"Years from now, when you talk of this -- and you will -- be kind." - Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson.
Robert Anderson, a playwright whose intimate emotional dramas like “Tea and Sympathy” and “I Never Sang for My Father” attracted big names to the Broadway stage if not always substantial audiences to Broadway theaters, died Monday at home in Manhattan. He was 91.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Nevin Terence Busch, Mr. Anderson’s stepson.
Mr. Anderson was a contemporary of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and though his reputation never ascended to the artistic heights that theirs did — his plays often walked a tightrope between realism and sentimentality — he was among the theater’s most visible, serious playwrights of the 1950s and ’60s.
Mr. Anderson also wrote screenplays, including those for “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), with Steve McQueen, and “The Nun’s Story” (1959), with Audrey Hepburn. But he thought of himself as a playwright who wrote movies for money.
I was standing on the terrace of a house called Glencliff in Independence, Kansas. It was the first evening of my first William Inge Theatre Festival in April 1991. I was at a dinner for invited guests, and I was there because I was friends of the Inge family. I walked up to the little bar set up on the patio and asked the bartender, a dapper man in a blue blazer and tie, for a drink. He promptly poured it out for me, smiled, and handed it over. A moment later, the real bartender, a college kid in the appropriate white coat, came back carrying a bag of ice, and thanked the other man, who turned to me and said, "Hi, I'm Bob." It was Robert Anderson, and as it slowly dawned on me that I had been served my first drink at the Inge Festival by one of its first honorees, I stammered my apology for assuming that he was the bartender. He laughed, patted me on the shoulder, and said, "I'd probably make a better living doing that."
I had read all of his plays -- Tea and Sympathy; I Never Sang for My Father; You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running; Silent Night, Lonely Night -- and as we chatted I felt like I was talking to kindred spirit. I knew exactly how Tom Lee felt in Tea and Sympathy, being an "off horse" at a boarding school (although I didn't have the outcome he did during my miserable year), and as I spoke to him about his occasionally tempestuous relationship with his father, I saw how he turned that into a story -- I Never Sang for My Father-- that anyone, even someone who is very close to his father, could understand in the most intimate way.
Bob and I became friends at that first Inge Festival, and we kept in touch by mail during the months between each festival. He came back every year -- something very few of the honorees do after their time in the spotlight -- and he participated in all the panel discussions. He took an active interest in my work as well, and when he asked for a copy of one of my plays, I was beyond flattered. A month later I received a five-page letter telling me how much he enjoyed the play, complimented my characters, my dialogue, my use of space, the depth of the relationships between the characters, and then with gentle guidance he told me what he thought didn't work. He urged me to explore the characters with even more depth -- "I know you can" -- and asked me to keep working on it and let him see what developed. I had never had such a detailed critique of my work, not even in grad school, and he inspired me to keep writing.
Bob became a devoted friend. His letters, always either typed on his old manual typewriter or written in his nearly indecipherable handwriting, were full of stories about his life in Connecticut and his tennis games at the court he shared with his neighbor, Arthur Miller. And when he said, "If you're ever in New York, let me know," he meant it. In February 1993 I went to New York for a teacher's conference, and when I wrote him and suggested we meet up for lunch, he called me immediately and set the date. True to form, at the appointed hour, he was waiting for me in the lobby of the New York Hilton, nattily dressed in a suit and tie. He had walked from his apartment up on Sutton Place. After lunch I offered to get him a cab for the trip back, but he smiled and said, "No, I love to walk." And so we did, up to Central Park, talking about all sorts of things.
Bob never won the Pulitzer Prize or a Tony for his work, and in some ways I think it rankled him that other playwrights that he knew -- and sometimes competed with for production space -- did. But his attitude about it seemed to be philosophical, and his quip, "You can't make a living in theatre, but you can make a killing," pretty much summarized his feeling about those who became famous beyond their worth. Above all, he was always a gentleman and a gentle man.
