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Good Morning, Mrs. Shaffer by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Favorite Teacher

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The magnificent Shirley Shaffer. Such fond memories.

It takes a long time to learn gratitude. When I look back and recall some of my schoolteachers, I’m sorry I never took the time to thank them — to let them know their hard work made a positive impact that still reverberates in my life.

I wish, sometime before she died, I had located my third-grade teacher Mrs. Shaffer. Picture a vivid personality, bright-red hair, a clarion voice, and take-charge personality. Mrs. Shaffer is an East Coast Jew, a bit of a Shelley Winters type — and therefore out of place in WASPy 1950s West Covina. She has moxie; she knows who she is.

As a kid I like her very much: She’s sassy and peppy and outspoken, but warm and caring beneath the brass. At our school there’s something called the “freeze bell” which rings loudly at the end of recess and requires students to stand completely still for 15 seconds and then walk — not run! — back to our classroom. One girl is making faces for the amusement of her friend. Mrs. Shaffer, the teacher on playground duty, quickly approaches and admonishes her. I can’t hear what the girl says in return but Mrs. Shaffer shouts back, “Young lady, it’s time you learn how to speak to your elders and superiors!” It sounds harsh and dictatorial but in the moment I’m impressed by Mrs. Shaffer’s quick comeback and command of language. It feels like a scene from a movie.

Mrs. Shaffer teaches us penmanship, and endeavors to foster a love for reading. One day she has us read a short biography of Abraham Lincoln, with the assignment to summarize it in writing for class. “Eddie, did you write this yourself?” she asks me the next day. “Yes,” I answer, a bit puzzled by the question.

“Well, it’s very good,” Mrs. Shaffer says. She’s the first person to tell me I have writing talent. I still remember how good that felt.

Mrs. Browning. Her dedication and discipline still inspire me.

Fast-forward nine years. I’m a senior in high school and Mrs. Browning is my English teacher. Quiet and conscientious, she’s a totally different personality from Mrs. Shaffer but similar in that she’s all business. She’s divorced and raising two teenage daughters while teaching five or six classes a day. I get the feeling she’s lonely, was probably hurt deeply when her marriage ended.

I imagine her going home to fix dinner each night for her daughters, asking how their day went and staying up late to grade papers and write lesson plans at the dinner table. The next morning she’ll dress quickly, fix breakfast and dash off to school. She is undeviating in her professionalism and devotion to teaching.

Mrs. Browning isn’t chummy. She doesn’t gossip, curry friendships with students or ask personal questions like some teachers do. Consequently, she doesn’t inspire the affection that the light-hearted, “cool” teachers do. But in retrospect, I appreciate her and know I learned more from her than from any other two or three instructors combined. She doesn’t nag or call out the slackers in class, but treats us as adults and expects us to step up and do the work correctly. She gives detailed instructions on how to write a term paper: where to type the footnotes, bibliography and index. She sets a timetable for completing each task. I miss several deadlines — it takes me years to develop a fraction of her discipline — but the example she sets never leaves me.

I never got the satisfaction of thanking Mrs. Shaffer or Mrs. Browning in their lifetimes.  But three years ago when I opened a Facebook page called “You Know You’re From West Covina If…,” I saw an old photo of my seventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Nyeholt. The memories flooded in and I decided to search for him online.

Henry Nyeholt, a great teacher and my “Mister Rogers.” Kindness is one thing we never forget.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood hadn’t aired yet, but in seventh grade Mr. Nyeholt was my Mister Rogers: someone who makes you feel good about yourself. On the surface he couldn’t have been more different: whereas Fred Rogers was plain and dweeby, Mr. Nyeholt was dashing and athletic. But in the most important way Mr. Nyeholt was similar: He had a calm, steady voice, never lost his temper and never spoke sharply to anyone. He listened, and treated his students with respect. As a result, nobody acted out in class. We’d all found a friend.

When I saw his picture in 2015, I remembered what a great guy he was. I googled his name and amazingly located Mr. Nyeholt right away. He was still living in West Covina fifty years later, and his address and phone number were online. I dialed his number.

“I’d like to speak with Henry Nyeholt,” I said when a man answered the phone. It was his son-in-law. He asked why I was calling and when I said I’d been a student of Mr. Nyeholt years ago, he stepped away to bring him to the phone. I was nervous. “Mr. Nyeholt,” I said when he picked up. “I’m sure you don’t remember me but you were my English teacher at Cameron Junior High…”

“Oh? Well, in that case you must be old!” he joked.

“I am. I found you online and I just wanted to tell you what fond memories I have of being in your English class. You were kind and you treated your students with respect. You were a wonderful teacher and I want to thank you.”

There was a brief pause. “That’s very nice of you,” he said. I think he was startled.

Mr. Nyeholt told me he was ninety one, still married to his wife of sixty six years, and had retired many years earlier. I didn’t know what to say next, so I wished him well and said goodbye. The phone call lasted three minutes at most.

The next day I emailed three friends who were at Cameron Junior High with me. When each responded and said how much they liked Mr. Nyeholt — April: “He was kind, soft-spoken”; Donna: “I appreciated him for motivating us to find an interest to study on our own all year”; Alan: “I owe him big time” — I decided to print out their remarks and mail them to our former teacher.

Two weeks later I received a letter from Mr. Nyeholt’s daughter, telling me how elated her dad was to receive the phone call and subsequent mail. That felt good. A couple of years later, I googled Mr. Nyeholt again and read that he died in December 2017. I learned he was a Navy veteran. A father of five, grandfather of ten. He taught school for thirty five years and, like most schoolteachers, he was probably undercelebrated.

There are bad teachers in everyone’s life; I had my share. The great ones are a rare and wonderful occurrence. If you have the opportunity to thank a teacher who’s still living, do it now. For yourself, and for that person whose gift will always be with you.

Falling in Love at the Theater by
25
(30 Stories)

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Times Square, 1964

In 1964 our family drove cross-country to see the World’s Fair in New York. On our last day in town, my mom and I took the subway to 51st and Broadway to see Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand. I was 13, starstruck, and thrilled to be in New York. But when we entered the Winter Garden Theatre lobby a grim announcement awaited us at the box office: “This performance sold out.”

Cue the sad trombone. Now let it fade and move forward 11 years to my first solo trip to New York.

By that point I’d seen touring companies of Broadway shows in Los Angeles, and religiously followed the Broadway scene through the New York Times’s Sunday Arts & Leisure section (thank you, West Covina Public Library). Broadway tickets were $16 tops in 1975 — it seemed exorbitant at the time — and I saw Anthony Hopkins in Equus, Rita Moreno in The Ritz, and Bob Fosse’s original production of Chicago with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera.

In all the years since I’ve made a theater pilgrimage to New York at least once a year, the exception being these Covid years. I’ve seen between 350 and 400 stage productions, mostly Broadway and several off-Broadway. In some way, it seems, I’m making up for the bruising disappointment of not seeing Funny Girl that summer afternoon in 1964.

Rita Moreno, hilarious in “The Ritz.”

One of the joys of live theater is witnessing a performance in real time, unfiltered and immediate. As a theater-goer, you’re a participant, a collaborator. You share the same space, breathe the same air. You wait for those thrilling moments when audience and actors create something together – a kind of magic, a chemical exchange, a perfect dance. For the performers it’s called “being in the zone” — when the audience is so alive that you ride the waves of their energy and responsiveness.

I’ve always loved actors and great acting. I’m grateful for all the pleasure and insight they’ve given me. Here’s are some memorable performances I’ve seen, not in order of preference.

Two stellar performances: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave in “Long Day’s Journey into Night.”

* Philip Seymour Hoffman played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 2012, two years before his death. He was excellent, but it was Hoffman’s painfully raw performance as the alcoholic son Jamie in Long Days Journey into Night that stays with me. I couldn’t imagine how someone could spill that much blood, figuratively speaking, for eight shows a week and still survive. It felt like you were watching his heart break and his spirit wrenched dry. What could still be left of him when he walked off stage?

Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis, “Porgy and Bess.”

* Audra McDonald is great in everything. She has a powerful soprano that’s lush with color and emotion, but she’s also a superb actress. I’ve seen her seven times on Broadway, in Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, 110 in the Shade, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, as Billie Holliday in Lady Emerson at the Bar & Grill, and in Shuffle Along. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d go with Porgy and Bess. Bess is a desperate drug addict – that’s what drives her and crushes her – but until Audra I’d never seen that aspect of her character realized so vividly. The whole show made more sense as a result. I’ve also seen Audra in concert two or three times, and she’s one of the warmest, most generous performers. She loves what she does.

*  Reba McEntire was the original choice for the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, but when she wasn’t available the producers hired Bernadette Peters. A year later when Reba’s schedule opened up, she replaced Peters and gave a robust, joyful performance that might be the greatest musical-theater turn I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t a Nashville-hitmaker-slash-Broadway-newbie trying her darnedest to convince us she belonged on a Broadway stage. No, this was a consummate pro giving a fully realized performance, so expert in comic timing and stagecraft that had you not known better you’d have sworn she’d spent her entire career in musical theater. Dazzling.

