An Artsy Day – October 14

Today is the birthday of Lillian Gish, first lady of the silent screen, whose career in films spanned 75 years.

Pretty little thing, isn’t she?

One of the many wonderful things about having parents who were somewhat older was that they were raised in such a different era, when movies didn’t always have sound, automobiles were a unique luxury, and corncobs and pages from the Sears catalog were sometimes used as toilet paper.  While I don’t recall our discussions about it (though I don’t doubt we had them), my parents were both aware that some of the things they had and had experienced growing up were things that we (their children) would never experience unless they made a conscious effort for us to do so.  Classic movies and legendary performers were some of those “things’, if you will.

While neither was raised in a particularly sophisticated environment, to say the least, they both had an appreciation for great talents.  That may be in part because it took so much more effort to see great performers and much more effort on a performer’s part to be seen.  No YouTube or e-books existed.  As a child, I can recall my parents taking us to airings of Charlie Chaplin films in the basement of the Physics Building at Duke.  We also saw Charlie Chan movies(which put me to sleep), several classic Japanese films – I mean the realclassics, not Godzilla, which was a different kind of classic – and many others in that white room with the uncomfortable chairs.  At the time, some bored me to whininess, but as an adult, I recall and appreciate the experience most fondly.  And more importantly, my parents passed on a piece of their history, their generational consciousness to us, through those films.  Lillian Gish was one of the actresses we saw in those series of journeys to the past.  (On a side note, we also saw live performances by Dave Brubeck, Marcel Marceau, Judith Jamison, the Clancey Brothers, and others too numerous to name – all treasures of artistic history.  And I can still remember my father waking me up and bringing me out into the living room to hear Marlene Dietrich sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” live on the TV – it must have been the Ed Sullivan Show – because she was a legend and she was ancient and I would never have the opportunity again.  It made me cry at the wistfulness of it at the time and has haunted me ever since.) 

It is also the birthday of e. e. cummings, a poet famous for his unorthodox use of capitalization, line breaks and punctuation.  He was an accomplished painter as well.  Following is a poem in honor of his birthday (yes, today you get two Wednesday poems for the price of one!)

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
    I fear no fate
(for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world
(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

 It’s Be Bald and Free Day, which cummings would have appreciated, considering his hairstyle:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father would have appreciated today as well.  He lost most of his hair in his 20s, and I recall him sitting in the Daddy Chair shaving his head with an electric razor at least one morning a week.  He walked to work daily, and went through a ‘Kojack’ period, when he would wear mirrored sunglasses and suck a lollipop to amuse the students on the shuttle buses between campuses.  In stark contrast to “Bald and Free”, one of Kelsea’s and my gifts to Pat last year was a “hair hat”  – a baseball cap that looks like a visor with fake hair, that so perfectly matches his own shade and texture that he likes to shock people at the poker table by taking at off, as they frequently mistake it for his own hair.  (Kelsea swears she saw a football coach wearing one on a nationally televised game last weekend, and I’m not sure she isn’t right.  It looked pretty suspicious.)

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Errol Flynn, who died at age 50 – a true Tasmanian devil if there ever was one, and one of my favorite actors in his heyday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 That charm, that smile, that swash, that buckle.  That laugh that Pat and Kelsea both love, particularly in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.  Pat was suspended for reading Flynn’s autobiography, “My Wicked Wicked Ways,” when he was in junior high.  They confiscated the book and never gave it back, so I searched high and low and got him a copy of it for our first Christmas together.  He was very pleased.  Though I still don’t think he’s finished it.  If you aren’t familiar with Errol Flynn, do check out some of his films.  Off screen, he was a total scoundrel, who died in an Elvis-esque fashion – bloated, dissipated and addicted to drugs.  A sad, not-so-glamorous ending to an exceptionally vivid life.

And a very happy anniversary to the 6,000 couples, all members of the Unification church, who wed on this day in Korea in 1982.  Your wedding picture is below: