I don’t know what tripped the switch, but for the last couple of days my thoughts have been a bit fixed on Thornton Wilder’s play ‘Our Town’.  Below is an introduction lifted from a set of videos of two productions of the play.

(Can I assume that you’ve seen ‘Our Town’ in one form or another?  If not, then from the standpoint of this post, you’re at sea.  If we are to believe “Since its original production in 1938, Our Town has been produced on stage somewhere every single day”, you’ve had plenty of opportunity.  You need to face up to your sloth and general delinquency…)

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“Thornton Wilder was unhappy with the 1940 film and 1957 musical versions of Our Town. Before his death, in 1975, he worked with producer Saul Jaffe and director George Schaefer in an attempt to leave behind a definitive version of his masterpiece. The result of that collaboration was broadcast on NBC in 1977, featuring a stellar cast that included Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty, Sada Thompson, John Houseman, Glynnis O Connor and Robby Benson, and was such a success that the trustees of Wilder’s estate decided to never permit another television version of the play. The author had his definitive version.

Since its original production in 1938, Our Town has been produced on stage somewhere every single day, often by school or community theaters drawn to its simple set design, large cast and American themes.  Gregory Mosher, who directed the Lincoln Center Theater’s stage production, felt that as a result the play had been turned into a holiday greeting card, reduced by a consensus that it was a superficial, nostalgic, flag-waving poem to a lost America.

His production reflects Wilder’s very particular version of what life in this century had been and might become. The production, featuring Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Roberta Maxwell, Penelope Ann Miller and Eric Stoltz, ran on Broadway for 136 performances, and the trustees were so impressed by the Tony Award-winning production that in 1989 they granted permission for its presentation on PBS’s Great Performances series.  The 1988 production is the one recommended by the Thornton Wilder Society.

Our Town is considered one of the greatest American plays. Epic in scope yet profoundly intimate in its depiction of small town life early in the twentieth century, Wilder’s aim was to leave a time capsule for future generations curious about life in early 20th century New England. Upon his death he could not have known that his desire for a definitive television production of his play would be satisfied not once but twice. It’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have been pleased.”

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Both the 1977 and the 1988 productions talked about here can be seen on Youtube, though something of a grave viewing solution.  The 1977 one was directed and shot for television, whereas the 1988 one is fundamentally a taped stage performance, and consequently suffers some from the fact that the actors’ ‘effects’, which would have been intended for twelfth row center, are rarely modified for these kinds of taped records.

The casting of the ’77 production is glorious, though the whole production might need to shield itself from the ‘holiday greeting card’ lambaste (which would only be flung by a toad) mentioned before.  There are other ‘recent’ productions on video, one with Paul Newman, which is good.  And there was a recent production in New York done ‘in the round’ with cast scurrying amongst the audience, which in addition attempted to ‘open up’ the play with modern vernacular.  Disaster.

When I was in the tenth grade, I was in our high school’s production of ‘Our Town’.  Though the rest of the cast was mined from the speech and drama classes which were restricted to eleventh and twelfth graders, the director and teacher of those courses (a dear lady who seemed to have been plucked from central casting fulfilling a request for ‘schoolmarm’) approached me with the ‘Professor Willard’ role, such apparently was my nascent star potential…

A treasured experience, I refuse to entertain the notion of the viewing of that production today being massively wince-worthy.  However, faux-New England accents delivered by Georgia high school students?  Yikes.

At a party once upon a time, our friend Mike M, a big strawberry blond bear, volunteered that when he came out, he was ‘a whore-waiting-to-happen’.  Just pitch-perfect, though I’ll admit that I am perhaps unnaturally fond of a superior hyphenated term.

Somewhere betwixt a suggestion and an urging from our friend Martin L, we watched the documentary ’100 Men’ the other evening, and I must say I feel positively puritanical, bordering on chaste.

The film is running on Netflix at the moment, and rentable on iTunes.

Let me say preemptively that I wish that I could play the piano at a level even approaching ‘pedestrian’.

