Jew Eat Yet?

Keep A-Goin’, Robert Altman

The word “genius” is showered on people in Hollywood with reckless abandon. In my opinion, director Robert Altman, who died last week at the age of 81, is one of the few people in this town who really deserved the label. Maybe that’s because he wasn’t exactly “in this town” but always something of an outsider and a maverick, even during the sporadic periods when he was achieving (but not dependent on) great commercial success.

I’ve always been reluctant to list my favorite films in order of preference.  There are so many styles and genres of films that I love, why force an apples-and oranges-comparison? What sense does it make to rate films such as “The Philadelphia Story,” “All About Eve,” and “Brief Encounter” against the likes of “The Graduate,” “Sophie’s Choice,” and “The Deer Hunter?” Can’t I appreciate the works of Cukor, Minnelli, Bergmann, Scorsese, Fellini, and others without saying that certain films are better than others? It’s why I despise awards shows or any conceit that would have us believe that pitting wildly different works of art against each other is a valid and helpful exercise, like comparing two brands of laundry detergent. So while I’d be very interested in drawing up a list of 100 movies that have had an impact on me, I would be loathe to organize them in some kind of ascending order. Except for one. My favorite film of all-time is Robert Altman’s “Nashville.”

I remember walking into Chicago’s Esquire Theatre in June 1975 to see the film during its opening week. It would be the first of more than a dozen screenings in theatres as well as countless viewings on video and DVD. Altman had already made films using large ensembles and overlapping dialogue (most famously in “M*A*S*H” five years earlier), but he perfected this style in “Nashville” as he showed the interweaving stories of 24 characters over the course of five days in the country music capital. “Nashville” was not really about Nashville or the country music industry just like the new film “Bobby” is not about Bobby Kennedy. “Nashville” was about America, it was about us.

Endless articles have been written about this film. Reviewers around the world have dissected “Nashville” and taken a firm stand one way or the other. Pauline Kael got reamed by many (jealous) directors for her unmitigated raves that were published in “The New Yorker” a full four months before the film was released, Critics tended to hail the polarizing film as grand masterpiece and incisive look at the post-Watergate American zeitgeist or as a hopelessly scattered example of Robert Altman’s ego run amuck. A few years ago a whole book came out about the making of the film that is required reading for all Altman fans and “Nashville” fanatics like myself.

I don’t know what it was like to actually work for Robert Altman although I’m willing to take Meryl Streep’s word that it was creative paradise for an actor. Streep and Lily Tomlin, who co-starred in his final film “Prairie Home Companion,” presented Altman with a lifetime achievement award at this year’s Oscars. In the nick of time, it turns out. Streep and Tomlin’s work was by far the best thing about “Prairie Home Companion” and a perfect display of Altman’s deft ability to trust the process and get the most out of his talented actors (provided they come to the table with plenty to give).

Altman gave Tomlin her first regular acting role in “Nashville.” She herself questioned why she was cast as Linnea Reese, the white lead singer in an all-black gospel choir and wife to creepy lawyer Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty), who was working on the presidential campaign of Replacement Party candidate Hal Philip Walker. In truth, the part of Linnea had been written for Louise Fletcher who had to back out at the last minute. It was Fletcher’s experience with her own deaf family members and her knowledge of sign language that prompted screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to give the Reeses two deaf children. Tomlin gamely learned how to sign for the role and quickly proved that the gamble on her dramatic talents (until then she was mostly known for her comedy bits on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”) was very well placed.

Oy, I know I could happily write paragraph after paragraph about all 24 major characters so I need to restrain myself or start my own “Nashville” website. But I have to say that the casting of “Nashville” was truly inspired, even if several people got there in a circuitous or accidental way. At left are just a third of the brilliant actors in the film: Ronee Blakley and Henry Gibson, Barbara Baxley and Barbara Harris, Geraldine Chaplin and Keenan Wynn, and Karen Black and Lily Tomlin. Each of them brought their own skills and back stories to the roles, making for one of the richest ensembles in the history of American film. Rounding out the cast were Altman veterans Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Timothy Brown, and Gwen Welles; stalwarts like Michael Murphy, Allen Garfield, and Bert Remsen; and newcomers Cristina Raines, Scott Glenn, and 21-year-old Jeff Goldblum.

Susan Anspach was originally cast as the emotionally fragile superstar Barbara Jean. Rumors why she dropped out ranged from her demanding more money than the rest of the cast (Altman used a two-tiered salary range that was paltry even by 1970s standards) to the fact that she just couldn’t cut it vocally. Although I think that Anspach is a talented actress, I’m grateful that she dropped out. She went right into one of Kendall’s dad’s plays (“For the Use of the Hall”) and opened the door for Ronee Blakley’s luminous, tragic portrayal of Barbara Jean that holds the film together. Blakley was an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who was touring with Hoyt Axton in the mid-1970s. She went up to Altman’s office to try to sell him some songs for the film and  ended up with a lead role even though she had very little acting experience and had never made a film. Details of her own life were written into the script and her improvised dialogue in the two big breakdown scenes made me think she was no stranger to the complexities of mental illness. 

