chorus doing the kind of precision tap that one so rarely sees anymore, and the principals tapped their way through number after number just like Fred and Ginger.  What made this musical especially intriguing was for those members of the audience, like myself, who had seen the film enough times to have memorized more or less the routines, the choreography, the angles of the shots, every bit of paraphernalia trivial or serious that made the film.  There was a frisson to see this in three dimensions.  The film of course presented a flat two dimensional view of the action, and here the exact same maneuvers were extended into the third dimension, an aesthetic epiphany that was absolutely thrilling.  I have never understood why the show never came to the United States, but then it is true that the revivals of great musicals seem in the last decades all to come from England.  One thinks of "Oklahoma" or"Carousel", or "Guys and Dolls" to name some of the more outstanding.  I guess it is not the tap dancing per se, although that is awfully compelling, but in the case of these last three it was the incredible precision of performance together with the rethinking of the plots, bringing them along from their origins to what their potential for meaning is nowadays.  Ah, shuffle, ball, change, shuffle, ball, change.  I cannot ever get enough of that.  When I was in my forties a friend suggested we all learn to tap.  He had spend a like more entwined with the American musical, so it is fair to say he had lots of rhythm. I was totally enthusiastic and we build a wooden tap floor in our recreation room, recruited students--two of my children took it up--, mostly various gay friends.  I guess that was predictable. Once or twice a week our delightful tap teacher put us through our paces.  Forty years on it is another delicate bond between parent and child: we can stand in a row and do shuffle off to buffalo

Gazing From The Peaks Of Darien

So for ten days I was wandering around Manhattan, Cambridge and parts of New England.  Wandering misrepresents my  experience; I was confronting advancing balance problems that kept me on a cane, and even then in serious danger of falling.  The last day as I hailed a cab on the corner of Fifty Seventh and Ninth to go to Penn Station for an early train, I did indeed situate my body out at angle to attract a passing cab's attention and fell off the curb and to the ground.  Luckily it was early Saturday morning and the traffic was light, luckier still on the deserted sidewalk two construction workers saw my plight and rushed over to assist.  Lucky for me the one knew how to pull a man to his feet by having the man who had fallen put his arms around his neck and hold on as the burly fellow had the strength in his body and moreover in his neck muscles to raise the body up to a standing position.  In seconds I was face to face with this hunky gentleman, brushed off and assisted into a cab.  Not much damage, and his heroic demeanor and great good looks and obvious physical strength and extreme kindness were my last impression of the city.  On Sunday last my younger daughter drove me to New Hampshire to participate in Trinity Sunday services at my other daughter's church.  Being with them and an participating in the church service were memorable, but what more forcibly struck me was the sensation of spring in New England, an exotic and deeply sensual visual color experience for one just returned from parched and barren tropical lands: palm trees, which I adore to look at as they shake their fronds in the wind, have none of the soft, luxuriance of a the manifold greens of New England trees budding out in spring.  The church was in a small urban cluster of mostly eighteenth century houses, a moment in the history of American urban architecture that can't be beat.  Then brunch at the Exeter Inn where we were surrounded by the creme de la creme of early teenage prowess and success and as those things often go, physical beauty and great good manners.  All happy making.  Yesterday my Cambridge based daughter accompanied me on the subway out to the airport since she was concerned that I would fall if I were alone, a very sweet gesture, since indeed, i had grown increasingly wobbly on this trip.  I shall never forget my last impression which was the row of riders sitting in this early morning stillness, still waking up and hence, monumental, still, somewhere else just as statues, a row of them on either side of the long bench of the subway car.  The cream of the intelligent youth of the Cambridge area,  seeming to be so in control of their thoughts and destinies  looking, so serious, so gracefully pensive, physically beautiful, silent, gazing in repose on their inner thoughts.

Bella Abzug

Today I am flying to New York City, spending a week there, and traveling on by train to Boston, stopping on the way for a few hours to attend a memorial service of a very old, dear friend who was a professor at one of the universities in the Northeast Corridor.  Because I am so unsteady and have an apartment full of clothes in the city I tend to travel only with a capacious canvas briefcase into which I can add a couple shirts, underwear and socks for the few days trip north of Manhattan.  Because of the memorial service and its university setting I feel compelled to wear a suit, and since I am in Florida it will be very lightweight.  The weather prediction is for something in the high sixties low seventies; that is polar to my new sensibilities.  Should I take my outdoor jacket and make do with it as the alternative to the suit jacket?  My daughter who sent me weather tips from up north sternly rebuked me for even caring about the outerwear/suit jacket issue.  No one cares, no one, she insisted.  All those years at Ivy League faculty gatherings particularly among humanists who as we know tend to be well born and slightly pretentious from birth have left me denatured; I cannot resist worrying about what I am wearing for an hour visit at a memorial service.  86 years old.  Pathetic.  Today I have been reading an oral history of Bella Abzug, published perhaps a decade ago by Farrar, Straus.  I remember her as being so ugly, pushy--no, I don't mean that as a code for Jewish; she was that as well and insistent about it--and opinionated.  This book is an inspiration.  She was everything that makes me love New York. She was ambitious, hard working, she cared about social justice, the poor and oppressed needing help were her special concern along with the displaced Jews of Europe.  She was so vehement, always on task, energetic, and probably somewhat humorless in the sense that irony was not her frame of reference.  After reading one hundred pages of this I feel energized, liberated, a friend to humankind, ready to go forth, do battle, wear whatever to the memorial; my old friend's family will not care, old acquaintances will have other things on their mind.  I am not going to this service to ingratiate myself so as to get tenure.  At my age I am anonymous.  The world must belong to the likes of Bella Abzug.  I salute her memory.


