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To Kill a Goldfinch

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 14, 2014| 4 Comments »

My Ivy Farm Book Club is reading it. My MIL Ada just finished it. And the Bride wants me to send it to her, the book that’s all abuzz right now, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I finished the last six pages of the book yesterday, in the middle of the day because I couldn’t wait until bedtime when I barely have enough energy to keep my eyes open…and I was afraid of that white space; the blank white space at the end of a book. I knew that I’d have a lot of feelings to process in that white space, and my mind wouldn’t be up to that at midnight.

The Goldfinch is a coming of age story, in the tradition of Catcher in the Rye. We are drawn into the life of Theo Decker, a typical New York teenager who grew up around Sutton Place and went to a private school. He’s being raised by a beautiful and kind single mom, one we imagine is like Holly Golightly, except instead of being a call girl she married the wrong guy, a drinker who disappeared one day. They are a happy couple, son and mother, until one day a terrorist happens to set off a bomb at The Met, just as Theo follows a pretty red headed girl into a hallway.

Tartt sets off the bomb and the motion of her book early on, and so we are hooked, wandering around with Theo who is trying to recover his connection to the world. The cast of characters is familiar. The trust fund kids, the socialite/philanthropist types, the doormen. But it’s the stolen painting, Fabritius’ 1654 Goldfinch,  that glues this epic journey together, through a few lost years in Vegas with the wandering father and Boris the Ukranian best friend, and finally back to the Big Apple. I haven’t been so drawn to a book in ages. In some ways, it’s the small Dutch masterpiece that propels our protagonist forward – his mother’s love for it, a dying man’s plea for its survival.

In the last six pages I wanted more, and I suspect that Tartt was hoping we would. Ms Bean startled me by barking at the window. A lonely hawk was spreading its wing on a tree too close to the house. photo I remembered one of my earliest teenage rules for living, like never stay where you are not wanted, or never cry in public. Never, ever keep a bird in a cage. It was a sort of pre-feminist, Ibsen-like decision. Live free, or die! And I wondered what would happen to Theo Decker. Will he be pulled into a life of crime and drug abuse, or more crime and more drug abuse, by Boris and end up in prison? Did he settle in at Hobart and Blackwell and become a respectable antique dealer like this guy? http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/my-not-so-secret-history.html                           Will he marry damaged-goods Kitsy or Pippa of the morphine lollipop?

As you know, my sister Kay lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She raised her only daughter alone, sending her to the Convent of the Sacred Heart with ambassador’s children. I used to visit them all the time as a teenager, and we’d often walk to the Met for a special exhibit or just for lunch. Later, I would always meet Kay for our mutual September birthday celebration in the City. After 9/11, we roamed around the streets in the Village, trying to find a place that was open for our birthday lunch. Determined not to let the terrorists “win.” 

Fifth Avenue is magical in every season. I told Kay that we  need to see the Goldfinch at the Frick Museum. I want to see this little bird who is chained to her food box. The bird that really did survive an explosion in Delft that killed its painter. Is it serendipity that art is reflecting the current literary scene, in the same city this MS author has captured so well? http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/mauritshuis/605   

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Trending

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 14, 2013| 2 Comments »

Tomorrow is a big day. Today I’m waiting for the HVAC guy to show up and fix my furnace. Fires are going in both fireplaces and fleece is making a big comeback in my wardrobe. Luckily it’s sunny so getting out of my warm and cozy bed wasn’t quite so bad. I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things which means the temptation to stay under the covers this morning with book and  coffee in hand was nearly insurmountable.

While hovering slightly above 60, thinking about Friday keeps my fingers typing. Bob and I will join the Richmond cousins on the Historic Downtown Mall for Cville’s first ever TEDx conference. You’ve probably watched a few YouTube videos from TED, somebody walks onstage to talk about ‘ideas worth sharing’ –  they are usually very bright people, distinguished in one field or another, and you’ll come away from the requisite 18 minute TED lecture on your laptop feeling a bit smarter. I admit I’ve shared a few of these videos myself. Now I want to know just how all this smart talk got started.