Keith Carradine was first signed to play Bill, the most timid member of the folksinging trio Tom, Bill, and Mary. When Gary Busey dropped out of the film, Carradine was asked to take on his role of womanizing Tom who is not only sleeping with Bill’s wife Mary but also carrying on affairs with three other characters in the film including Tomlin’s suburban housewife Linnea Reese. Carradine played the role to perfection (and won the film’s only Oscar for his song “I’m Easy”) but apparently had a hard time playing such an arrogant jerk.

The late Gwen Welles was particularly moving as waitress and wannabe country star Sueleen Gay. Sueleen idolizes Barbara Jean and, with the promise of getting to sing with the star at an upcoming concert, agrees to strip at a sleazy good ol’ boy fundraiser for the Hal Philip Walker campaign organized by Delbert Reese. Sueleen’s desperate backroom striptease is one of the most poignant and painful scenes in the film. Finally, her friend Wade (Robert DoQui) is forced to tell her the truth in an attempt to help Gay avoid demeaning herself further. “Girl! You can’t sing! You got no talent!” but Sueleen, always the delusional optimist, is not deterred from her dream.

Geraldine Chaplin descends upon the characters in the guise of Opal, a pretentious British journalist who claims she is doing a documentary about Nashville for the BBC. Though she fancies herself a true intellectual, her biases and ignorance are on display whenever she turns on her portable tape recorder (following her deliciously obnoxious “Testing! Testing! Un, deux, trois, quatre.”). I’m only now realizing how many lines from “Nashville” are embedded in my brain to the point where I tend to spout them several times a month without warning. When I think of Opal, what immediately comes to mind is her foray through a lot of deserted yellow school buses as she intones, “Yellow is the color of sunshine, yet I see very little sunshine in the lives of the little black children and the little white children…” or when a local driver asks if he can show her around Nashville and she interrupts him in mid-sentence with, “I’m sorry, I make it a point never to socialize with the servants.” Chaplin’s character is clueless and constantly misinterpreting the reactions of her subjects. When she tries to interview the young soldier played by Scott Glenn during a concert at Opryland, he only has eyes for Barbara Jean who he’s had a deep crush on for years. She asks him if he’s just back from Vietnam. Glenn is staring rapturously at Barbara Jean and seeing this look on his face, Chaplin says very seriously, “Oh, I see that you have.”

Altman had most of the actors write their own songs for the film. Karen Black sings two of her own (pretty damn well), Carradine sings “I’m Easy” which he wrote years earlier  (aren’t songs nominated for Oscars supposed to be written specifically for the film?), and the folksinging trio sings a Gary Busey leftover from his days on the set. Ronee Blakley contributed four songs—two for Barbara Jean and two for other characters who lacked the songwriting chops. Henry Gibson’s milk-drinking country icon Haven Hamilton sings three songs that perfectly complement his narcissistic self-image and his anxiety over the world that is beginning to pass him by. But Haven’s ego is mollified by some vague promise that Hal Philip Walker thinks he’d make “a mighty fine governor for this state.” Gibson’s first song in the film sets the appropriate grandiose tone for his character. With the country about to head whole hog into the yearlong bicentennial frenzy, Gibson’s song “200 Years” could have been its rallying cry.

I've lived through two Depressions
And seven Dust Bowl droughts
Floods, locusts, and tornadoes
But I don't have any doubts.
We're all a part of history
Why Old Glory waves to show
How far along we've come 'til now
How far we've got to go.

At the Grand Ole Opry, Haven Hamilton sets a familiar poem to music to wild applause. It’s familiar because we’d heard Henry Gibson recite the poem a few years earlier on “Laugh-In.” The poem, another personal motto for his evangelical character, is called “Keep-a-Goin’” and later in the film, following the shocking assassination of one of the major characters that also injures Haven, we see the extent to which he truly does live by these simplistic words.

If you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
If it hails or if it snows,
Keep a-goin'!
'Taint no use to sit an' whine
When the fish ain't on your line;
Bait your hook an' keep a-tryin'--
Keep a-goin'!

Could these lyrics also represent Robert Altman’s approach to Hollywood?

The campaign of Hal Philip Walker that is heard throughout the film (although we never see the third-party candidate who had already won three primaries and was poised to take Tennessee) was a prescient glimpse at the future of American politics. Just as we laughed at TV executive Faye Dunaway’s insane programming ideas in that year’s great film “Network,” we howled in 1975 at Hal Philip Walker’s words which blared from loudspeakers on roving campaign vans. Who knew that Faye’s ideas would seem tame in 2006 and that that there would be candidates who sounded an awful lot like Hal Philip Walker. Ross Perot even had the same vocal intonations. Here’s a blurb from the endless Hal Philip Walker tirade that blankets the city of Nashville throughout the film.

Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify - that's one. And to confuse - that's the other. He does whichever is to his client's advantage. Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn't he? Ever ask a lawyer how to get to Mr. Jones' house in the country? You got lost, didn't you? Congress is composed of five hundred and thirty-five individuals. Two hundred and eighty-eight are lawyers. And you wonder what's wrong in Congress. No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don't know the time of day.

Walker also advocated abolishing the electoral college, changing the national anthem, battling oil companies, and taxing churches. Sounds good to me. Jimmy Carter may not have shared those off-the-chart views, but his sudden dominance on the national scene that summer was a bit Hal Philip Walker-like in the way he captured the interest of a public desperate for change including many people who would have dismissed him as a country bumpkin a year earlier.

The shocking ending of the film (which I’m trying not to give away for those of you who are lucky enough to have a first viewing of the film in your future) is a perfect statement on where American was at in the mid-1970s following years of an unpopular war and an out-of-control government that was running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution (hey, that sounds familiar!).

Jesus, I’ve gone on for much too long about this film as I feared I might (thanks to the two of you who are still reading!) and I probably still haven’t conveyed why it is so meaningful to me. Do we love certain movies because of how we personally relate to the characters? Is “Nashville” my favorite film because I treat it like a dream with all the characters representing different aspects of myself? God knows I can relate to Henry Gibson’s blustery bravado, Geraldine Chaplin’s pretentious babbling, Gwen Welles’ desperate dreams, and Keith Carradine’s injured arrogance. But mostly I think I identify with Ronee Blakley’s sad ricochets between her purely innocent intentions and the tortured realities of her life that keep cutting her down.

I admit I became a little obsessed with Ronee Blakley after seeing “Nashville.” I listened to her two albums constantly (to this day I know every song by heart) and even went to New York that summer just to hear her sing at the Greenwich Village nightclub The Bitter End. At the age of 15 I couldn’t get in, but I stood in the doorway and listened. Yikes, I sound as  scary as the people who were stalking Barbara Jean in the film! Ronee Blakley was nothing like Barbara Jean back then but it almost seemed like she merged with her character over time. Though she was deservedly nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (along with Lily Tomlin), her film career never took off. Today she is best known, besides “Nashville,” for her role as the mother in the original “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Oh, Ronee. She toured with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez for a while and appeared as Dylan’s wife in the ill-fated “Renaldo and Clara” but her music career stalled and she never made another record. It was only this summer that her two albums were finally released on CD. She directed an autobiographical documentary in 1985 called “I Played it for You” about her stormy six-year marriage to German director Wim Wenders but I've never been able to locate a copy.

I finally had a personal encounter with Blakley when I went to the premiere of the Henry Jaglom film in which she made a brief appearance, “Someone to Love,” at the Los Feliz Theatre in 1987. I accosted her in front of the theatre and asked her about the rumor I’d heard that Altman was preparing a sequel to “Nashville.” It was true, she told me, she had seen an early version of the script and had agreed to be in the film but wasn’t sure how they’d use her. The story was to revolve around Lily Tomlin’s Linnea Reese running for governor of Tennessee and we’d see many of the old characters from the film. I salivated at the thought and was sick when I heard a few months later that the deal fell through and Altman had decided to abandon the project. I also heard that Altman had so much footage from the original shoot that he considered releasing a six hour TV version divided into two parts: “Nashville Blue” and “Nashville Red.” But this footage has never appeared on TV or on a DVD.

In the summer of 2000 I went to the 25th anniversary presentation of “Nashville” at the Motion Picture Academy with Altman and most of the cast members present including Ronee Blakley. Heaven. A few years ago singer Carolyn Mark and her friends including Neko Case, Dave Lang, and Kelly Hogan released a fantastic tribute CD to “Nashville” in which they recreated all of the songs and even a lot of the dialogue.

I think that Robert Altman’s body of work was extraordinary even though I didn’t care for all of his films. Apart from “Nashville” and “M*A*S*H,” my favorites included “A Wedding,” “Three Women,” “The Player,” “Short Cuts,” and “Gosford Park.” Less successful, I thought, were “Quintet,” “Health,” “Popeye,” and “Prêt-à-Porter.” But his is a voice that will be sorely missed in this age of unoriginal and regurgitated fare. Good-bye, Robert Altman, and wherever you are:

Keep a-goin’!

Thanksgiving Gratitude Revisited

I remember reading the inspiring, poignant posts on people’s blogs last year on Thanksgiving and feeling like I needed to follow suit. That led to a self-conscious post called “Is There a Holiday for Kvetching?” in which I ultimately rebelled from the self-imposed pressure to express my gratitude for all the amazing gifts in my life. Instead I mentioned the wild mood swings that I’d been having all that week and I ended up getting lost in a reverie about the Thanksgiving-themed episodes from the TV shows of my childhood such as “Bewitched,” “The Brady Bunch,” the Charlie Brown specials, and “The Waltons.” As I looked back at that post this Thanksgiving morning, I was stunned to read the following paragraph:

Oh God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Taking another sidetrip into the cathode ray tube that doubles as my brain to avoid looking at my own problems in the here and now. I guess I don’t feel like publicly kvetching on Thanksgiving after all. Let’s just say it’s been a challenging time for me lately as I come to terms with the fact that my fear-based way of looking at the world is no longer serving me very well, in fact it’s driving me batty—something’s gotta change. When I first started therapy I thought that awareness was 9/10 of the battle. As soon as I started realizing what I was doing to cause pain to myself and others, I’d be able to stop doing it and all would be resolved, right? Not hardly. Being aware of negative behavior patterns IS a necessary step towards growth, but when you achieve this awareness without yet having the ability to substitute those patterns with something healthier, it actually feels worse (at first) than being unaware of the behaviors to begin with. Does that make any sense or am I starting to spout New Age mumbo jumbo? I realize that it’s hard to talk about my “issues” without really getting into them which I can’t bear to do right now—I have too many vegetables to cut. Besides, all this negative talk so does not fit my Blog Character!

I guess I’m stunned because I could have written the same exact paragraph this morning (except the part about the vegetables, we’re going to friends for dinner this year). I have absolutely no idea what the content of last year’s anxiety was, but I can sure relate to the frustration of being unable to gain control over my fear-based patterns that wreak no end of havoc in my life. I’m sure there are plenty of ways that I’ve grown over the past year but based on how I’ve been feeling this week I sure as hell haven’t let go of the need to “go faster” and to become the perfectly evolved human being I think I should be who never makes mistakes.

I look back on some of my earliest posts in this blog and realize that I used to get into way more personal stuff. I’d talk about difficult periods I was going through and personal problems I was having without feeling the need to wrap it up nicely in a carefully composed piece. Not that I was an open book exposing my innermost secrets to the world but I definitely used the blog as a way to process some of my conflicted feelings. Sometimes it helped a lot to write about them even though I have a very hard time looking back at those early posts without wincing in discomfort. They are very deliberately omitted from my sidebar links.

I have some friends who recently started blogs and they are going through some of the same early stages of blogger self-consciousness that I went through. “Who the hell am I to publicly write about my own personal thoughts and tribulations? What kind of crazy narcissism makes me think anyone could possibly be interested in my ramblings?” I shared my veteran blogger’s view with them that this was a perfectly natural feeling to have at the beginning but that it would pass. But did mine pass, or did I just start using my blog in a different way? I first started becoming aware that I had created a “Blog Character” that bore only partial resemblance to myself a few weeks before Thanksgiving last year. It was quite helpful to write about it back then and I’ve been aware of that duality ever since—how certain aspects of my thoughts and feelings are tweaked to create what I believe is a more palatable version of myself that I think people will be able to understand more clearly (and like more?).

But mostly, I realize, I’ve come to avoid writing at all when I’m feeling sad or depressed or overwhelmed, thus the huge dropoff of posts in the past few weeks and months. My Blog Character would explain that away by detailing how busy I am with exciting projects, but that’s just not accurate. I’ve sat down several times in the past few days to write posts on two different topics and have been unable to get very far because I felt too raw and caught in my own self-judgment. So my posts are not only much less frequent, they’ve also become more like stand-alone essays on specific topics with less overt connections to what’s going on for me emotionally. I’m not even saying that there’s anything wrong with that. Part of my growth over the past year has been to develop more discernment about when my so-called disclosure of personal information is really just a spewing to try to “get rid of” uncomfortable feelings. I don’t want to do that anymore.

I really don’t want to use this blog as an online personal diary and yet I’m consciously pushing my envelope right now almost as an experiment. I am so fixated at times at how I am perceived by others, will my world really shatter if I write something that’s presented in a messier, less resolved way than my usual posts? Part of my problem when I’m having a challenging time in my life is that I develop tunnel vision about whatever issues I’m dealing with and I have a tendency to catastrophize everything into a painful and terrifying belief that I am defined by my inadequacies and that “nothing will ever be the same again” because I fucked up in one way or another. And then, minutes, hours, or days later, when I realize that the planet is going to keep spinning and that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem when I’m in my darkest places, I can quickly revert back to “what crazy shit was I thinking?” mode and sweep everything under the rug until the next incident. This cycle (which I was apparently smack dab in the middle of a year ago today) goes on and on. That’s why I know that while there are actual content issues I need to address (but not here in this post), it’s actually this PROCESS I’m grappling with that is the true killer.

I’m uncomfortable treating this blog as a therapeutic tool although I know to some extent it always will be. It’s funny to write something that I know part of me will regret later. I so fear that label of “obsessive self-indulgent navel gazer” and yet I also know how much I admire when some of the bloggers I read do delve into personal matters and self-analysis. I’m especially impressed when they have the courage to expose some of their ugly warts. So maybe this is my Thanksgiving tradition, daring to take a look at where I’m at emotionally despite my fears of self-exposure and judgment. Still, I better post this rumination within the next few minutes before I chalk the whole thing up to appalling self-indulgence and press DELETE.

