The mercury’s dropping tonight and most Southerners I know hate the cold. We’re starting school later, turning on space-heaters, taping shut doors and doing every last thing we can think of to avoid exposure to frost. Well, some Southerners can’t handle cold. We can tolerate endless heat, corrupt politicians and bad manners from visiting outsiders but our homes and our lives aren’t made for frigid temps and sub-zero windchills. So we check our weather apps and complain about the artic blasts because most Southerns prefer not to suffer in silence. For cold tolerance and stoic behavior you have to travel to the plains where I grew up. Kansans have made an art form out of endurance. Maybe that’s why William Inge’s prairie characters work so well in his plays, especially “Bus Stop”. These folk know how to deal with a cold, dark night. If you’ve seen the movie Bus Stop (and if you haven’t, don’t bother) you may think this is another Marilyn Monroe vehicle but the play is not. Bus Stop is really about feeling cold and lonely and there are few places as cold and lonely at a diner in the middle of Kansas. Some of the characters…
I’m usually a lukewarm John Grisham fan. I was a youngish paralegal when he hit it big with The Firm, but I found too many holes in the next few legal thrillers to enjoy them much. I’m too much of a southern girl not to love A Time to Kill and I like some of his non-legal stories. I love what he did for the Oxford American. All in all, you could say there are writers I usually like more but that’s not true today. Today, I found out about Gray Mountain and this evening, I read the book. I had to because this Grisham thriller touches a field close to home. This is his book about coal. For those who don’t know, coal generates a lot of the USA’s electricity. Right now, it supplies about thirty-nine percent, more than any other single source, and that’s way down from what it used to be. Coal mining is a big, tough industry and it has a huge impact where I live. People have jobs and incomes here that they probably wouldn’t have except for coal. On the other hand, the toll mining takes on a human body is scary. Even with…
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” So begins seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of Dodie Smith‘s I Capture the Castle. You’ve got to admit that’s an interesting opening line. Only eight words and you know something unusual must be going on because who sits in a sink to write? Well, Cassandra does and she has a good reason to since that position catches the last of the daylight. The Mortmain family doesn’t have electricity. They’re a 1930’s family living in a medieval castle and they use lamps and candles after sunset. If they sound romantic and eccentric, I Capture the Castle suggests that normalcy may be something only people with an income can afford. The Mortmains might still be eccentric under regular circumstances but right now they’re too poor to be normal. Once Mr. Mortmain wrote a successful book and their income was such that eccentricity was more acceptable but that was before his leviathan-sized writer’s block moved in. Since then the family has been making do on his ever-decreasing royalties, the money his second wife brings in from artist modeling jobs and what the family gets from selling the castle’s furnishings. (Not really their property). It is obvious…
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…