FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

Amazing how many stories of interest center on food. Some of my and my wife Pat’s liveliest adventures involve eating. Take our holiday weekend in Beach Haven on the Jersey shore, where we had dinner at the leading hotel restaurant. I ordered snails (I doubt if they were known as escargots there), and they came with a modest mountain of croutons. I decided, next, on a salad which arrived with an immodest mountain of croutons.  Then onion soup topped with--you guessed it! “More croutons?” I exclaimed in horror. Promptly the waitress returned, beaming, with a Himalaya of croutons.

Wonderful place, Beach Haven. In her musical-comedy actress days, Pat had starred there at the Starlight Theater. But star-bright everyone is not. When at a local cafe, I ordered hot tea and lemon, the waitress apologized that they were out of bottled lemon juice, and all they had were fresh lemons. But can nature, pace Oscar Wilde, really imitate art?

Or take the time in a London Chinese restaurant, where an item on the menu fascinated us: Mange Tout. This didn’t sound Chinese. We asked the waiter what was mange (as rhyming with change) tout (rhyming with trout)? He answered in good French that mange (rhyming with blancmange) tout (rhyming with choux) referred to peas in the pod, eaten whole (mange tout).

Then there was the time in Paris, when we could still afford such things, and went to the most expensive restaurant, Lucas-Carton. Pat ordered something innocuous, but I ordered brains, imagining something nicely breaded, perhaps like a wiener schnitzel, only brainier. When the elegant cover was removed, there was, all by its naked self and staring at me, a large, gray, quivering, convoluted mound, the size of a human brain, perhaps one actually. “Yikes!” as we say in French.

Venice brings to mind a lovely lunch I enjoyed with a former girlfriend. On a cart next to our table was a huge truffle--I still don't know how they could come that big. When no one was looking, she stuffed it into her pocketbook. We kept it hidden in our hotel closet until it started to smell. We had to toss the precious thing into the lagoon. I hope the fish develop a taste for it.

Perhaps the most wonderful dish either of us ever ate was in pre-Katerina New Orleans, at the Stella Restaurant.  It was a veal tenderloin, beyond delicious, and much as we searched everywhere, we could not find anything of that kind—not just in culinary quality, but even in quiddity—again. We still think of it with lip-smacking nostalgia, as of a long-lost relative.

Memorable as well were long-ago meals at Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia where on our first visit I opened the gentleman's menu with the prices and exclaimed loudly, "It costs $85.00 per person!!!!"  It turned out worth every penny.

One New Year's Eve we hoped to dine at Le Bec Fin but couldn't get a table so decided on the Ritz Carlton where they had a prix-fixe dinner and dancing.  There is an art to a proper tasting meal in that the courses must be sized and spaced for enjoyment.  By the time the main course--buffalo filet--was served Pat and I were both feeling quite full from the preceding courses but tucked in. We then discovered that we disliked the taste of buffalo filet and asked the waiter to bring us something else.  He offered us filet mignon and we agreed.  When it arrived we realized we were too full to enjoy it but felt terrible about having asked the waiter to make a switch.  So we hid the filets in a potted plant next to our table.  The next morning at breakfast we laughed wondering if the people seated at that table could smell the meat beginning to rot.

Our all time best tasting meal was at a now closed restaurant in Portland, Maine.  Run by Erik Desjarlais, it was called Bandol--but it should have been called Perfection.  Erik now runs a less fancy place in Portland called Evangeline and we keep talking of returning to Portland to see what he's up to there.

At the instigation of the then famous Andre Heller, the Austrian government invited us to visit Salzburg (out of season, alas) and Vienna (never out of season). On Austrian Airlines, in first class, the food was outstanding, and we looked forward to more adventures in gastronomy.

On our very first evening, we were given seats at the Opera for a performance of  Don Carlo (not one of my favorite Verdis) starring Placido Domingo. After that, there was to be at the famous Hotel Sacher (home of one of my favorite deserts, the Sacher Torte) a late night supper in our honor. The guest list read like a who is who of some of the greatest names in opera.

We arrived at the already late hour to find a table set for about 24, but no one there except a bunch of nervous waiters eager to get things started and over with. After a while, an elegant elderly lady arrived. It was the fabulous Martha Moedl, an octogenarian still in fine voice, as we found out later at The Queen of Spades, another of my nonfavorites. (How crazy of Tchaikovsky to prefer it to his true masterpiece, Eugene Onyegin.) The diva was utterly charming, graciously spoke perfect English to  my wife, and the highest German to me.

Finally, the Nr. 2 guy on the Opera staff, an affable chap, showed up as we sat down to eat. He looked at the list of invitees and laughed. Muti had left Vienna the day before, Abbado had not yet arrived, and Domingo had gone off to his hotel for the night. And so on. We started on the soup just as Herr Direktor showed up, as grouchy as Nr. 2 was jolly.