In 1984 Richard Saul Wurman, an architect, writer and designer, came up with the idea for a conference that would synthesize three areas: Technology of business; Entertainment industry; and the Design Professions (TED).

…things that seemed to be interesting to me, had the other two involved. If there was a seeming technology project, it had entertainment, and design involved (when they were good). Certainly, you can look at the first Macintosh — which was shown at my first conference, in ’84. Later on, Google was announced at my conference — a combination of technology, entertainment, and design. When Google Earth was called Keyhole, it was first shown at my conference. And then Google bought Technology Entertainment Design. So that was pretty good. People seemed to like that.

Initially, speakers were very Silicon Valley,  but during the ’90s scientists, philosophers, musicians, religious leaders, and philanthropists all got on board the TED train. Tomorrow we’ll hear from distinguished UVA professors, some alumni and even a few community members, including someone I wrote about once with her Dirty Barbie show. I’m looking forward to hearing from a 3rd year student, Hawa Ahmed. who started her life as a refugee from Chad, and now is studying Politics and Middle Eastern Studies. http://news.virginia.edu/content/local-ted-talks-feature-uva-faculty-alumni-and-student-s-unique-journey

TEDx branched off about four years ago as a kind of repertory company for the rest of these United States and it has now sold out in Cville. Ted.com has been viewed over a Billion times around the world! I believe even my current crush author, Elizabeth Gilbert, expounded once on creativity. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/your-elusive-creative-genius-elizabeth-gilbert And you know I had to just watch this again right?

But after listening to oceanographers, brain researchers, educators and physicists online, sitting in the beautiful Paramount Theatre tomorrow for some 3D inspiration should prove illuminating. And hopefully we won’t end up snoozing simply because we’ll be nice and warm.   IMG_2139

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Nobel Pursuits

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2013| 2 Comments »

It’s that time of year again. No, not carving pumpkins time and trying to find or create a family-friendly Halloween costume. It’s the Nobel Prize announcement time; time to try and figure out just what the Higgs boson particle really is and how it’s responsible for the secrets of life and our universe, and I am not speaking biblically.

But try to find the 2013 recipient of the prize in physics, Peter Higgs, and you’d be out of luck. The elderly Edinburgh scientist left his cell phone behind and like Garbo, would like to be left alone.  Of course, once that Large Hadron Collider at Cern proved that his theory about the “god particle” was correct, Higgs was considered a shoe-in for the Nobel in Physics.

So maybe we’re closer to knowing “how” we got here, two other winners this year help us understand the “why.” A man whose mission is to heal won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology. Since I have a few healers in the family, I was interested in this article I found courtesy of my musical great niece: http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/10/nobel-medicine-winner-says-i-owe-is-all-to-my-bassoon-teacher.html  Dr Thomas Sudhof credits his music teacher with imparting a sense of discipline that helped to forge his “…powers of analysis and concentration.”

I always try to understand everything I encounter—not only in science, but also historical and political events and music and movies—get to grips with the content, meaning, and process. This is immense fun, as strange as that may sound.
Who was your most influential teacher, and why?
My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.
Science and art, the interconnections are endless. Next is a woman whose elegantly sparse prose helps us to understand the human condition, along with the roles we all play; an artist who is also part of the faculty here at UVA. Congratulations to Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature! This 82 year old Canadian writer had her first book of short stories published when she was 37…take heed all you late bloomers! She has only taught the occasional writing class in Mr Jefferson’s Academical Village, and was unavailable when I was studying fiction as a community scholar, unfortunately for me.  She is Queen of the Short Story, and has recently published Dear Life.   
Rumor is she will stop writing now, but I find that hard to believe. Here is what Munro, America’s Chekhov, had to say about her attempt at writing a novel, and I feel her pain:“It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it,” she said. “I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way.”imagesSo that’s my problem. Too many years writing 300-500 word newspaper columns. Thank you Ms Munro, for sharing your knowledge and sense of possibility with us.

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Read for the Record

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2013| 1 Comment »

Yesterday was Kale Day, but today is the official national book reading day for millions of children in libraries, homes and schools all across the country, and the idea is that we’ll all be reading one book. Well, you could read more than one, but doesn’t everybody love a tractor?

