My Burger Kingdom for a Horse

The chevaline stall — you should pardon the expression — in a market in Poitiers.

The current scandal over beef burgers “tainted” with horsemeat has me mystified, to the point that I’m tempted to downgrade it to a mere moo-haha — though it’s been hyped and sensationalized in every press outlet. Granted, one would prefer to know what one is eating, and even I observe the strict dietary rule of never eating anything that’s smarter than I am. (This rules out orangutans, dolphins, and, in some but not all cases, Presbyterians.) But unless one is an exceptionally strict vegan, the difference between eating a cow and eating a horse strikes me as extremely fine.

It’s true that little girls seldom develop sentimental attachments to cattle, as they do to horses, and movie audiences are far more likely to attend a screening of The Black Stallion than The Black Angus. Cattle don’t conform to the aesthetic model of strength and grace that horses uphold so beautifully.

Moreover, the Norman Conquest of Britain assured future generations of English-speaking diners that only certain meals would remind us where they came from: we eat “beef” (boeuf), not “cow,” “pork” (porc), not “pig,” and “venison” (venaison), not “Bambi.” The Normans never quite got around to providing us with a euphemism for “horse,” probably because those animals were too scarce and valuable; I don’t know what excuse they can make for failing to rename “rabbit.”

The chevaline stall at the market at Beynes can be seen in the background here. Unlike the fishmonger and the other butchers, the chevaline vendor comes to town only one day per week, instead of two.

With language as a foundation, British and American cultures over time built up a wall between the farm and the dinner table, one at which only hardcore foodies chip away. Supermarkets and prepackaged products are further manifestations of most modern consumers’ insulation from the realities of what they eat, and my own experience bears this out: I was shockingly old before I understood that tuna comes from the sea, not from a can; that it is fish-shaped, not cylindrical; and that, in nature, it is raw, not cooked, and smells like tuna, not like catfood.

Most of the excited news reports on the hamburger scandal mention that horse is eaten in many otherwise respectable countries, and that one of these is the cradle of haute cuisine, France. It’s therefore incumbent upon me to state that I have eaten horse, not only in France but also in Cuba, a country so lacking in horses that for a time its cavalry rode bicycles. In Havana one night, I ate horsemeat stewed with tomatoes, onions, and bell pepper. It was delicious, but it was prepared much the way any other dish might have been prepared in that country, and doesn’t tell one much about the distinctions of caballo.*

The French have come up with a word for horsemeat, chevaline, which is most often sold by specialist vendors in markets; I don’t recall ever seeing chevaline in a supermarket, and perhaps this reflects a desire to be absolutely sure that consumers understand what they’re ordering. In France, I’ve eaten ground horsemeat in a steack haché and in a thinly sliced portion that looked like (and may have been called) a hanger steak. The flesh is, as you’d expect, much leaner than that of beef, the flavor darker and yet not quite as strong. It’s red meat — no big deal, unless of course you don’t eat red meat of any kind.

A chevaline shop in Paris.

Chevaline vendors usually purvey steaks, ground meat, and great big sausages, in red casings, that look quite like bologna. I’ve never eaten horse sausage, though I have eaten very tasty donkey sausages, hard and garlicky, in Corsica. (This does mean that, over the years, I have sampled most of the cast of Winnie the Pooh, excepting Owl.)

As a few news reports have mentioned, nobody wants to eat American horsemeat. We reject it because we’re squeamish, and the Europeans reject it because American racehorses are pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs. A chacun son goût.

I hope these observations may serve as a corrective, in some small way, to the lurid coverage of the scandal in television, print, and the Internet. But, as I say, don’t come crying “Ew, gross,” unless you say neigh to meat of all kinds.

A horse is a horse, main course.

*NOTE: Dan Rather joined me at the dinner in Havana when we ate horse stew. When it was presented to us by a Spanish-speaking waiter, Dan asked me to translate. Knowing that he likes goat, and unsure how he’d feel about eating horse, I told him it was cabrito, which sounds close enough to caballo to cover my deception. I confessed the truth only several hours later.

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NYFOS Sings Brel & Trenet

Charles Trenet

Each time I attend a concert of New York Festival of Song, I am uplifted. Artistic director Steven Blier builds programs around themes that are always intriguing, and his eclectic tastes are impeccable: yes, he likes all kinds of songs, but only the good ones. He’s also got a knack for selecting fresh talent, often before I’ve heard them sing much if ever, so a big part of the uplift is the simple optimism that other concerts, in other venues, will be satisfying, too. After all, as an impresario, accompanist, and teacher, Blier is among the most significant forces that have revolutionized recital programs in America over the past few decades: it is now standard for sets and entire performances to be organized around themes, and the repertoire has expanded far beyond art songs and arias.