I was lucky to see her closing night, which is always a good time to see a hit show — the emotions run high. Reba’s parents were brought on stage to surprise her, and they were adorably shy and awkward and overwhelmed with pride. The audience was full of Reba fans and theater geeks and Annie repeaters who’d seen her in the show four, five times. Her cast members and half the audience were in tears. Unforgettable.

George Hearn and Angela Lansbury, both brilliant in “Sweeney Todd.”

* Angela Lansbury, George Hearn and Patti LuPone in Sweeney Todd. Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece is the ultimate proving ground for a musical theater performer. The lyrics are sophisticated and brittle, the musical structures complex, the material demanding even for seasoned veterans. Lansbury said Mrs. Lovett was the greatest role she ever played, and if you want a master class in acting please take a look at her stellar rendition of the songs “A Little Priest” and “The Worst Pies in London.” You can rent it from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sweeney-Todd-Demon-Barber-Street/dp/B085LVRHPK.

Hearn was equally remarkable. He wasn’t the original Sweeney (that was Len Cariou), but I saw him in a touring production in 1980 at the Golden Gate in San Francisco, and 20 years later in a San Francisco Symphony concert with Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett. The word that comes to mind when I think of Hearn in Sweeney is “titanic.” He harnessed such power, and expressed so viscerally Sweeney’s tragic thirst for vengeance, that I could feel his grief under my skin, crawling up my back and down each arm. I remember when LuPone and Hearn had taken their final bows, LuPone took a step back, opened her arms with love and admiration and said to Hearn, “Take another bow.” What a pro.

Patti LuPone delivers “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy.” What a great performer and what cojones!

LuPone, you might remember, is the actress who lashed out at an audience member (“Who do you think you are?”) who took a photo of her during her big number, “Rose’s Turn,” in a 2008 revival of Gypsy. Years later she saw someone texting in the first row and snatched the cell phone out of the miscreant’s hand. How can you not love her?

* In Terrence McNally’s Master Class, Zoe Caldwell played opera diva Maria Callas – not the young Callas but the later-in-life veteran giving a master class in singing. Caldwell, an Australian who worked in England before coming to the U.S., had an extraordinary speaking voice – deep and throaty, supple, musical in its variation and texture.

Magnificent Zoe Caldwell in Terrence McNally’s “Master Class.”

I always hope when I go to the theater (or to a movie) that one of two things will happen: 1) I’ll fall in love, or 2) I’ll see something I’ve never seen before. With Zoe Caldwell, both happened. She was sly, she was diabolical; she was flirtatious, wise and wickedly funny. She encompassed all of that in one performance.

The young cast of “Spring Awakening.”

* Spring Awakening. Timing is everything. When I visited New York in the fall of 2006, I heard the buzz about a contemporary rock musical, still in previews, adapted from an 1891 German play about disaffected youth. Sounds strange but it worked brilliantly. My friend and I scored tickets to the last preview before opening night and the ensemble cast – including Jonathan Groff, Lea Michelle and John Gallagher, Jr. – was on fire. The company was so thrilled to be on stage together — in a nascent hit — that you got a contact high from watching them. The energy was electrifying, the audience ecstatic.

There were many more. For these fine performances, I’m also grateful: Vanessa Redgrave in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Gabriel Byrne, heartbreaking in Moon for the Misbegotten; phenomenal Lily Tomlin playing 12 roles in her one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe; Amanda Plummer and Geraldine Page in Agnes of God; Dorothy Loudon in Annie; Rita Moreno, hilarious in The Ritz and riveting in Master Class at Berkeley Rep; Dorothy Collins, The Sound of Music; Dustin Hoffman, in a 1984 revival of Death of a Salesman.

Amanda Plummer and Geraldine Page in “Agnes of God.”

Judith Ivey, Hurlyburly and the best Amanda Wingfield I’ve ever seen in The Glass Menagerie; Mary-Louise Parker, How I Learned to Drive, Proof and The Sound Inside; Judi Dench, Amy’s View; Patti LuPone, Evita, Anything Goes and Gypsy; Mandy Patinkin, Evita; Cherry Jones, Doubt and The Heiress; Jefferson Mays, I Am My Own Wife; Elaine Stritch, A Delicate Balance; Joan Allen, Burn This; Sandy Duncan, Peter Pan; Natalia Makarova, On Your Toes; Alan Cumming, Cabaret; and John Glover, Love! Valour! Compassion!

“And now, right here on our stage…” by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Variety Shows

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In the years when I was growing up, which were the early years of television, my family watched a lot of TV together. My dad had his recliner, just like Archie Bunker, which no one else was allowed to sit in. My mom sat on one end of the sofa to his right, crocheting. The boys claimed the other chairs and our cocker spaniel Rusty, who howled to the Final Jeopardy music on Jeopardy, had his place on the carpet.

There weren’t a lot of choices on TV in the 1950s and ’60s – just three networks and three local channels, which made it easy to remember which shows appeared on which nights and in what order. We watched a lot of family sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons, and nearly every night one of the variety shows that proliferated on 1960s network TV. Saturday you had Jackie Gleason and later Carol Burnett. Tuesday was Red Skelton. Thursday was Dean Martin. And from 1948 to 1971, Sunday nights belonged to Ed Sullivan.

Sullivan was the unlikeliest of TV hosts. Originally a syndicated newspaper columnist, he had absolutely no charisma and no performing talent of his own (“Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else on television,” cracked comic Alan King) and was often mocked for his stiff-shouldered posture and stilted speech (“We’ve got a really big shew for you tonight”). He earned the nickname Old Stoneface. But he had a great eye for talent, and a keen sense of timing. “Who was hot?” “Who was about to get hot?” Ed always knew.

Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. The network insisted on shooting him from the waist up.

Today he’s best remembered for introducing Elvis Presley and The Beatles to American audiences, but in fact Sullivan booked the people you most wanted to see every single week, year after year. Watching his show, you got the sense of being part of a collective national experience — of having your hand on the pulse of popular culture. Anyone with a hit record went on Sullivan, anyone riding high in a Broadway smash. And being that it was a variety show in the fullest sense of the word, you got a stupefyingly wide range of entertainment. Alongside the A-list stars, there were Chinese acrobats, plate spinners, folkloric dancers and the Marquis Chimps. Into the mix came jazz, classical music and ballet; cameo appearances by popular athletes; novelty acts like the Italian mouse Topo Gigio and Spanish ventriloquist Senor Wences, who drew on his hand and made it a puppet.

Jackie Mason

You had stand-up comics, most of whom were Jewish: Jackie Mason, Myron Cohen, Jack Carter, Totie Fields and Joan Rivers. And, since the show originated in New York in the same Broadway theater where Late Night with Stephen Colbert is taped today, you got a taste of the grit and moxie of native New Yorkers. You heard those pungent accents – I’m thinking of Jerry Stiller, a Jew from the Lower East Side, and Anne Meara, his Irish-American wife from Long Island — that came directly off the streets and declared unambiguously, “I’m a New Yorker.” Sadly, those accents are disappearing.

Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.”

I grew up loving Broadway musicals, and I have Sullivan to thank for that. I remember Lucille Ball coming on his show to sing “Hey, Look Me Over!” from her short-lived musical Wildcat, and dazzling Gwen Verdon offering “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity. A spot on the Sullivan show could rouse a sleeping box office, create a hit where an early closing notice seemed imminent. In his memoir On the Street Where I Live, the My Fair Lady lyricist Alan Jay Lerner wrote that when Camelot opened in 1960, “Word-of-mouth was not good and the chances of recovering the investment seemed infinitesimal.” When Sullivan announced plans to salute the fifth anniversary of My Fair Lady with a full-hour tribute to Lerner and his songwriting partner Frederick Loewe, he agreed to include four songs from the struggling Camelot at the back end of the program. “Ed, one of the most gracious gentlemen in television, gave us carte blanche,” Lerner wrote.

Julie Andrews, Richard Burton in “Camelot.” A Sullivan appearance turned their sleeping show into an overnight hit.

The following morning, Lerner was awakened by a phone call from the manager of the Majestic Theatre: After weeks of sluggish box office, there was a line halfway down the block. Camelot became a solid hit, won several Tonys and ran for two years. There were probably hundreds of stories like that. The Sullivan effect was so deep and wide that a song in Bye Bye Birdie, “Hymn for a Sunday Evening,” playfully satirized his influence. The family of a teenage girl from Sweet Apple, Ohio, is about to make an appearance on the Sullivan Show, and they are so overjoyed that they burst into song: “Ed Sull-i-van! Ed Sull-i-van! We-e-e’re gonna be on Ed Sull-i-van!” Back then, he had the same level of clout and fame that Oprah enjoyed at her peak.