An awkward, faltering conversation ensued, until the subject of Croatia came up, which, with Teutonic support, had just seceded from Yugoslavia. I expected Austrians, part of whose empire Croatia had been, to side with the Croats. Still, I put in a good word for the Serbs, among whom in Belgrade I grew up, and considered much nicer than the Croats. Well, whose face lit up? That of Herr Direktor, who joined me in enthusiastically extolling the Serbs as far finer than the Croats. Thereupon, though no one further showed up, a pleasant supper was had by all. This despite the accursed Tafelspitz, which pursued us all through Austria. The national dish, beloved of Emperor Franz Josef I, it is boiled beef in broth Viennese style, usually served with roasted potatoes and sourcream mixed with horseradish. Horsefeathers! Imperial palate nowithstanding, we thought, and still think, it tastes like meat gone bad.

But back to the celebrated Sacher Torte, which we bought at the Hotel Sacher with high hopes. Well, it was a huge disappointment. Though gorgeously packaged—the outer wooden box itself is a thing of beauty—the cake was dry, not quite as dust, but approaching sand. I eventually discovered that this was indeed the original Sacher recipe, although later, decadently inauthentic versions have been much more to my taste.

Oh, the shock of it, though! Can you imagine Modena vinegar disappointing in Modena? Dijon mustard fall flat in Dijon? Swiss cheese flunk in Switzerland? Kobe beef batting out in Kobe—prior, of course, to the current catastrophe? But such things do happen. Not in Greece however where Pat found every moussaka she ordered to be different and terrific.

One night dining at Per Se, we found the very nice young waiter mispronouncing Montrachet as he poured it, with the middle T sounded. I amicably informed him that this T was mute, as in, say, Montparnasse, because the T in Mont (French for mountain) is unsounded. Which reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes, quite likely apocryphal. Jean Harlow was invited to lunch by Lady Margot Asquith, and kept mispronouncing the Countess’s name as Margott. Finally, the great lady pointed out politely, “My dear, the T in Margot is mute—as in Harlow.”

Let me not forget, however, what Pat does for me. Rushing home from her teaching job, she cooks up a helluva a meal in no time before we run out to the theater. To abolish the boundary between good home cooking and fast food is a miracle to be grateful for.

UNSTOPPABLE STOPPARD

In the Arts and Leisure section of the March 13 New York Times, I find an article about Tom Stoppard and his active involvement in the forthcoming New York revival of his Arcadia. That is a wonderful play, though like much of Stoppard it is hugely cerebral. Which is not to say it isn’t accessible enough to be manna to a civilized audience, but it does make me personally regret not having a scientific enough mind to comprehend it fully. The Times article informs me that “during the 1990s it was one of the most frequently produced plays around the world.” How much of it did or do audiences really get?

What struck me most about that article was that Stoppard is preoccupied with trying to cut three minutes from the first act of the current revival, and having a hard time figuring out just what to cut. So he is postponing the painful surgery till after previews begin, and he and his director can determine from the audience reaction just where to apply the scalpel.

Still, three minutes? What earthly difference can three minutes more or less make to a play? Shakespeare, a dramatist thought to be the equal of Stoppard, has been cut much more than that or not at all, and either way made out quite well. This concern tells us something about Stoppard. Is he a fabulous perfectionist, his brain so discriminatingly fine-tuned, that he can actually be discomfited by such a minuscule difference? Or is he a fussbudget like that fabled princess who couldn’t sleep because of a pea under her

multitudinous mattresses? Or, worse yet, is he a show-off, expecting to call attention to his giant cerebellum and hypertrophic sensitivity, setting him off from lesser playwrights who couldn’t care less about whether and where to cut three measly minutes?

Can you, in all honesty, imagine any of our successful boulevard playwrights shedding a single tear over three lost minutes? I can, though, visualize someone like Tony Kushner yammering about not being allowed to add three minutes of extra garrulity to his existing text. Such addition might not even be a bad idea in a demanding play like Arcadia, which, as the Times puts it, “discusses iterated algorithms, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory.” I myself couldn’t even distinguish between an iterated and an uniterated algorithm, should one of them poke me in the ribs.

There is, by the way, a bit of irony in the Times story’s observing that at the 1995 revival of Arcadia, Stoppard offered the cast “a tutorial in the play’s mathematics and science himself,” rather than having, as at the London premiere, an Oxford don dispense such instruction. When a cast member asked the author to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as Stoppard tells us, “his mind went completely blank.”

