A Voice, and Words, to Remember

My father, the actor Lionel Stander, would have been 109 years old yesterday. Though he died in 1994, his indelible presence and words live on.

In mid-October I was contacted by Scott Dawson, who was going to play my dad in a staged reading of the Eric Bentley play, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?" in Ithaca on November 6. Mr. Dawson wrote in an email, "The timing of the reading is especially important, given the political climate we find ourselves in. I am honored to have been cast to read Lionel’s testimony before HUAC, and as such have been trying to learn as much as I can about him."

Along with photos of Dad testifying at HUAC in 1953, I sent Scott these tips on how to play him: "Beyond the voice, there was my father’s larger-than-life presence. He never just walked into a room, he ENTERED it. Leading with his massive chest, he strode in and OWNED that room, and was the center of attention. Always. (Note his entrance in 'A Star Is Born.')" [Complete movie is here; Dad's first scene is at 44:43.]























I was disappointed that travel plans precluded my attending the reading; according to Mr. Dawson it went very well. Two days later (on my birthday...ugh), Donald Trump was elected president. Now some of my father's words ring out more loudly than ever.

 From his 1953 HUAC testimony:

"I know of a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving artists and others of life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness without due process of law ... I can tell names and cite instances and I am one of the first victims of it. And if you are interested in that and also a group of ex-fascists and America-Firsters and anti-Semites, people who hate everybody including Negroes, minority groups and most likely themselves ... and these people are engaged in a conspiracy outside all the legal processes to undermine the very fundamental American concepts upon which our entire system of democracy exists."

From a 1993 interview in the book TENDER COMRADES: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist by Patrick McGilligan & Paul Buhle:

"Right-wingers, unfortunately, are never in the closet. They're all out night and day campaigning, making noise, joining moral majorities and moral rearmaments. They're actually an immoral minority, but they're always out there. The left should only be so active."

Mike Kellin, who played my father in a 1979 production of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? (with Liza Minnelli in a cameo as Lillian Hellman), nailed his voice and mannerisms. However, the costume, coif and beard (!) were all wrong. I went to a performance; Dad was horrified when I told him his character wore a garish plaid sports jacket. The lengthy scene, which starts at 1:12:19, is electric, funny and ominous.

What to Do on a Rainy July 4th: Watch a Hummingbird!

This juvenile (I think) ruby-throated hummingbird has been perched on the feeder outside my window for some two hours. Unlike adult hummers and larger birds, such as finches, it doesn't care how close I get to the window in my bright red shirt, and is unfazed when I move the camera. Every few minutes it takes a drink or two from the feeder. I even saw its tongue!

Update: After some five (!) hours an adult male attacked, jabbing ferociously until feeding from the opposite port. (Hummingbirds don't share and are examplars of Kissinger's saying about academia: The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.) The youngster hung upside down for a few minutes, motionless.

I thought he was injured or dead, but when I went outside to take a closer look he'd righted himself. Now he's just sitting there again, taking the occasional sip. Maybe he'll spend the night...

Further update, 6:40pm: S/he's gone--hopefully someplace safe for the night.

What NOT to do at a Book Festival or Writers Conference

The spring book festival season is underway. As a public service, here is a list of bad behavior I've observed and/or had to contend with.

Panel Moderator: 

1. Wait to contact panelists till two days before the event—or not at all. 
2. Be unfamiliar with panelists’ work: Not read author’s book (at least the first few chapters and website); not know who the literary agent represents; not know titles the editor has worked on. 
3. Have no agenda for the panel, or a vague one, e.g., “I will read brief introductions, and each of you should speak for 12-15 minutes. Then we will take a few questions.” 
4. Let panelists talk for so long that there’s no time for audience Q&A. (This happened with the panel in #3.) 
5. Talk a lot about yourself or read from your own book. Your job is to help the panelists shine. If they look brilliant, so will you. 

Panelist: 

1. Cancel at the last minute because you just realized that the finances won’t work for you. Or cancel due to “family reasons”—but keep the plane ticket the organizers paid for. 
2. Author: Leave book at home, or not have a reading figured out—and practiced!—beforehand. Agent/editor: Leave business cards at home. 
3. Read for 15 minutes when you’re asked to read for five. 
4. Monopolize the conversation and/or interrupt other panelists. 
5. Belittle the moderator (“If you’d read my book…"), other panelists (“I can’t believe you’d say such a stupid thing!”) or audience members (“If you’d been listening, you wouldn’t need to ask that question.”) 