Lerner’s comments notwithstanding, Sullivan was a controversial and sometimes abrasive figure.  “As the show’s producer, he took dictatorial control over every aspect of his production,” wrote James Maguire in Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan. “In contrast to his persona as the reserved and respectful host, as producer he didn’t care who he offended, with the exception of a very few high-profile guests.” After a Sunday afternoon rehearsal, he would often cut or reshape a comic’s material, assign a different song to a singer or even drop a performer altogether if they didn’t “jibe with his gut instinct of what would reach the home audience.”

Sullivan with the recalcitrant Mick Jagger.

During those years of The Ed Sullivan Show, American entertainment wasn’t Balkanized the way it is today, meaning that every kind of act, irrespective of race, genre or nationality, appeared on the show “And now, right here on our stage,” Ed would announce, and bring on Diana Ross and The Supremes, or uber-diva Maria Callas, or Black comic Jackie “Moms” Mabley. When the Rolling Stones guested on Sullivan, CBS’s Standards & Practices office insisted they replace the lyric “Let’s spend the night together” with “Let’s spend some time together” – a silly sanitizing gesture that Mick Jagger derided by rolling his eyes during the live performance. I remember French chanteuse Edith Piaf making multiple appearances, each time in the same black dress and each time delivering her triumph-through-tears anthem “Milord”; and gospel queen Mahalia Jackson, another regular, breaking into a sweat and patting down the beads of perspiration on her face with an ever-present handkerchief.

Plate spinners on the Sullivan show. Ed offered variety in the fullest sense of the word.

Those are all vivid and fond memories. The Sullivan show was a weekly event in the life of my family, an every-Sunday-night ritual. When I look back, it’s significant that we watched it in real time. Nobody had DVRs or TiVo back then, so you couldn’t record a show; you couldn’t pause or rewind during a broadcast. That meant you had to be more focused, more present than the multi-tasking, smart phone-addicted TV watchers of today. It made the experience of sharing a favorite program — with your family, with the rest of America watching simultaneously — that much richer.

In March 1971, CBS foolishly decided to cancel The Ed Sullivan Show after 23 years and an astonishing 1,068 episodes. The network wanted to target the youth demographic with its greater potential ad revenue, and saw the Sullivan audience as old and staid. Ed was irate at being axed, and refused to host the additional three months of scheduled shows. The network ran reruns instead.

Television’s ultimate impresario lived another three years beyond his cancellation, dying shortly after his 73rd birthday on October 13, 1974. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, 3,000 people attended his funeral on a cold and rainy day, honoring a man whose personal manner was stodgy and uptight, but whose instincts as a host and tastemaker brought us decades of great entertainment. Television has never been quite the same since.

My Mom Was a Wonderful Mother, But Her Cooking…? by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Mealtime

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My mom was a wonderful mother in many ways – patient, modest, innately kind — but she was not a particularly good cook.

“Oh, I was a boring cook,” she admitted once when she was in her 70s and taking her meals in the dining room at Leisure World, the retirement facility where she and my dad spent their last years. “I made the same things over and over and never tried anything new.”

So true.

Generic family at dinner table, no resemblance to my own.

And yet, mealtimes were special in our household, in the sense that they were reliable and punctual and, though I didn’t appreciate this at the time, a source of comfort and constancy. I say this even though our family wasn’t very happy during my high school years. My brother Dan and I were sworn enemies, my dad was a tyrant who was usually grumpy after a long day at work, and my mother was left to walk a thin tightrope between pleasing Dad and simultaneously nurturing my brothers and me in ways that didn’t appear to him to be overly indulgent.

A proper place setting.

Older brother Dan and I sat at the heads of the table, far apart to deter our squabbling. Mom sat to my left, with younger brother Dave at her left. Dad sat opposite Dave, with Grandma at his side during the winter months when she visited from Chicago. I still remember the woven cotton place mats, off-white and salmon-pink. Fork on the left, knife and spoon on the right, Paper napkins, not cloth. A glass of milk at each setting. Never wine or beer for either parent. You weren’t allowed to put your elbows on the table, to sing or to hum, and if you finished early and had something to do you were expected to politely ask, “May I be excused?”

What Mom served for dinner, I’m sure, was largely subject to Dad’s approval. “I don’t want you boys eating highly seasoned foods,” he announced once with dour authority. “Why?” I asked. “Because I said so,” he answered. I never found out why — maybe because spicy foods lead to digestive problems and to colitis, gastritis and stomach ulcers? Beats me.

Tuna casserole. not to be served to gourmets, Francophiles or future restaurateurs.

Consequently, the bill of fare at the Guthmann table was bland and overcooked. Mom’s hamburgers, a weekly occurrence, weren’t flavorful, juicy or plump, but flat and dry and requiring lots of ketchup. On the side we’d have French fries, deep-fried on the stove top, that were three times the size of restaurant fries.

Tuna casserole was another standby. That recipe, which I still have on a faded 3×5 file card, calls for 1-½ cups of broken raw noodles (the word “pasta” was never used in our household, just “noodles”); a family-size can of tuna; a can of cream of mushroom soup; 2/3 cup of evaporated milk; 1/3 cup of minced onion; and half a cup of grated American cheese. Mix together lightly, sprinkle a crumble of potato chips on top, and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

I’m tempted to make it again. Who knows what kind of Proustian memories might be aroused?

Veal parmesan, not a favorite.

I made Mom’s tuna casserole in college, and for a brief time after I moved to San Francisco. I once served it in my tiny kitchen on Oak Street to Billy West, a Francophile and devoted foodie who later opened the now-legendary Zuni Café. I swear I had no idea at the time that tuna casserole was an embarrassingly down-market entrée – not to be served to sophisticates. Apparently I was forgiven, because Billy invited me to dinner, too. It was so long ago that I don’t know what he served. Poached salmon with haricots verte, perhaps? Persimmon pudding? I just remember being stunned by the rich, surprising and subtle flavors. Things I’d never tasted. I didn’t know that people could eat that elegantly in their own home! I thought you had to go to a fancy restaurant for food like that.

Tater Tots. Who’s ready for heartburn?

Which brings me back to my mother and her modest culinary skills. Pork chops and meat loaf were other staples. Fried chicken with Uncle Ben’s rice on the side – not bad. Steak, which I always smothered in A-1 Steak Sauce. Veal parmesan with enough cheese to choke a Clydesdale. Macaroni and cheese. Spaghetti prepared with tomato sauce, ground beef and a packet of Lawry’s seasoning.

On the side, there’d be a baked potato or more often Tater Tots. Frequently a salad of iceberg lettuce, chopped carrots and those tough, mealy tomatoes from Alpha Beta or Von’s supermarket. Oil and vinegar dressing was a favorite. Or “1000 Island,” which Mom improvised by mixing ketchup with mayonnaise. She had a thing for mayonnaise.

We never, ever ate avocados.

Years ago I read food critic Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, in which she describes with horror a dinner at her ex-mother-in-law’s home. On the side was a pear salad. One half of a syrupy canned pear sat on a iceberg lettuce leaf, with a fat dollop of mayonnaise in the scooped-out hole in the center. As I read Reichl’s book, I remembered with a cringe that my mother served that exact same salad. I suspect she culled it from Betty Crocker, or another quick-and-easy cookbook from the frugal Fifties.

Mom never served avocados or artichokes, even though we lived in California where they grew abundantly. All our vegetables were frozen or canned, corn on the cob being the exception. Until I was grown, I didn’t know how fresh spinach, peas, broccoli or Brussels sprouts tasted. White bread only, never wheat or rye. And, since Mom had an aversion to shellfish, never lobster, shrimp, scallops or mussels, which were probably out of her budget anyway.

It’s called cranberry “sauce,” but is it?

Even at Thanksgiving and Christmas, thrift and ease were Mom’s culinary guiding principles. Our turkey stuffing came from a package and turned soggy when cooked. Sweet potatoes were served; a relish dish of pitted olives, sliced carrots and celery. The cranberry sauce was canned – I remember the bright red cylinder slipping out and shimmying slightly on the plate, the ribbing from the tin still visible on the jellied hunk of “sauce.”

Oreo cookies. Don’t split them in half!

Desserts varied little throughout the year. Ice cream cake roll from Baskin Robbins was a huge favorite. More often Mom served rice pudding or Ish Kabibble (chocolate pudding with Nilla wafers), or Jell-O with sliced bananas and chunks of Libby’s fruit cocktail inside — plus a scoop of mayonnaise on top. Other nights dessert it was two Oreo cookies each, which was tricky since I loved to split Oreos in half and scrape the frosting off with my top front teeth. If Mom caught me in the act, she’d say, “That counts as two cookies, you don’t get the second.”

That makes her sound mean and stingy, which she wasn’t. She just hated to see me playing with food.

I feel a tad guilty discussing my mother’s culinary limitations, but in her defense she was never taught how to cook by her own mother. I know from talking to dozens of people over the years that she was typical of housewives from the 1950s and ‘60s, an era when the prudent budgeting of time and grocery bills was paramount. The exceptions I find are Jewish or Italian friends, whose grandmothers came from the Old Country and made delicious, fragrant meals and passed their artistry down to later generations. The rest of us, limited by experience and underdeveloped palates, had a long learning curve ahead.