It’s honorable of Stoppard to bring up this incident, but blanking out on that law is the equivalent in physics to blanking out in history on who won the Civil War. Or, in grammar, drawing a blank on the difference between an adjective and an adverb. To be sure, the average American college student may not know the answer to that, but then he wouldn’t have written Arcadia either—to say nothing about understanding chaos theory, beyond personifying at least the chaos part of it himself.

Still, it is impressive to have a playwright grapple in his oeuvre with scientific, historical, and political issues the way few if any American dramatists do. It does not make him superior to his equally brilliant British colleague, Alan Ayckbourn, who may not even know what quantum mechanics is—or are—but who turns out no less dazzling plays in even greater number. And while Northern Ireland is still not totally disconnected from England, there is the marvelous Brian Friel, which gives Britain a trifecta leaving most American playwriting eating Albion’s dust.

So overerudite or not, more power to British drama. What do we have to counterpose? Lanford Wilson seems to have stopped writing; Sam Shepard is both too obsessive and too regional; Donald Margolies one would wish more prolific;  and even the Alps are more even than Albee. What we do not have is a truly intellectual playwright, such as little Austria had in Thomas Bernhard, and tiny Switzerland in Duerrenmatt and Frisch. Whatever his shortcomings, Stoppard does fill that role.

Beware, however, of the pseudointellectual playwright. Such a one may be talented, as Kushner and Albee are, but not without some pretentiousness or even megalomania that spoils the brew. On the other hand, a playwright may do wonders without major intellectual aspirations, as long as he  has acute insight and unstinting empathy. We did have one of that kind, a long-lived and productive one: Horton Foote. His only flaw is being dead.

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS

French Without Tears is the title of the charming playwright Terence Rattigan’s first comedic hit. But this post is not a tribute to Rattigan’s centenary now being celebrated wherever English is spoken. For that, catch a forthcoming Theater Talk program on TV, where critic and journalist John Heilpern, actor Edward Hibbert, and I debate and evaluate Rattigan’s contribution to the theater.

No. This post is about my learning French back in the late Yugoslavia with the help of a French primer, which taught through edifying anecdotes. Two of these stick indelibly in my memory, as I experienced again the other day while shining a pair of my shoes, not as expertly as the professionals, but not too shabbily for an amateur.

Anyway, the first of these anecdotes concerns Voltaire and his manservant. As the philosopher was ready to step out one rainy day, he noted that his shoes had not been shined as usual. Under questioning, the servant replied, “What’s the point? It’s raining, and they’ll soon be muddy again.” “Right,” said the sage, and departed with unshined shoes. Forthwith the servant came chasing after him, crying, “Master, you haven’t left me the key to the pantry. How am I to have my lunch?” “What’s the point?” Voltaire rejoined. “In no time at all you’ll be hungry again.”

A thought-provoking morality tale, this. It is perfectly true that certain actions or procedures have to be undertaken even if the outcome is only of transitory value. So I have realized as a teacher that education must not stop even if students forget your teachings and revert to saying “lay” for “lie” or “With Bill and I” for “With Bill and me.” There are times—many times--when, like Nadezhda Mandelstam, one must hope against hope.

There was, to be sure, very little hope for Osip Mandelstam to emerge alive from the clutches of the Soviet GPU or NKVD, or whatever the secret service was called then. But for Voltaire’s shoes there was a faint but encouraging chance that their wearer might circumnavigate puddles, or at least bypass the muddiest spots, and thus preserve a minimum of polish. So too might students who can withstand the teachings of that greatest of educators, television, and thereby not say “We were laying in the dormitory”—unless, of course, the little lechers were.

In other words, without dreaming the impossible dream, there is no way the possible dream, purportedly inside it--and, like the thin man from within every fat man, just waiting to emerge--can conceivably break out. A slim chance, granted, but a slight polish education may, against all odds, conceivably provide. Voltaire’s shoes may not, like the harvest moon, shine on; yet just perhaps they may avoid becoming eyesores.

Now for the other anecdote. King Louis the Eleventh of France—but let me stop right here: Was it really the Eleventh? My secure knowledge of the sixteen Louis extends back only to the Thirteenth (thanks to Alexandre Dumas pere and the Three Musketeers) if that. Or perhaps the Ninth, known as Saint Louis, may have been the one. But no matter.

One day there came before the appropriate Louis a jongleur--or anglice juggler—and his boy to perform a rare skill. The boy stood several paces away, holding up horizontally a long pin. The juggler then, lofting a sack of peas, proceeded to toss pea after pea at the boy. Astoundingly, each pea landed, firmly impaled, on the extended pin. The King had to concede that this was truly amazing.

