The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery-With Little Anthony And The Imperials Tears On My Pillow In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery-With Little Anthony And The Imperials Tears On My Pillow In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Of course a writer, even a half-baked ex-editor like myself, and remember the old saying that those who can’t write, teach-or edit and so that is my writing resume, editor, writes about personal emotions, his, hers, some third party disguised or true, writes about places seen and described, and sounds, heard or belled. Less expressed, and maybe that was just my prejudice as an editor were pieces written which dealt with smells, the smells of something-fair or foul. But more than that smells associated with certain people like the elderly lady here who only gets her minute in the sun via those smells she produced in her homemade bakery. That is the nail that Seth Garth hung his hat on when he made one of his rare adult trips back to the old Acre neighborhood where he, we, came of age back in the day. Frankly, at first I balked at publishing the piece, showing that prejudice mentioned above but also fearing that to let the sun shine on the role of youthful smells ran counter to what we were trying to do with this series, a series dedicated mainly to sights and sounds.               

I let the piece go at the time figuring that it was harmless enough. But in a recent re-read to figure out how to introduce a piece that was not directly related to corner boy life or rock and roll I realized that smells, Ida’s bakery smells, were part of the fabric of those growing up experiences not all of them beautiful smells either. While I would today still be a little hesitant to let Seth run wild with such a piece if he, or somebody else added something about the smell of such a situation as part of a larger perspective I would not squawk.

After all how could you avoid smell when you were describing the first time Scribe, or any one of us, had our first tastes of whiskey which was a rite of passage in our neighborhood-and not when one reached the legal twenty-one age requirement. Scribe’s story was that he grabbed his first bottle of liquor when he went to Doc’s Drugstore up on Newbury Avenue in order to get his grandmother’s prescriptions filled and had Doc, a little sharpie by the way, throw in a pint of whiskey in with the order. In those days, maybe now too for all I know, druggists carried liquor for “medicinal” purposes and on occasion Scribe’s grandmother would order a bottle for herself so Doc threw the bottle in without question even though Scribe was maybe fourteen or fifteen.

The smell parts came from the nasty breathe that Scribe (and his confederate in the caper Frankie Riley) had as the aftermath of this occasion when the two went down to Adamsville Beach and sat on the seawall drinking swigs and slivering the taste. Worse, worse by far was the smell from Scribe when he vomited the contents of his stomach after the pint was finish and even Frankie wanted to get away from him-and in those days Frankie and Scribe were fast friends. My own whiskey experience at sixteen was not far off from that except in our extended family the tradition was that an uncle would take a male child well under that twenty-one requirement to the Dublin Pub and buy him his first whiskey. Although not the last that first ones smell lasted in my mouth for days it seemed.

I won’t dwell too much on this smell business but on the more positive side how could you explain the budding romance that Sam Lowell had in junior high school with Marla O’Hara without mentioning that fragrance she emitted from the perfume, maybe grabbed from her mother’s bureau top or maybe it was bath soap or something that lured him in like a little puppy dog. A year before, a year before puberty okay, Sam could hardly stand being around her, taunted her, made her cry I think and then the next year that smell which was the siren call, a siren call that would carry through three ex-wives and a number of love affairs. Maybe he was endlessly trying to recreate that first bloom of youth.

My own experience was less exalted when I was pursing Theresa Wallace who also had the bath soap scent but who dropped me like a hot potato when I showed up with a ton of Wildroot tonic on my hair, a ton of Listerine (or some mouthwash) on my breathe and Right Guard (or some such deodorant) on my underarms. She wondered what the hell the smells were when we had our first (and last) dance. Yeah, sometimes things don’t work out and describing those smells is the only way to convey what was what. Allan Jackson]     

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There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Today though I am in thrall to smells. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while ago, passed a neighborhood bakery here on the corner of St. Brendan Street that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house, living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.

Of course one could not dismiss, dismiss at one’s peril, that invigorating smell of the salt air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up. A wind that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-outs from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at North Adamsville Beach, the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. Or evade the fetid smell of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts. (Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo race expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.)

Or the smell sound of the ocean floor (or dawn, if you got lucky) at twilight on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell this retro crowd, the crowd that will read this piece, about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow old time classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.

You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set foot one in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. 

If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you grew up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. 

Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.

Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her to when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.

Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by this morning’s sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics we were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, so tuna fish. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a desecration. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s grape, also of course) and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.

And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I draw blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredient she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor.