The book for Jumpstart’s 2013 Read for the Record campaign is Otis! Published by Penguin and written by New York Times bestselling author Loren Long, Otis is the timeless story of a friendship between a lovable tractor and a calf that live on a farm. On October 3, 2013 children and adults will come together to read Otis as part of Jumpstart and the Pearson Foundation’s Read for the Record campaign.

I packed a box full of toys and books for the Love Bug’s arrival. And her parents brought her favorite books with them as well. I’m even working on a children’s book inspired by the Bug, so here’s a little clue:County Fair 009

We started reading early to the Bride and Rocker, almost as soon as they could sit semi-steadily on our laps. And I’m happy to see the tradition continues. I found a beautifully illustrated book, I’d Know You Anywhere, My Love by Nancy Tillman. It’s about how we parents would always see through any animal disguise in pretend play, and recognize our beloved child.

And while talking all things literary today, let’s jump ahead to the next book on my list. I cannot wait to dig into Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, The Signature of All Things. I follow this author on Twitter so I was aware of its release date, then I caught her on the Today Show and later heard her interview on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/01/225719994/fghfgh

The heroine is a botanist in the early 19th Century, who travels to Tahiti and discovers herself, along with “…varietals of vanilla pods; a sky-high waterspout; abolition…” and so much more, including a bit of Victorian pornography. Gilbert’s book, Committed, helped the Bride and many of her friends in their understanding of modern marriage. So I had to smile when Gilbert said she married a man who believes a wife belongs in the kitchen…”with her feet up and a glass of wine, watching her husband cook dinner.”

We read around here for the love it, to escape and be challenged, to learn and to laugh. For the record, ebooks, podcasts and iPads have their place, but in my life, nothing will replace the feel of a real book in my hands!  photo

 

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The Tyranny of Now

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2013| 5 Comments »

Yesterday was a busy day. It was also the second day of absolutely glorious weather, a day I’d rather have been enjoying outside instead of waiting in an endless waiting room.

While driving to said room, I was listening to an NPR author interview of Douglas Rushkoff who wrote Present Shock, the modern edition of future shock. He was talking about living in a digital age; about the constant pinging of tweets and Facebook messages that serve only to distance us from real time, face to face contact. We get a distorted feeling of connection; we are caught in an elusive virtual present. http://www.upworthy.com/loneliness-illustrated-so-beautifully-you-will-need-to-tell-someone?c=ufb1

The heroine in my current book is certainly not caught in her present. She’s a time traveler, sailing through the buildup to WWII, the 1980s and the flu epidemic of 1918. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is a wonderful ride for a summer read. The NYTimes calls it “Elegiac in tone,” full of intrigue brought on by an elusive doctor treating her for depression. Will Greta take a lover in this life? Will her philandering husband return to her in another? Is her twin brother really dead?

It seems Madonna has optioned the film rights to Andrew Sean Greer’s time traveling book!   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/madonna-the-impossible-lives-of-greta-wells_n_3683830.html

“I got a phone call last week. … I think it’s fine,” Greer said. ” … From a celebrity who read the book and loved it so much she called me up personally to talk to me about it. I thought it was going to be one of her assistants who was like, loved your book, she’s interested. Right. She didn’t read it. But oh no, no, no. She called me. She read it. She totally got it. There were a couple other people interested and they sort of all made a deal together, and she’s optioned the rights to it. We’ll see what happens. But it’s fun because it was Madonna.”

Yesterday, I was ready to complain about killing time in a doctor’s office. But my very own Dr MacDreamy saw me right away…so I had to switch my first few sentences above out of the present tense and into the past. And I awoke this morning to another glorious day, one day closer to a certain someone’s first birthday. If only we could slow time down just a little.

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Early Bird

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 18, 2013| 5 Comments »

In this heat, you’ve got to start your day pretty darn early. It takes me about an hour to water the gardens. We also have newly planted figs and an evergreen that needs daily care. If I’m not done by 9 am, the #heatwave knocks me out. Just checked my phone, yep it’s 83 and it “feels like 90” at 10 am. The windows are perpetually covered with condensation, and my glasses fog up as soon as I open the door.