At the juggler’s request for a reward, the monarch had a page come running with a well-filled crunchy bag. The happy juggler reached inside, but promptly withdrew his hand in horror. Inside were not gold nuggets but peas. Indignantly, he inquired whether this was the royal munificence. “Well”—or Eh bien—replied the saintly Ninth or secular Eleventh Louis, “for a perfectly useless skill this is the suitable recompense.”

As a boy, I felt that this tale made unimpeachable sense. Today, however, I am no longer so sure. Take, in the first place, the great circus artistes—the high-wire acrobats, the human projectiles shot from cannons, the athletic strongmen, the prodigious jugglers, the vast variety of clowns—none of whom provide a cure for cancer or a substitute for oil from Libya—are they to do this for peas or peanuts? Surely the state of wonder they elicit--our not entirely selfless pleasure in seeing human potential in the ascendant—is not to go unrewarded. They deserve whatever they get at least as much as the TV newscasters who deliver the news in their customary faulty English.

But never mind the artistes; what about artists of the not entirely trendily pop kind? Those so-called singers, millionaires whose earnings should really go, if to anyone, to the makers of their microphones. Should not some portion of the earnings of rappers and punkers, of Justin Biebers and Celine Dions, really be diverted to classical composers (other than Philip Glass and Steve Reich), or given to poets who still believe in meter and rhyme and communication, rather than in nonsensical Ashberiesque verbal masturbation?

And what about the monstrously unrewarded intellectual laborers, who, for example, as drama critics (yes, dammit, I am arguing pro domo)  work their asses off in uncomfortable theater seats to review often unconscionable plays and are honest enough not to be politically correct and circulationally enhancing professional yeasayers? Sure, there are exceptions, not quite as rare as hen’s teeth, but easily as rare as centenarian ones. If Terence Rattigan were alive today, how many natural choppers would he have left?

This, alas, is late learning. If I had known better in my youth, I might have become a stockbroker or standup comic, anything but a drama critic. At least, though, it disproves those who claim that after age_______(you fill in the blank) one can’t learn anything anymore.

            

OH, THOSE OSCARS

Herewith some reflections on this year’s Academy Awards from a longtime film critic currently not reviewing movies. Of course I watched the Oscars as I always do; they provide the kind of entertainment that yesteryear’s really pretentious B-movies used to. But this time round they were mostly just plain boring; still, a few kudos and a number of Bronx cheers don’t seem uncalled-for.

Things began with the very sad appearance of Kirk Douglas as presenter of the Best Supporting Actress award to Melissa Leo of The Fighter. Douglas, saddled with the aftereffects of a stroke, severely speech-impaired and looking like Methuselah on a bad hair day, should probably not be exhibited in public. But far worse was the carrying on of Ms. Leo in a dress bedizened with tiny mirrors, no doubt to attract the attention of fellow narcissists. She had already indulged in an elaborate pre-Oscar self-promotion campaign, which alone should have disqualified her. We would have been spared her lengthy dithering replete with Pinteresque pauses, breathlessly self-serving gush, a laundry list of invoked names, and a general air of participating in a ceremony dedicated entirely to herself. An obscenity inherited from her movie role was not quite obliterated; left intact, it would have revealed her as the vulgarian she seems to be.

           

The co-hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, were meant to add young viewer appeal, but a prerecorded introductory routine for them already seemed hopelessly contrived. Otherwise they managed to be fairly innocuous, except when Franco appeared in drag as Marilyn Monroe. He did however, look bored or uncomfortable most of the time, whereas Ms. Hathaway effervesced like the queen of the Junior Prom. She did thus contribute some welcome sparkle, though I am bothered by those jet black designer eyebrows, saucer eyes, and large mouth red enough to enrage a bull, rather like a creature born not so much of woman as of Pixar. She had more costume changes than a runway model, but she did sing a bit rather engagingly.

The best Supporting Actor award to Christian Bale, likewise from The Fighter, was yet another reward for overacting. It should, in my view, have gone to Geoffrey Rush, as splendid in his supporting role as Colin Firth was in the lead of The King’s Speech, deservedly winning the Best Actor Oscar.

I have yet to catch Natalie Portman in Black Swan, but am prepared to agree with her Best Actress award. She has been a wonderful performer since her first film role at age eleven, and even her convincing ballet dancing in this movie (I have seen excerpts) strikes me as worthy of recognition.

The Song Oscar had three dismally tuneless numbers competing, and even the fourth and winner—Randy Newman’s “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3—was only minimally better. On the other hand, Newman’s speech was witty and modest, assuredly one of the evening’s best. He noted that if his category had had five contenders like the others, that fifth might well have beaten his.

The other distinguished speech came from the white-haired David Seidler, who won Original Screenplay for The King’s Speech. Tersely and unostentatiously, he spoke on behalf of older scenarists and stammerers. Charming, too, was Sandra Bullock’s presenter’s banter with celebrities in the audience, better managed than a similar undertaking by Jeff Bridges.