The last time I saw him was at the Inge Festival in 2001. It was apparent that he was beginning to fade into the long night of Alzheimer's; he remembered me, but did not remember reading a book I'd written and that he had written detailed notes on several years before. I said goodbye to him in the lobby of the hotel that Sunday morning in April 2001 with the sense that we were parting for good. I heard from friends who saw him over the years that he was slipping away, and I was sorry that I would not be able to sit with him in the shade of the trees at the 4-H picnic grounds in Independence and just talk one more time.
I'll keep a place for you at the table in April, Bob.
I've been following with interest the coverage of the domestic violence case in which singer Chris Brown has been charged after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, singer Rihanna. Editor & Publisher has an update on the LA Times' decision to release Rihanna's name, which they say they would not have done if she had been raped, but, per reporter Andrew Blankstein:
There isn't a set policy when it comes to physical assault or a criminal threat. In that case, there's a decision internally and on a case-by-case basis of whether to name somebody. In this case, obviously there was a discussion among the editors about this. The nature of this case—against the backdrop of the Grammys, the delay in changing things, the explanations put out by both camps—the decision was made that this was fair game.
Well, it's nice to know that as long as a woman is merely beaten, but not sexually assaulted, she's "fair game" for reporters.
Take note, ladies: You've got to be really victimized before the media is unwilling to victimize you again by turning your assault into an item for public consumption.
The thing is, there is a legitimate argument that can be made for making Rihanna's name public. (And if it were an honest argument, it would include: "She's famous, and it will help our bottom line!") Not everyone would agree with that argument, but it is legitimate.
But it does not include the term "fair game," the etymology of which is, of course, animals that hunters are legally allowed to stalk, wound, kill. I almost can't imagine a more inappropriate way to describe the decision to publish a victim's name after an assault than calling her/her identity "fair game."
People who make their living with words should know to use them carefully.
Congrats to Kelis, who is pregnant; her husband, rapper Nas, is the father. [Mirror]
When a straight woman becomes pregnant (via traditional means), she is generally referred to as an "expectant mother," or a "mommy-to-be," or some other euphemism that indicates motherhood is in the future, contingent on the birth of a baby.
Her male partner, on the other hand, is generally referred to as "the father." Not the expectant father, or the daddy-to-be. He's "the father" as soon as his sperm hits that egg and the whole business "takes." If a woman is pregnant, and we don't know by whom, we don't say, "Who is the expectant father?" We say, "Who's the father?"
Interesting, that.
Motherhood begins at birth, but fatherhood begins at conception.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence how much that latter bit mirrors the anti-choice rhetoric about when life begins.
The abhorrent shitbag who killed two and injured six more people at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee last year, because he hates liberals and believes Democrats "were responsible for his woes," has pleaded guilty to murder (and other charges) and has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He smiled as he entered his plea, showed no remorse, and declined to make any statement to the court or to his living victims and dead victims' survivors.
"Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.
I said at the time: The conservative media has long been centered around violent, eliminationist rhetoric and "jokes." I would like to think this tragedy will make people reconsider the wisdom of "jokes" exhorting violence against other Americans (or anyone else), and fear that it won't.
It's all too easy to shirk responsibility for one's contributions to the culture in which this happened with pithy statements like, "Millions of people listen to that stuff and only one guy took it to heart." Thing is, all of us who put ideas "out there" into the public sphere know damn well that we influence people, which is why it's important not to be flippant and toss around dangerous ideas as "jokes." And somehow, "Hey, I was only kidding; it's not my problem if the guy couldn't understand a joke" doesn't strike me as being of particular comfort, to the people who lost someone in a real-world manifestation of such "hilarity."
As I've said before, and will no doubt say again, this shit doesn't happen in a void. But the conservative punditry doesn't give a shit. They are the polar opposite of All In.
They're out. Out to lunch. Out of ideas. Out of touch. Outside the bounds of common decency. Without conscience. Without empathy. Without responsibility. Out of their fucking minds.