But this day started at 5 am, when I woke up and finished reading my book, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. It left me thinking, instead of sleeping for another hour. She is one of my favorite writers, and this story is a not too subtle attack on climate deniers. However, it’s woven deftly into the everyday dynamics of a young farming family in TN, and the mother Dellarobia, is our protagonist. It touches on poverty, on women and independence and on class bias, all while trying to figure out why a million beautiful monarch butterflies have decided to roost on Dellarobia’s mountain.

So of course I had to do some research, and they did only just discover this roosting behavior almost forty years ago in 1975 which is pretty new in the world of scientific discovery. nat-geographic-cover-e1295402536266Roosting is a wintering over, a sort of dormant time for the butterflies when large clusters hang from trees and hibernate in plain site. Normally they will migrate and roost in the mountains of Mexico, but in this fictionalized version they’ve arrived in Appalachia like a miracle from God to the poor people living there. http://texasbutterflyranch.com/2012/07/10/founder-of-the-monarch-butterfly-roosting-sites-in-mexico-lives-a-quiet-life-in-austin-texas/

The monarch is our state insect and sometimes they will land on my shirt! Unfortunately while watering this morning I came inside with your normal everyday tick attached to my leg. I’ve learned not to panic when I see these critters sucking their way into our dogs, our children or my leg. We’ve probably dislodged hundreds over the years with our bare fingers – I find that much easier than trying to use a tweezer. But now I do keep the tick around for Bob to look at when he gets home, just in case. In order to transmit Lyme Disease, the tick must stay attached for 24 to 36 hours in order to transfer the LD spirochete, http://www.aldf.com/lyme.shtml so a good rule of thumb is to always do a tick check when you come inside.

Here is a picture of my butterfly tree, as seen through the sleeping porch. It is currently buzzing with honey bees!    photo

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Life in the Fast Lane

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 11, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’m on the road again. It’s a brutal ride in one day to Nashville, filled with trucks, billboards, country music, and this time I brought an audiobook along for fun. Inspired by our trip to see Gatsby at our newest cineplex, I’m listening to Z : a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler. Zelda Sayre was nearly 18 years old in Montgomery, AL when she first met the author, masquerading as a soldier in 1918.

The book takes Zelda’s point of view since really all we’ve ever heard about her was that she was crazy and institutionalized. Her father was a judge in their Southern town and marrying the Northern carpetbagger, against her parents advice, seemed like a good idea at the time. And that’s where I am now, in a wi-fi free zone somewhere in TN, when she gets off the train for the first time in NYC. She’s going to meet Scott at St Patrick’s Cathedral, with a priest.

Excitement is building, I can’t wait for them to meet  Pablo Picasso, the Hemingways and Gertrude Stein! And to find out if she was really mentally ill, or just another smart woman not willing to compromise or subsume her life to align it with her husband. The Flapper once told me about an aunt who stopped cleaning the house, and stopped cooking after one or two too many babies. She was sent away to an asylum, and never returned.

When I left this morning, I heard that Richmond Airport had been evacuated because of a “serious threat.” The Rocker was flying but not through this VA airport, so I just kept packing the car. Then I heard on an NPR station that Princeton University was evacuated:

“Please evacuate the campus and all university offices immediately and go home unless otherwise directed by your supervisor,” the school’s website message said. “Do not return to campus for any reason until advised otherwise.” http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/11/us/new-jersey-princeton-evacuation/index.html?iref=allsearch

Fitzgerald attended Princeton and Joyce Carol Oates, a Princeton Prof, tweeted: “At some schools, like Princeton, there is a formal honor code. But “honor” shouldn’t be just for undergraduates.”  I wonder if Fitzgerald, who just missed serving in WWI, could have imagined a world where bomb threats are called in to his alma mater. Where newspaper reporters, a nearly extinct breed who would rather risk jail than give up their sources, have no choice when their emails are hacked. Where buttons are pushed in New Mexico and people are killed in Pakistan? Unknown

 

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What’s in a Purse?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2013| 4 Comments »