Last night’s performance of songs by Jacques Brel and Charles Trenet provided eloquent, abundant proof of the qualities I admire in NYFOS programs. Even in the work of two songwriters I know well, Blier found numbers unfamiliar to me, and I’d never thought of pairing the angry Belgian with the sunny Frenchman: the combination shed new light on both. To lend authentic flavor to the proceedings, Blier invited two top-notch musicians, guitarist Greg Utzig and accordionist Bill Schimmel (who’s also one of the leading exponents of Weill’s music). With two native-French singers of exceptional charm, it was a memorable evening all around.

Jacques Brel

Indeed, mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand was so brilliant that one almost regretted that this wasn’t a solo recital — contravention though that would be of the NYFOS philosophy that it’s better to share the music (with each other, with the audience, with the world). Pert and pretty, funny as hell, Lenormand fully inhabited the dramatic situation of each song, and she expertly negotiated the vocal distinctions between chanteuse and cantatrice. Moreover, the woman knows how to work a crowd. We were at her mercy, and we loved her for it.

Singing opposite her, the young tenor Philippe Pierce, a graduate of Brown University (go, Bruins!), would have been justified in boasting if he’d merely avoided letting Lenormand mop up the floor with him, but he managed to hold his own and to shine, notably in the opening number, Brel’s “Valse à mille temps,” with its accelerated tempos and tongue-twisting lyrics. Pierce sailed confidently through. Since Trenet was approximately a baritenor and Brel decidedly a baritone (who played the lead in Man of La Mancha, by no means a tenor role), it must be said that, generally, I’d have preferred a darker voice in this music, but Pierce’s linguistic skill and aforementioned charm did offer valuable compensations.

Tenor Philippe Pierce

In Blier’s piano accompaniment, he showed generosity to the young singers but didn’t mollycoddle them; throughout the evening, his affection for this music was audible and infectious. In his arrangements, he did better by those numbers in which Utzig played banjo (creating the perfect atmosphere) than by those in which the indisputably accomplished Utzig played electric guitar, which unbalanced the acoustic and didn’t contribute much that seemed truly necessary. (It seemed mostly a kind of sonic filler.) Schimmel’s accordion, however, was right on the mark, and he plays so well that one forgets how badly other people play. Even watching him is a pleasure, like watching a great dancer.

This music is important to me, in ways that transcend aesthetic considerations, and Trenet’s songs in particular hearken to summers by the sea and to the spirit that guided so many of my explorations of France and its culture. (After all, when you speak a childish French, and when everything is new to you, you do acquire a youthful, Trenet-esque exuberance, even if you’re not a kid anymore.) To be honest, since the death of my mother-in-law last month, I’ve not had the heart to listen to Trenet or to Brel, and some of their songs can wring wracking sobs from me even on a good day. I managed to hold it together through Brel’s “La chanson des vieux amants” and “Ne me quitte pas” and Trenet’s “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” and “La mer,” not through any lack of commitment on the part of the musicians but through sheer willpower on my own.

The Indispensable Steven Blier

The real surprise was a Trenet song, “J’ai mordu dans le fruit de la vie” (I’ve bitten into the fruit of life), which I had always supposed was one of those rosily nostalgic-slash-congratulatory numbers with which Trenet, in old age, pandered to little old ladies in his audience. Au contraire, as Blier pointed out in his introduction, it’s nearly a confession of Trenet’s homosexuality — precisely the kind of song I hoped for but didn’t find in “Tu me manques, Johnny” (about which I wrote here). Trenet was the Gypsy Rose Lee of French pop music when it came to revealing his true self, and excepting songs about his childhood, he seldom removed so much as a metaphorical eight-button glove, but Blier made a persuasive case for this song as a personal statement, and Pierce sang it with sincere but gently restrained feeling.

NYFOS’ next concert, “Song of the Midnight Sun,” will be March 12 at Merkin Hall, and features Caramoor’s 2013 Terrance W. Schwab Vocal Rising Stars in music of Scandinavian composers, with Blier and NYFOS’ associate artistic director (and the Caramoor Center’s current artistic advisor and former CEO and general director) Michael Barrett on piano. For information and tickets, click here.

Meanwhile, I have a new mezzo to worship.
Mesdames et messieurs, Marie Lenormand.
(I’d heard her before, notably as the Fox in Houston Grand Opera’s production of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince, but she surpassed all expectations last night.)

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Interview: Salon/Sanctuary’s Jessica Gould on Space, Vision, & ‘Tantalus’

Soprano and Artistic Director Jessica Gould.
Photo by Christian Steiner, courtesy of Jessica Gould.

Some of my most memorable experiences as an audience have come from hearing a piece in a space that’s comparable to that in which the composer expected his music would be performed: hearing Susan Graham sing Reynaldo Hahn’s salon music in a private home, for example, or hearing a Bach oratorio in a church. The flip side of that is that sometimes it’s taxing to hear a work in a space for which it was not designed. Mozart never imagined that his operas would be heard in an auditorium as vast as that of the Metropolitan, and one of the most heartbreaking performances I ever attended was a contemporary opera given its world premiere in a church, where the sound bounced off every wall until word and most instrumental effects were lost.

That’s why I was so pleased to learn of the soprano Jessica Gould’s efforts to produce concerts in settings that are appropriate to the works performed — and under the aegis of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts, her producing organization now in its fourth season, those efforts are paying off. Consider the way she’s championed the Salamone Rossi (1570–1630), who composed liturgical works for synagogues as well as music for the court of Mantua: Gould defied expectations, and her annual concerts, performed in a synagogue, are among the hottest tickets in town.

Part of what I admire is Gould’s moxie: rather than wait for somebody else to produce the concerts she wants to sing — or hear — she makes them happen. Indeed, when I finally got to attend a Salon/Sanctuary concert, Gould was nowhere onstage, but sitting in the audience and ceding the spotlight to countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, dancer Jared Angle, harpsichordist Bradley Brookshire, and choreographer Troy Schumacher. In the event, I found the Players Club not quite an ideal setting, but the integrity of the overall concept rang true: nobody could argue with these artists communicating so directly through music so intimate. Make no mistake, I’m firmly a believer in the Salon/Sanctuary goals.

Looking forward to the next Salon/Sanctuary concert, The Heirs of Tantalus (February 22 at the Broad Street Ballroom in New York), Jessica Gould spoke to me about her search for space — both literal and metaphorical, both as a producer and as an artist — as well as about her fidelity to her own wide-ranging vision.

Q: How did you come up with the idea of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts?

JG: I kept going to early-music concerts that were in big concert halls, or concerts of secular music in churches. It’s been a big thing for early music to be performed in churches, no matter what the repertoire. As a secular child growing up in New York, I grew up thinking churches were for music. I had no idea they were for any other purpose! I thought all those pictures and images must have something to do with music, and I would understand when I grew up. When the opportunity came for me to start my own organization, I thought the ideal would be to perform in a context as close to the original as possible, so that you would hear salon music in a salon, and religious music in a house of worship.

Q: You’re a singer, and it’s still unusual to find a singer who is also an impresario.

JG: I have encountered that. I think that more of us are impresarios than are immediately apparent. Any of us who have our own ideas about what repertoire we want to do and want to make it happen, we become impresarios by default, whether we use that title or not. I have always had ideas about the music I’ve found interesting, the historical periods I found interesting, and ways I thought that music could be presented that were different from what was going on at the time or what was the status quo. When I was just auditioning, I found myself in a kind of curious state of mind, where I would in the back of my mind hope that somebody would come up with the idea that I actually had myself and then I would get cast in it. Then I realized, well that’s not going to happen unless you do it yourself.

In music, there are many artistic directors who are instrumentalists and in theater there are many artistic directors who are also actors. In the United States it’s unusual for singers to do this, although there are more of us than there used to be. We’re getting beyond the idea that one should do only one thing. I think that does a disservice not only to individual artist but to the music itself. Performers have great things to contribute and in some ways they have more adventurous ideas, because we are the ones who experience it firsthand, who practice every day and do the research. It’s a shame to cut that off and just wait for it to happen rather than to take on the agency yourself and create something.

I’ve always had, I guess, a more unusual background than a lot of singers in that I spent a great deal of time in art school, RISD [Rhode Island School of Design], Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design, as a high-school student in adult classes. I had the opportunity get a BFA, but I loved academics too much and of course I loved singing. My interests were too diverse, and I knew I would be unhappy if I was in an art studio all day long. The upshot is that I always look at a piece of music in the cultural context and history of it. As a self-professed nerd who loves to read, whenever I find a new piece I guess the second thing I do is to read every book I can about the historical background of it. I formulate ideas about ways to present it in cultural and historical context and not as a presentation of the music extracted from its context.

Brookshire, Costanzo, and Angle at the Players Club.
This and other photos of the performance by Erin Baiano©.
Courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

That’s one of the issues that I wanted to address in my concert series and I think the idea has picked up momentum with colleagues and certainly around New York with other concert series. If you perform early music on period instruments in a large concert hall, it’s nice that this obscure music will gain exposure, but is it really good for the repertoire to be heard in a space that’s too large, where the detail of the phrasing, the idiosyncratic sound of the instruments, some of which are recreated and sometimes authentically centuries old, will be obscured? Are you really doing the music a service by hearing it in a concert hall that’s designed for steel strings and metal winds? In addition, the music was always a social experience, whether that was a mass in a church or a salon in a private house or a performance in a royal chapel. These are all smaller spaces than what we’re used to. [Today], and certainly in New York City, we’re all about louder and bigger.

