Tomorrow Susie and I will celebrate our twenty-eighth
wedding anniversary. I will take her to
dinner at a lovely upscale Durham, NC
restaurant on West Main Street called Revolution
[you can't make this stuff up.] At
dinner this evening, we were reminiscing about our first dates, in 1948 and
1949, when we were students at Forest Hills High School in Queens.
Our very first date [a story I tell in my Autobiography] was a movie outing. I took Susie to the Thalia Theater in
Manhattan, an early art movie theater, to see a revival of César, the third in a pre-war film trilogy made by
the great French director Marcel Pagnol.
[For musical buffs, the entire trilogy -- Marius, Fanny, César -- was turned
into the Broadway show Most Happy Fella.] At about the same time, I started taking
Susie to performances of the newly formed Bach
Aria Group, which performed arias from the Bach cantatas at venues such as
the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan. It was
there that I first heard Bernard Greenhouse, the marvelous cellist who was
later a mainstay of the Beaux Arts trio [with the inimitable pixie Menahem
Pressler on piano.] The violinist was
Maurice Wilk, the very best student of my violin teacher, Mrs. Irma Zaccharias,
Somewhat later, I took Susie on a big date to the Cherry
Lane Theater in the Village, where we watched a performance of T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes with the curtain
raiser Desire Caught By The Tail by
Picasso. We even went to the Davenport
Free Theater , a weird and wonderful place in Manhattan where one could watch
terrible performances absolutely free.
But our fanciest date was in the summer of '52, when I was
working as a Copy Boy at the New York Herald
Tribune. I took Susie to the Blue
Angel, a New York cabaret named after the dive in the famous Marlene Dietrich
film. The cover charge was five dollars
per person -- a fortune -- but the show was quite memorable. There were three acts -- Orson Bean, who
opened, Josh White, and Eartha Kitt.
Josh White and Eartha Kitt were spectacular, of course, but I still
remember Orson Bean's opening joke. He
came out, took the microphone rather diffidently, and said, "Hello. My name is Orson bean, Harvard 48 ... Yale
nothing." It got a big laugh.
I wonder sometimes.
Do young people today go on dates like that?
2 comments:
You will be pleased to know that as recently as a few years ago, at least, Pressler was still going strong. I heard him in a concert with the clarinetist Richard Stolzman at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, a club setting for classical music that is quite innovative. Pressler seemed to take it all in stride. They performed a Brahms duet as their main piece togeher. But the hilight for me was Pressler's solo performance of Debussey's Estampes.
How wonderful! The times I saw the Beaux Arts, he was delightful.
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