In “Purse Politics; Tote and Vote,” the NYTimes thought it might be fun to do a puff piece on what women Senate and Congress members carry with them all the time. And thanks to Jezebel, I found it! Sen Claire MacCaskill said, “I think most of us, while we may look at the cute little purses, our lives don’t fit in a cute little purse. Our lives fit something that is in between a purse and a briefcase, and that’s what I carry.” http://jezebel.com/new-york-times-profiles-powerful-congresswomen-and-thei-511022241

Right, something in between, like a big purse…a tote maybe. In 2013 we have a record number of women on The Hill, 20 in the Senate and 81 in the House, and all we want to know about are the things they carry? iPads and phones, chap sticks and wallets? This article led to a bit of stream of consciousness for me, so follow along if possible.

A book on my teenage children’s summer reading list was, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It just so happens their English teacher Mr Shea was a friend of the author, and this book has been coined the next best thing to Hemingway in writing fiction about war. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Unlike lady senators, soldiers in the Vietnam War carried mosquito netting, writing paper, letters from home and tarps to keep the jungle at bay; “For the most part they carried themselves with dignity.”

And I started to think about the things I carry around hither and yon. The damnable iPhone leaves me feeling rudderless should I forget it, and because of my shoulder problem, I’ve switched to a smaller summer purse. I sling it cross-body like a bandolier setting forth to do battle every day with life in the country. Keys, check! Water, absolutely! Wallet is a must have, along with all those plastic cards that let retailers know all my personal information. I’m holding out at Panerra Bread, why do you need one of their cards, really?

When I was working for a newspaper, I always had a small notebook and pencil with me, very old school Lois Lane. Now, I just send myself a text on my phone if I need to remember something. And my text said “WWII and sex.” I’d been listening to NPR’s “All Things Considered” about our GIs and prostitutes in Normandy around the end of the war. Mary Louise Roberts wrote her non-fiction book titled, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, to bring some attention to some of the lesser known evils of war; like the rise of VD in our troops and the increase in African American soldiers charged and promptly hanged for rape in Le Havre.  http://www.npr.org/2013/05/31/187350487/sex-overseas-what-soldiers-do-complicates-wwii-history

Soldiers to senators, writers to doctors, we all carry a microcosm of meaning with us every day. Diaper bags are toted everywhere with new moms and dads, and they always have less to carry with the second and third child. Still I’d rather read a book about what lady legislators actually do, and how their approach to politics may differ from their male colleagues. What kinds of policy are they willing to compromise on, when do they stand and fight for a bill. Are they cookie-cutter voters with their party mates? Do they bring in cookies for their aides? Are they furious with the GOP for trying to repeal Obamacare for the 36th time? Is a woman fundamentally different in building consensus?

Because in the end, it’s not about what we carry, it’s about what we do with it once we get there. Let’s see; can you guess who is the DC lawyer, the San Francisco businesswoman, the Chicago child psychologist and the Nashville ER doctor?

J&M 0992

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Still Crazy

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on June 2, 2013| 3 Comments »

Well folks, 34 years ago tomorrow I was busily sweeping up around the swimming pool and hoping the sky would clear up for my wedding day. Bob was trying to find the rabbi, in an age before cell phones, and got lost in Livingston.

We did everything wrong. We were not only co-habiting before the wedding, we bought a house, got pregnant and moved all in that same year – the trifecta of stress inducing change. Oh, and Bob started his first job as an Assistant Director of an ER; it was 1979.

The Deer Hunter won an Academy Award; Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” won the Grammy’s Record of the Year; the Iranian Hostage Crisis happened while Carter was in the White House; Mother Theresa won the Nobel Peace prize for her work in India, and in PA, a nuclear reactor had a meltdown on Three Mile Island.

We, surprisingly, survived after all these years. Through shoulder and back surgeries, through deaths of parents and our siblings, through 3 miscarriages, through 2 more monumental moves. One back to NJ from the Berkshires, and this last (I hope) to the Blue Ridge Mountains. What, you may ask, are we doing right?

