Saturday is our food shopping day, girls, and while this is a given, I also stopped by the pharmacy to get my second Covid booster. Anticipating a reaction--as I had to the others--I was low keyed this weekend and did not get to write what I should have. Now, it is time to make up.
The 23rd of April marked the birthday of these two disparate icons--William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple!!!!!!!!!!! Shakespeare was born in 1564, and Temple in 1928. How those stars must be aligned on this date!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Too bad one could not get Shakespeare and Shirley to do a dance number together!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, who is this gentleman, and why is he on here? This is Elliot Forrest, the classy, gentleman host afternoons weekdays on WQXR. Baby Gojira actually has the hots for him!!!!!!!!!! So, why is he on here? April 23 is his wedding anniversary, which he mentioned on one of his programs. So, Happy Anniversary, Elliot! I love your movie music, "The Score At Four!!!!!!!!!!!"
This next installment may have meaning to some particular viewers in my age group, and I will try and be concise. Fifty years before, on April 23, 1972, "The New York Times Magazine" published Joyce Maynard's piece, "An Eighteen-Year-Old-Looks Back On Life." She maintained ours was "the generation of unfulfilled expectations." I could see through the phoniness of the piece right away, but I could not see through my own phoniness. Because, shortly after, I wrote a rebuttal piece called "A Twenty-Year-Old Looks Down On Life," wherein I chided my peerage for having turned into "an apathetic group of jaded cynics, a society unto ourselves, a self-centered generation." Before submitting it to "The Times," I had a professor go over it, who said my outlook on life was rather precocious. It may have been, but what I now realize I was doing was indicting my peer group for how it had treated me during our adolescent years. I saw myself as above and beyond them, and, at the time, I wanted everyone to know it. Years later, Joyce owned up to her piece being all I said it was, and now I am owning up to mine. Still, the date is etched in my memory. And I have Joyce to thank for one thing--by example, she helped me become a writer, eventually finding my own voice.
So, Saturday, April 23, was a biggie. Not to mention "Svengoolie," which I will reflect on in another post.
"Where have we gone, what have we come to," darlings????????????????
I would Love to read your rebuttal!!
ReplyDeleteI’ve never read any of Joyce’s books, have you??
All these years later, and I still think of her as the girl who left school to live with Salinger!
Victoria,
ReplyDeleteIf I could I would post it on here.
But the text got lost years ago, and
I never made a copy.
I did an update at reaching 40. Same thing.
I have read two of Joyce's books--"Looking Back,"
an expansion of her Times piece, and "At Home In
The World," wherein she goes into details about
the whole Salinger thing.