I watched some Bravo teevee again yesterday and saw what I believe to be either an Electrolux commercial or the trailer for a horror movie—possibly entitled Children of the Backlash—starring Kelly Ripa:
A transcript is unnecessary; most of the voice-over is Ripa rhapsodizing about the virtues of her Electrolux steam washer and dryer. However, please note that the music is the theme song to the 1964 sitcom Bewitched. And at the end, when Ripa tosses her cookies (heh) to the kids, she praises them: "nice catch!" Then she exhorts us all to be "even more amazing!"
The sight of Ripa happily twirling around doing laundry at turbo-robot speeds while her kids are too glued to the teevee even to dress themselves might have beaded up and slid off my occipital lobe had it not been for a conversation I recently overheard on the bus. Two 20-year-old male Major Research University students sitting in front of me were talking about how they wanted to have a party. One of them lamented that he had to clean his place up first. He expressed great chagrin, saying that he and his buddy never imagined when they got two female housemates that there would be more mess, not less: “We thought they would, like, cook and clean for us! But they actually make mess!” This young man was genuinely baffled that his housemates hadn’t sprung fully formed from their fathers’ brows programmed to clean up the shit of the nearest random guy. Furthermore, the thought that women actually mess stuff up too was beyond him.
I have no idea if the women were actually just as messy as the men, or if the men just perceived them to be. Since these guys were expecting self-cleaning servant droids instead of real humans, I guess the bar was set pretty high. What is clear is that the young men (and possibly the women too) expected to be done for at home, and felt aggrieved that they had to clean up their own crap. I wonder if these students grew up with mothers who were so pressured to be "even more amazing" that they counted their ability to serve their children as a point of pride and a measure of worth.
It would be comforting to think that Ripa's Electrolux ad is sending up the old ‘50s- early ‘60s image of the happy housewife made ever more productive by the modern appliances her husband buys. But there’s no twist here, no subversion of the stereotype. Unless you count the fact that Ripa is a well-known full-time “career woman” (one of her other Electrolux ads shows her dashing from work to a home full of guests and glazed, passive children). The only new addition to the old 1960 model is that Ripa is both the happy housewife and the breadwinner.
This is some cultural Benjamin Buttons Shit. And it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, folks.
The scariest thing about Children of the Backlash? It's a documentary!
The Australian state of Victoria is currently being ravaged by severe bush fires—a natural disaster of epic proportions, in which entire communities have been lost to fire. Nearly 200 people have already been confirmed dead, and the total may be as many as 300. Native flora and animal populations have been decimated.
Shaker Eden emails: "Nearly 1000 homes have been lost. To put that in perspective, the second worst bushfire ever left 70 people dead." And Shaker Rachel emails from Victoria: "Over 180 people have died, whole towns have been obliterated, and the fires are still raging across the state. It's an awful tragedy." (Donate to the Australian Red Cross' Victorian Bushfire Appeal here.)
Enter Pentecostal Pastor Danny Nalliah of (the unfortunately-named) Catch the Fire Ministries to pour some salt in the (literal) wounds—y'know, just like Jesus would.
The Catch the Fire Ministries has tried to blame the bushfires disaster on laws decriminalising abortion in Victoria.
The Pentecostal church's leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with "a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb".
…Asked by the Herald if he did not believe most Australians would regard his remarks as being in appallingly bad taste, he said today: "I must tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear."
There are thousands of homeless people desperate to find shelter, hundreds of people injured, people grieving at the loss of family, friends, pets, property, people seriously at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, more suffering than it's really possible to comprehend in whole—and this despicable fuck looks across that charred and heartbroken landscape and sees an opportunity to exploit, just the perfect chance to shame pro-choice women (and their allies), to blame them, to admonish them that asserting their autonomy is to blame for a national tragedy.
I can't even begin to explain how sputtering mad this shit makes me. And when I get mad, I pick up my teaspoon.
Donate to Reproductive Choice Australiahere. Donate to Pro-Choice Victoria here.
Our thoughts, our hearts, and our teaspoons are with you, Shaker Sisters in Victoria.
Because masturbation is a gateway drug, leading to dirty, dirty sex, the same way smoking weed means you'll inevitably end up snorting pancreas through a silly straw and mainlining nuke. Don't believe me? Well, it's a fact. Just ask read this article written by a "doctor." Or don't. It's painfully stupid. (That too is a fact.) Whatever. Just stop jacking off. And buy a shirt.