La Dolce Vita-Senior Set-Tennessee Williams’ “The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone” (1961)-A Film Review

La Dolce Vita-Senior Set-Tennessee Williams’ “The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone” (1961)-A Film Review         

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, starring Vivian Leigh, Warren Beatty, from the play by Tennessee Williams, 1961

The playwright Tennessee Williams was a hard fought acquired taste for me. Hard fought since the subject matter, or subplot anyway, of many of his most famous works revolved around homosexuality even if in a somewhat muted manner reflecting those harsh times when sodomy was on the criminal law books and everybody stayed at least publically in the closet, deep in the closet in the case of one of my hometown hang-out corner boys Timmy Riley, oddness and off-beat-ness in general, loneliness and assorted despairs. Back to that hard fought part though when I first read I think the play Suddenly Last Summer and then saw the film starring Kate Hepburn, Liz Taylor and Monty Clift I was put off by the insinuated homosexual procuring process which was behind the storyline. Kate as mother procuress and Liz as “bait” for the boys.

Reason: well, reason which even Timmy Riley claimed to understand when he hung around with us. “Fags,” guys light on their feet that kind of were nothing but subject matter for verbal abuse, fights and endless baiting. It was sometime after Stonewall in 1969, a few years later, when Allan Jackson found out that Timmy was gay, and was also doing a drag queen act in Frisco where he fled to when his parents essentially disowned him after he told them about his sexual preferences. (WFT, Timmy had been the lead guy when we went down drunk as skunks to eternally gay-friendly Provincetown with the specific purpose of gay-baiting some poor sap in order to beat him up. What awful stuff Timmy must have gone through since he later told Allan he knew his was gay from about thirteen). That and Scribe finally telling us we had been dead ass wrong about those fights and that bear-baiting we indulged in on the corner.

That was when I went all out to check out Tennessee Williams after seeing The Glass Menagerie on the stage at I think the ART in Cambridge. Funny the more I checked on Williams the more I found out that half the literary figures, or so it seemed, were gay or lesbian. Guys like Walt Whitman, Auden, Allan Ginsberg (although I knew he was gay before vaguely from when Scribe would recite Howl to us and almost get murdered for it, not because of the homosexuality but because we could have given a fuck about such stuff when we were hanging out Friday nights girl   dateless).         

I may have read the offering here The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone in play form but I don’t remember it so this is my first take on his take of the underside of the ex-pat community, the well-heeled single older women part, in Rome in the post-World War II la dolce vita world of those lonely, worried types who need plenty of assurance that they still had “it,” still had sex appeal of one form or another. Take the lead character Karen Stone, played by Vivian Leigh who was facing her own battle as a fading actress after her legendary performance as Scarlett  O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, she Karen of the famed legitimate theater, the Broadway white lights when that meant something. Her latest effort, a run at Shakespeare’s As You Like It trying to play the young queen type was in her mind a bust. Friends were publicly more generous but among themselves knew the thing was a stinker. That led to her closing the play and taking off for parts unknown with her ill husband. During the trip there he had a heart attack and died leaving Karen to face the future alone.

Karen went into exile in Rome after that in order to as she said “drift.” But drifting only goes so far for a still young senior set denizen. Of course in those days proper and rich women left by themselves didn’t go to the Yellow Pages looking for companionship or go to get picked up in a bar. It was all done through various nefarious upscale native connections but in the end there was no dearth of poor beautiful young men to “escort” milady-for a fee one way or another usually with “gifts” or expense accounts. That was how Mrs. Stone met Paolo, played by a very young Warren Beatty. The duel here is between Paolo’s alleged sensibilities about Karen and her fending him off as another gigolo- for a while. But soon the inevitable expense account gets established and she plays his bills. Problem or rather two problems, one, Paolo is a whore and goes after a young American actress and two, on the rebound of sorts, Karen goes the go with another beautiful young man who has been stalking her. We are left with some serious doubts about what will happen with that young man who looks like he could murder her and not give a damn about the consequences. Pure Tennessee.              