One thing that often comes up for me is my tendency to live in the polarity of extremes: something is either Good or Bad, Real or Fake, Right or Wrong. I have a hard time accepting that we all have conflicting feelings a lot of the time. My worried Blog Character says that anything I express on today of all days should be focused on the gratitude for all that I have in my life, all the loving relationships as well as the emotional, spiritual, and material abundance that I am blessed with. I DO feel gratitude for those things today. And at the same time I feel overwhelmed by the challenges of rising to my highest self and the need to get in touch with the real sadness and pain that lives side-by-side with my joy.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

In with the Old

Living in an historic home in an inner city neighborhood can be a daunting challenge. We’ve been in our 1909 house near downtown L.A. for over three years now and while we’ve loved every minute of it, we realize that it is a lifetime project that causes some of our friends who live in lovely modern homes to question our sanity. When people ask me if we’re “done” with our renovations I just laugh. Bringing back the faded glory of these magnificent but neglected homes is more of an ongoing lifestyle choice than a project with an end date. But despite the overwhelming nature of restoring an old house, it is a richly rewarding pursuit that puts you in touch with an amazing array of artisans, craftspeople, historians, experts, and like-minded homeowners whose favorite past-time is sifting through hundred-year-old archives looking for clues to help unlock the mysteries embedded in their homes.

I wrote the cover piece in today’s Los Angeles Times real estate section. It’s just a brief intro to the topic of historic home preservation but if it helps to prevent just one person from switching out their wood-frame windows, removing a 1905 light fixture, or trashing their original pedestal sink or clawfoot tub, it will be time and energy well spent. It’s a running joke for me that I keep writing these cover stories for the Times since I know next to nothing about real estate and for that matter am no journalist, but I am quite passionate about the need to protect L.A.’s rapidly disappearing history. Sometimes when I walk around my neighborhood I am gripped with acid-churning anger at the wanton destruction of so much of the historic fabric of the city thanks to the short-sighted greed of shady developers and decades of urban decay. But other days I am filled with joy and hope at the work that is being done by so many people who care just as deeply about preserving our historic community.

I interviewed several of our neighborhood heroes for this article, preservation contractors who are as visionary as Nostradamus in the way they can see through the modern-day ruins of historic homes and carefully bring them back to their original splendor.

One of the first big projects we took on when we moved in was restoring our hundred-year-old floors. They had been terribly damaged over the years including some bad sanding jobs that were done without removing the large area rugs. A few vendors turned us down flat, saying that the floors were too far gone and we’d be better off replacing them. Finally, one company agreed to give them a final sanding (we were down to the nail heads) without making any guarantees. We were thrilled with the results. Our house is very modest compared to the few grand mansions that remain on nearby West Adams Boulevard, but I’ve yet to see inlaid floors that come close to ours in terms of craftsmanship or materials. Every piece of the three different types of wood used in the floors was hand-cut and inserted. If you want to see me babbling about the floors and other elements of our house, you can check out the rebroadcast of our “If Walls Could Talk” segment a week from tomorrow on HGTV. Kendall will kill me for mentioning it since I dragged her onto that TV show kicking and screaming but she comes off great while I sound like a Warner Brothers cartoon character and look like Jabba the Hutt next to the male model host.

One of the people I interviewed for the L.A. Times article was Adam Janeiro, a local realtor who has a great blog called Recentering El Pueblo. Adam rails on about preservation issues and highlights inspiring success stories as well as egregious examples of urban planning gone bad. Another local blog that I like is called 1912 Bungalow which gives readers a front-row seat for the many projects a couple is doing to restore a beautiful home in our neighborhood. Check out the before-and-after photos, they are stunning. I wish Kendall and I were that ambitious but we’re moving along in our own sweet time. Our current project is gutting a hideous 1970s bathroom and bringing back original fixtures that belong in the house. We found an amazing sink, bathtub, and even a hundred-year-old toilet with a round tank that mounts on the wall. Our bathtub was rescued from the torn-down mansion of the guy who owned the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. This is where “Some Like It Hot” was filmed in the 1950s and I like to imagine that Marilyn Monroe visited the owners during the shoot and took a bath in this very tub. Hey, it could’ve happened.

I better stop since I’m not sure this historic home stuff is of interest to anyone outside of our specialized cult. But remind me to tell you the story of the ghost sighting we had a while back. Well, it was more than a sighting, it was a three-dimensional entity who actually climbed into bed between me and Kendall before vanishing. Swear to God. It wasn’t scary, though. My hunch is that it was the spirit of Emma Jensen, the wife of the original owner, who wanted to thank us for all the work we're doing on her house. Do you think I’m losing it? Maybe I should start selling a package deal to visitors: Take a bath with Marilyn Monroe and then hold tight for a ghostly ménage-à-trois. Ah, history!