"Vice, virtue—it's best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then you're bound to live life fully."
Perhaps the reason women are becoming "breadwinners" in record numbers isn't so much a "challenge to longstanding gender roles," as the New York Times would have it, as it is a confirmation of those roles: Women work more flexible hours, under worse conditions, for less money. Hence, when it's time to cut, the more highly valued male workers are the first to go. (Conversely: No paternity leave for you! See also: Wartime employment and subsequent postwar backlash.) And the trend of women-as-breadwinner, of course, doesn't imply gender parity; as the Times story itself acknowledges, women whose husbands are unemployed are still "likely to remain responsible for most domestic duties at home."
Related: The Wall Street Journal's work/life balance blog advises those readers whose spouse's career is on the rocks to stop criticizing, seek counseling, and be patient. However, it should've specified that those suggestions only apply to wives: Every single example in the post is of the emasculated-unemployed-male variety.
"God wants me to serve."—Senator(?) Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota), still deadlocked in a never-ending battle with comedian-cum-politician Al Franken for a US Senate Seat.
But I guess if God wants him to serve, then that settles it!
Check out the promotional poster for upcoming romantic comedy The Ugly Truth:
This film would have us believe "the ugly truth" is that women love with their crazy little emotional centers and men love with their rascally cocks. But the real ugly truth is that there are people who treat that shit as actual fact—and the even uglier truth is that there are people who will pay good money to see this film because they find it "so true!"
You know, even if the shameless fortification of utterly grim stereotypes wasn't making me positive I'd prefer to hit myself in the head with a tack hammer than see this film, the plot summary alone is prohibitively awful:
A romantically challenged morning show producer (Heigl) is reluctantly embroiled in a series of outrageous tests by her chauvinistic correspondent (Butler) to prove his theories on relationships and help her find love. His clever ploys, however, lead to an unexpected result.
Gag.
In the movies, men and women who find each other unbearably obnoxious always end up falling madly in love. You know what happens when I meet a guy I find unbearably obnoxious? I stay the fuck away from him—and, if, by some unfortunate circumstance, I am compelled to routinely share space with him, I may, after many long months spent unearthing his best qualities, find him merely tolerably aggravating in five minute intervals.
That's because I'm a human being with a functioning brain, not a poor approximation of a woman ubiquitously rewritten by Hollywoodized fucknecks to drop her knickers, against all common sense and logic, for a man who treats her with grinning contempt, but is so handsome that we're meant to regard him as charmingly challenging and not just another smug asshole who deserves to eat supper alone while watching King of Queens reruns.
Speaking of the Grammys, can anyone explain how this piece of tripe won Best Recording Package? (Did Ted Nugent not release an album this year?)
Of alltheothernominees, the one that looks like it was drawn on a Pee Chee folder by a 14 year old boy was worthy of the win? Jebus, the Ditty Bops's cover was actually interesting. And the cover of that Christian rock album was kind of fun. But the "coffin cooter" (as Liss called it)? LOL your sophomoric album art. I'm truly confounded as to how this got nominated, much less won.
You may have noticed my rather conspicuous absence from the blogosphere lately -- it's partially due to the fact that I've been wrestling with css, php, and other obnoxious forms of code as I attempt to integrate four sites that have evolved semi-independently into one site that makes sense.
Blossom Dearie, the first nightclub singer I ever saw in real nightclub, has died.
A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre unto herself. Rarely raising her sly, kittenish voice, Ms. Dearie confided song lyrics in a playful style below whose surface layers of insinuation lurked. Her cheery style influenced many younger jazz and cabaret singers, most notably Stacey Kent and the singer and pianist Daryl Sherman.
But just under her fey camouflage lay a needling wit. If you listened closely, you could hear the scathing contempt she brought to one of her signature songs, “I’m Hip,” the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough demolition of a namedropping bohemian poseur. Ms. Dearie was for years closely associated with Mr. Frishberg and Mr. Dorough. It was Mr. Frishberg who wrote another of her perennials, “Peel Me a Grape.”
