Turner Classics was playing it and we had to watch it. It really never gets old. And they’ve cleaned up and remastered it for sound and pictures, so it sparkles like the gem it is.
There is a lot of back story to this movie. Debbie Reynolds hasn’t been shy about sharing her story, the dissatisfaction of Kelly at having to work with Reynolds — who had to be taught to dance for her role. By the end of each day of shooting, her feet would be bleeding. Kelly was a perfectionist and a bit of a slave driver. But it’s hard to argue with the result.
Whatever was going on behind the scenes, the result is a masterpiece. Sixty-one years after the original opening, it’s fresh and funny, and the choreography is a wonder and carefully works around Debbie Reynolds more limited dancing skills. If you watch “Good Morning” carefully, notice how often she is posed while Kelly and O’Connor carry the most complex parts.
The plot is a light-hearted look at the movie business during the transition from silent to talking movies.
There had been several versions ofSinging In the Rainbefore, but none of them enjoyed the success of this version. Rightfully so. It’s delightful. After more than 60 years, it still plays beautifully. A pleasure to watch and a family favorite. Many great musicals have been produced since this classic. Many were and are brilliant, but although they may be as good, they are not better. In many way, Singing in the Rain set the bar.
Until they make a new Gene Kelly, they won’t improve on it.
It was greeted with no great enthusiasm when released, yet with each passing year, its popularity grows. That is, perhaps, the true definition of a classic when the years only increase respect for a film. Time has not diminished Singin’ In the Rain.
Today, tell us about the most unconventional love in your life. Photographers, share a photo that says unconventional.
Pandora’s box had nothing on this one. Wow. Sizzle. Smoke. Hot, hot, hot!!
Okay, this is a G-rated site, so I won’t go there. Instead, I’ll tell you a story and leave you free to fill in the details from your own rich imaginings.
At 18 I married my first husband. I was already in my senior year of college. Jeff ran the college radio station as Station Manager. My now and forever husband was Jeff’s second-in-command, that is to say Garry was the Program Director. The two men were best friends. Together with most of the people I still count as friends, we had a great deal of fun. Not just the usual college stuff. We were creative. Just our Fall of Sauron Day parties — scripted, costumed, with special effects — were the stuff of lifetime memories. And, because we were young and healthy, we could party all night and go the work the next day looking none the worse for wear. Try that nowadays!
I married Jeff in August 1965. I spent the next year finishing my B.A. and having my spine remodeled, so it was a few years before I got on with life. My son was born in May 1969. We named him Owen Garry, Garry being his godfather and all.
Fast forward through a non-acrimonious divorce. I later realized if you just give up everything and walk away, it’s easy to be amicable. It’s also a big mistake you will come to regret sooner or later.
Off to Israel with the kid. Not too long thereafter, a marriage in Israel about which I won’t talk, even under torture. One visit from the ex and current husband – exactly in time for the war in Lebanon. It ruined our plans to see the Hermon and the Galilee, but created great anecdotes for another post. I have one picture that says it all: me, Jeff and Garry arm-in-arm by the Dead Sea. The picture taken by husband number 2.
Photo: Debbie Stone
August 1987. Back to the USA. Garry and I are an item. Subsequent to finalizing my long-distance divorce from husband number 2, we are wed. It’s the right marriage to the right guy. I declined to have my first ex-husband be best man at my third wedding. We did, however, have the “real” reception at his house. There was the official one at the church, but the fun was over at the old house.
Garry and I will celebrate our 23 anniversary in September.
Is it a bar? It looked like a bar. Well, we’re here. Let’s sit down in one of these booths. We can get something to drink, you think? Maybe something to eat, too. Those hot dogs look pretty good. Why not? Not like we have something else to do, eh?
It occurred to me one day I really needed to see the spine doctor. When you have chronic pain, you learn to ignore it most of the time. Unless you want to wind up a pill addict, it’s the only option. It’s not being brave. It’s an entirely practical decision. Do I want to keep living? Walking? Participating? Then I have to deal with what I have to deal with. That’s the way it goes. Oh well.
Sometime, when I was in my mid-twenties, I was doing my mother’s hair. I liked fixing her hair. It was easy to style, thick, silver and just a bit wavy. I asked her to turn her head to the right, and she did. When I asked her to turn the other way, she said “I can’t.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
“Because my head won’t turn that way.”
