DALLAS ~ NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Photo:PBS.org

Fifty years ago, in the autumn of 1963, I was in ninth grade. I had Miss Mildred Brown again as homeroom teacher for the third year in a row. She was a rather plain looking geography instructor. But I guess she liked me. For citizenship she gave me an A double plus. That's really rather embarrassing.

My brother Sherry (Sheridan) was a senior at Princeton. For his junior year thesis, he had written a paper on Laos and Vietnam. Sometime when I was in elementary school, Sherry had suggested a future career for me. I should go to Princeton, of course, major in Arabic studies and become an expert in petroleum. This was 1960 or 1961. Today, Sherry doesn't recall suggesting that to me, but it was rather prescient for the time. Needless to say, I didn't do any of that. Although, for years I did have my heart set on going to Princeton for undergraduate studies.

Senior year, Sherry escorted Madame Nhu (the Dragon Lady) and her very attractive daughter (who later died in a Paris motorcycle accident) around the Princeton campus. This was just before the coup, which toppled the Diem regime in early November.

Friday November 22 started as an ordinary day. In second year Latin class with a severe Miss Halbert –while we were translating Julius Caesar's Gaul Commentaries— Miss Halbert started fiddling with the radio. As murmurs arose, she snapped at us: "For your disorderly information…... the President has just been shot!"

The class went into an uproar. Students screamed and sobbed. But we went on to the next class, typing, I believe. Finally, an announcement came from the Principal on the intercom that we were excused to go home early.

As I walked past Italian Lake, toward the Zembo Shrine Mosque, and the Scottish Rite Temple— just before the McFarland Rose gardens— my Dad came by in his Ford, looking for me and drove me home.

Remembering the events of that weekend, I regret I didn't insist on going to visit Aunt Marg and Uncle Elmer Staats in Washington. I should have liked to have gone to the viewing in the rotunda. Instead, like everyone else, I stayed transfixed to the television screen, and watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in real time.

RICH & FAMOUS ~ American Conservatory Theater

Image:act.org

Last night Russell H, a friend from work, and I went to ACT's current production Rich and Famous. Below is a blurb from their website.

Playwright Bing Ringling yearns to savor the sweet taste of celebrity, and he's hoping play number 844 will be his lucky break. But on opening night, Bing slips into a nightmarish phantasmagoria that shows him just how wrong things can go. From the ingenious mind of John Guare, who brought Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves to the American stage, Rich and Famous springs to life with twisted humor, rapid-fire dialogue, and outrageous songs scribed by Guare himself.

John Rando (A.C.T.'s Urinetown, The Musical and Broadway's The Wedding Singer ) directs this newly revised, delicious dark comedy in its first major revival since its 1976 New York debut. Brooks Ashmanskas, who was nominated for a 2007 Tony Award for Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me and has appeared in The Producers andGypsy, takes on the role of Bing, starring alongside Mary Birdsong (Reno 911! on Comedy Central, Hairspray on Broadway), Stephen DeRosa (Hairspray and Into the Woods on Broadway), and A.C.T. core acting company member Gregory Wallace ('Tis Pity She's a Whore  and The Government Inspector).

My friend Adam, who saw it a few weeks ago, had expressed mixed feelings about the play. I now understand why, and why he chose not to see it again. First I hadn't realized it was a musical-- if a low budget one, at that-- and not a particularly good one. Parts of the play are funny, but a lot is really strange, if not weird. The production was up to ACT standards. I just have some reservations about the play itself.

On the other hand, the four actors playing multiple roles did an outstanding job. And there were several elements to which I could relate: the frustrated playwright with an obscure subject (one of my heroines is the divorced wife of George I as Elector of Hanover) and then the entire issue of staged suicide. Oh well, I guess it gives me something to talk about to my new therapist.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET PROGRAM 1

Program 1

Prism

Composer:

Ludwig van Beethoven

Choreographer: 

Helgi Tomasson

Diving into the Lilacs —New!

Choreographer: Yuri Possokhov

The Four Temperaments

Composer: Paul Hindemith

Choreographer: George Balanchine

The season begins in full grandeur with Diving into the Lilacs, a world premiere by Yuri Possokhov, along with the return of Helgi Tomasson’s critically acclaimed work Prism and George Balanchine’s timeless neoclassical masterpiece The Four Temperaments.

Last night my friend Adam K and I went to San Francisco Ballet's Program 1. It was such a pleasure to attend! Artistic director and choreographer Helgi Tomasson has made San Francisco Ballet one of the preeminent dance companies in the world.

