Mill Hill Broadway Blues: Sunday, September 1st

Once upon a time a man whose ax was missing suspected his neighbor's son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his ax while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor's son, the boy walked, looked and spoke like any other child. -Lao-tzu, philosopher (6th century BCE) 

Hello Simon!

Trust you are well. I assume school will be starting this coming week. We have had a simply marvellous time everywhere in England. Arrived in London yesterday afternoon after driving from Cornwall where we'd done our house-exchange.
 

Just wanted to confirm that either Trudi or Niall will be meeting me at Beau Soleil tomorrow, or else what arrangements I need to know about in order to gain access to the house. I leave London on the Eurostar and then Paris from there to Béziers on the TGV. I am to collect my car there and will drive to Neffiès. All things going well, supposed to arrive in Béziers at 16:28 so I assume I'll be at Beau Soleil somewhere between 5:00-6:00 pm, depending on car hire arrangements and my ability to find my way to Neffiès. Please let me know if this seems fine. Thanks and Cheers, Patrizzio!

Pic: Idle Rocks at St Mawes, Corinne and Patrizzio!

Didn't sleep particularly well after that as I was worried about concussion, (She had a huge goose-egg on the back top of her head and her tailbone/coccyx was extremely sore. She had obviously landed on both at some point in her aerial journey, coming down to a hard landing!), and a whole host of other injuries that might surface. Heard her get up at around 3:30am and rummage around for some painkillers so I knew she hadn't broken anything. I was up at 7:30 am myself and she seemed to be sleeping peacefully so I left to start massive clean-up. Was just about to go back upstairs at around 10:00 am when the Queen of the High Wire walked slowly and carefully into the kitchen! Sore, very sore but apparently going to live to perfect her flip!
 

Brunch, bacon/sausage sandwiches on patio; clean-up outside 
Madcap picked up my Montague so I was about to pack in readiness for tomorrow's travel when Cora lee came upstairs to have a nap. Downstairs to attend to email  when Mad Max arrived with his parents in tow. Brief visit, lost 10/6 to MM in soccer. When they left I returned to The Diaries but Cora Lee came downstairs a few minutes later so now it really is time to get serious about packing!


Hi Patrick I have forwarded your email to Niall and Trudi.There is a lock box outside the front door - the combination is XXXX Glad you are enjoying yourselves.  We were at whistler this weekend - next weekend I get to cycle there as I am taking part in the Granfondo. Best Simon

Hi all

Hope everyone is enjoying the long weekend or some fabulous Euro locale!

Heard from John Vogt who admitted withholding information about his current health until after my vacay. The right lung is now also showing a tumor and his liver is covered with lesions as well. He has a maverick Oncologist willing to take some additional experimental steps if he can get his strength up. He went to Tofino for vacation with the Vogts but had just been in hospital for several weeks. Spoke to Marlo, Pam, Grandma and Grandpa today...all were well...Dusty was happily watching the Bombers play.

So I may have to go to Vancouver sooner than later, given the circumstances. On a more pleasant note, I met an interesting man this week...whee!! Lol Love to all. Ayn

Elaine, I'm so sorry to hear the news about your mom. It is countered  in some small way upon the arrival of Oliver. Please give Kristina and Alex our congratulations. I'm sure you must be very excited to be going to meet him.

We are in London at Penny's after great month in Cornwall. I fly tomorrow to Rome to meet Robyn and spend 3 weeks exploring Italy. Will meet up with Patrick in Beziers on Sept. 22.

Love to you and Ted, Corinne

Hi Patrick!

Hope your trip to London went well and your onward journey to France goes smoothly. Gayle wanted me to send you a quick message to see if you could ask Corrine before she leaves for Italy where she buys her bedding. Gayle was making the bed yesterday and somehow her ring got caught in the sheet and caused a small tear. Gayle wants to replace the sheet but didn't know where Corrine buys them!
 

We are just getting ready for the kids to pick us up for our few days away on the Island.
Best wishes Derek

Hi Gayle & Derek, Please don't worry about sheets. They are not new. Off to Rome tomorrow. Trust good weather is still holding. All the best from Mill Hill Broadway, more later. Corinne

Hi Pat

Thanks for the long e-mail which I found very enjoyable to read and I loved the Garmin read-out of your biking exploits.  I hope that the weather has improved in the UK and that the move to Languedoc goes smoothly.

Life speeds along as usual here with lots of babysitting recently and now that Nikki and Ben have baby girl number three (arrived early this morning) I'm sure we will be doing a lot more.

I am back playing golf and walking the course quite easily, and really pleased to be back playing again after a 9 month hiatus.

We tried lawn bowling last Thursday in a charity event for juvenile diabetes, and organized by our youngest son Davey.  We bowled at the club adjacent to the Lawn Tennis club and it is a lovely setting.  Not sure if I am quite ready to take it up as a sport yet, but it was a lot of fun. Have a great time in France Mick  

Patrick

Ayn Prince's (ayn_prince@spe.sony.com) birthday is on Wednesday September 4th. Ayn will be 46 years old.