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- Ancient Dreams, Dreamed- With Diana Talbot In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- Ancient Dreams, Dreamed- With Diana Talbot In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[A lot of what the now locally legendary corner boys from the brick front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the woe begotten working poor Acre section of North Adamsville talked about on lonely Friday nights was about the opposite sex (even Timmy Riley now known in Frisco town among the drag queen connoisseurs at his very successful Kit Kat Club as Miss Judy Garland). About what to do about, how to get close to them (after clearing the Scribe’s intelligence to see if they were “spoken for” meaning  “going steady” or some other such arrangement), and, frankly how to get into their pants (a lot harder in some cases than you might think and easier in others you might not think of). By the way that locally legendary part no misstatement for those from high school who stayed in town, not many but enough in the wandering generation, passed on the lore to their kids, (and now the kids to theirs). So that it would not be uncommon for kids today, those who still get their pizza from still-standing Tonio’s although minus Tonio to speak in reverent terms about the guys who went wild in the 1960s. At some point I am sure mall-dom will erase even though few remaining memories (although nothing will erase Richard Rizzo, 1946-66 and David White, 1946-67 KIA in Vietnam and remembered by Tonio with a plague in the front of the building etched in the brick wall.

That might be true, the girl part, which to those who have passed the age of 64 mentioned below probably don’t have the same testosterone ardor of their youth but recent trips back to the Acre to get some “color” for the series made me realize that there were plenty of other things that preoccupied our minds, or maybe best said Scribe, Seth Garth, Sam Lowell and my mind. Things about family and the few good times we had in my household when we went, even in high school to day time Squaw Rock for barbecues (night time Squaw Rock was another thing, the local lovers’ lane thing and best not be mentioned here just in case some ancient mother gets wind of what I have to say here. In any case no self-respecting parent would be caught dead with impressible youth within five hundred yards of the place as sunstroke turned to dusk). Things about the various projects we got involved in some of them like getting books for school kids in Jim Crow Alabama which almost got us skinned alive. Things like the Fourth of July festival which the local fathers and uncles put together in the days when pre-Vietnam we guys were as patriotic as any kids out in heartland America and could have gone toe to toe with any Norman Rockwell or Grant Wood pictorial take on the matter. Those precious although no not obvious memories are what drove this sketch. You can fill in your own memoires as well. Allan Jackson] 

YouTube  film clip of the Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four from the animated movie Yellow Submarine.

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Many of my fellows from the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair, go to the big step-off kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde, frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled through the womb or some toddler’s crib maybe, at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.

Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window “the projects” wait on better times, get a leg up, don’t get left behind in the dawning American streets paved with gold dream but for now just hang your hat dwelling, small, too small for three growing boys with hearty appetites and desires to match even then, warm, free-flow oil spigot warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching, relentlessly marching as he, that older brother, went off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles floating aimlessly in the clogging still air night.

A cloudless day, a cloudless blasted eternal, infernal Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits of wildly-maned horses, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places, strange boxed rooms filled with the wax and wane of learning, simple learning, in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.

Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb aimed right at my head unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears, and what did they do wrong to get the chair anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night. Alone, and, and, alone with fears, and avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead, and the idea of dead, the mystery of dead, and of sea sailor dead on mains, later stream thoughts of bitch proctoresses, some unnamed faraway crush teacher who crossed my path and such, in lonely what did he do wrong anyway prison cells, smoking, reading, writing of dinosaurs die and other laments. Dead.

Endless walks, endless one way sea street water rat-infested fear seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells, swaying grasses in light breezes to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat stinks to the left making hard the way, the path, the symbolic life path okay, to uptown drug stores, some forgotten chain-name drug store, passing perfumes, lacquers, counter drugs, ailments cured, hurts fixed and all under a dollar, trinkets ten cents baubles, gee-gads, strictly gee-gads, grabbing, two-handed grabbing, heist-stolen valentines, a metaphor in the making, ribbon and bow ruby-red valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet. Man emerging out of the ooze, and hope.

Walks, endless waiting bus stop, old late, forever late, story of a young boy’s life late, diesel-fueled, choking fumed non-stop bus stop walks, no golden age car for jet moves in American Dream wide-fin , high tech automatic drive nights, walks, walks up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year no fix rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, you get the picture, pass trees are green, coded, secretly coded even fifty street rutted years later, endless trees are green super-secret-coded except for face blush waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now. For what? For one look, one look, and not a quick no-nonsense, no dice look, no time for ragamuffin boys either that would elude him, elude him forever. Such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance, no coded trees are green dance, either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school either, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name trees are green brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?

City square, no trespass, no standing, standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped-up crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.

A bridge too far, an unarched, unsteeled, unspanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and geared meshes, churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing

Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path

Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Stopped short. Who would have figured that one?

Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, a small-time after school soda split sit at the counter Doc’s drugstore date, or slice of pizza and a coke date at Balducci’s with a few nickels juke boxed in playing our song, our future song, a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall song, and dreams of I Want To Wanted sifting the hot afternoon air, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore car parked submarine races and mysteries unfurled, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no known even forty years later. Wow.

Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, no romantic Bogie tobacco-lipped unfiltered, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh-mown streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.

Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish, although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, hubert, tricky dick war-circus all hell broke loose thing then, or wanted to.

Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.

The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not for ancient robert frost to guide you… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.

Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.

Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas’ flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarcaderos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.

He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.

Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored antic newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.

A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggared time, right.

Lashed against the high end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Ya, wrong number, as usual.

White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against Persian gulf oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. 

The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.

Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.

One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- With Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- With Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is In Mind

A YouTube film clip of Hank Williams performing minute back in the You Win Again to set the mood for this piece.

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[We never fucking, excuse my English but I am suddenly hot under the collar thinking about it now after having damned it up for a while, not fifty years like a lot of things mentioned in this series, talked about what the hell our parents did, or did not, do to us in the privacy of our family life. Sure some of it was the old time religion, acting like a religious tenet anyway, of not airing one’s dirty linen in public a staple of Irish Catholic tradition a couple of generations back (and still around, still around damn it from what some of the younger crowd has conveyed to me. But mainly it was about not talking about what hurt us so deeply that we could not utter anything even to close brothers until death corner boys. The late Peter Paul Markin who was more screwed in his family life, his living hell family life, mainly through his mother, his father too beaten down to raise his voice except under extremity set the parameters. And if a guy like the Scribe was closed-mouthed about his family affairs none of us lesser mortals were going to weep in public about our plights. Scribe’s “solution” was to be the running kind like in the Merle Haggard song, and sneak out the back door, or front if he could, in the middle of the night and take the all-night subway to Harvard Square and hang around Hayes-Bickford, or some such place where kindred spirits dwelled. Surprising that got him through a lot of things when he and that mother were in almost daily combat about what a bad son he was. Most of the stuff about Scribe’s home life came out later in dribs and drabs after he had passed away way too young by guys like Seth Garth and Sam Lowell. But I wonder how much what happened to Scribe beside Vietnam was hell-bent on that family blood tribute altar.                  

Over the last several years a bunch of us have gotten together either through our work here or joining each other someplace and talk about the old days which is really what this rock and roll series is about as filtered through North Adamsville’s Acre neighborhood. What we seldom talk about although it probably weighs on each of us is that private family part of our young existences. And that after all we went through in Summer of Love new consciousness, radical politics, social wisdom accumulated through age and the like. What would be good to know though, and Josh Breslin’s remembrances of his father here is part of that knowledge, is how extensive this closed family circle was. By Josh’s lights it extended to the working class neighborhood of Olde Saco up in Maine. I wonder where else. Allan Jackson ]    

***********

Josh Breslin had been since he retired a couple of years ago as a journalist writing for half the alternative and special interest newspapers and journals in the country, make that half the unread, mostly, newspapers and journals in those categories sitting on some glassy coffee table showing that the residents therein had been a part of that vaunted minute in the 1960s when they had collectively tried to turn the world upside down, in something of a reflective mood. Not every day, certainly not on golf days with his golfing associates over at Dunegrass, when reflection over some missed chip or putt on the previous hole spelled the kiss of death for the round. Much better to keep an empty mind on those days and just hope enough muscle memory kicks in to survive the round. But enough of golf, enough of unread journals, hell, enough of retirement except as the cushion that Josh’s thoughts fell on one day when passing through his  old home town of Olde Saco, a town farther north in Maine than the one where he now lived, on some family business.

While in Olde Saco he passed by his old growing up house, as was almost always the case since it was located near a main town road which he would have to cross to get on to the main highway and not always in some fit of nostalgia.  Or rather he passed the plot of land where the old home was situated, an old house that had been little better than a shack, a cabin maybe then, maybe especially when his three sisters came of age and hogged the single bathroom and stuff like that. A place which left little room for a single growing boy to attend to his own toilet, his own sense of space, to any sense at all. The house may have been a shack, no, he thought better say a cabin but it had been located on about two acres of land and in the intervening years, years well after his parents had passed on and his sisters like him had left the dust of Olde Saco behind the land had become valuable and now had been developed into an eight-unit condominium complex. Not that his parents, not that his father Prescott Breslin derived any real financial benefit from that development since the house had been sold when he needed to go into a nursing home after Josh’s mother, Delores, passed away. Had been sold well before there was a resurgence in the Olde Saco economy which had taken a beating when the MacAdams Textile Mills shut down and moved south to North Carolina in the early 1950s and had only recovered with some “high tech” start-ups using the old factory space well after Prescott passed on. The sale of that old house had broken his father’s heart despite its shanty condition at the end. The damn sale of the cabin in any case had not brought enough money. Not enough to cover all Prescott’s increasing medical expenses which Josh and his sisters wound up subsiding. 