The modern experience is about paring down the excess and getting to what is putatively the essential “truth” of any art form. Form follows function. However, what does that do to the concert hall? It makes it uniform in every case. And I don’t think that’s the best thing for the music of the 17th and 18th centuries and earlier. It discounts the role of the other senses in our perception of music. Auditioning singers are always warned “be careful about your appearance because people hear what they see.” Well, that is true about sensory perception. Going to a performance is not the same as listing to a CD, and the aural experience is affected by the visual. What about visual sense, the sense of space? Not just what it does to the acoustic but how it affects the experience of the music when you’re in a smaller space that is intrinsically social, like a salon. That’s an essential element of much of this repertoire, and it is completely lost in a standard anodyne concert hall.

I believe that [performing in appropriate spaces] is something that really appeals to audiences and performers alike in the performance and consumption of music, a sense of being transported back to an entire world to the best of our ability, not just a sterile presentation of this piece of or that piece in a concert hall.

Q: What are challenges in finding appropriate spaces?

JG: Honestly the challenge is that I have so many ideas about what I want to do, that I have to decide what I want to do in one season and what I’ll have to hold off until the next season. Sometimes I find a concert so fascinating that I can’t wait to share it, and it’s really hard to say, Just wait on that for next year and see what happens. In terms of finding venues, you know, New York has a lot more venues than people are aware of. There are so many museums, so many embassies, so many cultural centers. These are not originally purposed for music, but they are perfectly suited to it. Musical performances in a time of economic difficulty also happen to be a wonderful way for institutions to increase their audiences. Audiences come to realize what beautiful structures there are and the other events that happen there, like fascinating cultural programs, when they came in the first place just to hear music. They have a whole other reason to come back.

Q: The next concert in a space that was originally a bank.

JG: Yeah, it’s a real find. I was thrilled to find this venue. The Broad Street Ballroom was built in 1929, just before the Crash. It’s an awe-inspiring space, built in replication of a Roman temple, with Doric columns lining the hall, bronze doors and carvings on the walls, and mosaics and murals that are all evocative of Ancient Rome. It was a really serendipitous kind of find. The esteemed artists Jory Vinikour and José Lemos had approached me some months go and wanted to do a concert with me, which is such an honor. They were so lovely and down-to-earth; they said, “We want to do a concert, we don’t care where it is. The venue can be whatever.” I couldn’t do that, I wanted to find a space that was deserving of them. In the meantime José and I had been invited to do the opera Agrippina together, he was going to sing Ottone and I was going to sing Poppea. The opera ended up being cancelled because the company changed their season to all-bel canto. So we had this repertoire on our hands and were chomping at the bit to do it, and we came up with the concert idea of doing selections with it, and we thought, How are we going to bridge the selections and create a sense of narrative flow in the absence of the rest of the opera and other characters? We thought of actors. My sister, Erica Gould, runs the Fire Dept. Theatre Company, which is the fiscal sponsor of my concert series, and we frequently collaborate on multidisciplinary projects.

The first thought that popped into my head was Euripides, because these are plays from a period of heightened “expressionism,” if you will. We went through Euripides but got back to the Aeschylus Oresteia. We realized with a spine-tingling moment the parallels between the real members of the Roman Julio-Claudian Dynasty, and their atrocious behavior actually eclipsed anything the Atreians did. The Romans outdid them. Nero’s horrible shenanigans got him declared a public enemy by the Romans; they were so shocked by his depravity even the Ancient Romans couldn’t deal with him. They ran him out of town, and he committed suicide before they could get him and execute him — probably in a way similar to the way he’d executed so many others! There are all these parallels between the House of Atreus and the House of Nero, Orestes’ murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, and Nero’s murdering his mother, Agrippina. The exile of Orestes, the exile of Ottone. Orestes is pursued by the Furies after he kills his mother, and Nero imagined himself to be pursued by them after he killed his. It goes on and on.

José Lemos.
Photo by Tina Gutierrez, courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

At the same time, there’s an interesting “mirror image,” if you will, between the Greek drama and the Roman history. The Oresteia is often seen as a parable for the establishment of reason and logic and civilization, which erases the endless circle of revenge into which the cursed Atreians are locked. Yet the members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, many of whom fit the modern definition of psychotic, if not at least sadistic, repeat a downward spiral of incest, rape, sadism and general bloodthirsty mayhem throughout the generations. So Greece rises and Rome falls. In the middle of all this, we’ve created a character of the Roman historian Suetonius, who was sort of a gossip queen, clearly enjoying reporting on all the salacious details he witnessed or nearly witnessed, and whose writing was a source for both opera libretti.