That seemed a curious answer. “What do you mean by that?”
“My neck is stiff.”
“Um, mom? How long has it been like this?”
She thought for a while. “Fifteen years? Something like that.”
That stopped me. Fifteen years? “Have you seen anyone about it?”
“No,” she said. “I figured I was just getting old.”
At the time, I thought this was totally bizarre. It turned out, she had entirely treatable (but advanced) tendonitis and it got better. She hated doctors.
Time has marched on and I’m older than my mother was then. I totally relate to her response. When I called the doctor for an appointment, I discovered the last time I saw him was six years ago. To be fair, I’ve had a few medical crises since then and I got distracted. Besides, I know what’s wrong with my back. It isn’t going to get better or go away. It isn’t going to kill me either. I’ve lived with it most of my life. I’m used to it and generally ignore it. Recently, though I’m having trouble walking, even on flat surfaces and going up and down stairs is hard. My legs don’t seem to want to support me. It crossed my mind that there might be something that could be done to improve it without major reconstruction.
My doctor is wonderful. The best. The only doctor who can look at my spine, not gasp with horror and immediately decide I need to be rebuilt with screws, pins, and bolts. He’s a minimalist, medically speaking and I like that.
So I made an appointment and I got lucky, because there was a cancellation in December. It usually takes five or six months to get in to see him. He’s the king of spines in Boston, maybe in the entire country. I would have willingly waited the six months if I had to. Of course, as soon as I made the appointment, I had to make another appointment because I need new films of my spine. I also haven’t had a CT scan or MRI in six years and he isn’t going to be able to do much without new films.
I wondered how come I hadn’t processed the fact I can’t walk properly? I suppose I wasn’t paying attention. Too busy ignoring the pain. I don’t always know I’m doing it, but I was being my mother.
She taught me to be stalwart, a Spartan. She told me she didn’t use Novocaine when she got her teeth worked on. I asked her why not and she said “Pain is good for your character.” She meant it. I grew up believing showing pain or giving in to it was a sign of weakness. To a degree it serves me well, but sometimes it’s dangerous. If you ignore the wrong stuff, they can kill you. One needs a sense of balance, but it isn’t so easy to find.
Watching the documentary on Ethel Kennedy last night reminded me of my mother. Mom was an athlete and I’m sure she always wondered how she have wound up with such a klutzy daughter. She had been a good tennis player. She rode horses, she played ice hockey. She went bob sledding. She painted, sculpted, designed and made her own clothing. She also never got past seventh grade, so she made up for it by reading everything. She had a truly voracious appetite for life and knowledge.
After a radical mastectomy, she couldn’t play tennis anymore, so she played a ferocious game of ping-pong.
She played savagely. She served so hard it was more like a bullet than a ping-pong ball. As a family, we vacationed in dinky little resorts in the Catskills where there was no entertainment. The one thing they always had was a ping-pong table. So I played against my mother.
She didn’t believe in any of that “let the kid win” stuff. She was a competitor. You won or you lost. Trying hard was irrelevant because she expected nothing less. She slaughtered me. As I got older, I played better and but she always beat me. She told me she was giving me an advantage by playing with her left hand. I knew she wrote with her right hand, so I assumed that she was a rightie. Until the day my father told me she had always played tennis with her left hand. My mother was psyching me out. Her own daughter.
I still never beat her, but I beat everyone else.
From her, I got a gritty determination to never give up, to do everything as well as it could be done, or at least as well as I could do it. It turns out winning isn’t everything, but I didn’t learn that until I’d already missed a lot. Late in life, I realized I don’t have to be the best. Playing the game because you enjoy it is worth something too. Another lesson learned a bit too late.
The older I get, the more I remind me of my mother.
We all miss so many things. Some intentionally, others accidentally. Sometimes, I miss things accidentally because I’m avoiding other things intentionally. One thing leads to the other.
I wonder what else I’m missing? I know, on this Mother’s day, that I’m definitely missing Mom. I have so much to tell her.
The modern commercialized celebration of gifts, flowers and candy, bears little resemblance to Julia Ward Howe‘s original idea. Here is the Proclamation that explains, in her own powerful words, the goals of the original Mother’s Day in the United States…
Portrait drawing of poet, antislavery activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe.
- – -
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
- – -
To all mothers and children of mothers, wishes of strength, peace and hope for this Mother’s Day.
