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Archive for March, 2007March 2007 in Black LambVolume 5, Number 3 — March 2007March 1st, 2007 READ THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IN THE ENTRIES BELOW In our cover article (Wal-Mart to the rescue) Greg Roberts nominates an unexpected environmental hero. In You say tomato, I say… Rod Ferrandino reflects on the perils of being too often right. Actor William Bogert remembers when he did the Charleston with Julie Andrews in The light fantastic. In Spots, Andrew Darrel reflects on a lifetime of food stains on his clothes. Lorentz Lossius paints the portrait of an Australian city in Melburniana.
Posted by: The Editors Wal-Mart to the rescueMarching gratefully, and greenly, into the futureMarch 1st, 2007 BY GREG ROBERTS Under a spreading chesnut tree the village smithy stood. Thank goodness the unproductive lout is now gone, or we’d all be in the poorhouse.
Posted by: The Editors You say tomato, I say…... but you may have a point thereMarch 1st, 2007 BY ROD FERRANDINO My wife, Deborah, says she has “nigglings”. Webster’s says she has “inklings.” “Nigglings” is her definition for the intuitive flashes she has that rule my life. When I’m making the call (and remembering that I’m married), the home team, i.e. Deborah, has a decided edge. I know what she means, while the technically correct Team Webster, outfitted in 2,000-plus pages of italics, footnotes, abbreviations, racing stripes, designer logo-wear, and accent marks, not only gets the short end of this particular stick, but can also be banished to a musty closet. (I’ve spent time in that closet; trust me when I say it’s not Cozumel.)
Posted by: The Editors The light fantasticMarch 1st, 2007
I am pleased to report that this year’s recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award will be Julie Andrews. It’s always nice to see a former dancing partner achieve success. More than fifty years ago there appeared on Broadway a mildly amusing comedy called Anniversary Waltz. In those innocent days before the explosion of television “mildly amusing” often equated to “modest success.” And so it seemed it would be with this play. Somewhat to the surprise of all concerned, it ran for more than two years, and it was decided on the second anniversary (get it?) of their opening they would give a party. The show was running at the Booth Theatre, which is at the corner of 45th Street and Shubert Alley, a private pathway that connects 45th to 44th, and the producers of AW invited all the casts of the shows playing those blocks to the party, which took place in the Alley after the performance of the night in question. One of these was the Cole Porter musical Silk Stockings, in which an old friend of mine was the dance captain. Her husband was the company manager, and party was on payroll night, so he couldn’t go. She asked me if I’d like to fill in, and I said that I thought I could find the time.
Posted by: The Editors SpotsMarch 1st, 2007 BY ANDREW DARREL I think I saw myself on the metro the other Sunday morning. I was on my way to work, not fully awake yet, and at the stop after mine an old man got on and sat across from me. He was in his late seventies, I would say, and at a first glance seemed quite smartly dressed, in a greenish tweedy jacket and blue silk tie. Further inspection, however, of the type that you have time for on the metro, showed that everything he had on was covered in stains. They looked like old food stains on clothes that had been washed or dry-cleaned several times since the original accidents, so that the stains themselves had faded away and lost the vividness of the original beetroot or ragù — but they had not disappeared completely.
Posted by: The Editors I saw the cutest thing…March 1st, 2007
I was nearing our apartment in Brooklyn on a bright brisk day, and near a neighbor’s stoop saw a little sparrow standing sentinel over the mangled body of its compatriot: neck torn, thoroughly flattened ruffles, supine. Birds aren’t supposed to do supine. Must’ve been a cat done that, I thought. And that little sparrow sentinel was as puffed up and erect as an honor guard, motionless, a picture of stoic mourning and regard. Trying to assume a portion of his mantle of respect, I shuffled quietly past, not two feet past, and looked back at the maudlin, heart-tugging scene… and the little sparrow was pecking chunks of flesh out of that torn neck, avidly.
Posted by: The Editors Stupid kid tricksMarch 1st, 2007
Hurricane Carol hit Cape Cod at the end of August, 1954, when I was twelve. It was a bad storm, but our family’s big shingle-style house in Quissett had been built in the 1880s by my great-grandfather, using local carpenters who doubled as boatwrights and took bad weather as the norm. And unlike the last big one in 1938, people had enough warning to get ready. The house had wooden shutters for most of the windows, a pantry icebox supplementing the kitchen fridge, and a gas stove. The iceman who stocked the holds of the local fishing boats had delivered a block a day or so before. And a dug well with a hand-pump behind the house backed up town water. The place had been wired for electric light only in the 1930s, and my grandfather never trusted it, so we had an array of kerosene lanterns and candles in tall hurricane glasses.
Posted by: The Editors An honest manMarch 1st, 2007 BY DAVID MACLAINE Late in the morning of September 26, 1976, I was walking on a quiet New Orleans side street, heading toward the French Quarter from Canal Street. It was my first trip to the city; my wife and I had taken Amtrak down from Chicago and had endured a stretch of perhaps six hours, although it felt like more, starting around the time we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line, during which the heating system on our car had been stuck on high.
Posted by: The Editors Monkey see, monkey doMarch 1st, 2007 BY ED GOLDBERG I recently saw a news photo in The New York Times of a miserably poor town in what was once a fairly prosperous Latin American country: tumble-down shanties, garbage and sewage in the streets, pretty grim. There are many explanations available, none of which makes much sense, except that it is a manifestation of bullying. (Not a gang sign or a marker for drug activity. The phenomenon existed long before the current gang/drug culture.) The weakest, dorkiest or fattest kid got his US Keds tied together and launched over the wires. With the price of sneakers what it is now, this can be a financial hardship. (One small bit of civic pride. Here in Portland, home of high-quality eccentricity and creative nonsense, one may see conjoined spike heels or dog booties or baby shoes dangling from wires. No received wisdom here in Little Beirut. One town’s bullying is another’s artistic statement.)
Posted by: The Editors Partners in crimeMarch 1st, 2007 BY CATE GARRISON CHAPTER 17 OF THE JJ CHRONICLES Geographically orphaned by my rattish parents’ abrupt departure from the sinking ship of my marital home, a disaster occasioned by our dog JJ’s consumption of my car’s internal organs, I had no one to consult about my next move, and, namely, the relation of the above events to my increasingly absent American husband. Clearly a phone call had to be made to his office, where he seemed to live. Once my children, my dog, and I had returned home from depositing the Aged Ps at the airport, delaying tactics were in short supply, though I still hadn’t finished mentally writing the script of my story. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t intend to tell the truth (though whether the whole truth and nothing but was a matter of some internal debate). My hesitation was more to do with who to blame. The dog for actually eating the car? My mother for insisting on leaving him inside it while she slaked her hunger? Myself for acquiescing despite my better judgment? And then there was the matter of repair costs. “Could be a fair amount,” might sound more acceptable than “over three thousand dollars,” for example, though I was doubtful he’d consider any amount as “fair.” To protect youth and innocence from anything that might sound like equivocation, I sent my two live-in lads off to their bedrooms. I’m not sure why I pointed the dog in the direction of his bat cave. I suppose youth, rather than innocence, was still on his side.
Posted by: The Editors |
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