Audience:

1. Leave your cellphone ringer on. 
2. Give copies of your manuscript or self-published book to panelists. 
3. Pitch your book during Q&A session. 
4. Ask self-serving questions instead of general ones. (“Why didn’t you answer the query I sent you six months ago?” vs. “What should a writer do if an agent hasn’t responded to their query after six months?”) 
5. Engage a panelist in lengthy conversation afterwards, when there’s a line of people waiting behind you. 

  I'll be at VaBook Festival next week. Now go forth and be good!

Who's the Goat?

After more than a year of silence, I thought my father's 106th birthday would be a good day to start posting to this blog again. Especially since I acquired this photo yesterday. 

One would think that the headline for the caption that ran with the above photo would be something like "Oh, You Kids!" But one would be very wrong. Here's what's on the other side, date stamped Aug 6 1940:

MOVIE COMEDIANS CAN'T STAY MARRIED

LIONEL STANDER divorced Mrs. Lucy Stander in 1936. He charged she was hostile and belligerent and would call  him names in the presence of their friends. She also told him, according to his complaint, that she was tired of him and regarded her marriage as a handicap. The Standers  had been married eight years.
(Copyright 1939, Register and Tribune Syndicate Photoservice)

Why would such a story run four years after the divorce and some two years after my father had married again? Dad was still appearing on radio but his movie career had plummeted since 1938, when Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn called him a "Red sonofabitch" and said that any studio that renewed his contract should be fined $100,000. Consequently Dad was in just two pictures in 1940, down from eight in 1936. What an odd coincidence that just eight days after the above photo was stamped, "secret" testimony about him was leaked to the press in Los Angeles.

"HOLLYWOOD STARS ACCUSED AS REDS BEFORE GRAND JURY," trumpeted the New York Times on August 15. "The testimony identified the following as Communist members, sympathizers or contributors: Lionel Stander, actor; Jean Muir, actress... The witness who gave the Hollywood names was John R. Leech, alleged former 'chief functionary' for the Communist party in Los Angeles... Mr. Stander, himself, in recent appearances before the grand jury denied he ever knew Mr. Leech or was a member of the party."

Quote of the Day

More like Quote of the Year, since I haven't posted since January. (Curse you, Facebook & Twitter!)

"Men don't seem to notice unless there's a breast hanging out! But the fact that they look at our faces is rather nice."

Revealed: Women Are the Secret Oglers

Before "Downton Abbey"...There was SNOBS

Photo of Julian Fellowes © Giles Keyte

I still remember the day in late 2004 that an unexpected package arrived from St. Martin's Press. Inside was an advanced reading copy of SNOBS, the debut novel of Julian Fellowes. Stephen Fry's blurb on the back cover got me hooked: "A delicious thoroughbred delight, a guilty treat that is awake to every maddeningly and appallingly attractive nuance of English social life."

I gobbled up the book, then snagged a phone interview with Mr. Fellowes courtesy of my new best friends at St. Martin's. The piece ran in Bookreporter.com in Feb. 2005. It seems to have been pulled, but my interview with Mr. Fellowes about his second novel, PAST IMPERFECT, is still there. Fans of Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess in "Downton" will enjoy Lady Uckfield in SNOBS (soon to be rereleased with a new cover, per today's NYT.

BIOGRAPHY
At the tender age of 55 [in 2005], Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes has just had his first novel, SNOBS, published in the United States. Born in Egypt, where his father was in the Foreign Office, Fellowes grew up in England and attended Cambridge. After going to drama school, he was a “jobbing actor for ages” and appeared in more than 40 movies and TV shows. Fed up with going to auditions, Fellowes turned to writing and worked for a while for BBC TV, where he adapted LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY and THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER for the small screen. Subsequently he wrote a screenplay for Anthony Trollope’s THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS, which caught the eye of producer Bob Balaban, who was looking for a British society insider to write a screenplay for a murder mystery. “And so ‘Gosford Park’ was born, and so was the rest of my life,” Fellowes explains.

In addition to "Gosford Park,” Fellowes wrote the screenplay for “Vanity Fair” and the book for the new London musical "Mary Poppins." He also wrote and directed "Separate Lives," a film starring Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett, which opens in the U.K. in March. He describes it as “a little art house British movie about middle-class people being unhappily married, and so will doubtless be steamrollered in the Big, Bad World but I love it and I loved making it so I have no sad tales to tell.” Never one to sit idle, Fellowes is currently writing a family movie for Columbia pictures; SNOBS is in the works as a three-part series for British TV. He and his wife Emma Kitchener, a descendant of Lord Kitchener and a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent, live with their teenage son in “Hardy country” near Dorchester.

INTERVIEW
January 17, 2005
Narrated by an actor with an aristocratic pedigree, SNOBS is a delicious social satire set in 1990s England, in which a beautiful middle-class young woman claws her way into British society by marrying a dim-witted earl. Though its setting is modern, the wry sensibility and gimlet-eyed deconstruction of social morays put SNOBS firmly in the tradition of Jane Austen, E.F. Benson (especially the “Lucia” series) and Anthony Trollope. Fellowes talks with Bookreporter.com’s Bella Stander about mental toughness, second chances and the tribulations of the acting life.

BLS: How did you come up with the idea for SNOBS?

JF: I live in two secret worlds: show business and high society. People know them from magazines but not from the inside. I thought it would be fun to go into those worlds in a reasonably clear-seeing vein.

When I was a young man, I came from the bottom end of the landed gentry. Now I get the glad hand; in those days I made up the extra--the one who gets invited when someone else can’t make it. At house parties I had the bedroom next to Nanny with the uncomfortable bed. When you're a minor player, you're in a better position to see people as they really are than if you're a grandee.

BLS: There are many references to Anthony Trollope in SNOBS. You write about Lady Uckfield, the mother-in-law of protagonist Edith, “She did not know what it was to be bored--or rather, to admit to herself that she was bored…In our sloppy century, one must at least respect, if not revere, such moral resolution. And after all, to borrow a phrase from Trollope, when all was said and done, ‘her lines had fallen in pleasant places.’”

JF: Yes, it means that without planning, your life has entered a pretty nice area. Mental toughness is becoming increasingly a class thing. The twentieth-century concept is that we should only consult our private wishes and always live in accordance with our personal tastes and desires. Trollope would regard that as a recipe for an ultimately disappointing life, and on the whole, I would agree with him. It is a false notion that the more rules we abandon, the freer and more fulfilled we will become. One only has to look around to see that a great many people are floundering because of the abolition of all rules.

SNOBS is a rather caustic look at the British upper classes and their obsession with rules. They don’t see themselves as others see them, to quote Burns. They believe they live in a world whose values are more broadly held than they are. However, I am unable to keep from a feeling of respect for their un-breaking standards. The Lady Uckfields of the world are still capable of self-discipline, which is the key virtue. Our education system avoids giving children a clue that the world is going to be a tough place. Adulthood comes as a horrible disappointment to them, because they believed that the whole thing was going to plop into their lap.

One of the most important elements of the book is that it’s about choice. All our lives, we’re the product of our choices. We’re all at the point that our choices have taken us. We can set off in a new direction, but what we can’t do is start again. The great advantage of America is its optimism; it’s always open to new ideas. You don’t drag your past around with you like a heavy chain.

BLS: Americans believe in second chances, in starting over. Miss Manners recently wrote, “This country was founded by people who weren’t doing well at home.”

JF: The notion that you can get a facelift and be 33 again is a false one. You have to take the consequences of your choices: That’s the one you married; that’s the mother or father of your children; this is the career you chose; you have to make this career work for you. You can’t spend the rest of your life regretting that you didn’t go to med school. You have to have the strength to realize and accept when there isn’t still time. I’m all for doing something for yourself and not allowing other people's expectations to steamroll you, but you should choose something where you have a reasonable expectation of fulfillment.

BLS: That’s certainly hard when you’re an actor. You get rejected all the time.

JF: This business continually tells you you're nothing until you start thinking you are, and finally you collaborate in your own humiliation. That’s the horrible truth of it. The great challenge of acting is to hold onto your own self-worth despite constant attack. Actors have my sympathy. A lot of them don’t hold on. The only real protection is to have people believe in you.

When our son Peregrine was maybe four, I was leaving for an audition for a commercial. Emma had gotten stuck in traffic and I had to take him with me. They were totally hostile to this little boy and this poor actor who had to take him in. This was one of those key moments. I thought, I don’t have to involve my child and myself in this. I am too old to justify myself to people I don’t even like! That was the last audition I ever did for a commercial. I retook ownership of myself and my own dignity. It was a curative, positive step for me. However, I’m not saying that everyone who turns down commercial auditions will go on to write a screenplay and get an Oscar.

