About Last Night

Ms. Kate’s Book Blog has made up a meme and tagged the world. I’m game:

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you? I taught myself to read at the age of three. Somewhere in the family archives is a snapshot taken by my father that shows me lying on my stomach in the living room of the first house I can remember, reading the Daily Smalltown Standard.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library? I “owned” dozens of books, some of them confiscated from my parents’ shelves and others bought with my allowance. A few can still be found on the shelves of my old bedroom, including a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, a long-forgotten series of volumes to which my parents wisely subscribed on my behalf. It was the Best Loved Books series that introduced me to Beat to Quarters, Call of the Wild, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. They were, to be sure, abridged versions, but what did I know? In addition, I went through a brief but intense period of youthful interest in comic books. My favorites were Batman, The Flash, and The Green Lantern. (I didn’t discover Spider-Man until much later.) I also owned several Peanuts paperbacks.

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money? Alas, I can’t remember–I was buying books from early childhood onward, and they piled up fast. The first book I clearly remember owning, though, was The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which my Uncle Jim gave to me as a Christmas present forty years ago. It traveled with me all the way from Smalltown to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it disintegrated at long last, having given me half a lifetime (I hope!) of loyal service.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often? I re-read all my favorite books regularly, but I especially liked Little Men, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I saw the 1935 film version of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the first time in January, and found it satisfyingly faithful to my fond memories of the Baroness Orczy’s book.

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it? I started dipping into my parents’ Reader’s Digest condensed books at an inappropriately early age–I can’t have been more than ten. Again, I read so many of them that I don’t recall which came first, but the one I remember most vividly is Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Washington novel, which I still revisit from time to time, always with pleasure. I was also hugely impressed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and so it tickled me no end to be able to review the Broadway revival of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial a few months ago, even though the production wasn’t any good.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones? Except for the Dr. Seuss books, I didn’t read any of the well-known modern children’s books as a boy. Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and several of the Little House books were read out loud to me in elementary school, though, and I loved them all. I read them for myself a few years ago and enjoyed them even more. I read and liked the first three or four Harry Potter books not long after they came out, but lost interest after the first Harry Potter film was released. Snobbery, I guess.

“In a way he was the most abstract person I’ve ever met. That sounds wrong, it sounds as if I meant he was a philosopher or absent-minded. ‘Plastically sensual,’ which sounds like God knows what, would be closer. What I mean is, when he went to see a film he was so busy looking at the chiaroscuro he never saw the actors, and when he went to my theatre, he came out talking about my elbows.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

The media, not surprisingly, took comparatively little note of the recent death of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, who was 98. (The New York Times eked out a nice obit last Monday, but it’s now safely ensconced behind the paper’s pay-to-play firewall.) For those who don’t recognize her name, she was the co-author of Cheaper by the Dozen, the perennially popular memoir of life with Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the once-celebrated efficiency experts of the Twenties whose work is now mostly remembered by specialists. It was turned into a charming film in 1950, then “remade” to appalling effect a couple of years ago (nothing survived but the title).

Has the story of the Gilbreth family lost its charm for latter-day youngsters? I wonder. I read Cheaper by the Dozen repeatedly as a boy, marveling each time at the utterly mysterious and romantic prospect of living in a giant-sized family (I have just one brother). Somehow I doubt it seems as romantic to today’s children as it did back in the Sixties. I looked up Cheaper by the Dozen on amazon.com the other day and found, among other things, this “kid’s review” of the book:

I did not like Cheaper by the Dozen because it did not grab my attention at all. I do not like reading about the life of a large family where the father ties to teach the kids everything, or showing off in front of a bunch of people. I also do not believe anything of this story is realistic. Do you think someone now of days can handle 12 kids? I do not think so. Now of days things are more expensive, so think how wealthy someone has to be to maintain a house, work, and still have time to spend with each child and buy things you need in the household. And do you think the dad has time, with work to teach each child all the different things. I think you would like this book if you are interested in stories about everyday life with a big family and the parents tutoring 12 kids and go on vacations. Or if you want to know what life was like back then and have 12 kids. Still how can they fit 14 people in a car, 9 kids in the back, 1 in the front, the mother in the passenger side with 2 babies in her lap, and the father driving the car? I was thinking how 2 adults keep 12 screaming kids under control. If you like the movie Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin you might like this book even though they are really different, even the last names are different. I really did not like this book but if you want to read it go right a head.

That made me smile, though it also made me sad. Above all, though, it made me want to reread both Cheaper by the Dozen and its equally touching sequel, Belles on Their Toes. Perhaps I’ll poke my nose into them again once I get my upcoming spasm of Thanksgiving-related travel (about which more later) out of the way.

P.S. You can view several of the actual Gilbreth motion-study films whose making is described in Cheaper by the Dozen by going here.

I did so much on my week off that now I need a day off!

See you tomorrow.