So the passing of that lot got Josh to thinking about how Prescott Breslin never drew a blessed break in his hard-scrabble life. Never drew a break although he was a hard-working man of the old school-“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”-when he had work. Got Josh to thinking about the early 1950s when he was coming of age, when he started even if unconsciously, or maybe semi-consciously, to feel that some new breeze was coming, some new breeze that was going to break through and unfreeze that red scare Cold War time. And while Josh’s horizons in those days centered on the emerging rock and roll, coming from some “new” Memphis hillbilly sources, some black as night rhythm and blues sources, some down and out urban blues sources, again black as night, that was leading the jail-break out then his father’s fate was being sealed in another way. See Prescott Breslin was an employee, a machine tender and mechanic at the MacAdams Textile factory that was heading south and he had no other resources to fall back on. That last thought was pure Josh though, pure Josh remembering back to those hard days. Prescott Breslin, as he would be the first to say, and had probably said it a thousand times, with a wife and four children had no time to worry about whether he had resources to fall back or not. Josh chuckled to himself over that one, yeah, that was pure Dad.

As Josh travelled further along Main Street (really Route One but everybody called it Main Street since they had no real such street in the town) he passed by what in the old days was Millie’s Diner, now re-opened as Mildred’s, the one right across the street from the old textile plant where guys would go before their shift and grab a coffee and crullers, maybe grab a quick dinner if they were single, or maybe meet some sweetheart and talk before going off to work. He did not know this from personal experience but his father had once told him that right after World War II the plant was working three shifts and guys, and gals, were catching as much overtime as they wanted.

Millie’s did not long survived the shutdown of the mill and had been abandoned for a number of years (like a lot of other businesses in that section of the town that were dependent on the mill-workers) but had re-opened about a decade ago with the same “feel” as Millie’s including a jukebox which played current stuff but also stuff from back then, stuff that hard-working guys and gals would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in to listen to whatever was “hot” in those days. Josh knew all of this because a couple of years before he had been contacted by an old high school classmate, Melinda, Melinda Dubois (the place, Olde Saco, was crawling with French-Canadians including his mother, nee LeBlanc), who had read some old article of his and got in touch to invite his up for a class reunion. During that previous time in town Melinda had taken him around town and showed him what had changed and told him the story of Millie’s resurrection as Mildred’s.              

Something that day, probably the sight of the old homestead, maybe just the thought of Millie’s where sometimes when his father had been making good money he would take the family for an out of house dinner and where Josh on occasion had stopped in to play the jukebox and have a Coke while looking furtively around for any stray girls, prompted him to stop and go into Mildred’s for a coffee and maybe a piece of pie (that pie an iffy thing what with him and his new weight problem but he thought why go into a diner if you are not going to have something that is “bad “ for you). As a single he sat at the Formica-top counter complete with red vinyl-cushioned swivel stool to sit on and a paper placemat and utensils in front of him waiting for the smiling waitress to take his order (a career waitress as is usual in diners, middle-aged, her white uniform a little tight trying to look younger, pencil in her hair for ease of taking orders, chewing gum but friendly until you placed your order and then either still smiling or a frown if you only ordered coffee and, not the young college girls and guys you find in better restaurants marking time with a job to help defray college expenses or for “walking around” money). He placed his frowning order, coffee, black, and a piece of apple crumb pie with, yes, with ice cream (bad, indeed).

While Josh waited for his order he thumbed through the panels on the jukebox machine that was placed between him and the next placemat. And as if by some strange osmosis Josh came upon Hank Williams’ You Win Again, his father’s favorite song when he was young back in Kentucky, back in rugged cross heartbreak legendary Hazard. (His father had been in a pick-up band for a while working a circuit and along the Ohio River.) Josh  put his quarter in to play that one selection (yeah, times have changed even in jukebox land, no more three for a quarter ) and as Hank moan’s his lovesick blues that triggered Josh to start thinking about his father and where he had come from, where he would have picked up those country tunes in his DNA. And then Josh thought of that hard time when his father was so discouraged about his prospects when the mill had closed down temporarily and then when the final word had come that it would be closing for good and would play that song repeatedly as if to try and ward off some evil spirits. He could remember his father’s voice like it was yesterday as he sat beside him in Millie’s:                  

 “Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us. And also telling us not to trespass under penalty of arrest, Christ, after all the sweat we have given the damn MacAdams family. I still haven’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I don’t even have a high school diploma, not even close since I only went to eight grade and then to the mines, to do anything but some logging work up North when they need extra crews,”

That is what Prescott Breslin, Josh sitting silently beside him, had half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, right at Millie’s Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.