The only King’s Speech winner who, though well deserving of the Direction award, came off unimpressively was Tom Hooper with a mostly flatfooted tribute to his mother. Nor was I impressed with a brief guest appearance by Billy Crystal, a former host, even though it elicited a standing ovation. These days, standing ovations have become as commonplace as hellos, and more often than not undeserved.

Testifying to the Academy members’ benightedness was their completely ignoring the French candidate for the Foreign Language award, Of Gods and Men, by Xavier Beauvais. A story about gallant martyred French monks in North Africa, beautifully written, directed and acted, it did not get so much as the slightest nod.

Another folly was the innovation of having ten films compete for Best Picture. This meant racing through ten items without indication of any special merit, and, to make matters worse, doing this with King George VI’s climactic speech on the accompanying sound track. This must have seemed mystifying to anyone not knowing what it was, and a dead giveaway to others of what the winner would be.

Three further questions arise. Why does the talented Helena Bonham Carter have hair to make a Gorgon envious? Why must the vastly overrated Scarlet Johansson’s hair look as if she came from running a windswept mile without having brought a comb? And why hasn’t the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, who numbers among his many achievements making the Coen brothers look much better than they are--despite nine nominations and numerous Society of American Cinematographers’ and Britain’s BAFTA awards—won a single Oscar?

Finally, as always, there were the absurd dresses, but I’d rather not even get started on those. This year, several of them looked metallic, notably Annette Benning’s, which appeared to be artfully cobbled together out of pieces of surplus armor from the year’s historical epics.

 

ELEVATOR SCIENCE

If you ride an elevator often enough—especially to and from a high floor—you can turn this experience into a psychological study of your neighbors, both the two- and four-legged kind. Such close confines offer a focus on some of the most animal aspects of humans, and the most human aspects of some animals.

            

A damning revelation of human benightedness crops up both inside the elevator and just outside where people wait for it. Inside, the button for the ground floor has been pressed and is lit up. As a new passenger steps in on a lower floor, he or she does one of two things: Either look at the lit-up 1 button, and do nothing, the sensible thing to do; or supererogatorily press that button once or even, in a nervous staccato, several times. This, I am sorry to say, is stupid.

            

Outside, when the elevator door opens on the ground floor, there is all too often some wretched person smack in front of you, a mere foot or two away, and thus blithely blocking the egress. Of course, the person does eventually step aside or back, but not before having given excellent proof of mindlessness.

            

Then there is the matter of what conversation may arise during the ride. The most likely subject, the only one of sure concern to all about to go forth, is the weather. You will recall the saying ascribed—with no great certainty—to Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The joke is in the absurdity: how could anyone change the weather? But perhaps the absurdity is even greater: why even waste much time talking about something that you can’t control?

            

Well, like almost any other subject, the weather can be discussed intelligently or not. Just to utter the cliché the characters sing about in the Kurt Weill-Langston Hughes musical, Street Scene, “Ain’t it awful, the heat?” is of very limited interest. But suppose someone says, “It’s funny. In the August heat we always think we can cope better with a severe winter cold. On a freezing January day, we always say that even the worst heat is better than this.” Not a particularly brilliant observation, but at least one remotely connected with thought.

            

And, incidentally, one can do something about the weather: dress accordingly. But in the elevator we usually see people dumbly dressed not by the weather, but by the calendar. It may be the most wondrously balmy winter day—65 or 70 degrees—but because the calendar says December, these folks are swathed in layers of clothing. And vice versa: on an unexpectedly frigid July day, with the temperature at an almost unheard-of low, these unfortunates go out in paper-thin batiste shirts.

       

But let’s get back to elevator talk. To begin with nomenclature, what about the very name “elevator,” which in my mind often conjures up those ugly elevator shoes worn onstage by short actors and singers? The British term, “lift,” adopted by several other languages, is much more attractive, even if you don’t get much of a lift out of the ride. The French ascenseur is quite melodious; the spondaic German, Fahrstuhl, too ponderously earthbound. To be sure, most people are not particularly sensitive to language; if the elevator were called glubglob, it would be just the same to them. Contrarily, the angel that frequently appears in the works of Cocteau, euphoniously called Heurtebise  (something like wind-repeller), derives his name from a model of the Otis elevator.

         

Anyway, talk. Some people will compliment a fellow passenger on his elegant Savile Row suit or her stunning Hermes pocketbook. Deep down, such compliments may please everyone, but the more discriminating person might take umbrage at them as flattery. A fond Dad or Mom may revel in your praise for a cute child; an owner, in admiration for his pure breed Afghan. But then again, must one fill two minutes involuntarily spent with a stranger with chatter? Isn’t a hello or a good-bye quite enough? As long as it isn’t that saccharine “Have a nice day.” But beware of persons who, you feel, cannot stand a couple of minutes of dead air. Those are the undesirably insecure.