But here’s what I want to emphasize: Although my mother wasn’t an accomplished or passionate cook, she was utterly faithful, dependable and the true emotional center of our family. She made it all work, and tried to keep the peace. She always had supper ready when Dad came home from work at 6:15 or 6:30, always greeted him sweetly and asked how his day went — knowing his mood might be foul — and rarely complained about her lot in life, the amount of work she exerted in having dinner ready each night, or the level of appreciation she received or didn’t receive.

I don’t know how she did it, but I am forever grateful.

That Summer in Europe by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By That Summer

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It seemed reasonable to me. I was about to go to Europe for three months, and if I budgeted myself correctly the trip would cost $450 for the entire summer.

So that’s what I did. It was 1971 and I was 20, the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I’d saved money from working in the campus library and with $450 in traveler’s checks, a Eurail Pass, a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day and a borrowed backpack I boarded a charter flight from Oakland to Amsterdam.

I did it alone, because none of my friends had the money or the inclination to go for that long. It didn’t occur to me I’d get lonely, which I often did, or that my $5 daily stipend would prove awfully limiting and sometimes painful. I traveled on the rough: staying in youth hostels that charged the equivalent of $2.15 for bed and breakfast; sleeping occasionally on trains; eating Wimpy burgers for lunch; making dinner from yogurt, cheese and a hunk of bread and eating it on a park bench.

Every single American college student was tramping through Europe that summer, or so it seemed. Time Magazine ran a story about the great exodus and put it on their cover. But there were thousands of young Europeans, Australians and Israelis as well. and what developed was a wide-ranging fraternity of  young and curious, like-minded adventurers. We crossed paths, swapped stories and shared information about bargain flights and cheap hotels, which hostels to avoid and which destinations not to miss.

I slept on cement floors more than once. In Madrid, a dusty youth hostel on the edge of town had no toilet facilities, just holes in the floor and two well-worn grooves to place your feet in. In Munich, hostelers were awakened each morning when a large frau marched through the dormitories banging on an enormous stewpot with a heavy metal spoon. In Geneva, they blasted you awake Waco-style with loud music until you got out of bed. Most hostels required that you vacate after breakfast, and barred you from re-entering until 5 p.m.

That kind of thing gets tiring. A couple of times I took a detour to the countryside north of Paris where my Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob were teaching at the European Bible Institute in Lamorlaye. I could catch up on sleep there and uncouple from the tourism circuit. Eat Aunt Betty’s cooking, do my laundry and enjoy my aunt’s shy, quiet, graceful hospitality. I adored her.

I visited nine countries in 13 weeks, circling clockwise from England and Scotland to France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. I got introduced to sangria, tapas and the audacious, dripping-candle architecture of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona; visited a tiny, remote Danish village called Vistoft where two American friends were apprenticing as ceramicists and escaping the Vietnam War; crossed the English Channel in a hovercraft and, when arriving in France after two weeks in Britain, felt like I’d stepped from dreary black-and-white into a gorgeous Technicolor spectacle. Near the boat dock in Calais you had a shop that sold nothing but cheeses, some in huge, 6-foot-tall wheels. Next to it a wine shop, a patisserie and a flower shop exploding with color and fragrance and something that felt like the celebration of life.

In Barcelona, I was hosted by Raul Alcalay, a Catalan who’d spent a year as foreign exchange student to my home town of West Covina. On the back of Raul’s motor scooter I got a king’s tour of Barcelona and everything designed by the miraculous Gaudi. His family dined at 10 p.m., a multi-course meal that lasted almost till midnight, and later Raul took me to rowdy tavernas where Catalan men played guitar and drunkenly sang Cuban revolutionary songs. At night I slept in the Alcalays’ tiny guest room and felt very fortunate; in another part of the spacious apartment Raul’s lovely mother, 45 years at most, was dying of cancer.

In Denmark I boarded a train in Copenhagen, located on the island of Sjaelland, and headed west. The entire train rode onto a huge ferry that crossed a 14-mile body of water, left the ferry and traveled overland on the island of Fyn, then crossed a short bridge to the Jutland peninsula. In Montreux, that elegant Swiss town on Lake Geneva, I took the greatest train journey of my life. As we headed east to the German-speaking region of Switzerland, a stream of cheerful, rosy-cheeked hikers boarded wearing lederhosen and rucksacks and carrying pointed, hand-carved hiking sticks. The train kept climbing, the Alpine landscape grew lusher and cooler, and by late afternoon we had slowed to a crawl while the train finessed a tangle of tight curves. The scenery was so enchanted that when the train turned to reveal a waterfall filtered through foggy mist, it seemed that everyone on the train – day hikers, old ladies, tourists and children — quietly sighed in unison. Or so it seems to me now in retrospect. A perfect moment.

The train terminated in Interlaken, a resort town high in the Alps. The youth hostel was full but outside the train station I met a lively Dutch family who invited me to share their dinner and spend the night at their camping site next to Lake Thun. Mr. and Mrs. Van Dyk’s kindness and generosity were overwhelming, and their beer was excellent. When it rained buckets that night their son Chris rescued me from the leaky tent they’d loaned me, and set me up on the floor of their caravan trailer. The lightning was thrilling on that magnificent night: with each angry thunderclap the entire valley lit up so brightly – like high noon in July – that you could see the blunt peaks of the Jungfrau, the Eiger and the Mönch in sharp relief.

The following day I thanked the Van Dyks and took a narrow-gauge train on a steep ascent up to Grindelwald, probably the prettiest, most pristine village I’ve ever seen. Rustic chalets with flower boxes at each window, the freshest air you’ve ever tasted, friendly people, amazing vistas. Everything sparkled. I remember speaking to a pair of older hikers who asked how long I’d be staying. When I said one day, they looked sad for me. My memory of Grindelwald is bittersweet, precisely because I couldn’t stay longer and also because I know that if I went back today I would be disappointed by the growth and the clamor of tourism.

My last stop that summer was Amsterdam, where I’d started the journey. I remember standing in a record store where you could rent a turntable by the hour and listen to a variety of LPs. I chose Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which had come out that summer. It was about travel, about being young and alone in the world and questioning your path. The song “California,” with its plaintive longing for home and connection and constancy, sounded like she’d written it just for me:

Joni captured an essential aspect of youth in “Blue”: the anticipation of something soon to change, the thrill and anxiety of that anticipation, and the ways in which foreign travel intensifies those thoughts. The day after standing in that Amsterdam record store and falling in love with “Blue” —to this day, it’s still my favorite record— I flew home to California. Out of the $450 in Thomas Cook’s traveler’s checks that I took to Europe in June, I somehow still had $15 left.

That summer in Europe was the beginning of a lifetime of travel – a passion that’s never sated. I don’t travel rough any longer, and sometimes I spend in two days what I spent over three months in 1971. I’ve visited 45 countries so far and all seven continents and I’m impatient as I write this, waiting for Covid to disappear so I can explore again without fear. Travel teaches you so much: geography and other cultures; how to see the world through someone else’s eyes; to think more openly and curiously and without bias.

“The world is a book,” Saint Augustine wrote, “and those who do not travel read only one page.”

Dad’s Las Vegas, My Las Vegas by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Family Trips

/ Stories

My dad loved Las Vegas. The glamour and sass, the bravado. He loved the chiming bustle of the casinos, the celebrity spotting, the chance to briefly feel like a big shot and maybe score a few quick bucks at the gaming tables.

Las Vegas in the early 1960s.

Vegas was totally different in the early ’60s. With 100,000 residents it had one twentieth the population of today, and while it had a certain tacky sheen it hadn’t approached the aggressively grotesque grandiosity you see today. It was quieter, more modest, less inclined to force itself down your throat.

Dad grew up in Chicago, and carried with him the raw, uninhibited grit of that city. I think he was out of place in California, even after he’d lived here 50 years. His buddies were Italian American, rough around the edges, and they’d all migrated, like him, from the Midwest or East Coast. You had Cado Castorelli, the grocer who brayed like a donkey and lived beyond his means; Rocco Calabrio, the all-seeing barber with the soft voice and Don Ameche moustache; and Vinny Manetti, who ran a TV repair shop and had daughters named Amelia and Philomena.

Vintage Vegas.

Dad’s buddies had connections in Vegas, the possible implications of which didn’t occur to me at the time. In the 1960s, the Mafia ran that racy town. Once a year, Dad took our family to Vegas for a weekend vacation but curiously never booked a hotel in advance. We’d rise at 4 a.m. to avoid driving in the midday Mojave Desert heat and arrive four hours later at the Riviera or the Sahara, both classy joints on the Strip. Inside the air-conditioned lobby with its shiny mid-century décor, Dad would approach the front desk and drop the name of somebody who was a very good friend of somebody else. An assistant manager would glide out from behind a wall, smooth and glossy. “How are you, Marv? Yes, I believe we can accommodate you and your family.”