The other day I was looking online for the cover of Chris Isaak’s signature song ‘Wicked Game’ being used in the television ad for Alpha Romeo.  The song itself is intoxicating and voluptuous and sumptuous and all those other ‘–tuous’ words, so the ad agency couldn’t have made a better choice.

What I ran across in the process of my search was this version by Marie Digby.  Though her keyboarding is a trifle pedestrian, her vocal performance is gorgeous and haunting.  (I wonder if my impression of her accompanying herself isn’t due more to the fact that miking the piano is essentially impossible, according to a couple of sound engineers I’ve talked to.)

I think I’m just going to start posting songs on Domani Dave.

It’s SO much easier than writing.

As I’m confident that my readers have been waiting with baited breath for word from me since my last post, I offer my apology for being so negligent…

With the present post, I will have seemed to have gone full circle, from feeling that it is slightly gauche to carry on about one’s maladies, to putting it all on display.  The accompanying illustration stolen from the Mayo Clinic website shows the procedure I underwent on the twenty-first of this month.

Since my trip to the hospital in January, in spite of several medications, my heart was beating at a constant 130 beats per minute.  It is now beating at +/-50 BPM.  I have a followup this coming Tuesday with the doctor who performed this procedure.

Though one of my readers — a physician himself — described this procedure as “rather ho-hum” (see last post’s ‘Comments’), as I pointed out to him, “All very well and good for y o u to say!  It wasn’t y o u r heart they were cathetering around in;-)”

But enough of that.  I’m going to resume my speed walking tomorrow.

And since tomorrow is Easter Sunday, I include the following text exchange my friend Will W and I engaged in last week, which got started over an incidental mentioning of George Steven’s (Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun) movie ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ — a movie massively panned in 1965 in part because of cameo-casting of nearly every star in Hollywood at the time.

Including Pat Boone.  I’m serious.

This exchange includes references only two movie buffs — one 65 and the other 71 — would understand.  I simply will not inflict historical explanations upon the junior reader.  Feel free to thank me.

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“Speaking of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, I saw it in Atlanta in 1965 in Cinerama with my longtime friend Tony, who begged me (well, he floated the idea) to leave at intermission.  Our friendship was on the decline at that juncture as I recall, and this may well have pushed it over the edge.  A major review at the time said the premiere in NY was enlivened only by the souvenir books sliding off laps and hitting the floor with a thud as attendees nodded off.  This remark is right up there with the white corpuscle attacking the mini-sub in ‘Fantastic Voyage’ being described as resembling ‘a large aggressive hominy grit’.  Unsurpassed in movie criticism.  Sadly, ‘TGSET’ has the best art direction in any ‘Biblical epic’ before or since.  And, sadly in a different way, Shelley Winters touching the hem of Max Von Sydow’s garment, and exclaiming “Oi’m healed, oi’m healed!” in perfect Brooklynese.

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So did you leave at Intermission or not?

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The only two movies I think I’ve ever walked out of are Elvis Presley’s ‘Double Trouble’, and a second feature (which Disney used to pair with reissues of animated features) about the Vienna Boy’s Choir.  What was I doing at ‘Double Trouble’?  I was in basic training in the Air Force seeking any escape, but ‘DT’ proved too much even under those circumstances.  Saw Francis Coppola’s ‘You’re a Big Boy Now‘ at that time, too.  You win some, you lose some…”

Tomorrow I go into the hospital for a procedure called ‘cardiac ablation’.  I’m not entirely sure why, but I feel not just a little peculiar announcing this here on the blog, but there it is.  You can read about it, or not, with the link attached to the term here.  Even though I certainly know what’s about to take place, I myself have kept a safe distance from the nuts and bolts outlined in such an article in order not to induce panic.  That seems sensible, am I right?

So, instead, let’s listen to Stacey Kent and her piano accompanist David Newton, both of whom I’m crazy about.  The little keyboard trills on this track, so nice.

Also on this record is My Heart Stood Still, much more upbeat than Easy to Remember, but let’s face it, a little tacky to consider including at this juncture…

(I’ll save that one for the day after tomorrow.)