Just then Prescott, hey, no Pres, or PB, or any such thing, not if you didn’t  want an argument on one of his few vanities, fell silent, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was shutting down for good and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.

Why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, girls and one boy with Delores. Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.

The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and played Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Hazard hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on the table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-downs, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girl’s stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.

Then Prescott thought about the Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightning.” And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances.

As Millie asked him for the third time, “More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his breathe and said to himself one more time- “Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, Jesus, but Delores, the four kids, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.”

And as if to put paid to that resolve, as Josh made a funny face in recognition, Prescott had put a coin into the jukebox and played You Will Again, which he always said brought him good tidings, or at least made him feel better. A few minute after the song was completed and he and his father were ready to leave after saying good-bye to Jack Johnny Dubois came through the door and yelled, “Hey, Prescott, Jack, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.”

In The Age Of The Marriage Made In Heaven-Maybe-Carol Lombard And James Stewart's “Made For Each Other” (1939)-A Film Review

In The Age Of The Marriage Made In Heaven-Maybe-Carol Lombard And James Stewart's “Made For Each Other” (1939)-A Film Review

DVD Review

Leslie Dumont

Made For Each Other, starring Carol Lombard, Jimmy Stewart, 1939

This film review of Made For Each Other is one of those “he said, she said” kind of movies. No, not in the way you think about some spat between two lovers, marriage partners or simple bedmates. Rather about how to approach this film, this old time melodrama a genre which got many a movie audience especially during World War II made up of waiting at home or working in the factory women through the tough nights and working days. Not that I have anything against old time melodramas which were the staple of date nights in college in the days when guys paid on the date and if short of money, a chronic problem, always suggested some such film at the second run and retro-theaters around campus. Moreover when I was working at this publication in the days when it came out in hard copy before I saw the writing on the wall about getting my own by-line Josh Breslin, who still works here and who then was my companion, let’s leave it at that, was forever taking me to such retro-theaters to watch some melodrama or other old time film he had been assigned to review.     

No, what has me in a “he said, she said” mood was something that old time film reviewer Sam Lowell told his now longtime companion and fellow writer here Laura Perkins to do when you hadn’t a clue about how to go about “the hook” which every movie review rests on. Sam said when all else fails on an oldie you can always check out the “slice of life” edge and get the job done. That, in any case, is what Laura told me when I asked her what the hell to do with this tear-jerker which you however know deep in your bones is going to work out right in the end. Has to work out right because remember those waiting at home or working in the factories women who needed a boost to get them through those hard nights and boredom days.

While this film is not the worse you could ever find for the slice of mid-20^th century married life movie that it represents it is still hard for me to pick out some points that will enlighten the reader about those times. Here is the play though. John, an up and coming Mayfair swell bred young lawyer in New York City, played by Jimmy Stewart, meets Jane (hey I didn’t make up the character names but John and Jane in a now age of Trevor and Regan do signify a different sensibility), played by Carol Lombard, a young women of unknown means, on a business trip for an important case his big-time Yankee New York law firm is handling. Both smitten they immediately marry on the fly something more likely to happen once the World War comes America’s way a few years later.

This may be, and as already signaled will turn out to be, a marriage made in heaven but the road is long and bumpy. First off John’s high and mighty mother, an endlessly carping type that I was all too familiar with both with my own mother growing up and with my first husband’s mother so I could certainly sympathize with that dilemma, disapproves of his marriage choice preferring the boss’ daughter for her charge and then, a widow, moves in with the young marrieds and drives Jane crazy (that mother moving in different these days when the kids are moving in or staying in the parental home what with rents and housing prices out of reach for many these days). Worse, hard-working steady at the wheel Johnny boy winds up getting passed over for a partnership-the kiss of death in most law firms and time to move on although he does not do so even when Jane steels him to ask for a raise so they can get a little house and put dead-weight mother in the attic or something.         