I have conflicts with ACT for two ballet programs. I'll have my friend Craig at work exhange the ACT tickets for Wednesday, my old subscription night. It's actually his subscription. But he bought a condo and has me keep his seats warm to retain his priority until he can afford them again. Craig was also responsible for getting me my ballet subscription. He knows the ins and outs of ticketing. The seats just to the left of mine are double the price. But the view from mine is just fine, particularly with binoculors. I like to see the dancers' faces.

Photos:sfballet.org

THREE EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMANCES

As I fully expected, Dave Jones' 50th Birthday Celebration was a brilliant affair. The event was held in the main dining room on the second floor at the Bohemian Club. The place looked festive with balloons and streamers. There were at least six food stations with sushi, fresh pasta made to order, shell fish, various vegetables, Caesar salad, carved roast beef, plenty of hot hors d'oeuvres and a dessert table including five or six birthday cakes with some for other guests who had recently had birthdays, including Herb Goodrich. 

 

The live band played fine renditions of rock and soul standards from the 60's, 70' and 80's. I danced a couple times with Lissa, our hostess, and joined in the conga line. Adam and I had a terrific time. His headache from the day before was gone...but I'm not so sure about tomorrow.

 

Before the birthday event, I went to the Sunday matinee of San Francisco Opera's production of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt. My Bohemian friend Richard Evans had invited me the night before, when his wife decided she couldn't make it. Richard is one of the best musicians I know. He's a wonderful composer, who has written a number of shows for Bohemia, and I've had the privilege of singing principal roles in two of his Grove Plays. And Richard is probably the best accompanist I know. On a first run through he can play a sensitively accurate written-accompaniment or produce a creative one following every nuance of the singer’s performance for a piece he may never have heard before!

 

Die Tote Stadt is a marvelous opera.  I was familiar with Erich Wolfgang Korngold from his film scores in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He wrote the music for Robin Hood and a number of Bette Davis movies. I had heard he had been a child prodigy (so I guess it’s appropriate his middle name was Wolfgang). He wrote this opera—not his first— when he was in his early twenty’s. The orchestration is extraordinarily rich – reminiscent of Richard Strauss, Mahler, some Wagner and early Schoenberg. The size of the orchestra is about the same as Der Rosenkavalier, one of my favorite operas.

 

The dead city in this case is Bruges in Belgium. I spent ten days there with Chanticleer in 1981 for a music festival. I guess you might consider it dead from the standpoint it didn’t expand and develop in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. But that was to our great fortune, since the medieval and Renaissance city then survived intact. It’s a brick city with canals—and along with Amsterdam and St. Petersburg— is a smaller Venice of the north. (There’s a terrific recent film noir In Bruges I highly recommend.)

 

Without getting into the plot, the sophisticated story moved me with its depiction of obsession and loss. I had learned after my return from Bruges that my dear friend Gary Murakami had committed suicide while I was gone. So I could relate to the psychological elements.  San Francisco’s production and staging was absolutely first- rate…and the singing was superb.

Richard had been given excellent comp tickets: row K in the orchestra right on the center aisle. They were by far the best seats I have ever had at SF Opera.

 

Continuing backwards…on Friday night I saw ACT’s marvelous production of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. I took my friend Juling from Starbuck's. She's a wonderfully enthusiastic supporter! (At first I thought I couldn’t afford to continue my friend Craig’s subscription, so he changed the series from Wednesday to Friday nights. In doing so, he gave up what I thought were the best seats in the house… the exact two center seats seven row back.  He still has a great row in the center section, but the seats have moved a little to the right. He convinced me to buy his series… at least for another year. Craig bought a condo a few years ago, and I’m just keeping his seats warm until he can afford them again.)

 

Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights. I first saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Yale Dramat my sophomore year in college. (One of the leads was Philip Anglim, who later played The Elephant Man on Broadway, and was Richard Chamberlain’s lovechild in The Thornbirds. His mother Paule has an art gallery on Geary Street in San Francisco.)

 

Tom Stoppard is Czech and English was not his first language. It’s incredible to me how someone can be such a brilliant writer in a second language. (The same, for Joseph Conrad.)

 

Rock ‘n Roll is set in Cambridge England and Prague from 1967 through the fall of the Soviet block in the early 1990’s.  So I relived my teenage years and young adulthood. I clearly remember Prague Spring, and I think I was selling ice cream at a summer job in August 1968 when the Soviet tanks entered Prague. Last February I spent a few days in Bratislava, Alexander Dubcek’s home town, and Praha, while accompanying Chanticleer on a winter tour of Central Europe.

 

ACT’s production was superb in every way, including the sets. Manoel Feliciano (Jan) was brilliant, and the ubiquitous Rene Augesen performed one of her best double roles yet.

 

So already it’s been a full Columbus Day weekend. I’ll write more about the holiday itself tomorrow.