Before you decide this means we are or were “rich,” Garry had been sharing a house with a bunch of other people from Channel 7 and other Boston TV stations for years before I moved to New England. This was not their first house. There had been others, but this was the most recent and favorite because of its location. The group knew each other well and had been sharing this house or another for years before Garry and I officially became a couple, though we’d known each other and been involved off and on since college.
After I came on the scene, we continued to share the house, though it grew more awkward as many “housemates” paired off and moved on with their lives. Eventually, the problem solved itself when the owners of the house decided to cash in and sell it.
It had originally been a boat house for the New York Yacht Club. At some point, it was converted to a summer residence. Right on the water, halfway between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs, it had a great dock and was just across Ocean Avenue from the hospital.
Drawing of he original boathouse, 1894. Artist unknown.
The house was currently owned by a pair of orthopedic doctors who worked at the hospital on the Vineyard and maintained offices across Nantucket Sound in Falmouth. A dock for the docs was useful and tax-deductible. Our rent paid their property taxes and perhaps left a bit of money over, though not much. Waterfront real estate on Martha’s Vineyard is expensive.
Mostly, I think they kept the place because of the dock and because we were amusing, all television folks, photographers, reporters, directors, producers … plus their insignificant others. We didn’t trash the place and were always up for a ride in their insanely over-powered Boston Whaler.The ferry ride from Falmouth to Oak Bluffs took 45 minutes. Either of the doctors could do it in just over 7 minutes. I don’t think they actually touched the water once they left the channel. They more or less flew.
It was an interesting and wet ride, exhilarating and terrifying and a heck of a lot faster and easier than the ferry. Cheaper, too as long as you didn’t need to take your car across.
After the doctors sold the house, the group split up. Several of the couples, including Garry and I, had married by then. Garry and I found a charming place in Oak Bluffs with a long staircase down the bluff to a small, private, sandy beach. We could bring our dogs. The house had two bedrooms, so we could invite friends to join us … a big bonus.
We rented during the off-season to make it more affordable and to avoid the mid-summer crush. We rented two weeks in June and two more in September. With both of us working, it was affordable … for a while.
Some years before the doctors sold the house, Garry had covered a story about Alfred Eisenstadt and Lois Maillou Jones, both of whom had been given Presidential Medals of Honor for their work. After the story, we became friends with both artists. Eisenstadt was in his early 90s and Lois Maillou Jones was in her mid 80s, Eisie told Lois she was “just a kid.” We laughed, but time has changed our perspective considerably.
I had been an admirer of Eisenstadt’s work as long as I’d been taking pictures. I took my first roll of film on Martha’s Vineyard in 1966 when I had stayed at the Menemsha Inn where Eisenstadt resided from late spring till just after Labor Day. Books of Eisie’s work — that was what everyone called him and he preferred it — were all over the inn, in bookcases and on tables. Most featured landscapes of Martha’s Vineyard that Eisenstadt had taken over the decades.
I was using my first camera, a Practika with an excellent Zeiss 50mm lens but no light meter. It had a crank film advance. This was a barebones camera perfect for a beginner. I had to really learn how to take pictures. I had to get a light reading using a handheld meter. I had to focus. No zoom lens, just that 50 mm prime, so my feet did the zooming. I learned the basics of photography that many people of the digital generation never learn.Many erstwhile photographers have never encountered a non-automatic camera. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But then again, maybe it does.
Portrait of Robert Frost. It hangs still in our home, reminding me of some of the very best of the old days
My camera had been a gift from a photographer friend who had moved on to more expensive gear, but with that Zeiss lens and a good eye, I followed Eisenstadt’s path. I discovered where he’d taken each picture, then figured out how he’d gotten the perspective, framed it, and not only duplicated his shots down to the clump of grass he’d crouched behind to create the impression of a foreground, I even added a few original ideas of my own that worked out surprisingly well. It was most surprising to me since I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just winging it.
My first roll of film was declared brilliant. It was, except that the photographs were Alfred Eisenstadt‘s pictures reproduced by me on my camera. I learned photography by following his footsteps and seeing what he saw. By the time I was done, I’d learned more than any school would have taught me about perspective, angles, and what makes a landscape something better than ordinary.
When I actually met the man himself, it was like meeting your favorite movie star. I was dumbstruck, not something that often happens to me.