Click below to choose one of our specially recommended birthday greeting cards and we will send it on Ayn's birthday...

http://www.BirthdayAlarm.com/eCard/93908997a2b307933820c21954956?MID=1955  

Kind Regards, BirthdayAlarm.com In the next three minutes you could help solve the water crisis: 

https://waterforward.charitywater.org/b3/

 

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village by John Strausbaugh, Harper Collins, 2013. In the 1940s and 50s, faced with increasing competition from movies and television, Broadway increasingly turned to lavish musicals such as The King and I, The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, and South Pacific. That left less room for serious drama -- and faced with this reality the actors union decided to allow its members work in small theaters for reduced pay, restricting the size of the audi­ence and the number of performances. And so that drama moved south to the smaller, disheveled spaces of Greenwich Village -- and showcased promising young unknowns such as Ed Asner, Jerry Stiller, Jerry Orbach, and Bea Arthur and works by T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and even Pablo Picasso, all chronicled by a new paper called the Village Voice:
 

"Greenwich Village was the birthplace of both Off-Broadway in the 1950s and Off-Off-Broadway in the 1960s. During the war, the most notable new theatrical activity in the Village had been the New School's Dramatic Workshop. The workshop's director Erwin Piscator, ...  a huge figure in the inter­national theater community [who had] fled Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Moscow before immigrating to New York. Because of his reputation his students had the opportunity to perform new work by im­portant writers, including the U.S. premiere of Sartre's The Flies and the first staging of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Out of his classes would come a generation of stage and film stars of the 1950s. 

"A few new companies sprouted in the Village in the first years after the war. One called New Stages took over an abandoned movie theater at Bleecker and Thompson Streets and staged work by Sartre, Garcia Lorca, and others. Another took over the Provincetown Playhouse and staged works such as Cocteau's The Infernal Machine. In 1949 Broadway and Ac­tors' Equity gave the nascent scene a boost. Broadway producers and in­vestors 'were caught in a two-way economic pinch,' the theater historian Stephen J. Bottoms explains, as 'a consumer-driven inflationary boom was driving the costs of production to unprecedented heights, while the­ater audiences were being seduced away' by film and television. Broad­way producers turned increasingly to handsomely mounted musicals to lure audiences back; the 1950s would be the epoch of grand productions: The King and I, The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, South Pacific. There was some serious drama on Broadway but many producers didn't want to take the risk. Work abounded for the few actors who could hoof 'n' holler; less so for the rest. Actors' Equity, therefore, decided to let its members work in small theaters for reduced pay, restricting the size of the audi­ence permitted and the number of performances.

"With the promise of affordable legitimacy, new theater companies be­gan to bloom around the Village. In 1950 the director Jose Quintero and others turned the former Cafe Society basement on Sheridan Square into the Circle in the Square. Their 1952 revival of Tennessee Williams's Sum­mer and Smoke, which had flopped on Broadway a few years earlier, was a huge success, the first big hit of the new Off-Broadway. It made a star of Geraldine Page, who went on to do the filmed version as well. Quintero had another big hit with a revival of The Iceman Cometh. The new Vil­lage Voice handed out its first Obie awards that year to Quintero and the show's star Jason Robards Jr. The show then moved to Broadway.

"In 1954 Marc Blitzstein's translation of The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater de Lys (later the Lucille Lortel) on Christopher Street, with a cast including Lotte Lenya, Bea Arthur, and John Astin. It played ninety-six performances before it had to clear the stage for another show. Audience demand brought it back to the theater in 1955 and it ran for six years, with casts that included Ed Asner, Estelle Parsons, Jerry Orbach, and Jerry Stiller. ...

"Reviving plays by Williams and O'Neill was 'not particularly daring,' Bottoms argues. 'In effect, the serious drama being squeezed off Broad­way by economic forces found an alternative home in these smaller the­aters.' For really new and challenging work, there were the haphazard collaborations of John Myers and Herbert Machiz's short-lived Artists Theatre, and there was Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, both closer in spirit to what came to be known as Off-Off-Broadway than Off-Broadway. In 1959 the Living Theatre produced a kind of junkie Go­dot: Jack Gelber's The Connection, the most controversial Off-Broadway play yet and its biggest succes de scandale.

"Beck and Malina had founded the Living Theatre in the postwar years and from the start had charted a singular course for it. ... Chronically broke, they staged their first performances in their apart­ment before renting Cherry Lane in 1951 to produce Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, which John Ashbery called 'one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on the stage.' In 1952 they presented an evening of one-acts: Stein's Ladies' Voices, T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, and Picasso's surrealist Desire Trapped by the Tail, best known for Gertrude Stein's remark on first encountering it that the painter should stick to painting."