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For the next ten or so days I will probably not work with the blog since I am always at a loss when it comes to transmitting from my IPad and from our New York apartment which has no Wifi although I have something else called LTE, I believe.  That seems to allow email.  Oh, well, a break is always good.

Grow Old Along With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be

The odd part of working out with my trainer is the understanding, like it or not, that I am actually deteriorating.  The trainer would not for a minute buy that statement, he is outrageously cheerful and optimistic at all times, not just about me and my physical well being but life in general.  He has confessed obliquely to a youth spent in the worst war-like gangs of the Bronx, so I suppose everything is on an upward course as far as he is concerned. He is in perfect shape, handsome, happy, the same age as my older son, a divorced man with a rolodex of babes to call on, not unlike my son, come to think of it.  He is forever complimenting me on my performance in our training sessions. But I can tell perfectly well that I am in fact going down hill.  Yes, I am recovering from open heart surgery, look years younger everyone says, know myself that the blood flowing so newly vigorously through my arteries is giving me pep and intellectual thrust.  But there it is: I am growing increasingly old and feeble.  Old and feeble, what dreadful words!  Old, yes, I know the new idea is that we are only as old as we think, or is it feel?  Well, let's see.  For one, I am so terribly unstable.  I am going to New York on Friday and the recent photos in the Times of the crowded subway platforms makes me realize that I cannot go down into that with my cane, nor can I easily go through Times Square by myself to a performance of a play.  The crowds and their back packs or the baby carriages produce an obstacle to safe walking that is a calamity.  I think of Beckett's play Happy Days I simply cannot muster up Winnie's cheer, much more prefer thinking of Yaweh telling Moses that for the mistake of striking the stone instead of talking to it he would be denied ever to cross over into the Promised Land.  Isn't that sort of the truth about life and better to know it than sit in sand yammering away as one slowly sinks deeper and deeper?  I have never been fond of Beckett: too many gloomy home truths that we all know only too well.  Waiting For Godot, I've seen all the great productions,for instance, the original one with Bert Lahr, and then John Wood, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and so on and so forth.  Beckett resists interpretation, and he is right.  The play is an exercise in waiting, and as such, a moment of existence made special, that never ending pointless being on hold for nothing.  I find the play obvious.  I guess I'll go with Bette Davis in "Now Voyager" when she asks "Let's not ask for the moon. We already have the stars"

"Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.” W.C.Fields

My mother lost her newly married husband at the front in the summer of 1918.  Her second husband, my father, died in an automobile accident a few days after his fiftieth birthday, leaving her with six children ages 14 to 4, and a considerably diminished trust income.  Her relatives considered her life tragic, and she an unfortunate victim of terrible circumstances.  The population of my home town considered her life a happy and comfortable one.  (I remember not really understanding a parent of a fellow student in first grade saying nastily to the teacher within my earshot no less:  "It's about time she had something to suffer over," referring, I have to imagine, to the death of my father only a few months earlier.)  We lived in a very large house, with a staff of five plus a full time gardener to deal with extensive grounds.  Mother did not work.  Well, what did she do?  Puttered in the garden, read several newspapers, went to luncheons, did all the grocery shopping--these were the days before supermarkets when it was possible to establish a relationship with the provender of every sort of food, and mother took that relationship seriously, appealing as it did, I imagine, to the feudal in her.  She distanced herself from her children when they were young, the servants being a buffer, but any time I was in her company she was never failingly pleasant.  That was her default mode.  She always had a slight smile on her face, even when no one was with her, you could see it on her walking along for instance from the garage to the house when she came home.  She encouraged it in us much to the rage of my teenaged sister who insisted it was utterly false.  My mother accepted the dichotomy between what life had brought her and the way she presented herself to the world.  In some sense she insisted everything was coming up roses.  As I grew older and spent more time with her I saw that what held the day together was the cocktail hour, the time when she drank slowly and with considerable relish two Scotch Old Fashioneds prepared in an exquisite cut crystal glass.  All her relatives and friends did the same.  Your mother's cocktail hour was what High Mass is to others, a friend once observed, and I think, yes, it was a sacrament that gave in loosening the tensions some kind of benediction as well.  A.R. Gurney's play"The Cocktail Hour" catches this.  I can still see the actress Nancy Marchand, feigning a posture of slightly bent age, in her knit cardigan and white hair, holding out her cocktail glas, and saying from time to time in the play "Just another splash, please."  That was my mother-in-law to a tee at ninety eight as I remember her, same attitude toward life as my mother.  W.C.Fields, although it describes comically the point of view of a lush, and is very different, in a perverse way always makes me think of mother.