So we worked with Erica, and developed this into a multi-disciplinary project, and we’re very much looking forward to doing it in this wonderful space. It’s a perfect theater and music space, acoustically it has high ceilings, it’s like an asset that ‘s already built, it will be a very exciting production. I’m very much looking forward to it.

Jory Vinikour.
Photo by Kobie van Rensburg, courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

Q: What else can audiences look forward to in the spring season?

JG: We have a really exciting and diverse season. In March we’ll have two events. The first, on Saturday, March 9, is at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium on East 61 Street. It’s part of the structure that houses the original home of John Adams’ daughter, built in 1799; there’s a concert of works by Schubert and Beethoven performed by Grand Harmonie, a recently formed ensemble that will perform Mozart, Schubert and Weber. At the end of the month, on March 23, at Fraunces Tavern, the oldest structure in Manhattan, we’re doing another multi-disciplinary program of works from early America, proto-spirituals and Shaker hymns, combined with slave narratives and Quaker texts focusing on a theme of liberation, which was and has remained central to the American identity. It’s called “Exodus, Dreams of the Promised Land in Antebellum America.” The music of that period is so underrepresented and so misrepresented, I think; it’s often kind of dismissed as Yankee Doodle kitsch, but there’s a wealth of diverse and beautiful music that has yet to be heard by an audience beyond scholars and specialists. The performers of that concert will be The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, and the venue, built in 1719, was the seat of the American government when the capitol was in New York. It is where George Washington said farewell to his troops in 1783.

Then on April 21, back at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium, is a program that has toured England, a BBC tour, featuring the Four Nations Ensemble, one of the most highly regarded chamber music groups in New York and the United States, and the ensemble Music from China. This concert will highlight parallels between court of Versailles and the court of Beijing, alternating French Baroque with Chinese repertoire. The influence of chinoiserie was big in the French court, and the rigidity and formality of the two court societies had a lot of similarities.

The finale, on May 25 at Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium, is the esteemed harpsichordist Kenneth Weiss, who is on faculty at Juilliard and the Conservatoire Nationale de Paris. He is going to perform Book I of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. That is our spring season, and we hope it should offer something for everyone, and that people will come.

Tantalizing: The Broad Street Ballroom.

Q: That’s quite an ambitious range.

JG: Thank you. I’ve always had an eyes-going-ahead-of-your-stomach situation all of the time with my programming. When we opened last season, September of 2011, it was the tenth anniversary of 9/11, so I planned a program to indirectly salute New York City, and focused on Cordoba, Spain, a “melting pot” of the previous millennium, and the many religions and cultures that managed to coexist in the so-called Dark Ages. José Lemos managed to sing in several languages, including Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and medieval Castillian, and he did it masterfully. I feel like one rises to the challenge if one sets one’s goals slightly out of the comfort zone.

I should say for myself that I get ideas from what I read and the music I listen to and the music I practice. I refuse to give up on those ideas. I will write grant proposals, I will work ’til the end of time to make this happen. That’s what makes it meaningful to me to be head of this organization, to bring these ideas to fruition, beyond what people expect from an early-music series. So far we’ve done quite well, we’re in our fourth season. We’re honored to have received a significant amount of foundation support as well as private support.

Our fall season, our problem was finding enough seats for all the people who wanted to attend, which I never expected to happen, but pretty much every concert in the fall was sold out. So I feel really lucky in that regard. I’m in the position where I can make my ideas come to a reality and share them. And they seem to be appreciated. So I consider myself very lucky.

I might add that about a tenth of the repertoire that I envision for performance involves things that are suitable for me to sing. Of course I’m a soprano, and there’s repertoire I want to sing, there’s repertoire I want to get to, but there’s a whole other level of satisfaction from just seeing something produced effectively and sharing your intellectual fascination with an audience and watching it catch on. That’s an entirely different realm from performing, and the usual singer’s joy — “Oh, this piece fits my voice perfectly” — this is a totally different kind of space from that.
The couple of times I allow myself that singer’s indulgence, that’s definitely not the bulk of the repertoire. That would be so boring, maybe not to me, but to everybody else. One singer, even the most brilliant and versatile, you don’t want to hear them — maybe a few, but for most of us mortals, I don’t think we can carry off an entire season devoted to ourselves. That’s asking a lot from an audience unless they’re members of your family.

Q: At times I even forget that you sing! I read about Salon/Sanctuary events and think of you first as a producer.