BLS: What was the reaction of your society friends and acquaintances to SNOBS? Did any of them think you were betraying your class?

JF: There certainly were mixed feelings as to whether or not I had, in some way, betrayed my own kind by holding them up to ridicule. Of course, lots of people thought they had sat for the portraits--although they were mostly wrong. Characters, as you know, are usually an amalgam of different acquaintances and seldom drawn from a single model. Having said that, there were one or two pretty close depictions, and one person in particular was very annoyed. "Really!" she said. "A lifetime of avoiding the newspapers, and now look!" Although, in my defense, I never gave away her identity.

At the risk of vanity, I would say the accuracy of the book was what irritated them most. Like politicians or show-folk, toffs usually shrug off any criticism of themselves in fiction by pointing out the inaccuracies which demonstrate that the author cannot have had a close view. One senior aristocrat was reported as having said, "The problem with SNOBS is you can't fault it." An old pal telephoned with the greeting, "It's a wonder to me you have any friends left!" However, all in all, I would say more of them were amused to find their world in print than were offended. For which I am heartily grateful.

BLS: Will your screenplay of THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS be made? It certainly should be, as Lizzie Eustace is a character for the ages. I saw shades of her in Edith.

JF: No, "Eustace" is still looking for a home. You're quite right about Lizzie. I always think of that trio--Becky Sharp, Lizzie Eustace and Scarlett O'Hara--as being identical triplets, and I love them all.

Yahrzeit - Ahead & Behind theTimes

My father died 17 years ago today. November 30 is also Mark Twain's birthday. I imagine Dad would have liked to be linked to Twain, however tenuously. Funny... I just now remembered that I read THE INNOCENTS ABROAD the one time I visited Dad at his home in L.A.

In his early years in Hollywood, Dad lent his voice to various progressive causes, which got him branded as "a Red sonofabitch" (allegedly by Columbia Pictures honcho Harry Cohn), then tailed for decades by the FBI. The sign proclaiming "SCHOLARSHIPS NOT BATTLESHIPS" in this photo from 1937 (below) would have been perfect for an anti-Vietnam War demonstration--or an Occupy rally now. Alas, Dad and the other peaceniks were proved wrong four years later, when battleships became vastly more necessary.

PEACE "STRIKE" OFF CAMPUS AT U.C.L.A.

Westwood, Calif.--More than 1000 students of the University of California at Los Angeles walked off the campus in a peace strike as part of a nation-wide demonstration called by the United Student Peace Committee. --PHOTO SHOWS-- Lionel Stander, cinema actor, as he addressed the crowd of strikers, while standing on a truck parked near the campus. 4-22-37

Another Piece of History

My latest acquisition (above) is an AP Wirephoto of my father from 1953. Caption:

NEW YORK, May 6--Rep. Harold Velde, left, (R-Ill. chairman of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, points a warning finger at witness Lionel Stander, seated at right, during the actor's testimony here today. Stander refused to tell the committee at an open hearing whether he had ever been a Communist. He said he was not now a Communist, but refused to say whether he was a party member between 1935 and 1948. Rep. Morgan M. Moulder (D-Mo.) sits beside Velde.

That appears to be the infamous Roy Cohn standing in the back at left.

Summer Reading Assignment for Obama & Congress

To the legislators of 2011 and most especially the candidates of 2012, I offer this excerpt from Charles Dickens's LITTLE DORRIT:

Containing the whole Science of Government

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Back to Mr. Dickens

I kept thinking how much the US Congress dickering over the debt ceiling is just like Dickens's Circumlocution Office, with all the talk of why "it can't be done." So I put aside Susan Isaacs's LILY WHITE, which was boring me, in favor of LITTLE DORRIT, which isn't.

The cinematic opening, which I looked for in vain when I watched the BBC series, fits right in with the breathless weather we're having:

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months.

This may be the last time I read my Penguin paperback edition, which I bought in 1984, as the pages keep fluttering out of the cracked binding. It's odd to have a book that I remember buying new to be looking--and especially smelling--so old.

Strange & Beautiful: Kevin Wilson & THE FAMILY FANG

The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson’s debut novel from Ecco Press, opens with:

Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. "You make a mess and then you walk away from it," their daughter, Annie, told them.

