Archives for July 2016

From 2006:

Grammatical pet peeve. Misplaced apostrophes. My father, God rest his soul, once commissioned a huge sign that read Season’s Greetings From The Teachout’s. I secretly attempted to paint out that damned apostrophe, but to no avail. It caused me years of annual adolescent embarrassment, though I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t enough of a smartass to tell my father about it….

Read the whole thing here.

“I don’t know of any thing in my book to be criticised on by honourable men. Is it on my spelling?—that’s not my trade. Is it on my grammar?—I hadn’t time to learn it, and make no pretensions to it. Is it on the order and arrangement of my book?—I never wrote one before, and never read very many; and, of course, know mighty little about that. Will it be on the authorship of the book?—this I claim, and I hang on to it, like a wax plaster. The whole book is my own, and every sentiment and sentence in it. I would not be such a fool, or knave either, as to deny that I have had it hastily run over by a friend or so, and that some little alterations have been made in the spelling and grammar; and I am not so sure that it is not the worse of even that, for I despise this way of spelling contrary to nature. And as for grammar, it’s pretty much a thing of nothing at last, after all the fuss that’s made about it. In some places, I wouldn’t suffer either the spelling, or grammar, or any thing else to be touch’d; and therefore it will be found in my own way. But if any body complains that I have had it looked over, I can only say to him, her, or them—as the case may be—that while critics were learning grammar, and learning to spell, I, and ‘Doctor Jackson, L.L.D.’ were fighting in the wars; and if our hooks, and messages, and proclamations, and cabinet writings, and so forth, and so on, should need a little looking over, and a little correcting of the spelling and the grammar to make them fit for use, its just nobody’s business. Big men have more important matters to attend to than crossing their ts—, and dotting their I’s—, and such like small things.”

The Autobiography of Davy Crockett

My mother’s parents were born right around the turn of the twentieth century. Albert Crosno, Sr., my maternal grandfather, came from Decaturville, a rural Tennessee town whose current population is 867, and spent the bulk of his later life in Diehlstadt, a rural Missouri town whose current population is 161. He served as a private in World War I, became a dirt farmer after the war, then went to work in a shoe factory. After hours he played the banjo, listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, and doted on his two sons and four daughters.

I have only the vaguest memories of Albert, who died of a heart attack when I was six years old, but Gracie, his wife, lived well into my adulthood. Alas, she spent her last years in a cloud of senility, making it impossible for me to get to know her more than superficially, though I clearly remember her devotion to the soap operas that she watched on TV every afternoon, which she called “my stories,” and her keep-my-skillet-good-and-greasy country cooking. Whenever I read about pioneer women, I see in my mind’s eye Gracie sweating over a hot stove while Albert sat in his rocking chair, frailing away at his banjo.

I’ve been thinking about my grandparents ever since I started reading Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by J.D. Vance, who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, joined the Marines, attended Yale Law School, and now works in Silicon Valley. It tells the story of how the members of his family, who moved to Ohio from Breathitt County, Kentucky, in the hope of escaping the grinding Appalachian poverty into which they were born, were permanently scarred by the world they left behind, the same world that Gracie and Albert had left behind them three-quarters of a century earlier.

If you watched Justified, you have some sense of what that world is like today. If not, Vance talked about it in detail in a recent interview with Rod Dreher that is both frank and illuminating:

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The book itself is, if anything, scarier:

Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs…At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.

I suppose you could have called Gracie and Albert “hillbillies,” but you would have been stretching a point to do so. Nor did they have much in common with the latter-day hillbillies portrayed in Vance’s book. They were good country people, Scotch-Irish Bible Belt Christians (my mother was baptized in a river) who scratched their way through the Great Depression and World War II, passing on their homespun, hard-tested values to their children, who in turn raised their own children in much the same way. What I am, I owe to them. As I wrote in this space last summer, “To come from such unfancy people, ordinary though they may be by the standards of the gilded city in which I now live, is to have a leg up in the long race of life, all the way from the starting gun to the finish line.”