The Sun’ll Come Out…

I’m ecstatic about this week’s election results. In a million years I never expected the Democrats to regain control of the House and  the Senate. Now I just pray that they don’t get too full of themselves and screw things up too badly over the next few years. As always in the days after an election, especially one in which the dominant party was routed, we are hearing a ton of rhetoric about bipartisanship. After years of ever-increasing enmity, suddenly everyone wants to be best friends. Bush has a coffee klatch with Nancy Pelosi and makes a bad joke about Republican interior decorators. Is that what bipartisanship means these days—that Democrats as well as Republicans now have to smile wanly through Bush’s inane and vaguely inappropriate good ol’ boy humor? I wish I could believe that this handshaking across the aisle was going to last beyond Thanksgiving but I’m not very optimistic, we’ve seen this short-lived dance too many times. I know that Republicans are lying in wait eager to pounce on the first misstep just as much as the Democrats have delighted in condemning the actions of the Republican-controlled Congress all these years. Sigh.

Is true bipartisanship possible anymore? Can you cite an example in which Democrats and Republicans worked together effectively? I can think of one but I have to go back 75 years and move from the front page to the funny pages. (Is there a difference?)

Do you remember when Republican billionaire Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks worked closely with New Deal President Franklin D. Roosevelt to find the birth parents of his ward, Little Orphan Annie? In the musical version of this story, plenty of jokes are made about industrialist Warbucks’ close friendship with liberal FDR. In truth, Annie’s creator Harold Gray was an ultra-conservative who despised Roosevelt. If you look at the original comic strips from the 1930s you will find many veiled and not-so-veiled swipes at Roosevelt and his policies. Gray got a lot of criticism for it at the time but his political beliefs were never under wraps in his comics. At one point he even killed off Daddy Warbucks as a protest to what he considered the outrages of the New Deal and only brought him back to life following Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

I’m contemplating the Warbucks-Roosevelt partnership with the same immediacy as Bush-Pelosi because our house these days has become All-Annie, All-The-Time. Leah is deep in rehearsals to play the lead role in the musical “Annie” this December. She’s been in a bunch of shows with this theatre company over the years but most of the parts she’s had up until now have been men. There’s never an abundance of boys in children’s theatre and Leah frankly has more masculine energy than most of the actual boys in the company. She started her musical theatre career as Officer Krupke in “West Side Story” and then played the King in “Cinderella.” She was a tough Danny Zuko in “Grease,” a hip-swiveling Conrad in “Bye, Bye Birdie,” and a terrifying Bill Sykes in “Oliver.” 

But Annie was always the dream part. From the moment she was born with a head full of curly bright red hair, my daughter has been compared to Little Orphan Annie. I remember once when she was 4 we were walking by a group of tourists sitting at a table in Farmers Market who called out, “Hey, Annie!” at which point Leah reeled around, put her hands on her hips, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “I’M NOT ANNIE!” But she wanted to be. By six she knew the entire score to the musical and could belt out “Tomorrow” like there’s no tomorrow. I know that little girls warbling that particular song has become a shorthand cliché for the horrors of child performers but I never cringe when I hear that familiar opening—I love it!

I saw the original “Annie” at the Alvin Theatre in New York (now the Neil Simon) in early 1978. It was still one of the toughest tickets on Broadway but back then you could get Standing Room Only seats for an unbelievable five bucks a pop and you got to lean on comfortable padded cushions right behind the last row. It wasn’t bad at all and I was transfixed by the production which still included the late Dorothy Loudon as the deliciously evil little girl-hating Miss Hannigan. Andrea McArdle had just left the cast to open the show on London’s West End so the Annie I saw was ten-year-old Shelley Bruce who was one of the original orphans. Bruce was quite good although she never became as famous as the next Annie replacement, Sarah Jessica Parker. I heard that Shelley Bruce survived a bout with cancer recently and now has two kids in New Jersey.

Leah loved the movie versions of the musical including the ill-fated John Huston film that came out in 1982. This movie should have been a hell of lot better with people like Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan, Albert Finney as Oliver Warbucks, and Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters as Rooster and Lily. So what went wrong? Is it terribly unfair to blame a bad movie on a defenseless little girl? Aileen Quinn as Annie was so sugary sweet that you needed a blood transfusion after watching each number. This was Huston’s only musical and he clearly did not have a feel for it. Back to the African Queen for you, Maestro.

But Leah and I both loved the 1999 TV version directed by Rob Marshall and starring Kathy Bates as Miss Hannigan and Broadway stars Victor Garber, Alan Cumming, Audra McDonald, and Kristen Chenoweth. Alicia Morton played Annie with exactly the right amount of spunk, sarcasm, and sincerity. Even the grown-up Andrea McArdle got to exercise her still amazing pipes in a cameo role.