JG: Sometimes the fact that I am a singer and that’s my main thing, gets lost in the shuffle. That doesn’t bother me that much. I still go off and perform in different things. I really derive such joy from researching and developing an original project. It’s part of what I grew up with. My older sister was a child dancer at New York City Ballet. I was a kid, running around backstage, I was always in art classes, singing in chorus and playing the violin, and she was always doing theater. It’s kind of in my blood, presentation from inside-out and to see what goes on to make it happen. And what ideas have potential to be successful. I read history books on top of that, and these things formulate in my head and I can’t wait to develop them. That’s really the engine of the series. Then singing is — if I’m able to see myself as a singer objectively, to the degree that’s possible — okay, well, Jessica’s voice fits in here, she can do this. And not program myself to the point where it’s, how shall we say, obnoxious, or just inappropriate. That’s how I see it. I’m not here to showcase me.

I’ve been very fortunate with the reviews I’ve received for things I’ve performed with the series and elsewhere too, but I’ve never been content to be a singer who doesn’t do anything else. Singers have to be a bit monomaniacal. You have to have those blinders on and eyes on the prize, and I’ve always been really interested in many other things. You’ve got to come to terms with that at some point in your career. What are you going to be happy doing in your life? The concert series really brings a lot of fulfillment. I’m glad that it’s successful.

I think it’s important for — I don’t want to sound like too much of a Hallmark card here, but what this experience means to me is that it’s important for performers to have a sense of agency and hold onto their sense of vision and not let that be slashed by the audition process and not feel that you have to wait to be chosen all the time. We live in a market economy in which everything is commodified, including talent. It’s much easier to sell something if it can be reduced to a simple “pitch,” and when that comes to performers, it means we need to present a very streamlined version of our capabilities in order to not confuse a potential buyer. There should be space for performers to create, and I don’t think that a talent for creation in a performer should be derided. I think there’s a slightly negative connotation to that in the United States still, perhaps because there is something uncomfortably challenging in a performer who takes ownership of the means of production. We feel more comfortable with singers who can be reduced to “one note” as it were, but many artists have much more to offer, and it’s to the benefit of everyone when they can exercise that potential, that vision, that creative power.

For tickets to and more information on The Heirs of Tantalus and all of Salon/Sanctuary’s programs — past, present, and future — click here.

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Wendy Lawless & ‘Chanel Bonfire’

Wendy Lawless’ Chanel Bonfire is subtitled A Memoir, but really it might have been called “A Thrilling Tale of Survival” or even “A Most Dangerous Book for Girls.” I’ve known Wendy for years, since she began dating a friend from the Columbia Writing Program, David Kidd, and I’ve heard some of the stories she tells here: I even read a couple of chapters in manuscript. Yet I suspect that no amount of familiarity could prepare me for the full impact of Chanel Bonfire.

How on earth did Wendy survive her mother — to say nothing of how Wendy and Dave managed to construct one of the sanest households I know, inhabited by two of the coolest children I know? Wendy’s mother, Georgann Rea, was a monster of narcissism whose pursuit of her own fancy led her to upend and sometimes jeopardize her daughters’ lives again and again; she drank too much and spent too much and dated recklessly. It goes almost without saying that she suffered from mental illness, yet numberless people fell for her most outlandish self-dramatizations. Reading the book, I found myself mentally pronouncing her name “Gorgon.”

Wendy spent much of her youth apologizing for her mother and covering over her worst faults and lapses, largely but not entirely in order to protect her younger sister, Robin. But Wendy has come to terms with the truth now, and by “terms” I do also mean language, and that much at least is no surprise: any actor who can handle the furious wordplay of David Ives’ All in the Timing, as Wendy did Off-Broadway, must wield the language dexterously, and Wendy does.

One of my favorite people —
and now she’ll be one of your favorites, too.

Yet there’s not a single note of bitterness in the book, even when she’s describing, for example, how Georgann kept Wendy and Robin apart from their father for years (telling them he no longer loved them, telling him nothing at all) or how Georgann vamped Wendy’s boyfriend and drove him away. Instead, Wendy writes with a serene objectivity and a healthy dose of wit that led me to call the book “horricomic.” Her prose can be laugh-out-loud funny, even when it’s breaking your heart.

It all seems so glamorous, on the surface, as Georgann indulges in designer clothes and vintage wines and spins around Manhattan nightclubs and London salons. But there are all kinds of price tags attached to those fancy labels. Georgann is indifferent to her daughters when she isn’t actively hostile (and violent, especially toward Robin), and every time she jets off to a new man and a new address, she forces the girls to make their way in another new environment, alone. They’re perpetual outsiders, constantly on the move, and with a military-surgical precision, Georgann cuts her daughters off from everyone they care about, especially adults who might save them: their father, their stepfather, a beloved nanny.