What happened to the full-fledged hillbillies my grandparents left behind in Appalachia? Why did their great-grandchildren exchange their unselfconscious faith for self-ravaging hopelessness? I leave it to others to plumb the moral disintegration of America’s rural working class, for I know nothing of it at first hand. The small Missouri town in which I grew up, though far from wealthy, was nothing like Breathitt County, Kentucky. All I know is that Gracie and Albert lived at a time when the behavior chronicled in Hillbilly Elegy was, quite literally, unthinkable. I weep to imagine what they would have thought of it.

* * *

Uncle Dave Macon sings “Take Me Back to That Old Carolina Home,” accompanied by his son Dorris. This clip, an excerpt from the 1940 film Grand Ole Opry, is thought to be the only surviving sound film of Macon in performance:

Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys perform “A Voice From On High” in 1954 or 1955. This is thought to be the earliest surviving sound film of Monroe in performance:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“When someone’s argument boils down to ‘it cannot be,’ it means that it probably is.”

Sean Trende, “Yes, Trump Can Win,” (RealClearPolitics, May 31, 2016)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Goodspeed Musicals’ revival of Bye Bye Birdie. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Musicals don’t have to be first-rate to be fun. “Bye Bye Birdie,” a peaweight farce about the coming of rock and roll to Sweet Apple, Ohio, is the quintessential case in point. While it was a hit on Broadway in 1960 and remains popular to this day with high-school and amateur theaters, professional revivals are increasingly rare, and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2009 production was a major meltdown (only one of the stars could sing). But “Bye Bye Birdie” still has undeniable charm, as well as a well-crafted book by Michael Stewart and a Charles Strouse-Lee Adams score that sports two blue-chip standards, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” and “Put on a Happy Face.” Stage it well and you’ll send everybody home with a smile. Stage it really well—the way Goodspeed Musicals is doing—and they’ll go home laughing out loud.

What makes Goodspeed’s “Birdie” fly high is the presence at the helm of Jenn Thompson, one of the most talented directors on the East Coast. Ms. Thompson first came into view four years ago with an imaginative off-Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” a serious comedy that’s harder to stage convincingly than you’d think. She followed it up in 2013 with a similarly striking production of William Inge’s “Natural Affection,” a 1963 Broadway flop that proved to be a gem in urgent need of rediscovery. But Ms. Thompson, who played an orphan in the original Broadway production of “Annie,” is just as much at home with musicals, and she has brought to “Bye Bye Birdie” the same fresh point of view that revitalized “Lost in Yonkers.”

Ms. Thompson has moved the action forward from 1958, the year in which Elvis Presley (the real-life model for Conrad Birdie, played by Rhett Guter) went into the Army, to 1961, when John Kennedy led America out of the Eisenhower era. This makes it easier for her to recast the show as an exercise in baby-boomer nostalgia, an interpretation underlined by the clever video montages of early-‘60s TV commercials (Tang, anyone?) and home movies that preface each act. Yet there is no distancing irony: Instead, Ms. Thompson has turned “Bye Bye Birdie” into a wholly affectionate portrait of life on the New Frontier.

Nor is there is anything faded or dusty about her production. Not only has Ms. Thompson interpolated two “new” songs by Messrs. Strouse and Adams, one from the 1963 film of “Bye Bye Birdie” and one from Gene Saks’ 1995 TV movie version, but she’s discreetly brisked up Stewart’s book….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A clip from the dress rehearsal of Goodspeed Musicals’ revival of Bye Bye Birdie::

Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh perform “Put On a Happy Face” in the 1963 film version of Bye Bye Birdie, directed by George Sidney:

The second episode of Orson Welles’ Sketchbook, a BBC series in which Welles talked about his life and work. This episode, in which Welles talked about critics, was originally telecast on May 8, 1955:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“One never gets accustomed to a miracle; one may only wonder at it. A poet is always filled with wonder.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Mozart and Salieri (trans. Robert A. McLean, courtesy of Patrick Kurp)