If all that wasn’t enough John and Jane have a child who before he is a few years old winds up catching pneumonia and things look like he is a goner much to the distress of his loving parents. Nowadays getting the right medicines for childhood illnesses is no big deal but then whatever serums were around were sparse and expensive (as some drugs are today as well). Johnny up against it begs his niggardly boss to give him an advance or loan to get the drugs necessary which have to come all the way from Salt Lake City. So here is where the nail-biter part comes in-the part about getting the drugs to New York from there in a blizzard. Getting through the blizzard in an open cockpit plane for crying out loud. In the end though the child is saved, Johnny gets a raise and due to Jane’s stoic presence during the crisis gains Johnny’s mother’s respect. That will do it.

Ennui In The Fading Empire-The Film Adaptation Of Elizabeth Von Armin’s “The Enchanting April” (1992)-A Review

Ennui In The Fading Empire-The Film Adaptation Of Elizabeth Von Armin’s “The Enchanting April” (1992)-A Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Enchanted April, starring Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker, Joan Plowright, from the novel by Elizabeth von Armin, 1992

Somebody could have made some serious money in an office pool here betting on whether I would be assigned this “women’s movie” (I refuse to say “chick flick”) Enchanting April from the BBC based on Elizabeth von Armin’s novel. Apparently I am these days the “go-to” gal for anything that looks like it will be a romantic theme and with a happy ending. I will hold my fire on this issue for a bit since for a while I was getting juicy reviews to do. But recently it seems that the “good old boys” network has taken up all the good stuff. The good old boys including my long ago companion Josh Breslin who should know better since he both encouraged me to take a by-line at Women Today many years ago when it looked like I would always be a stringer here and recently asking me to come on board with the new management bringing in new ideas.   

But enough of the internal workings in the Internet publishing business and get to the story, not a bad story until near the end when that happy ending business falls from the sky. There was plenty to be sad about in post-World War I England in the 1920s after the blood bath of the war had taken the flower of young faltering British Empire manhood to the white cross graves in places like Flanders fields. Plenty as well to be sad about as well when the eternally rainy and foggy London weather could dampen even the blithest spirts. And plenty to be sad about when you are a woman (or a man but women are the punished here) in an unhappy marriage. Those three ideas come together in this film when two unhappy middle class women have seen the same ad in a newspaper for a castle to rent on the Italian coast for a month, the month of April.

Unhappily married Lottie, played by Josie Lawrence, convinces unhappily married Madonna-like Rose, played by Miranda Richardson, to pursue the idea and they eventually go for the brass ring. Having some financial problems swinging the expenses with just two they grab elderly and frail Mrs. Fisher, played by Joan Plowright, and the beautiful Lady Caroline, played by Polly Walker, to share expenses. The latter two also unhappy the former with growing old and alone and the latter having had it as the prime sex object of her set.

The play amongst the four very different personalities with very different desires gets mellowed in the enchanted April Italian sun amongst the flowers and sea breezes. Part of that mellowing process at least from Lottie is that she finally realizes that she is incomplete without her penny-pinching husband. So she invites him to come and stay with her. Guess what the Mediterranean mellows him out. Number one problem solved. Lottie gets Rose to write her husband to come visit as well and she does not expecting to see her tawdry novelist husband to show up but he does and the Italian sea air softens him too. Number two problem solved. That magical sea air also softens the sickly Mrs. Fisher who after the month gives up her walking cane. Problem number three solved. Finally the angst-filled Lady Caroline takes up with the gentile man who rented them the place after he was on the rebound from an unsuccessful courting of Rose. Problem number four solved. That by the numbers at the end when they all leave the castle together is where the whole thing breaks down in my mind given the troubles of the cast of characters. I would like my own problem solved by not having to be put upon to do these improbable women’s films.      

The Best Interest Of The Child-Pierce Brosnan’s “Evelyn” (2002)-A Film Review

The Best Interest Of The Child-Pierce Brosnan’s “Evelyn” (2002)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Special Guest Reviewer Frankie Riley

Evelyn, Pierce Brosnan, Aidan Quinn, 2002  

Christ, I haven’t written a film review in so long, hell, any non-legal writing that I have almost forgot the talent existed in any form. You might as well know right now that I have been dragooned into do this review of Evelyn  by Greg Green the site manager here via the machinations of one Sam Lowell who I grew up with in the old Irish Catholic-dominated poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville south of Boston. The dragooned part comes in from the bright idea that Sam, who before his merciful retirement used to be the film editor here (and in the old days at American Film Gazette which is where Greg came from as well speaking of nepotism), that this film needed the gentile hand of a lawyer to work out. Of course Sam, Greg, and the whole non-lawyerly universe does not realize that being a lawyer in America does not give one some “cred” when speaking of foreign, in this case Irish Republican, read Holy Mother Church-etched law even though all derives from the bloody Mother English common law.