         

Speaking of the cute child, however. Every so often there is the doting parent who must bestow a lesson in elevator science on his tot, explaining what button to choose, how and where to find it, and the way to press it. Or, as more commonly expressed, push it. This can fill you with apprehension: what if the darling presses or pushes the wrong button anyway? The resultant delay is not tragic, unless you are in a great hurry, but somehow, in the close quarters of an elevator even a minor deviance feels like a delinquency. Proximity, like a magnifying glass, enlarges things.

        

Now what about dogs on the elevator? There is a goodly difference between a well-behaved dog who cleaves to his master or mistress, and one that can’t be restrained from nuzzling you. But an even greater, mysterious difference is between  dogs who, upon arrival, respond only to a tugging leash, and others who actually sense the proximity of the desiderated ground or home floor, which will provide them with a walk or bring them back to their quarters. These know exactly when and where to position themselves with palpitating spout, ready to leap forth the moment the door opens. How do they do it? A mystery, like that of the migration of birds, I suppose.

        

Finally, there is the person with an elevator phobia who refuses to enter one, and not merely because it is too crowded or usurped by carts or strollers. Such a person is also unwilling to walk up more than a given number of floors, and if you live higher than that, won’t visit you. If it is someone you don’t care for, bless the elevator. If it is someone you like—well, what are restaurants made for?

THE BEST OF BEST FRIENDS?

            We know, of course, that the dog is man’s best friend. But how reciprocal is this friendship? Is man also the dog’s best friend? When I see Yorkies being carried about by women in their pocketbooks, or sundry dogs constricted by fancy habiliments, or owners sleeping with their dogs between shared sheets, I begin to wonder. Is this truly mutual friendship or some sort of ego trip or ostentation on the owners’ part? Isn’t the coat nature bestowed on canines enough to keep them warm? Or do spoiled, overindulged doggies feel underdressed in the street without bejeweled glad rags?

            These and similar thoughts occurred to me the other day while watching the 135^th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on television. This, as you may know, is the canine equivalent of the Miss America and other like shows, where a young woman is crowned the fairest in the country, or the world, or the universe. Is the winner in what is essentially a mere girlie show truly the most beautiful anywhere other than on television, and even there only on that particular show? And is the best-of-show dog at Westminster (the kennel club, not the cathedral) really the best dog of all? And what does “best” in this case actually mean?

            I love all sorts of animals including dogs and, perhaps most of all, cats. An ex-girlfriend of mine and I once even co-owned a coatimundi we named Humbaba (because its cage was lined with cedar shavings and the monster guard of the cedar forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh is called that), but which we probably shouldn’t have acquired; a coati, however smart and lovable, is meant for the wild, not for a domestic pet. So I wonder whether all that grooming and fussing, pampering and photographing, really benefits a dog. Or only the owners and handlers, who may thrive on all the hoopla.

            My first problem with the dog show is that the competing divas (for that’s what they are) come in seven categories: toy, herding, hunting, working, sporting, nonsporting and terrier. Now, I may be obtuse, but listening to the commentators’ descriptions of the numerous breeds (well over a hundred and counting) it seemed to me that the laudatory epithets that introduced them—such as child-friendly, rat-catching, rabbit-hunting, fox-unearthing, powerfully built and fiercely loyal—were verbosely and repetitiously applied to any number of them, and becoming monotonous. Would Miss America candidates be repeatedly styled bosomy, leggy, family-oriented, negligee-friendly, bedroom-eyed or whatnot?

            Above all, the winners in the seven rather tautological categories were all splendid specimens as they were paraded about before the ultimate judge, Paolo Dondina of Italy, who was carefully kept from eyeballing them until the minute he stepped into the Madison Square Garden arena to pick the champion of champions. Incidentally, all the dogs have elaborate names beginning in, or at least comprising, a Ch., meaning some sort of champion, without which they wouldn’t have been qualified to compete. Thus the Scottish deerhound who won this year is named in full Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind, regularly abbreviated as Hickory, which is rather as if the Miss America contestants were referred to exclusively by their first names, Jeanie or Katie or Tiffany.

            Here, though, is the rub. When one looked at the seven finalists, they seemed not just different breeds, but actually wholly different animals. How on earth could a tiny Pekingese run against a mighty Scottish deerhound?  As soon have a contest pitting gorillas against hamsters. At least all Miss America contestants are young women, none of them dwarves or giantesses.