When Leah auditioned for the musical I tried my hardest not to become Mama Rose. “Any part you get will be great, Leah,” I assured her, secretly sending stage parent vibes to the director of the show that she’d have to be out of her freaking mind not to cast Leah as Annie. Come on, think of the money they’d save on that damn wig! When Leah called me from the theatre the following week to tell me she got the part, I burst into tears. What is wrong with me? Since then we’ve been mastering our duet of Daddy Warbucks and Annie’s big song, "I Don't Need Anything But You." Hey, I have to be ready in case the 8th grade girl playing Warbucks mysteriously falls ill on opening night, don’t I?

I’m poor as a mouse
I’m richer than Midas
But nothing on earth
Could ever divide us
And if tomorrow I’m an apple seller, too
I don’t need anything but you!

Should that be the new theme song in Congress? Democrats and Republicans can sing it to each other on the Capitol Steps. It sure beats that “hard-knock life” song we've been singing for the past six years.

Leah’s show opens on December 14th and I’m probably a little too excited about it. I’ve now heard her belt “Tomorrow” a thousand times and it gets me every time. Talk about a good political theme for this year:

When I’m stuck with a day
That’s gray and lonely
I just stick out my chin
And grin and say, oh!
The sun’ll come out tomorrow
So you gotta hang on til tomorrow
Come what may!

To be honest I think the bipartisanship in “Annie” is just as forced as it is in Washington. Harold Gray would be catapulting in his grave if he could hear the lyrics to the closing song in “Annie” in which Oliver Warbucks, Gray’s personification of the conservative Republican values he held near and dear, undergoes a total political transformation and joins FDR’s New Deal with all the gusto necessary for a show-stopping finale:

WARBUCKS:
I know the Depression’s depressing

GRACE:
The carols are stilled
The stored aren’t filled

WARBUCKS:
And the windows are minus the dressing

GRACE:
The children don’t grin
The Santas are thin

GRACE AND WARBUCKS:
And I've heard a terrible rumor
No goodwill, no cheer

WARBUCKS:
But we'll get a New Deal for Christmas
This year!

ANNIE AND ORPHANS:
The snowflakes are frighting of falling
And oh, what a fix
No peppermint sticks!

WARBUCKS:
And all through the land folks are bawling

GRACE:
And filled with despair
'Cause cupboards are bare

WARBUCKS:
But Santa’s got brand new assistants
There's nothing to fear
They're bringing a New Deal for Christmas
This year.

Those happy days that we were promised

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT:
Are finally here!

ALL:
We’re getting a New Deal for Christmas
This year!

Oy. Even I’m not that optimistic about the Democrats!

Reunion

When I mentioned my 30th high school reunion in my previous post I was surprised to read the following comment from Pearl:

“So nice that you have felt that bond with your school all these years, enough to go back, again and again.”

Bond with my school? But I hated high school! I’ve practically made a career out of dissing the Chicago Public School system and my four years at Von Steuben Senior High on the north side of Chicago. And yet Pearl was right, I keep returning to these reunions. What am I looking for? I know that it was my dissatisfaction with our 20th reunion that made me actively participate in the planning for the 30th. Working with three former classmates, we agreed that it needed to be a casual event inside our urban high school rather than a formal affair at some hotel in suburban Chicago that had absolutely nothing to do with our class.

When we were trying to locate people during the planning of the reunion some of our old classmates were adamant. “PLEASE take me off the reunion list, I am not interested and do not want to be contacted by anyone.” Others agreed to come but it was with the reluctance and trepidation of someone invited to an execution. Still others could hardly contain their excitement and said how much they looked forward to the event.

The reunion took place last weekend in our old cafeteria and it was, as far as I’m concerned, a resounding success. Writing about the planning of the reunion last August, I began to figure out why my mostly negative memories of high school didn’t turn me into one of those people demanding to be taken off the mailing list. I now believe that my cynicism was a protective device that helped me maneuver through the social minefield of adolescence as well as the acute numbing that I adopted following my parents’ painful divorce in the early 1970s. It was too risky for me to feel anything back then so I retreated into a cocoon of contempt and indifference where my only victory was the extent to which I could extricate myself from the realities of daily life and float above it all with an air of superiority and carefully studied insouciance.

I was hardly the rebel I pretended to be. I never got into any serious trouble and I maintained my straight-A average throughout four years of high school. It’s only now, with my own child on the precipice of her teenage years, that I can look back at my attitude during high school with compassion and sadness rather than as some kind of act of defiance I should be proud of. I deeply regret many of the experiences I missed by building such an impenetrable wall around myself. Planning and attending my 30th reunion was something of a healing process for me, one that wouldn’t have been possible 10 or 20 years ago. But thanks to age and therapy I can now look back at that scared kid with empathy and understanding and see my old classmates with eyes that do not dart away the second any contact is made.