I’m not saying Rocco, Cado and the rest of Dad’s Italian buddies were actual wise guys, but in my fertile imagination they might’ve had connections to the lower rungs of that flashy extended family that dominated Vegas. Maybe.

The Riviera, my favorite Las Vegas hotel. Closed in 2015, and later demolished.

A weekend in Vegas was our family’s once-a-year slice of living large. In the daytime Dad shot craps and played poker in the casino. Mom read books at poolside and my brothers and I swam in the enormous pool and squabbled. There was something fun and something charged — literally — about staying in a big modern Vegas hotel: if you scooted your shoes along the hallway carpet and then pressed the elevator button, you’d get a tiny shock.

At night Dad treated us to dinner and a big-ticket nightclub act in one of the showrooms along the Strip. He loved playing big spender and when we arrived he would slip the maitre d’ a twenty-dollar bill – $178 in today’s currency – to secure a good table near the stage. Once settled in a posh banquette he’d sit up straight, shoulders back, and wink to acknowledge the grandness of the occasion. In a formal voice reserved for such occasions he’d say, “What do you wish?” to my brothers and me, inviting us to select from a menu of lobster, filet mignon, sweetbreads and flaming desserts.

A very young Richard Pryor.

We saw Johnny Carson do his nightclub act one year, Donald O’Connor the next, and in 1966 caught Bobby Darin and an unknown, opening-act comic named Richard Pryor. The Vietnam War had started and when Pryor did a silly bit that night about a sailor on a submarine, the inebriated mother of a deceased soldier stood up in the audience, shouted “Up yours!” for disrespecting servicemen and stormed out. Pryor never recovered his cool and his set was ruined.

In the early ’60s, the era of Ocean’s 11 and the Rat Pack, Vegas was totally different. With 100,000 residents it had one twentieth the population of today, and while it had a certain tacky sheen it didn’t approach the aggressively grotesque grandiosity you see today. It was quieter, more modest, less inclined to force itself down your throat. The Desert Inn resort had a country club ambience and its own golf course. The town wasn’t overbuilt: along the Strip between the Sands and the Flamingo, the Stardust and the Tropicana, there were still vacant lots with tumbleweed and creosote bush. Instead of nonstop glitz you’d also see liquor stores, gas stations, a drive-in movie theater and several low-priced motels – the Tallyho, the Lotus Inn, the Wagon Wheel – with promises of frosty A/C, silver dollar jackpots and cheap steak-and-eggs breakfast.

Liberace.

One afternoon Dad took us to the Desert Inn where Phil Harris, fresh off a golf game, was holding court and laughing like a bon vivant in the lobby. Nobody knows who Phil Harris was any more, but he was married to movie star Alice Faye and did the voice of Baloo the bear in Disney’s The Jungle Book. Vegas was much more relaxed in those days, the stars a lot less cautious. One year I saw Phyllis Diller enter the back door of the Sahara near the parking garage, looking like a tourist with a big bunch of shopping bags. I was even more entertained when Eddie Gevirtz dove into the pool at the Sahara. Gevirtz was a wacky Los Angeles TV personality who owned Regal Furs and hawked his pelts on the local pro-wrestling telecasts. He was a furrier by trade, which struck my brothers and me as hysterically funny when we saw his hirsute body in swim trunks.

Peggy Lee.

I was starstruck as a kid. One year at the Riviera Peggy Lee was headlining and somehow I discovered her room number. Full of chutzpah, I left a large picture postcard under her door asking for an autograph with a special request that she have it delivered to my room. Today she’d be ensconced on the edge of town in a gated community, or in a secure hotel penthouse with a private elevator. And here’s an interesting footnote: the following year our family stayed again at the Riviera and Liberace was headlining. I remember looking out the window of our hotel room and seeing the name of his opening act on the marquee: an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.

A very young Barbra Streisand..

That was the summer of 1963. I knew who Streisand was — she’d been on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Garry Moore Show and her first album was rising on the charts — but I didn’t know enough to urge my parents to take us to see her in her first Western U.S. appearance. Years later I read that Liberace had championed Streisand, insisted she open for him at the lavish Versailles Room. When the Vegas audiences, who didn’t know her, chattered during her set, Liberace decided to walk out on stage at the top of each show — probably in a red-sequined tuxedo and voluminous fox fur coat — and introduce Streisand as his exciting new “discovery.” With an emphatic stamp of approval from the world’s highest-paid entertainer, the blue-haired Liberace diehards got quiet and paid respect to the unusual girl with the Modigliani face and amazing voice.

I don’t have much interest in today’s Las Vegas. On every level it’s too much. The crowds, the traffic, the vulgar one-upmanship, the 120-foot-long stage at the Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace. Everything is inflated, designed to eclipse what came before. I prefer my memories from the early ‘60s when Vegas, even though it seemed brassy and opulent at the time, was tiny and simple compared with today.

Watching Whoopi Get Famous by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Interviews

/ Stories

The first time I encountered Whoopi Goldberg, she was doing her act at a tiny performance space in San Francisco’s South of Market district. The proprietor at 544 Natoma, a friendly madman named Peter Hartman, invited me to drop by and catch a new solo performer. The name sounded like an old-school Borscht Belt comic. So I laughed.

Seriously, Whoopi Goldberg? He said she was a black woman, and very good on stage.

This is the show that Mike Nichols directed and presented on Broadway in Nov. 1984. It’s also exactly how I remember Whoopi looking when I first knew her. That floppy knit tam she wore on stage — she wore that offstage, too.

I went on faith and that night saw Whoopi morph from one character to another: a male dope fiend, a blonde surfer chick, a 77-year-old show-biz fringie. Her portraits were textured, humanistic, finely tuned. There were 20 or 25 people in the audience that night, in a room the size of a large kitchen. I remember Whoopi breaking the fourth wall as she acted, looking into people’s eyes and sometimes approaching and touching them on the knee or the arm.

That was 1981. She was obviously gifted, and obviously had a bedrock of self-confidence. But I never expected – who could? — that in three years Whoopi Goldberg would be an A-list movie star. One day she’s a struggling artist, dressed in oversized painters’ pants, a man’s thermal undershirt and a floppy knit tam. She’s sharing a messy cottage in Berkeley with her boyfriend David Schein and her 10-year daughter Alex. She and Schein are acting with the Blake Street Hawkeyes, a scruffy, experimental stage troupe, and in between gigs she collects welfare.

As Celie in “The Color Purple.” Her first Hollywood film, her first Oscar nomination.

She didn’t have Mainstream Future Star written all over her — not at all. And yet, in 1984 Mike Nichols was presenting her on Broadway and Steven Spielberg was offering her the lead role in The Color Purple. There was no middle ground, it seemed, over which she had to pass; she just catapulted from obscurity to stardom.

“All this stuff is coming to me on a silver platter,” Whoopi told me when I interviewed her for the San Francisco Chronicle. “People have literally told me, ‘Anything you want, ask.’ ”

Over the next 36 years, Whoopi made 184 film and television appearances. She won an Oscar, a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy. Hosted the Oscars four times and several Comic Relief specials with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. Co-produced and starred in Hollywood Squares, then leveraged her visibility into a lucrative, 13-years-and-running gig as host of The View.

In grade school, in the Chelsea district of Mahattan.

A remarkable tale, especially when you consider its origins. Reared in a housing project in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, Whoopi was born Caryn Elaine Johnson. Her parents divorced early and her schoolteacher mom, Emma, raised Whoopi and her brother Clyde on her own. In her teens Whoopi struggled with heroin addiction, got clean and became pregnant by her drug counselor. She also married him. In 1974, mother to a 1-year-old, she moved to San Diego and played lead roles in Mother Courage and Marsha Norman’s Getting Out. She met  David Schein, also an actor, and followed him to Berkeley.

Whoopi thrived in the Bay Area theater scene. “The name Whoopi Goldberg was a godsend,” she told Vanity Fair. “That’s what brought ‘em out.” In Berkeley she created a one-woman show about Jackie “Moms” Mabley, the legendary African American comic. The first time I saw Moms, a man in a wheelchair with a pronounced nervous disorder started to laugh uncontrollably. Without breaking character, Whoopi/Moms slowly walked into the audience and placed a gentle hand on the man until he quieted.

I knew her boyfriend a little bit. David Schein was wiry and frisky and passionate about theater; he wrote an opera Tokens, a Play on the Plague, that he staged at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. He called Whoopi by her birth name, “Caryn.”

One day Whoopi and David called me at home and serenaded my answering machine with “Hymn For a Sunday Evening” from Bye Bye Birdie. Remember the silly, mock-triumphant line, “Ed Sul-livan! Ed Sul-livan! We’re gonna be on Ed Sul-li-van!”? They riffed on that, replacing “Sullivan” with “Guthmann.” I also have a postcard Whoopi sent to acknowledge something I wrote. On the front is a vintage Dixie Boy advertising graphic, showing an African American boy eating a grapefruit. On the back she wrote, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.”

With Whoopi in her Berkeley cottage, early 1984.