            And another thing. I fully appreciate Hickory’s pulchritude, even though, like others of her breed, she displays somewhat spindly legs under a mighty body. Surely no Miss America would combine a C-cup bust with shoe size five feet. But there is something even more problematic: Judge Dondina. For Miss America, there is a whole panel of ten or twelve judges—male and female, young and old, straight and gay—to crown the winner. That winner, then, has amassed the highest point score from a number of ecumenical arbiters, making her an across-the-board laureate. (I am not even mentioning the intelligence test with questions like  “If you were stranded in an African jungle, what would you ask for in your prayer?”)

            Hickory was pronounced dog of dogs by just one ultimate, ungainsayable judge, old Paolo Dondina. I stress old, because Dondina looked like a dodderer even if he wasn’t, and because the Times quoted him declaring, “I am a hound person. I had Afghans. I had whippets. I had Irish wolfhounds. I never owned a deerhound. This is my dream.” Well, should a fellow who for many years owned big dogs and dreamt about deerhounds be the single, supreme judge, rather than one of at least nine? Who would have been the winner if Paolo had dreamt about Pekes? It’s as if a buxom blonde became Miss America merely because the sole judge did not dream about willowy brunettes.

            Yet even this may be less important than what I read about Hickory and her likes. She is a five-year-old veteran of beauty contests, five dog years being the equivalent of thirty-five human ones. How many 35-year-olds would be allowed to, or even want to, compete for Miss America? If not disqualified for being over-the-hill, they would recuse themselves for having better things to do than spend the next year rattling around as poster girl for the title.

            Think of what a neurotic mess poor Hickory must be. In shows for five years, dragged hither and yon, exposed to hordes of photographers crowding or dare I say hounding her, with spotlights and flashbulbs, cameras and hubbub? Moreover, I read that she is owned by Sally Sweatt of Minneapolis, but lives on a farm in Virginia with her breeders, Cecilia and Robert Dove, when not, frequently, on the show circuit with her handler, Angela Lloyd. This means that the poor creature is parceled out among four parents and hustled left and right. It is as if Miss America had parents in two separate, distant locations, and were dragged to any number of others by an Argus-eyed guardian who scrutinized her and slept with her (see below) during all these travels and travails.

            Any compensation? Well, I read about all manner of absurd diets and cosmetics, routines and rituals, show dogs are heir to. Says the Times: “Hair is blown straight or teased into fanciful poufs. Snouts and paws are daubed with talcum powder. Wayward hairs and whiskers are trimmed with precision.” For Hickory, Ms. Lloyd concedes, this is quite an extreme experience, inflicted on a sensitive dog best suited to living on a farm and chasing deer and squirrels. No wonder Hickory will nudge Angela when the handler is watching television—“really nudge you”—enough to make you throw an arm up in the air. Indeed, she nudges the sleeping Angela even in the middle of the night.

            Right now Hickory is already booked into several events, starting at 6:30 a.m. What good is the fluffy bed she sleeps on and the extra biscuits she gets? Unlike some other show dogs, at least she isn’t walking with towels on her back and her ears pinned down. Yet even the less hysterical owners are apt to feed their pets luxury dog food, chicken livers, raw bison, and steak on a restaurant platter. During the post-victory press conference, Ms. Lloyd would blow gently on Hickory’s snout to keep her cool. Still, “growing tired of the paparazzi glare, she walked off the stage.” Hickory that is, not Ms. Lloyd. What’s more, Hickory, the day after her triumph, refused even a diced and elegantly served filet mignon at Sardi’s.

            It all goes to show that, however pampered a dog you are—and perhaps especially if pampered—it’s a dog’s life. Is that any way to treat your best friend? 

A PRINCESS OF MARS

            School days, school days! Something just reminded me of good old Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pa., where I put in a couple of turbid semesters before transferring to the far superior Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York City. It had been very nearly a waste of time, because I was put into a form according to my age rather than my aptitudes, which included a better grasp of English grammar than that of my classmates. No boasting here; they were a pretty dim lot.

            Why Perkiomen? My father had a business friend, Stephen Kiss, a good name in English, but not so much in Hungarian (which he was), where it means “small.” He had been in this country longer than our recently immigrated family, so my father asked him to recommend a private school for me. With small understanding, he picked Perkiomen for my sixteen-year-old self.

            Pennsburg was a burg indeed.  Not even a one-horse town—I certainly don’t recall seeing a single horse. As for the school, no one with horse sense would have chosen it. My having an assiduous, book learner’s grasp of English made me stand out somewhat undeservedly, which is how I, a junior, caught the attention of senior English teacher Homer Nearing. A smart young fellow he was, sophisticated, witty, very erudite, and as eccentric as his name. Why he was stuck in that Sargasso Sea of scholarship, Perkiomen, I cannot now comprehend.