Awful as the details may be, Chanel Bonfire is never depressing, not only because of Wendy’s wryly humorous perspective but perhaps also because at heart the book is a coming-of-age story, and we watch (white-knuckled at times) as Wendy wins her independence from Georgann. It would be rather hard to believe her victory, if we didn’t hold the evidence in our hands. And, as I say, I can testify that, in this regard, Wendy isn’t acting. She’s writing — exceptionally well — and living proudly with her own grace and intelligence.

Further proof of victory: Wendy and Dave’s children
are people you actually enjoy spending time with.
WVM, with a Lawless Kidd, Paris 2008.
Photo by Wendy Lawless©

Chanel Bonfire is available for purchase directly from the publisher, Simon & Schuster, here; you can purchase from Amazon, as well, by clicking here. The website for the book can be found here.

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Stanley Karnow

With malice toward none, with crosswords toward all.
Photo by Catherine Karnow©

Stanley Karnow has died. I knew him for about three decades; for many of those years, he knew me as “Paul Jefferson — you know, Cathy, that boy you went to school with.” But over time, he learned to call me Bill, and we became friends. At one point I was supposed to be his research assistant for a book he never wrote, on Jewish vaudeville comedians, but he was a mentor just the same, particularly because so many of the things I’ve tried are things he’d done already, and excelled at: journalism, writing books, living in France. I sometimes had the feeling that he watched my fitful progress with an especially amused and always affectionate appreciation.

Whether I was Paul or Bill to him, I found it flattering enough to have made any impression on him at all, especially at first. Cathy introduced me to her parents with pleasure and anticipation of my good fortune, a build-up and a kind of drumroll, as one might introduce a school friend to prominent actors or heads of state: if there is one trait the Karnow children share beyond the family name, it is a perfect awareness of how remarkable Stanley and Annette have been.

They were not like other people; I’m pretty sure they never tried to be. Perhaps the trick was that they never tried not to be, either. They were who they were, and they were awfully good at it.

Father and daughter at the Vietnam Memorial.
Washington, July 2009.
Photo courtesy of Catherine Karnow.

We watched them this summer, in a series of film clips that Michael pieced together and in a slide show that Cathy presented, as part of a memorial celebration of Annette, who passed away in 2009. There they are, merrily trotting the globe together, and what struck me was how glamorous and fun they made even the most ordinary activity. Annette was still a beauty to the end, and yet it was almost startling to see her young again: she’s like a movie star whose name you can’t quite remember. And always at her side is Stanley, looking absolutely tickled to be with her.

When at last they settled in Maryland, and I came to know them, I felt that Stanley and Annette’s home was a household and that I was stepping into a kind of living novel, a great family saga peopled with fascinating characters. I’ve had this sense sometimes with other families, but always with the Karnows, and for Stanley of course narrative held a privileged place, not only in the prize-winning books he wrote but also in the stories he told over the table.

In recent years it seemed he was always in the middle of a story and constantly being interrupted by the kids, who remembered the past in their own way or who had heard the story many times already. “Will you just let me finish?” Stanley would holler, and sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t, and sometimes he’d interrupt himself with another story altogether.

Stanley explains it all for you. August 2012.
Photo by WVM.

He was, as you can imagine, the biggest character of them all. He thrived on good food and good wine and good books and better friends. People and politics were puzzles to be solved — but only after he’d finished his crossword in the morning. He had an appetite for argument, and a voice that was made for it, though he did prefer to win. He could tell a joke so slyly you were hardly aware he’d done it: when “People Power” toppled the Marcos government in the Philippines, he told me, “Things are shaping up very nicely for television treatment there.” (He’d already begun his book on the subject, which did in turn become a PBS series.)

He’d traveled from Brooklyn to Harvard to Paris to Algiers to Hong Kong and Saigon and Manila; he’d rubbed elbows with starlets and philosophers, potentates and peasants, because really, what else would you do with your life?

Thus it’s no surprise that the kids wound up doing exceptional things, too. Photographing victims of Agent Orange — not to mention Prince Charles. Creating television series. Deciding the law. After all, what else would they do?

And yet the achievement for which I’m most grateful to the Karnows is simply this: they shared their parents with me. I’m proud to be Paul Jefferson.

Extended family portrait, August 2012

In 2009, Stanley and I had a long talk about his career, his books, and the world as he’d lived in it. You can find the first part of that interview here; the second part is here. Stanley’s Amazon page — which at the time of this writing omits a few of his books — can be found here.

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Dear Downton Abby

The recent death of Pauline Phillips, better known as “Dear Abby,” has reminded us all of the value of good advice when it comes to proper behavior and personal problems.

Of course, there’s one place where everyone behaves properly — and everyone has terrible personal problems. Perhaps they need an advice columnist.