I got to know Whoopi in those days and liked her. She was direct, spontaneous, and could be both warm and tough. Her charisma was enormous, but she was not someone to be messed with. In February 1984, lacking a manager or an agent, she took The Spook Show, a multi-character solo show, to Dance Theater Workshop in New York. During the run, the actress Judith Ivey saw Whoopi perform, contacted Mike Nichols and insisted he not miss her show. Nichols saw it, went backstage and, reportedly in tears, offered to present Whoopi on Broadway. During those six or seven months before she opened, Spielberg asked her to star in The Color Purple. In 1991 she won an Oscar for Ghost – the first Black woman to be so honored in half a century.

For several years I reviewed movies and interviewed celebrities for the San Francisco Chronicle. Usually, the people I profiled were long-established stars. Only once did I write about someone totally unknown and then see her “blow up” and become a big star. That was Whoopi.

With her Oscar for “The Color Purple.”

It felt surreal and disorienting to watch someone I knew, who was part of my community and for whom I had affection, suddenly become a public commodity. There were casualties in Whoopi’s life when the hydra-headed monster of fame arrived. She and David Schein broke up. When her daughter Alex got pregnant at 15, a friend at Berkeley High betrayed her and sold her story to the National Enquirer. Probably hoping to keep the tribulations of fame at bay, Whoopi vowed to stay in Berkeley. But that didn’t last a year. Soon she was in New York and Los Angeles, juggling a world of business managers and agents, publicists and personal assistants — the life of a major star.

She didn’t always handle it well. In May 1984 – during her last window of relative anonymity — Whoopi fulfilled a commitment to revive Moms at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District. She’d signed the contract before Mike Nichols came calling, before Spielberg, and she wasn’t happy about it. Granted, the venue was shabby and the pay probably lousy, but it was tacky of her to grouse about it on stage, which she did in character as Moms.

Would she have made those cracks if she hadn’t crossed over and been offered riches and fame, as she said, “on a silver platter”? I don’t know. “The biggest deal for me,” Whoopi said when I interviewed her at that time, “is being able to dialogue with people I respect, like Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams. But there’s the other side, too, which is not so fun … phone calls and talkin’ money and learning to say ‘No.’ And finding yourself looking in the mirror at this egotistical bastard you’ve turned into in a matter of moments.”

“Luckily,” she added, “I’ve got people around to say, ‘Hey bitch, put some deodorant on it.’ That stuff kinda keeps me steady – that and my kid and my old man and my funky little house.”

In November 1984 I flew to New York to see Whoopi on Broadway and visited her in the Chelsea district apartment she was renting. She was warm and friendly and encouraged me to keep in touch; she even invited me to stay with her on my next visit. I was flattered, but when I got in touch months later she didn’t return the call. I heard similar stories from other friends who were closer to Whoopi than I.

It’s difficult to maintain a friendship with a star. They have countless pressures and distractions: invasive fans, press and paparazzi; sharks eager to exploit and profit; layers of protection insulating them. A level of suspicion sets in: a feeling that the people campaigning for their time and companionship aren’t genuine friends. I get that, and I remember a little frisson of excitement when I walked down the street with Whoopi in New York, soon after she got famous, and noticed the excited stares and waves. The air gets heady in a star bubble; if you get to share it for a little while, you feel special by association.

I saw Whoopi rarely in the years that followed. I didn’t understand some of her career choices, but I loved the way she used her celebrity to support human rights issues and stand up for the maligned and oppressed. She’s very generous.

When Whoopi starred in Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” on Broadway, Al Hirschfeld drew this caricature of her for the New York Times.

In 1997, she starred on Broadway  in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on Broadway. I was in New York that spring and when I left a note at the stage door, her assistant called and asked me to meet Whoopi before the curtain that night. I showed up, and she gave me five minutes of her time before she started her vocal warm-ups. As I left she offered me house seats for the next evening’s performance. Sure, I said, but when I arrived late I had to be seated after her opening number, “Comedy Tonight.” Whoopi saw the usher guiding me down the aisle and called out in mock outrage, “Edward Guthmann, why the hell are you late?” It got a laugh from the audience and in hindsight I wish I’d said, “Whoopi, could you repeat that opening number?” — just to see how she’d react.

Our friendship, predictably, didn’t stick. I might have avoided my disappointment had I followed the journalism rule book and never pursued the friendship to begin with — with Whoopi or any interview subject. That’s easier said than done: Interviews are in many ways like a first date, and when you discover a mutual interest and congeniality that feels good, you want it to continue.

I think there’s an element of seduction and flirtation in any interview. Several marriages were launched that way: Gregory Peck and his wife Veronique; Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols; Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas; Clint Eastwood and his last wife Dina Ruiz.

When you make a strong connection in an interview you feel great – just like you do when launching a romance or meeting a new friend. But if circumstances dictate an early goodbye, it can feel lonely. “It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time,” Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest. “The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, but even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.”

My Journey to Rwanda by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Volunteering

/ Stories

Monday, June 9, 2008. Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

I awake early and hear my hostess Shirley Randell swimming in her pool. The goat outside my window bleats. A bit later Shirley, dressed in the sari that’s her daily costume, is rushing off to work.

I arrived yesterday, bleary and beat. Shirley was on the patio with two friends, a tureen of soup, hunks of hearty bread and Rwandan beer on the table. I managed a modicum of cheer despite my exhaustion. Shirley will be my hostess and landlady the next three weeks, as well as the organizer of my volunteer project.

Shirley Randell, right. With Tupo Mtila, a delightful young woman from Malawi who stayed at Shirley’s house the same time I did. Tupo’s aunt Joyce Banda later became the President of Malawi

I’m here to conduct a series of interviews with members of RAUW (Rwanda Assn. of University Women), a professional organization that Shirley started. These are educators, businesswomen and politicians who generate educational opportunities for Rwandan girls and shed light on domestic violence and AIDS prevention. I’ll write profiles from each of the interviews, and Shirley will post them on the RAUW website.

My friend Simin Marefat, a San Francisco nurse who spent time in Rwanda in 2007, made the introduction. Shirley is 68, Australian, and has worked all over the world for humanitarian organizations. Raised her four children in rural New Guinea, spent years in Bangladesh and the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. She’s been in Rwanda three years, working for SNV, a Dutch development organization. Always in motion, juggling several balls in the air. Knows absolutely everyone in Kigali’s expat community.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda since 2000, was commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that ended his country’s horrific 1994 genocide.

Shirley’s house is in Kiyovu, an upscale section of Kigali where Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, also lives. Good restaurants nearby. Also the Hotel Milles Collines, which we saw in the movie Hotel Rwanda. That’s the hotel where the temporary manager Paul Rusesabagina (played in the movie by Don Cheadle) sheltered 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, saving them from slaughter by Hutu militia.

Wednesday, June 11. Kigali.

Rwanda is one of Africa’s tiniest countries and the most densely populated. It’s the size of Vermont, with the population of Chicago – 10 million people. And yet, there’s an amazing orderliness to Kigali. The streets are clean. The traffic isn’t horrendous as in most African cities. It’s a dream compared to Nairobi – there isn’t that same sense of chaos.

Kigali today.

Fourteen years ago, the city was decimated. Homes, schools and hospitals trashed. I’ve learned that few of the city’s pre-genocide residents remain. Kigali was rebuilt by Tutsi exiles, many of them living for decades in Uganda, the Congo, Kenya and Europe. Once the genocide ended, they repatriated to Rwanda, determined to reclaim their country. The genocide claimed 700,000 to 1 million people, but an equivalent number of exiles returned to Rwanda in the year following the genocide. Today, Rwanda is one of only three countries in the world with a female majority in the national parliament.

Thursday, June 12. Kigali.

Rwandan men at upscale Bourbon Coffee.

I’m sitting on the terrace at Bourbon Coffee, a Starbuck’s-like café. It’s a total disconnect: a social nucleus for networking expats, NGO workers and the local elite, umbilically linked by laptops and cell phones to the great Cyber-Mommy. The Rwandan clientele are beautifully dressed, polished and confident. The wait staff look American in their jeans, styled hair and trendy T-shirts. This is an oasis of the privileged. Customers with laptops gets a complimentary Internet access code for an hour when they buy a drink and/or food item. We could be in Santa Monica, Sedona or Santa Fe.

I hire a Moto – a motor scooter that functions as an alternate taxi, for one fifth the price – to the main road to change money. Then take a cab to the Rwandan Women’s Network offices to meet with Mary Balikungeri. The driver goes 10-15 minutes outside the town centre, through a series of dirt roads into neighborhoods so ramshackle I start to think he’s lost. Finally I see the sign for Rwandan Women’s Network. I’m 30 minutes late, which means very little here.

The fabulous Mary Balikungeri

I like Mary. Forthright, as Shirley promised. Energetic, strong, a robust sense of humor. Very take-charge. She won’t let me turn on the tape recorder until I explain who I am and what I want to talk about. She immediately determines that, since I’m a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, I shouldn’t restrict my reporting to Shirley’s RAUW website but should also profile the Rwandan Women’s Network for the Chronicle. She’s a bit of a general.