            The only distinction the school seemed to have was the chapel, where the banners of many nations were displayed, purchased with the pocket money of hapless former students from the respective countries. Clarence Tobias, the headmaster, had sweet-talked them into forking over a hundred bucks per flag. I later learned that Tobias had embezzled from the school, and much of the flag money doubtless ended up in his pocket. He tried very hard to make me pay for a Yugoslav flag, but I didn’t bite--one of my extremely rare sound financial decisions.

            But back to Homer Nearing.  He and a girlfriend, a grad student in Philadelphia, were collaborating on an epistolary novel. It took place on a desert island, where two young lovers were stranded. Homer and Girlfriend wrote alternating chapters, but sometimes a favorite student was allowed to contribute a chapter as well.  I was such a one, but for the life of me I can’t remember what I wrote.

            Most likely it was something in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, some of whose work, back in my Belgrade days, I devoured. (It made my worthy private English tutor wonder how my bookshelves could incongruously house, side by side, the collected works of Friedrich Schiller, in German yet, and Edgar Burroughs.) I had no use for Burroughs’s Tarzan novels (though I liked the movie versions), but I relished the Martian series. This chiefly on account of Dejah Thoris, a Princess of Mars, for whom the first of the novels was named.  She was extremely beautiful, and differed from Earth girls only in that her skin was strikingly pink. Schiaparelli pink, I imagined, a shade I liked.

            The good thing about these novels was that they were not sci-fi, which would have bored me. Thus Captain John Carter, the Virginian hero and Dejah Thoris’s lover, did not arrive on Mars by means of some complicated interplanetary contraption, but simply by loving the red (or perhaps pink) planet, often staring at it, and one day finding himself miraculously transported there.

            Ah, Dejah Thoris! How lovely a damsel she was, and how much in distress, always needing John Carter to rescue her. In looks and misadventures she was not unlike a much later favorite of mine, Dale Arden, the beloved of the eponymous protagonist of the Flash Gordon comic strip. Equally disaster prone, she was dependent on Flash to keep saving her. Needless to say, I projected myself into the shoes (sandals? boots?) of these gallant rescuers.

            I wonder what became of that epistolary novel. Unpublished, it almost certainly never got finished, and was, like Penelope’s web, useful merely as an ongoing project that warded off other lovers. Curiously, though, I have only two clear memories from my friendship with Homer Nearing.

           One concerns the pronunciation of the name of the Russian composer Borodin. We had a lengthy and lively altercation about where the accent should fall. Homer insisted it belongs on the BO; I plunked for the RO. When we finally looked him up somewhere in those pre-Wikipedia days, the accent was assigned, reliably or not, to the DIN. To this day I haven’t investigated which is correct, not wishing  either Homer or me to be tarred with the stigma of error. The other is Homer's response to someone's suggestion he take up equitation: "Why should I give a horse the useful exercise I need for myself?"

            Back, however, to Pennsburg. The prettiest girl around was named Florence, a waitress who went out with some of the Perkiomen seniors, she being, I guess, of their age. Though she liked me, I was too young to be of real interest, which filled me with pangs of jealousy. But my chance came. Florence was operated on for appendicitis, and was recuperating in her Allentown hospital bed. I bought some flowers and made a pilgrimage to her, by my boyish standards, distant bedside. None of her senior boyfriends had paid her the slightest visit, and she was duly touched. But not enough so to go out with me.

            Many years later, a man in publishing and common friend of ours, put us in touch, and a correspondence ensued, with--Florence being a divorcee with a grown daughter who favored the idea— her hoping for a possible renewed nexus. As it happens, at that very time a book of mine came out with a reminiscence of Florence. I described her as a charming butterfly getting involved with various students, a bit flighty but appealing. Well, I got a furious letter from her daughter saying how hurt her mother was to be accused of promiscuity, and that was the last I heard from either of them.

            However, to return to Homer Nearing. As I got to be somewhat known as a critic, a lady—I forget how she made the connection—wrote to me that my old teacher, now a crabbed recluse, was living in a suburb of Philadelphia, and would probably enjoy hearing from me. In those days, Pat, my wife, and I made fairly frequent trips to Phillie, partly for me to review some play, partly for us to dine at Le Bec Fin, our favorite restaurant anywhere.

            So, with such a trip impending, I wrote Homer, and he somewhat reluctantly agreed to a meeting at the hotel. I can’t recall why this didn’t happen, but, alas, I didn’t get a chance to acknowledge how much he had meant to me. Shortly later I was sent a newspaper clipping with his obituary.

            Thus, in compensation, I am making a point of thanking my wife for all I owe to her, my real-life Dejah Thoris. And I would strongly advise you that, upon reading this, you too give explicit thanks to someone from whom you have learned an important lesson or two.