Well for one thing, we talk A LOT. We can easily be quiet together, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always something that needs discussing. I will say, “Did you hear that author speak about her book “Gulp” on NPR?” He will say, “Yeah she was fascinating.” Then I’ll ask him why my shoulder still hurts, and he will say, “Your problem is ‘ballistic movement’ with your AC joint.” I will say “What?” And usually this will lead to a long explanation, so I will interject, “What should we do for dinner?” And usually we end up with, “Don’t get me started on health care in this country…” Full disclosure, we both think Obamacare didn’t go far enough to effect real change.

And for another thing, we still LAUGH. We can still kid around together, we can call each other out on things, maybe because that time when we went to the Prom together feels like yesterday. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/19/us/20110519_PROM_USERGEN-5.html I forgave him for going to Woodstock without me, and he forgave me for setting up housekeeping in Westchester first. We’re on the same side in this game they call marriage, and that’s maybe one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn.

The truth is, we made a pact to renegotiate the marriage contract every 5 years. Here’s a news alert for newlyweds, gay and straight:

It’s never equal you know, never a 50/50 split. Some days it’s 70/30 and others it’s 51/49.

I wanted to be closer to family once the Rocker arrived, he wanted to open an Urgent Care. Every anniversary we’d celebrate at a fine French restaurant, but this year L’Etoile is closed on Monday. Mon Dieu, what to do? Maybe we’ll just use the Maps App to find a new favorite restaurant. Man, look at those bat sleeves Robin!

Wedding Cake 1979 20130602

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Word for the Day

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2013| 2 Comments »

The word for today on Dictionary.com is “Quacksalver.” I love it when I’m unfamiliar with a word so I eagerly clicked on its meaning:

Noun  1. a charlatan. 2. a quack doctor.
Origin: 
1570–80;  < early Dutch  (now kwakzalver )
Of course, quacksalver is onomatopoeic. Someone who is hawking his snake oil cure-all from the back of a pioneer wagon, someone who’s home made salve promises to do everything. Someone who is not who he appears to be, like Jay Gatsby.
Bob scooped me up on Mother’s Day from my self-induced TCM mom/alone/coma, and deposited me in our town’s newest movie theatre symposium. We didn’t see Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D version of The Great Gatsby, which was screening later in the evening, but we sat through 20 minutes of previews until F Scott Fitzgerald’s characters materialized onscreen in all their digitized glory. I’m so glad I waited until the next day, on the bike at the gym, to read one critic’s take on this classic American novel turned screenplay.
Fitzgerald coined the phrase, “The rich are very different from you and me,” and this was his most subtle way of proving the point. It was the Jazz Age, skirt lengths were going up while the price of bootleg liquor was going down. The reason the love story of Daisy and Jay has lasted so long is because it’s a pretty universal one. Boy meets girl, boy can’t have girl for a myriad of reasons (like class or clan differences) and chaos ensues. But more than a romance, it’s a morality play. Fitzgerald’s genius is in his elegiac prose:
“It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Gatsby creates an empire and holds lavish parties at his Long Island mansion with one thing in mind, winning Daisy back. But he didn’t go to Yale with Nick and Tom, and he didn’t graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. He will never fit in with this polo-playing crowd; Gatsby created an image of himself built on his shadow world of respectability – a precursor to the celebrity culture of today. Old money vs new money. Like Juliet or Zelda or Anna Karenina, Daisy Buchanan could never be his happy ending.
I was 23 in 1972, attending SUNY College at Purchase when I drove to one of those “cottages” in Rhode Island with a friend from the Dance Department to audition for the ballroom scene in The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. My friend Nadjia made the cut, they told me I “…didn’t look the part.” Little did they know that I was the daughter of a real Flapper, a Dime a Dance girl, who shimmied with Cab Calloway at a speakeasy. But then again, I didn’t know that either. My Mother kept a few secrets too.
When the Flapper was in her 80s, my brother Michael arranged for Cab Calloway to surprise her at a party on Lake Minnetonka. And I realized that my Mother must have felt very much the same way I did my whole life, the way Fitzgerald felt:
i.2.s-great-gatsby-farrow-redford-dicaprio-mulligan
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

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