Wake up and smell the Montrachet, kids!

Dear Downton Abby,

Today, my supervisor upbraided me sharply because I did not know the difference between a soup spoon and a bouillon spoon. I am quite out of sorts. What should I do?

Signed,
Clueless with Cutlery

Dear Clueless,

Tell him to go use the spoon for an aspic.

Dear Downton Abby:

I am the victim of a most unfortunate circumstance. After making the intimate acquaintance of a foreign gentleman to whom I was not wedded — he expired most suddenly, requiring a good deal of subterfuge on the part of myself, my mother, and one of the parlormaids. Do you see any potential harm in concealing the truth of this incident from my fiancé? I would drop the match altogether, but Granny says it’s a good one, and really, my prospects are otherwise dim. Moreover, my fiancé is the only person I have ever known who can inspire me to any sort of facial expression. Please help!

Signed,
Somewhat Sullied Virtue

Dear Sullied,

The longer you string your fiancé along, the greater the risk that he’ll take up with some wishy-washy blonde heiress. Tell him the truth or don’t — but grab him while you can!

Dear Downton Abby,

The new footman is rather dishy. How can I get him to notice me? I’ve tried “accidentally” dropping by whenever he changes his shirt. Perhaps some sort of trickery would help my cause. Stealing his trousers and then pretending to find them and return them to him might do the job.

Signed,
Surpassing the Love of Women
(P.S. I am not female.)

Dear Surpassing,

Fresher breath will make a difference! Try Entailmints, the new candy from Altoids!

Dear Downton Abby,

I seem to be the only person in the English-speaking world who truly cares that me husband is in prison for a crime I refuse to believe he may actually have committed. What should I do?

Signed,
Keeper of the Flame

Dear Keeper,

Whatever you do, don’t just sit around reading his letters!

Rich people’s problems

Dear Downton Abby:

I recently received a substantial bequest from the estate of the late husband of my late fiancée. Of course I cannot accept the money. How best may I tell my wife of my decision?

Signed,
Unbending Rectitude

Dear Rect,

Your question bores me. Shut up and take the money.

Dear Downton Abby,

Everyone treats me like a child! Perhaps ’tis because of me freakish inability to age — but that’s true of most folks in these parts, due to the mysterious properties of the local water, which is why we’d all like to stay on here. So I think ’tis more likely because of me lowly position in the household, but I digress. I look like I’m about 14, but I’m in me mid-to-late-20s now and I’ve been married and widowed already. Nobody understands that I have me needs, like any healthy girl. The footmen won’t even notice me! (Except for me husband, and he’s dead, like I told ye.) I’m at me wits’ end, I don’t mind telling ye.

Signed,
Heat’s in the Kitchen

Dear Heat,

Have you considered another position?

I say, what’s that crashing sound?

Dear Downton Abby,

My husband invested and lost our entire fortune in a foolish business venture; lately I have learned that he has been mismanaging our estate, as well. A recent visit from my mother reminded me that I am in fact Jewish. What are the rules for divorce among Jewish people?

Signed,
Co-raspondent

Dear Raspondent,

You can get one, maybe. I should be a rabbi, in your opinion?

Dear Downton Abby,

What is a “weak end”?

Signed,
Countless Confusions

Dear Countless,

It’s what you get from too much horseback riding.

Readers, are you a middle child? Are you sibling to a middle child? We all know the resentment and loneliness — to say nothing of financial hardships — that can result. Write today to ask for a copy of my free pamphlet, Combatting Jan Brady Syndrome.

Lady Jan?
(Without the goo-goo-googly eyes.)

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To an Athlete Lying Young

From A Shropshire Aunt*

The times you won the Tour de France,
We fanned the fire of your pants;
Man and boy heard you deny
The dope that brought you victor-y.

To-day the road your girlfriend came —
Though you’d not Google once her name
To find she neither lived nor died —
Will not permit your face to hide.

Smart lad, to put the truth away
From fields where myth holds greater sway!
For brightly though the laurel grows,
It’s slower than a puppet’s nose.

Those wars and murders, poisoned air,
Rough politics: we do not care!
Of you alone the public chatters,
Instead of weighty, vital matters!

So smile, before the spotlights fade,
And don the mantle that you’ve made!
O’erwhelm the papers! Command the news!
Consent to countless interviews!

Endure the late-night comic’s joke,
Until to Oprah you have spoke!
Forget that once you played a sport —
You’re on the nightly news report!

And though your honor is the cost,
Take heart, stout lad! All is not lost!
Just contemplate the question cruel:
Was’t you or we the bigger fool?

*NOTE: An obscure but terribly pertinent reference of which I am exceedingly proud. Check The Importance of Being Earnest if you don’t believe me.

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