“It’s difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live–exist or whatever–in the sense that other people do. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else’s life surrounded by plate-glass. I mean I’d like to break through it just once and actually touch one.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Here’s what I saw, heard, read, and did during my week off from “About Last Night”:

• I saw four shows: Mary Poppins, The Little Dog Laughed, and the revivals of Les Miz and Suddenly Last Summer.

• I added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, a 1936 print by Louis Lozowick, a precisionist who specialized in lithography. A sharp-eyed art collector who shares my passion for prewar American modernism had suggested that I look into Lozowick, and I liked his style so much that I decided to bid on a copy of Storm Over Manhattan when it came up for auction last week. (Click on the link to see what it looks like.) Now it hangs in my living room, directly beneath Alex Katz’s Late July II. They look beautiful together.

• I decided to check out the ambient music of Aphex Twin, about which I’ve been hearing interesting things. Two of the cuts I downloaded from iTunes, “Alberto Balsalm” and “Windowlicker,” are now in heavy rotation on my iPod. (When I told my trainer that I was listening to Aphex Twin, he looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown a horn and said, “You’re listening to techno?”)

• I read Gordon Forbes’ Goodbye to Some, a World War II novel suggested to me by a reader, and the galleys of Howard Pollack’s nine-hundred-page George Gershwin biography, which comes out next month. I also reread Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, one of Our Girl’s favorite novels.

• I knocked off two Wall Street Journal columns, revised the first five chapters of Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and wrote the outline of an opera libretto. (Yes, that’s a teaser–I’ll tell you more later if it pans out.)

• On Tuesday I took the train to Washington, D.C., where I spent three days in conference with the National Council on the Arts.

• The NCA plays a part in the selection process for National Medal of Arts nominees, so on Wednesday I dined with this year’s medalists, among them William Bolcom, Cyd Charisse, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Ralph Stanley. In addition, I met Mrs. William Bolcom, better known as Joan Morris, whose singing of American popular songs I’ve admired extravagantly for at least a quarter-century. Most of the two dozen albums she’s recorded with her husband at the piano are now out of print, but you can still get this one without difficulty.

• I sat next to Cyd Charisse at dinner. She was wearing pants, so I can’t say whether her legs are as perfect now as they were a half-century ago, but I can assure you that she’s as nice as can be and that she remembers Fred Astaire with great fondness. She wanted to know if I’d seen any good musicals lately, so I told her about the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, and had the pleasure of reminding her that one of the characters in the show mentions her by name:

From seeing all those movie musicals, I used to dance around on the street, and I’d get caught all the time. God, it was embarrassing. I was always being Cyd Charisse. Always.

• On Thursday I had breakfast with a friend about whose wedding I blogged two years ago, then went to the White House to attend a reception for the recipients of the 2006 National Medals of Arts and Humanities, who met with President Bush in the Oval Office. The rest of us made do with the First Lady, who looked cool and composed in a simple greenish-beige suit. A sextet of military musicians played Debussy and Mozart (very prettily, too) as the crowd of gogglers jostled for position.

The whole first floor of the White House was open, so I skipped the buffet and gave myself a fat-free art tour instead. The reception rooms are elegant, serene, and immaculately kept, and the windows are so thick that you can’t hear any sounds from outside. The walls are covered with paintings, most of them presidential portraits of widely varying distinction. Two are first-class, Rembrandt Peale’s Thomas Jefferson and a museum-quality 1903 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in a corner of the East Room. Another Sargent, The Mosquito Net, is in the Green Room. (Alas, Childe Hassam’s Avenue in the Rain, the best painting in the White House’s permanent collection, is not hung in a public area.)

I was much taken with Aaron Shikler’s glamorously introspective paintings of John and Jackie Kennedy, by far the best of the postwar portraits. The booby prize, by contrast, goes to this cartoonish study of Lyndon Johnson by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who is best known for the fact that she was painting Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs one spring morning in 1945 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck him dead. Also in the room was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, FDR’s mistress. I bet the White House guards don’t tell that to visitors!

A year ago I was dying. I like this better.

“It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

It’s time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which is a bit jaundiced this week. I reviewed three shows–the New York premiere of The Clean House, the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, and a Seattle production of Steve Martin’s The Underpants–and didn’t like any of ’em:

Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur “genius grant,” but she’s making a high-profile New York debut: “The Clean House,” which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren’t enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she’s working on a new play about the history of…the vibrator.

If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there’s a reason. It’s possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who’ve won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same resume, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn’t surprised when “The Clean House” failed to live up to its own hype. It’s clever–too clever by at least half–but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it’s nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals….

“Grey Gardens,” the cultiest show of the 2005-06 season, has transferred to Broadway, and though it’s been tweaked and tightened, I don’t like it any better now than when it opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons back in March.

In case you missed it the first time around, “Grey Gardens” is a musical version of the 1975 cin