I was surprised to discover at the reunion that several people I had rarely, if ever, spoken to in high school had seen my blog posts about my high school years. The Anderson twins confronted me about my charge in one post that the award for “Friendliest” student that Carol won senior year was undeserved. Gulp. It’s clear that it was my own attitude back then that prevented me from experiencing that friendliness since I was convinced that Carol and her sister Cathy were too popular to give me the time of day. At the reunion I was struck by how sincere and friendly both of them seemed. Is it too late to change my vote?

Alan Spector (voted Best Personality) told me that he was surprised to learn how miserable I was during high school because I didn’t seem that way to him. That’s probably because he really did have a great personality and I was always more at ease in his presence. Isn’t it funny how much our own attitudes color our experience of other people, and their experience of us?

I remember that line in “The Breakfast Club” when geeky outcast Ally Sheedy asks perfect popular girl Molly Ringwald why she’s being so nice to her. Molly looks at her for a moment and then replies, “Because you’re letting me.” It’s easy to play the victim in high school but if I’m really honest I’d have to admit that the people I most accused of dismissing me were the very ones I had already dismissed out of my own insecurities.

It was fun catching up with all sorts of people at the reunion, old friends that I haven’t seen in ages and people I never would have dared speak to when we were young. It took me 30 years to work up the courage to talk to Lajuan Amos, the classmate I always tried to stand next to in every class picture. She was amused to hear of my longlasting crush and I was thrilled that her fabulousness withstood the test of time. Lajuan was as glamorous as ever and still had the air of a superstar.

A few of our old teachers attended the reunion including Mr. Daniels whose filmmaking class so energized me that I was able to rise above my trademark apathy. That one class did more to change the course of my life than any other experience I had in high school. It was nice to be able to tell him what an impact he had on me all those years ago. Mr. Daniels didn’t stay very long but he was surrounded by hordes of former students. I was amazed that he remembered the exact content of everyone’s films even though he hadn’t seen most of us since Gerald Ford was President.

Of course we all played the favorite game at reunions the world over: “Who Got Fat?” Ah, finally a high school award that I could win! Truth be told, it was a shock to see how certain people had changed after so many years but in most cases the shock wore off after a few seconds. As a generalized comment I’d have to say that the women in our class weathered the years better than some of the guys but hey, we do the best we can. I was stunned to learn how many long-term marriages there were in our group including several high school couples who were still together three decades later. I guess my classmates never got the memo about our generation’s out-of-control divorce rates since more than half of them have been married for well over 20 years. We also had several grandparents in our ranks. Oy.

It was a largely professional group, lots of doctors, lawyers, nurses, and teachers and not so many people involved in the arts. Can I blame that on our old art teacher, Ms. Lignell, who used to grab my paintbrush and say, “no, this is how you’re supposed to do it” as she painted over my work? Several women listed their occupations as “stay-at-home moms” or “homemakers” without any of the self-consciousness that might have accompanied such a designation 10 or 20 years ago. Politically, we were all over the map, from the classmate who moved to another country after Bush was re-elected to the people who were thrilled that their sons were off “fighting for freedom” in Iraq.

Since I’m posting all these pictures of my former classmates without their permission I think it’s only fair to include one of my own aging process. Here’s me and my old crush Debbie Shub in a yearbook photo from algebra class and at the reunion last week. Debbie, now the mother of two grown daughters, looked great but I’ve obviously lost my luscious locks and replaced them with about 50 new pounds. Oh well, as one comedian put it, “Time marches on…and it’s marching over my face!”

I put together a souvenir booklet for the event in which I included the results to some offbeat questions we sent out to participants. In the category of “most memorable odor,” the winner by a landslide was the Von Steuben swimming pool which some said rivaled the contents of a toxic waste dump. In truth the pool was so loaded with chlorine that I’m sure no bacteria within a 12-mile radius could have survived. I’m surprised our skin didn’t look like Karen Silkwood’s following her scrubdowns for plutonium contamination at Kerr-McGee. Locker room odors came in second and consisted of, as one person put it, “a symphony of smells which were well orchestrated and played to a higher sensory level than I ever hope to experience again.” A bunch of people made reference to the aroma of marijuana wafting through the hallways and bathrooms at Von Steuben. Further discussion at the reunion revealed an inordinate amount of drug use at the school back then, even people snorting cocaine behind their books in the middle of math class! I was completely oblivious, of course.

In the category of clothes you wore in high school that make you cringe today, the winner was those insane elephant bellbottoms that often “dragged on the ground and became filthy, torn, and frozen.” Platform shoes were next (“I can still feel the pain I felt standing in them throughout a Marvin Gaye concert”) and several people mentioned our classmate Cleo’s famous pair of silver platform shoes and one pair that allegedly contained live goldfish in the soles. Only the black guys could get away with wearing platform shoes but us white boys committed our own fashion crimes with our plaid pants and hideous polyester Nik-Nik shirts that made us look like dancers in a Donna Summers’ disco extravaganza.

When we started planning this reunion I kept saying, “Let’s do this right because it’s obviously the last one we’re ever going to have.” Now I’m not so sure. I’m ready to start the planning for our 40th in 2016.