It was Thanksgiving, 1967, and our family had all met up in New York, since the older kids were all at boarding schools on the East Coast. We stayed at the Plaza Hotel, and we saw Mame, Henry, Sweet Henry on Broadway, and Now Is the Time for All Good Men... at a little theatre in the Village. But one evening we went down to the nightclub -- I think it was the Plaza 9 -- and there in the spotlight was a little lady with a child-like voice who sang and played piano while the customers smoked and drank. It was like something out of a 1940's film noir, and I, who had just seen Casablanca for the first time the year before, thought it was the coolest thing to be there and hear a real nightclub singer, even if her name sounded made up (but it wasn't). I've been hooked on her music ever since.
We'll be talking about the book, the concept of enthusiastic consent, and other issues surrounding the rape culture, and we'd very much like your participation. Submit your questions and I'll moderate as quickly as I can!
When I read the news that Washington State Rep. Tami Green was sponsoring legislation to make it legal to breastfeed in "places of public accommodation," I have to admit that my first response was, "You mean it isn't already legal?" Forty states, including Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, allow mothers to breastfeed in public. But not Washington, my home state and one of the bluest states in the nation. Green's proposal would rectify that, by stipulating that any restriction on the right to breastfeed in public constitutes discrimination.
Why now? From the looks of it, breastfeeding mothers simply haven't been a priority for Washington legislators in the past. Looking back at previous years' legislation, the only proposal I come up with is a bill "encouraging employers to be infant-friendly," later amended to the somewhat voyeuristic title "studying breastfeeding women in the workplace." That bill, which had only a handful of sponsors, died in 2005.
Yes, it's hard to believe we're still talking about this. On the other hand, as long as social-networking sites classify breastfeeding photos as "obscene content"; as long as celebrities get called "udderly icky" and "addicts" and worse for "still" breastfeeding their year-old infants; and as long as the response to proposals like Green's range from "OMG! Boobies!" to "as long as they restrict it to HAWT chicks" (wade into the comments at the Seattle Times at your own peril), we're gonna keep talking about it.
Green and her cosponsors were in a meeting all morning, so I wasn't able to ask what inspired her to push this legislation now. UPDATE: One of the bill's cosponsors, state Rep. Zack Hudgins of Seattle, says he hasn't heard any opposition yet to the proposal, which will have its first committee hearing on February 12. However, he says, the Washington State Legislature "isn't the most family friendly place." Hudgins recalls that when he was first elected in 2002, the state Capitol lacked any diaper-changing facilities. Although that changed in 2003, the building still doesn't have any place for women to breastfeed or express milk. "Their response was that women should just use the restrooms, which is a bad answer," he says.
"We’ve got 10,000 years of evolution saying that breastfeeding works. Motherhood is as American as apple pie and Chevrolet, yet we still discriminate" against breastfeeding moms, Hudgins says.
In the Times story, state legislator Lynn Kessler's response to people who think breastfeeding is obscene was even more succinct:
I found this juxtaposition particularly interesting in light of my letter about "real" wo/men, Americans, etc., which underlined how asserting authenticity is frequently used to challenge or maintain privilege:
Jess explains that the poster was put up at a bus stop at the University of Western Ontario, later found partially destroyed in order to convey a very different idea indeed.
Not infrequently, we have gentlemen, ahem, visit our threads to question the existence of the rape culture. The truth is, if it didn't exist, people wouldn't mangle posters in a desperate bid to maintain the privilege of widely-condoned rape and reinforce its deep associations with traditionally-defined masculinity.
The two posters, and their disparate messages, also reinforce the point I was making with last week's post: There are men who stop rape. There are men who rape. They are all real men.
And their real victims can't tell the difference by looking at them.
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Robert Anderson, a playwright whose intimate emotional dramas like “Tea and Sympathy” and “I Never Sang for My Father” attracted big names to the Broadway stage if not always substantial audiences to Broadway theaters, died Monday at home in Manhattan. He was 91.