Butterflies

My trainer at the gym is also a photographer, mostly making money from shooting fashion shots of gorgeous and exotic if not to say erotic women.  But he has a kind of other passion which is photographing butterflies which have landed upon the petals of various budding flowers.  The exquisite moment of rest for an insect so much in flight together with the harmonious blend of shape and color which it is his genius to capture far outshine the curves and shining skin of the young ladies who pose for him.  Butterflies when their wings are spread and they are in flight have a way of bouncing on the air that is delicious; they make so many tentative and delicious passes at the flowers beneath their path.  And then they land, and assume a texture with the shapes and color of the plant on which they are feeding.  And evolution dreamt this up I have been told so that the birds overhead would not be able to make them out.  Camouflage.  How different it is from the other subject of his photography, these beautiful models, whose goal is always to put their breasts, their thighs, their everything on full display.  Women are vulnerable because they are subject to or rather more to the point the object of the male gaze.  It is an erotic gaze, needy, demanding, rapacious.  It is in a way like the birds overhead yet they miss out on seeing the butterflies alighting on the multi colored flowers below in the garden because of the camouflage.  Some women think they have much to lose if they were to employ camouflage; others hope that they just are not that much noticed.  It is strange but my photographer friend's outrageously beautiful semi naked women are in their own way so aggressively beautiful that they provide their own defense against the gaze.  Their beauty and artificiality are their camouflage.  "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" asked Yeats.

Gay, gay, all the way

My husband and I just watched an HBO documentary called "The Out List," which appeared quite by chance after something with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda which  he has a penchant for and I am trying to learn to love.  This other piece was riveting, a series of interviews with gay and lesbian persons and their life experience.  Riveting is one word for it, painful was another, at least for me.  The world has changed so completely since my youth.  I never knew another person who was a homosexual, never knew the term, did not even know what the sexual experience was.  As I grew into some dim awareness I also learned that same sex experience was punishable by prison terms.  What a shocking awakening that was!  As I have written in my memoir I was exceedingly blessed in the youngsters with whom I went to school who for the most part casually shrugged it off as my eccentricity rather than the work of Satan or some other more disease.  The same was not true of my mother, nor I suppose for her cohort; she made me feel truly awful and unloved, and that never changed.  I could never redeem myself.  Ah, well.  What this documentary made me realize was that the generation who were interviewed are all comfortable with themselves in a way that I shall never be.  Ever.  I am not comfortable with other gay persons either, unless they are presenting themselves as rather plain under the radar guys.  Drag queens, wildly effeminate guys, guys who wear lots of bracelets, guys who put their sexual orientation out there pure and simple, no, I run away.  I cannot claim them as my own.  Suddenly in the film there appeared Larry Kramer, eighty years old and almost my exact age, who was one of the founders of Act Up, and he is describing a group demonstrating at the high altar at St Patricks in NYC.  It was 1989. He was putting himself on line.   Where was I?  Well, as a matter of fact, in Athens on a sabbatical, but I know that if I had been here I would not be demonstrating with Act Up.  There was the fact of my parenthood and four children.  I was divorced as of 1975, yes, and my children were still too young, in my judgement, to tell them. But that HBO documentary made me realize that my life has been entirely disfigured because I have never come to terms with being gay, or really bisexual, a better term for me.  I really never went to gay bars, I never acted out gay, I am always an alien on the alert, never relaxed despite my famous wit and charm.  Well, I am not sure that it absolutely true.  I think so when I am alone in my room.  I just don't know how to act.  The odd fact is that whenever I meet young straight males I am completely at ease.  Whenever I meet straight males older than sixty I am instantly wary, close mouthed, withdrawn--unless they are with a female companion and then I can chat her up and it's all okay. Older straight American males, I just don't get them.   The film is a heart warming account of men and women who have found their place in society and in their family and are happy and comfortable.  That is what the film is all about, but I watched if from some place where I was shut off from the ease and comfort and joy I was watching.  Sad.