And so does my husband Stephen (our house is full), but that’s another story.

To avoid a March vacuum here on Domani Dave, I offer this piece from seven years ago, which several posts back I threatened to recycle.

Sharp-eyed Bare-breasted Boys

March 2, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I began my forth year of walking for exercise, every single day.  I walk a roundtrip distance of two and a quarter miles, the same stretch — from Broad Street, crossing Baxter, to Five Points, and back — and I do it in about twenty-nine minutes.  It would not occur to me to skip this daily routine.  Though I’ve mentioned this walk a couple of times on this blog, you’ll have to take it on faith that I do not stop people on the street to natter on about it.

Why the same strip of sidewalk?  Well, for one thing, it’s flat and it’s predictable, and it’s a block away from the street where we live.  It’s also one of the busiest streets in town, and I’d be less than honest if I said that the fact that people tell me that they see me walking all the time doesn’t give me some kind of validation.  I also see a number of other ‘regulars’ — we don’t know each other, but we wave.  Stephen jokes about how I need to get out there with my ‘peeps’.

I used to wear sunglasses, but I found it isolated me from people walking in the opposite direction.  People smile and acknowledge you if they can make eye contact, not so much with sunglasses.  Which brings me to another aspect of my routine.  The street I walk on is a very popular jogging route.  And this is a college town.  Hello!  I know it’s going to get cold again before this is all over, but recently the weather has gotten almost warm, and the jogger shirts came off.

Admittedly, I get a bit blasé as the Summer rolls on.  On the odd evening that Stephen might ask for a report, I eventually end up describing some youth as ‘standard-issue gorgeous’ because the details get so repetitive.  Only if there is a magic combination of height (six-three, maybe) and shoulder width, for example, will I get into tiresome (!) particulars.  But, back to sunglasses, or the lack thereof.

I read somewhere a long time ago that evolutionarily speaking, one of the refinements the human species acquired for survival is the ability to tell with great accuracy where another pair of eyes are trained, even at a considerable distance.  Let me corroborate.  If I espy an approaching jogger, and closing at thirty feet away I allow my eyes to b r i e f l y drift below his navel, inVARiably there will be some subtle indication that this glance has been detected.  Though I’m well-past caring, it IS somewhere between frustrating and fascinating.

In spite of this post, my handful of readers will know me to be a gentleman of taste and breeding, and nothing like a dirty old man.  Well, old, yes, and maybe a bit dirty, but not dirty and old in combination with each other.  It should also be pointed out that whereas I have great legs, it would never occur to me to display my own bosom while out on the hoof.  I’ve s e e n contemporaries in this state of déshabillé, and the next one that comes along, well, there’s going to be an intervention.

My recent circulatory setback has nudged me offline, but since I think I’ve been consistent in posting, for better or for worse, at least once a month since 2009, indulge my feeling inclined to place a marker here to signal that I’m still around.  If you don’t hear from me in March, consider me kaput.

I know… its too painful to contemplate.

Sorry to be a week late with my annual birthday selfie.  It’s been a rough year…

Today is the seventy-first anniversary of Davemas, aka my birthday.

The lead-up to it has been inauspicious to say the least, as I spent Tue/Wed/Thu of this past week in the hospital (leave out the ‘the’ if you’re from the UK).

As Stephen had the flu, he insisted that I go to a nearby walk-in clinic to get swabbed.  While there, we discovered that my heart was racing at double the normal rate, and the doctor insisted that I go to the ER, which I did.

With no symptoms that I was aware of, we discovered I have AFib.  Wish me well.  (I insist.)

My only relief during my hospital stay was my day nurse, ‘a well-made youth’, as sweet and charming as could be — made all the more charming by (though he tried) an almost complete inability to make smalltalk.

How prescient my previous post;-)

I’ve been out of commission for a while, and haven’t posted.

When I posted this photo before, it gave my ‘views’ a boost.

I’m certain it was the eyes that engaged so many then, so…