As we got to know Eisie better, I asked him to autograph his books for me and he did, but he didn’t just autograph them. He went through each book, photograph by photograph. He was in his early 90s and forgot many things, but he remembered every picture he’d taken, including what film and camera he was using, what lens was on it, the F-stop and most important, what he was thinking as he shot it. He could remember exactly what it was about the image that grabbed his attention. It was a wonderful education that money could never buy.
For example, the picture of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day, he said he was walking around Times Square with his Nikon and he saw them, the dark of the sailor’s uniform against the white of the nurse’s dress and he shot. He knew it was what he wanted. The light, the contrast, perfect. Great street journalism looks accidental … but it isn’t. It’s, in my opinion, the most difficult of all the various types of photography because you have to see your shot and grab it, get it right the first time with no framing, no planning and if you miss it, it’s gone forever.
Were we close friends? Close enough, considering the late date at which we entered his life. At that point, he spent most of his time in the company of Lulu, his former sister-in-law who took care of him. She was a lovely, warm, sweet lady who sometimes needed an afternoon off. We were happy to Eisie-sit and let her go to town for an afternoon. Eisie was interesting and funny, but high maintenance. He did not suffer from a lack of ego strength.
We spent time with him every summer for about five years until he died, and we were honored to be among those invited to the funeral.
The funeral was closed to the public and although it was sad because Eisie was gone, we also found things to laugh about. Knowing him was special and some memories are worthy of laughter.
The issues of the world … the problems between our government and the governed, hostility between nations. Terrifying and potentially calamitous environmental and economic crises everywhere you look. Bombarded by the woes of humankind and a myriad of looming catastrophes. Besieged by forces over which we have no control.
Indeed we have little control over many things. Our destinies lie in the hands of other people, Fate and God. Tossed hither and yon by the winds of chance, buffeted by challenges that seem unconquerable, we can take comfort in small joys, little things, simple gifts.
I didn’t expect acquiring an uncomplicated, modestly priced, nice-sounding CD player would present a major challenge. How hard could it be to buy something on which to play music as I fall asleep at night? It has been a while since we had the wherewithal to play music without complicated reconfiguration of speakers and various connected computerized equipment. I know MP3 players are all the rage, but I don’t want to use a teeny tiny device I can barely see and which requires either auxiliary speakers or earphones. I want music to fill the room. And I want it to be a simple thing. Put the CD in, press play. Music!
It turned out to be a lot more difficult to satisfy my criteria than I imagined possible. If I was willing to spend a lot of money — much more than I have — I could get something amazing. But I’m not looking for a stereo system. I’m sure Bose equipment is terrific, but it’s way beyond our budget. All I wanted was something simple. With a nice sound. At a reasonable price.
Searching for my simple solution to playing CDs in the bedroom without buying a full stereo setup I finally saw this odd old-fashioned clock radio with a CD player built into it. I was about to give up, and there it was: this amazing retro style radio and CD player designed to look like an old Philco television set.
The Amazon reviews were all five stars. You don’t see that very often. Like never. Usually someone has a complaint. Not for this, though. With a price just under $50 and a size that would fit on the shelf behind my bed, it looked to be exactly what I wanted. I could drift into slumber to my favorite Beethoven string quartets.
I remained skeptical. Too often I’ve been seduced by great reviews only to be disappointed.
In a strange happy moment, I got exactly what I sought. The reviews were dead on. It’s an amazing little unit. Wonderful rich, big sound. It fits on top of the headboard bookcase. It’s got a vintage look I like. It’s heavy for its size, has a solid feel, not flimsy or plasticky. I like it so much I got a second one for the living room. In theory our DVD player plays CDs, but it’s not a simple “pop the CD in and voilà music” sort of DVD player. It’s a very fine DVD player, but it’s got dozens of functions I have yet to figure out and in which I have no interest at all.
I am strongly in favor of simplicity. Easy to use stuff get used. The more complicated the equipment, the more likely it is to become a dust catcher, another great idea that didn’t work out.
And so we welcomed music back into our lives after a long absence. Surprisingly, radio reception is good too, remarkable for this area renowned for poor reception.
It is a small thing, but I smile every time I look at it. I sigh with contentment every night when I wrap myself in music. Sweet dreams guaranteed. For just under $50. Life is good.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