And what a mess Caleb and Camille Fang have made of Annie and her younger brother Buster! Labeled “Child A” and “Child B,” from infancy they were pressed into service—not always willingly, or even wittingly—as key players in their parents’ notorious performance art pieces.

Having attended art school and hung around the Manhattan art/music scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I came of age with people like Caleb and Camille Fang. I was curious how Kevin Wilson managed to capture them and their milieu with such piercing, tragicomic accuracy....
More at Wild River Review

Quote for the Day...and all time

"No corrupt mind ever understands words healthily."
--THE DECAMERON (c1350), Giovanni Boccaccio

A New May Day

The view from my back fence this morning.

At a Denver riding club on May 1, 2006, Gomez the Thoroughbred threw me into a steel-pipe fence. My first-ever helicopter ride brought me to Swedish Hospital, where I spent a week in the multi-trauma unit. My body and psyche were as shattered as my glasses (see May 1, 2009, post with pic here).

Five years later, I'm finally healed. I think. I hope.

There's a difference between "healed" and "all better." After 3 surgeries on my right arm, I still have to carefully position it when I lie in bed. Three fingers on my dominant right hand remain partly to mostly numb. My right upper lip is numb; so is my right upper eyelid and my right forehead from just above the inner brow to the hairline. That eyebrow also is higher than the left, and doesn't go down when I frown. After rhinoplasty and 3 root canals, my nose and front teeth still hurt.

But the progress outweighs the remaining pain. For the first time in 5 years, the other day I was able to clasp my hands behind my back--and even raise them several inches. Last month my dentist applied a resin veneer to cover the gray on my dead right front tooth. So now I don't have to remind myself to keep my lips closed when I smile.

Even better, I no longer panic when I hear sirens or helicopters, or the news on radio/TV, or squealing tires on ads, or a football scrimmage (I still can't watch, but I never liked football anyway). Nor do I burst into tears when I see photographs of carnage or destruction in the newspaper, though I still have to cover some of them.

My short-term memory has returned. I couldn't remember a string of digits long enough to write down a phone number. I had to listen to a voice mail 3 or 4 times--first for the area code, then the exchange, then the next 2 digits, then the last 2. People thought I was kidding when I pleaded brain damage. I wasn't; 3 years after my accident a CT-scan finding was "traumatic brain injury."

"Time is a great healer," goes the old saying. True, but I wouldn't have gotten this far without the help of my gifted therapist in Denver, Mel Grusing, who practices Somatic Experiencing.

A new therapist just provided the last piece in my healing process. His name is Superstar, and he's a shaggy, battered little rescue horse at Blue Ribbon Farm in Tivoli, NY. After Gomez nearly killed me, I swore I'd never get on another Thoroughbred again. (Funny how my new digs back onto a racing horse farm, pictured at top.) But Superstar, who's the proverbial bombproof horse, made me eat my words. I've ridden him twice and can't wait to get back in the saddle.

Tally ho!

Guffaw of the Day OR Hypocritic Oaf

I laughed out loud when I saw this AP headline:

Gingrich: Love of country contributed to affair

LOVE the lede:

Newt Gingrich says his passion for his country contributed to his marital infidelity.

(Yes, and my passion for dessert contributed to my thighs.)

What follows is a motherlode of self-serving hypocrisy. Consider this gem:

The twice-divorced former U.S. House speaker has admitted he had an affair with Callista, a former congressional aide, while married to his second wife. It happened at the same time he was attacking President Bill Clinton for his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Takeaway (via Jon Stewart): There are 3 women who'd have sex with Newt Gingrich!

The piece ends with this emetic tidbit:

He also said former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, a Democrat who has backed many Republicans in recent years, will serve as a co-chairman of his national campaign effort.

In Cairo with Caravaggio

Above, a group of young men in Tahrir Square, by Moises Saman for The New York Times.

Below, "The Taking of Christ" (c. 1602) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, at the National Gallery of Ireland.

The Ultimate Writing Prompt

My driveway was plowed early yesterday--apparently after the newspaper was delivered, as I spotted its bright blue plastic wrapper peeking out of a snow bank this morning. I read the "Weekend Arts" section over lunch and hit gold in an article about the Winter Antiques Show, A Smorgasbord of Fine Art, the Strange and the Old:

At Allan Katz, there is a sculpture of two voluptuous nude women, one fondling the other’s breast, smoothly carved from a solid block of mahogany. This comical, curiously erotic fusion of autodidactic craft and neo-Classical style is believed to have been created by an unknown artisan about 1920 for a Buffalo sex cult.