She left Rwanda with her family when she was small and lived in Uganda until 1995, one year after the genocide. Mary offers me literature and a DVD on her organization at the end of the chat, then brightens and seems genuinely happy when I say “J’ai racines Africaines” (I have African roots). “Yes?” she says. “My mother was born in Cameroun and her parents were missionaries.” “Then you are family!” she exclaims. “You are a missionary’s child.”

My missionary grandparents, Fred and Roberta Hope, 1912. In Cameroun with their first-born child Arta Grace.

This is so powerful for me that I look down and clench my teeth not to cry. I’m very proud of my grandparents Fred and Roberta Hope — especially my grandfather’s work operating an industrial school that gave self-sustaining trades to the men of Cameroun. In the U.S., when I mention my grandparents’ work there’s typically a chilled silence. “Missionary” is a loaded word and no one stops to consider that a lot of valuable work was done by ecumenical workers. Only in Africa, among African Christians, do I get a sense of appreciation or enthusiasm.

The sun is falling and I can hear the traffic down the hill. Faint dog barks, a whistle, the insistent rhmmmm! of a Moto bike and the sassy, unruly call of a tropical bird. It’s six o’clock, just a half hour until Rwanda’s early nightfall. When you’re this close to the Equator, the divide between daytime and nighttime is suprisingly sudden, and occurs at the same time all year long.

Monday, June 16. Kigali.

Late in the afternoon I meet with Stephanie Nyombayire. A remarkable young woman who lived the past seven years in the U.S. – three in a boarding school in Connecticut and four at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She’s just graduated, and is back in Kigali working for Orphans of Rwanda.

Stephanie Nyombayire

Stephanie is pretty, could be a model, and in fact was featured twice in Glamour magazine: the first time when she and other Swarthmore undergrads started Genocide Intervention Network, a campus organization for Darfur relief; the second time when she was selected one of the top 10 college women of 2007.

Stephanie was born in exile to Tutsi parents, in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and lived there until she was 7 – the year of the genocide. Her family returned to Rwanda that year and she went to a French-speaking school, Ecole Belgique, until she won a scholarship to Kent School in Connecticut at 15.

“A lot of Rwanda is made up people who are very young,” Stephanie says. “A lot of them don’t have parents because of the genocide and a lot of them had to raise younger siblings from the age of 10. So I’ll be trying to focus on youth and opportunities that will move them forward.”

Thursday, June 19. Kigali.

Odette Mutangua Mukazi

Just returned from the Ministry of Education and a very strong interview with Odette Mukazi, a great woman who coordinates the Rwanda chapter of FAWE (Forum for African Women Educationalists). It’s a pan-African organization that encourages girls to stay in school, where they often drop out after primary school and in general are intimidated by boys. Tuseme (Swahili for “speak out”) is their major initiative, aimed at empowering girls and focusing on their specific education issues. They’re partnered with Orphans of Rwanda and a lot of their girls receive ORI scholarships.

Odette is dynamic – not as animated as Mary Balikungeri but a force nonetheless. She tells me about growing up in exile in Uganda, her daughter Matilda who is in a U.S. law school, her return to Rwanda so soon after the genocide ended. When I ask if she’d lost a lot of family in the genocide, Odette pauses and becomes silent. “Yes, so many. I have no idea how many.” I start to cry, clench back my tears. It’s as if everything I’ve heard or learned in the last weeks, now accumulated, comes rushing toward me in a flood of grief.

Odette begins to cry and for a few minutes neither of us can speak. I grab a Kleenex. I say to her, “I am so sorry,” but barely get the words out. I’m not sure but I suspect she appreciates that I felt the enormity of her grief. Are African men taught not to cry?

Gradually she composes herself and speaks about FAWE and the results she’s seen in young women. When I ask about her two daughters she says, “Yes! They are very empowered!” The one in law school even confronted a Rwandan man – a former Hutu militia, in exile to escape prison – who spoke on her campus and claimed the genocide never happened! According to Odette, Matilda stood up and said, “Excuse me! I am Rwandan and there absolutely was a genocide.” The man blew more steam and Matilda stood up and walked out. “He didn’t expect there would be a Rwandan in the audience,” Odette says.

Monday, June 23. Kigali Airport.

I’m on my way home. Said my goodbyes at Shirley’s house. Shirley was effusive with thanks when I wrote a $100 check to RAUW for one of the orphanages it supports. Many people asked these last days if I’ll be returning to Rwanda. Shirley kept saying it’s bound to happen — as if it were etched on a chart of my destiny, a fait accompli. I met some extraordinary people here and I’m amazed by the beauty of Rwanda, the resilience of the people, and the miracle of recovery that took place in the wake of so much hatred, bloodshed and loss.

Confessions of a Recovering Film Critic by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Fame

/ Stories

The San Francisco Chronicle building, 5th & Mission, San Francisco.

I never asked to be a movie critic. And yet it happened. People don’t believe me when I say this; they assume movie reviewing is such a plum job that I must have scrambled and hustled to get there. Not really.

In 1991 I’d been working at the San Francisco Chronicle seven years when the senior movie critic Judy Stone took a buyout offer and retired. In a crisp email, the assistant managing editor informed me I would forthwith be reporting full-time as a movie critic. There wasn’t any “Come in to my office to discuss…” conversation. No “How would you feel about doing this…?”

I was the logical choice, given that I’d been pinch-hitting for Judy when she was out sick or on vacation. Plus, I’d previously reviewed films for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative weekly. That job also came unbidden: I got it because my neighbor at the time was the arts editor and had a hunch I could do it.

Even though I had a lifelong love of movies, and a deep trove of cinema trivia in my head, I never thought I’d be a critic. I figured my take on movies was too idiosyncratic, too personal and off-the-mainstream. I later realized that every film critic is idiosyncratic — that taste and aesthetics are by definition deeply personal. If a critic writes safe, generalized pabulum that doesn’t spring from a strongly impassioned point of view, then you’ve got a problem.

For the next 12 years I reviewed movies full-time in addition to writing features and profiles on movie personalities. I saw between 200 and 250 movies per year, and wrote up to five reviews and feature stories per week. I got to meet Catherine Deneuve, Lillian Gish, Stephen Spielberg, Lucille Ball, Gregory Peck, Pedro Almodovar, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern and hundreds more. I went to film festivals in Toronto, Sundance, Telluride, and Hong Kong. I had the privilege of championing artists like Krzysztof Kieslowski and Satyajit Ray, whose work might otherwise go unnoticed because their distributors had tiny advertising budgets; and I got to discover Oscar-winning filmmakers like Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) and Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videtape; Erin Brockovich) as their careers were just starting.

With Gregory Peck, 1989.

Being a movie critic brought me a minor level of fame in the Chronicle’s circulation area — at least among the people who read movie reviews — and a feel for the privileges and annoyances of being a public person. I was gratified when someone said, “You’re my favorite critic” or “I saw that movie you recommended and loved it.” It was fun to see my name quoted in a movie trailer, and then hear from a cousin back East or an old college friend who also saw the trailer. Who doesn’t like an ego boost? I enjoyed the dialogue with readers and the fringe benefits — like getting choice seats and not waiting in long lines; like getting comped for concerts and plays; like having my phone calls answered quickly. You can get spoiled that way, and I did.

Being semi-famous wasn’t always fun. When email became the standard communication mode in the early ‘90s, the feedback I received tripled or quadrupled. Some correspondents were kind and thoughtful; a lot were not. I learned that anger, not satisfaction or admiration, is the single greatest incentive when writing to a total stranger. Think about it: How often do you contact your utility company and enthuse, “Wow, the heat feels great on this blustery day. Thank you!”?

One day a fellow reviewer at the Chronicle asked me, “Are you getting a lot more hate mail now that everyone’s doing email?” I was. “You owe me the $10 I wasted on that piece of crap!” was a grumble I received more than once. Or, “Are you sure you saw the same movie I saw?” Or this lulu: “It is clear in the last analysis that the only thing coursing through the mind and pen of Edward Guthmann is viciousness of the lowest sort.” At least he could string a sentence together.

One hater used to cut my reviews from the paper, deface them with a large rubber stamp saying “BULLSHIT” and mail them back to me. (He did that with other critics, I learned.) People take movies personally and if you criticize something that touched them or reinforced their identity, they feel you’ve violated their entire being. Occasionally I got nasty phone calls at home — always anonymous. A colleague introduced me to a friend once who said, “I always know I won’t like a movie if you do.” How the hell do you answer that?

Once you’re semi-famous, you’re fair game. At a preview screening I was photographed kamikaze-style from three feet away by the since-deposed editor of a San Francisco literary journal. He hated something I’d written. “You might ask first before you photograph someone,” I said. “Ohhh, would the Chronicle?” he sneered. The next day, he posted the photo online and claimed I “lashed out” at him when he took the picture.