I might as well get to the dilemma here, the legal dilemma since it essentially is an early case of “the best interest of the child,” a legal doctrine that is followed in many places in place of the old standard that     

the state should take hands off except in extremis in the matter of the welfare of children in the care of their loving parents. Wish that sentiment were truer than to say it is so. Society have come a long way on that score and still have a long way to go but this film gives a small brush of what the stakes were ( an unintended pun since the main character, main adult character is a painter as they used to say by trade). Of course when you speak of Ireland in the old days, the post-independence from bloody Mother England days when the boyos, including a few of my grand uncles and cousins of advanced degree gave His Majesty all that he could handle and then some and then caved in to the damn clergy and dear Most Apostolic Mother Church , so you know where I am coming from days. Unlike today when the Catholic Church has lost some of it relentless grip on the population (witness the vote on same-sex couples tying the knot and the forthcoming close election on abortion rights which really will break the strangle hold if successful) half the damn Irish Constitution had the Church’s position on all aspects of social life embedded in it. While watching this film I kept returning to a feeling that I am blessed to be living in a secular republic whatever inroads that the religiously-oriented crowd running amok and their secular allies in America have made in my now long life time.

The crux of the legal matter here, ultimately the constitutional question, was whether an article of that blessed document concerned the fate of the children in family when one spouse deserts the family and the other is left holding the bag and is at the mercy of the state. The procedure before anything else in other words. The provision contested concerned wording that in order for the children to stay with one parent, here the father, that un-punned painterly father, the other spouse wherever he or she is must give consent. Weird. Weirder still was that as a result of this 1941 law many, many Irish children with one non-deceased spouse were thrown to the wolves of the Catholic Church run orphanages. It is only the past few years, maybe a decade now that the ugly truth of what happened physically, sexually and emotionally in those hell-holes has come to light. Some people, religious and secular, are going to roast in hell for a long time over their heinous actions against their charges.      

The storyline here, what Sam always called the skinny, centers on the family of one Desmond Doyle who will be the driving force behind the struggle to get his children back. His wife left him for parts unknown with another man, worse, worse in Ireland and in the Acre neighborhood too with a bloody Englishman, meaning that she was not findable in order to give her consent. This left Desmond, played by Irishman Pierce Brosnan last seen in this space according to Sam playing the epitome of English bravado as 007, you know James Bond in one of those endless sagas about how a single resourceful MI6 agent can keep the empire from falling to ground, with no recourse one a lower court determined that his personal and employment life were not good enough to keep the state from getting its grubby hands on the sweet children and turning them over to the hands of legerous priests and witchy, bitchy nuns who had no problem not sparing the rod on the child.

But Desmond seriously loves the little ones, loves his little princess Evelyn above all at least the time she is given in the film to develop a winsome character against the time given to her two younger brothers who seem to be able to blow with the winds. So, with the help of a good woman, speaking about winsome, a winsome woman, he gets two parts of his life back in order. He give up “the drink” as they used to say at his pub and at the old Dublin Grille in the Acre when somebody went on the wagon (my father for one although he battled the bottle all of his life, at least all of the life I knew of him before he ran off with some “shawlie” but that was when I was an adult and had my own marital problems). The winsome lass also puts him in touch with her brother, a solicitor, who in turn brings in a barrister who is the one who can actually try the case (and who as a sidebar is also smitten by that winsome lass and no one could blame him). This is where the Promethean uphill battle gets joined to try to get some freaking court to overturn the lower court judgment and let Desmond have his little ones back.

I would have to say in the 1950s when this legal case moved forward I would have bet against victory given the strong role of the Church on governmental officials and that lucrative slave labor orphanage racket (and the other part as well with slave labor unwed mothers to speak nothing of the pedophilia crimes -Jesus, yes the fires of hell will burn brightly for many a night when that crowd, state and church gets it comeuppance). But several things happened that helped the case along, a case which depended on angel rays in the end (which is also a title of one of the songs on the soundtrack). One was getting a solid law professor as an advisor who helped get publicity for Desmond’s case. Best of all (and I don’t know how this actually played out in the real case) Evelyn who deserved her title of the film honor blew the court away with her pleading honest child-like testimony. Case closed.