1920. Buffalo. SEX CULT.

Think of the possibilities: Farce, murder mystery, morality tale, amorality tale...against a backdrop of snow and Niagara Falls.

The mind boggles.

Snowy Fun in the Back 40

A snowstorm is Nature's way of saying "Stay home!" And I'd gladly hibernate inside, only I have this 64-pound bundle of joy that needs off-leash romps several times a day. So I put on the puffy jacket, pulled up the tall boots and ventured out.

Abby went over to the car, as usual, and was incredulous when I started walking up the street. After a bit of convincing--she didn't understand about the driveway not being plowed--she came bounding through the snow. We trespassed in our neighbors' backyards (nobody else was outside; go figure) then ended up in our own, where I took these pictures.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Lionel Stander (center) in "The Big Show-Off"

My father would have been 103 years old today (the simplest date of all: 1/11/11). My latest acquisition of Lionel Stander memorabilia is a publicity still from The Big Show-Off, released in January 1945. I haven't seen it, but per the synopsis it seems to be a typical Republic Pictures "B" movie. Its one claim to fame is that it stars Dale Evans just before she hitched up with Roy Rogers.

I visited my mom and stepfather in Maine two weeks ago. While I was doing my morning stretches, I suddenly noticed a book, which I'm sure had been on the same shelf for 20 years: BUILDING A CHARACTER.

"Huh," I thought. "This might be useful in writing fiction." (I've been working on The Great American Potboiler, in fits and starts, for several years.)

I pulled the book down, and saw that the author was Constantin Stanislavski, inventor of "The Method" espoused by Jacob & Stella Adler, and countless other of Dad's actor friends. I opened it and was surprised to see that it was from the New York Public Library's Bloomingdale Branch, on West 100th St.

Even more surprising, my father's temporary library card was in the pocket, with our old West End Avenue address and phone number--proof that he had indeed moved back in with Mom and me. The book was borrowed Dec 16, 1961, and due on Jan 26, 1962. The overdue fine is 5¢ "per calendar day." That's almost $900 by now, so this is a very valuable book.

I felt a mental connection with Dad when I started reading BUILDING A CHARACTER: this was a book that he went out of his way to read. The Dewey card is stuck between the first two pages of Chapter Four: "Making the Body Expressive." Did Dad get bored and stop there? That chapter is a bit of a slog. But he was such a voracious reader--often a book per day--and Stanislavski's work so important that I'd like to think he read all the way through.

As luck would have it, today I found a bit on YouTube from "The Danny Kaye Radio Show," in which Kaye hilariously explains the Stanislavski Method to my father, who was a regular on the show. What I miss most about Dad is his voice, which is like no other. (I've never heard a credible imitation. When I was little my mother took me to the doctor because my voice was hoarse. Turned out I was trying to speak like Daddy.) So it's wonderful to be able to hear him long after his death--and long before my birth. He gets a few lines to set up the bit, then it's all Danny Kaye. Listen:

Abby v Snow Monster

Someone built a snow(wo?)man at Burger Hill, Rhinebeck, our default dogwalking venue. Abby wasn't having any part of it. After much barking--plus a treat placed at its base--she cautiously approached before going up the hill with me.

She barked at it again on the way down. One can't be too careful...

Patrick Dennis Forever!

Holiday thoughts from razor-witted Patrick Dennis (aka Edward Everett Tanner III), who deserves to be remembered as the author of books beyond AUNTIE MAME.

AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME (1958) begins with this:

Christmas is nearly here and I look forward to it more and more with loathing. All the shops that didn't have their holiday decorations up by Michaelmas made up for it with sheer ostentation by Halloween. Canned carols bleat from every corner. The clerks at Saks are surlier, the ones at Lord & Taylor lordlier, the ones at Bergdorf's bitchier than at any other season.

From THE JOYOUS SEASON* (1964), narrated by a 10-year-old boy:

Daddy always said that Christmas is a joyous season when suicides and hold-ups and shoplifting and like that reach a new high and that the best place to spend the whole thing is a Moslem country.

*Confession: I've put down THE FINKLER QUESTION twice to reread Patrick Dennis. Interpret as you wish.