In May of 1959, a musical opened on Broadway that became an landmark show. With “Gypsy”, Styne, Sondheim and Laurents created a terrific play with songs that have become standards and a role actresses fight to play like actors fight to portray King Lear. The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee which were, according to her sister, pretty loose with the truth already. What people see on the stage is a compelling, entertaining, occasionally disturbing story of show business and family. Karen Abbott researched the lives of Miss Lee, her sister, June Havoc and their mother Rose Thompson Hovick for her book, American Rose and showed that the musical barely scratched the surface. If survivors are worthy subjects of study, then college courses should be dedicated to the Hovick sisters. Their very identities are a mystery. They were born in the northwest during the first years of the twentieth century’s second decade but their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick forged so many birth certificates with different birth dates and names that neither woman could be sure of those details later on in life. What their mother was sure of was her vision: both of her girls…
There’s a shiver I get when I first pick up certain books. Reading is almost an autonomic function for me and nothing is more inviting than the site of a new, fat book but every so often I will pick up a book, read a few pages and get the “Aha” kind of shiver. It’s a reflex of recognition, when my eyes fix on some indefinable thing that says this book is really something special. This is one of those books that seems to walk and talk under its own power and will become a beloved friend. This book will transcend its time and be loved by people for centuries. This one is a classic. Other people have already awarded that title to The Bridge to Terabithia but I didn’t know that until I picked up the book. The shiver told me everything. For one thing, it’s so universal. Every kid that ever went to school has lived in one of two camps. Either you have been the new kid in class, like Leslie Burke or you are Jess Aarons, who has never been the new kid. Either status has its own brand of hell. The new kid is supposed…
Ok it’s January, cold, bleak and raining. The decorations have been packed away, the weight from party nibbles has been packed on and I’m uncomfortably aware of the low balance in the checking account and the high one on the credit card. I don’t want to sound ungrateful after all of these winter festivities but I think I need a vacation. I want to go someplace warm where life’s pace moves with the seasons and nothing moves too fast. Someplace where living well is more than the best revenge. Oh heck, I want A Year in Provence. A Year in Provence is one of those miracles that hit the publishing business about twenty years ago. Picture this: British author and advertising executive, Peter Mayle, accumulates enough money to retire early and move into an old, stone, farm house in the South of France. Living there, he finds, is both less relaxing and more fun than he ever anticipated. He writes an account of the strange and wonderful things he finds there (under the heading of strange include a neighbor who expects him to cook a fox; the expert who teaches him how to handicap a goat race; the winter gales…
I’ve thought a lot about this entry because it falls on a calendar date of some significance. Of course, calendar holidays aren’t usually the ones that make big dents in our memories (unless we’re talking about bicycle gifts for holidays or a wedding celebrated on Valentines). The days you hold on to, good and bad, aren’t marked on someone else’s calendar. And of all of the marked days, New Year’s Eve isn’t anticipated by loads of people outside of the liquor business. Still, it has significance and so does the book, Just an Ordinary Day despite it’s title, because its author was no ordinary writer. Just an Ordinary Day is a selection of stories written by Shirley Jackson. Some of these are previously unpublished stories that seem to go back to her college years and the final one was published three years after she died. She created a lot of material between those two events that fall into several different genres. There are the psychologically disturbing stories that made her famous, the domestic ones that made her loved and several tales that resist categorization of any type. As a guess, I suspect Ms. Jackson would like that. Her stories tended…
Birmingham, Alabama has a favorite son and I’ll bet they’ve forgotten his name. He was an editor and minister’s son, a foreign correspondence that parachuted into Normandy during World War II and a novelist. Of all things, Joe David Brown was a very good novelist who invented a great loud-mouthed little girl. Her name was Addie Pray. Does that child’s name ring a bell? Probably not if you’re less an 45 and that is your misfortune, Miss Addie Pray is a pragmatic girl with a will of her own. Book critics have called her a cross between Huck Finn and Scout Finch and they’re just scratching the surface. Add that she shares the indomitable will of True Grit’s Mattie Ross and the picture becomes clearer. Of course she can steal your heart but that’s to be expected. Addie Pray is a trickster, a confidence kid and the heroine of Paper Moon. Let me backtrack a minute. During the Depression (before he parachuted into Normandy and won a chestful of medals) Joe David Brown was a reporter for the Birmingham News. A police reporter, specifically. Part of his beat took him down among those guests of the county who were awaiting…