Fred Astaire, my first movie idol.

In October 2003 I wrote my last review, asked to be reassigned, and started writing author interviews and a variety of profiles. I bailed because my assignment editor was intolerable (a very long story), but as soon as I quit I realized how much I’d come to dislike the reviewer grind itself. Had the movies all been stellar, I might not have minded, but many were awful — and often in the same way that movies from the previous week were awful. I sometimes felt like I was justifying the stinkers by giving them any attention at all.

Suddenly my evenings were free. Slowly, I could recapture the original love of movies I developed as a 7-year-old watching Fred Astaire and The Wizard of Oz on TV. In that first year after quitting, I saw only one or two movies a month instead of four or five a week I didn’t have to sit through soul-destroying bilge to the bitter end. I only saw the movies I wanted to see, and if I was bored I got up and walked out. I was liberated! Like a frog in a pot of water that slowly comes to a boil, I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to stress, discomfort and a begrudging sense of duty.

At the same time, I knew I was surrendering a kind of cachet and name recognition, that I would miss the communication with my readers and the cushy, glamorous aspects of the job. I felt a pang of regret that my 12-year-old nephew, who liked having a movie critic for an uncle, would lose his bragging rights and be disappointed for himself and for me. But I don’t regret my decision: I regained an ease and comfort in my life.

Most of the writing I do now is personal, and my relationship with movies has never been better. During Covid, I watched Turner Classic Movies and streamed new titles regularly. I found that old favorites have a new dimension, a new fascination. Having lived more, I appreciate them on different and deeper levels. I’m falling in love all over again.

The Day I Met Lucille Ball by
25
(30 Stories)

Prompted By Fame

/ Stories

I’d heard how tough and intimidating Lucille Ball could be, but on the day I interviewed her at her home in Beverly Hills she was warm, unguarded and down-to-earth. It felt like hanging out with a favorite aunt.

Lucy picked up quickly on the fact that I was a fan, and since I was young and eager I think she liked me. She was promoting Stone Pillow, a CBS TV-movie in which she played a homeless bag lady named Florabelle. The movie was ill-conceived and Lucy was badly miscast, but it gave me the good fortune to meet a childhood idol.

Arranging our tete-a-tete was easy. One morning I called a veteran publicist at CBS and asked, “Do you think Lucy would do a one-on-one for Stone Pillow? I could fly down to Los Angeles.” With a big star like Lucy, you’d normally get a noncommittal response: “Let me look into it.” Instead, he asked to put me on hold. Within five minutes he was back. “Lucy wants to do it.” That kind of thing never happens.

A rare dramatic role for Lucy. But this CBS-TV movie was a mistake.

I flew into Burbank on the morning of Oct. 23, 1985, rented a car and picked up a large, exotic floral bouquet en route to Lucy’s house. I rang the doorbell at 1000 N. Roxbury Dr. in Beverly Hills, an assistant answered and within seconds Lucy entered the foyer behind him. “Thank you,” she said, nodding her head in a slightly regal manner, “that’s a lovely bouquet.”  The assistant guided us into a section of the living room where Lucy and I sat and talked for nearly two hours. She wore white pants, a pleated white blouse and turquoise-blue jacket. Tinted, oversized eyeglasses. Her hair was the same, familiar henna-red I knew from television. She was 74.

Lucy’s best days. With Desi Arnaz in “I Love Lucy.” Their marriage was troubled, but she always credited his skills as a producer with the show’s success.

Lucy’s ranch-style house was grand on the outside, comfortable and tidy on the inside. No major art pieces; just a painting of her husband Gary Morton swinging a golf club. In a corner of the room I spied a backgammon table, where Lucy probably spent hundreds of lively and competitive hours — backgammon being her favorite game. We weren’t alone as we confabulated. Joining us was a very old man, a minder I guess you’d call him, who CBS had sent to monitor Lucy’s remarks and make sure she said nothing too reckless or off-color.

Lucy was fascinated by my name. “Ed Guthmann! That’s such an old man’s name for a young kid like you,” she said with gusto. “Lucy, I’ll be 35 in three days,” I said, thinking I was practically middle-aged. “Big deal!” she harrumphed. “Big deal!”

Lucy with Vivian Vance, who played her landlady and best friend Ethel Mertz in “I Love Lucy.” When asked the secret of their successful partnership, both actresses answered “mutual respect.”

She reminisced about the I Love Lucy days, praised her ex-husband Desi Arnaz for his professional acumen (“Innovation after innovation”) but slammed his gambling,  drinking and womanizing (“We had five homes but to him they were just houses”); gave excellent marks to her current husband, comic-turned-manager Gary Morton (“On a scale of 1 to 10 we’re a 12”); and said she didn’t act for five years after her beloved I Love Lucy sidekick Vivian Vance died in 1979. When I asked how it felt to be at leisure after shooting Stone Pillow, she frowned. “To tell ya the truth, it’s been kinda boring around here lately!”

She didn’t mince words. Lucy was at a point in her life when she had nothing to lose by telling the unvarnished truth – which is precisely why the ancient minder was warming up his end of the sofa.

Lucy and her pal Clark Gable. In the 1940s, the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Lucy told me she got that low, husky voice by yelling from her car on the Pacific Coast Highway — a method recommended by movie maker Howard Hawks. She grew nostalgic talking about her friend Clark Gable. “We used to tool around in his jeep,” she said, remembering when San Fernando Valley was all farms and ranches and open land. “Oh boy,” she sighed, shaking her head and looking off to one side. The memory seemed to stir thoughts of distant youth, of time passing swiftly and few friends left to share her memories.

The great character actress Elizabeth Patterson played the babysitter Mrs. Trumbull in “I Love Lucy.”

I asked about Elizabeth Patterson, the fragile-looking character actress who played the babysitter Mrs. Trumbull on “I Love Lucy,” and Lucy told me she used to go home on the public bus after a day of taping at Desilu Studios. Patterson never accepted Lucy’s invitations to socialize — not from disinterest, but from feeling she didn’t belong. She was just as timid as the characters she played.

I told Lucy I’d admired Patterson in vintage movies, and described a poignant scene from the 1938 classic Remember the Night where Patterson plays the old-maid aunt of Fred MacMurray. When MacMurray brings Barbara Stanwyck home for Christmas, Stanwyck accidentally discovers an old, unused wedding dress in Patterson’s trunk. She’s startled. “But I thought you never –,” Stanwyck begins to say. Patterson cuts her off: “Oh well. That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Boy, you’re really a buff!” Lucy said when I finished the story. “You should meet my friend Robert Osborne. He knows the old ones like you do.”

Lucy’s house in Beverly Hills. Jimmy Stewart lived across the street.

For show business fans, the block that Lucy lived on was famous. At one time or another, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Oscar Levant, Agnes Moorehead, Ira Gershwin, Peter Falk and Rosemary Clooney all lived on Roxbury. In 1985 Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria were still across the street from Lucy. I don’t remember how it came up, but she started grumbling about a spate of neighborhood burglaries. “Jimmy and Gloria are worried,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “We’re worried! Oh, it’s awful. But I don’t trust the Beverly Hills police as far as I can spit!”

The old chaperone’s hand reached out pleadingly, and tapped me on the arm. “Oh, you’re not going to put that in the story, are you?”

Same thing a few minutes later when I asked Lucy about her recovering son, Desi Jr., a recovering alcoholic, and the inspirational lectures he delivered on the virtues of sobriety. “Yeah, he’s still doing that,” Lucy groaned with a roll of her eyes. “But at least he’s not so boring about it now.” The hand tapped my arm and the ancient minder whispered, “Oh, you won’t use that, will you?”

And a third time. While filming Stone Pillow on location in New York City, Lucy confided, she was so weak from long hours and from wearing a heavy costume in the oppressive New York heat, that she contracted amoebic dysentery. When she flew home to Los Angeles, 23 pounds lighter and suffering from dehydration, she fell out of her limo into the gutter at LAX. “I was really sick!” she exclaimed with big eyes and that froggy, bottom-of-the-well voice. Once again the weathered hand reached out and the old man looked stricken: “Please don’t mention amoebic dysentery in your story,” he implored.

I asked Lucy to grade herself, A to F, in several categories.

Lucy with second husband Gary Morton.

Mother: “B minus. I was deterred in many a way by working; I couldn’t complete the scene at home.”

Comedian: “Should I say A? I guess I can because of the I Love Lucy reruns and the longevity still proving itself.”

Dramatic actress: “I don’t know, especially when my idol is Bette Davis. I haven’t given it that much of a whack.”

Business executive: “F. I hated it and I depended solely on honest and loyal men.”

Late in the interview Lucy’s husband Gary Morton walked in, looking very Beverly Hills in an alpaca cardigan and slacks. Nice guy. Lucy greeted him and said, “Gary, say ‘Hello’ to Old Ed Guthmann!” Gary grinned, took my camera and shot the photo you see at the top of this page. She was absolutely terrific. Adorable. I’m sorry it was the only time I got to spend with her.

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