Trainspotting Monty Python, et al

Inspector: I suggest you murdered your father for his seat reservation.

Tony: I may have had the motive, Inspector, but I could not have done it, for I have only just arrived from Gillingham on the 8:13 and here's my restaurant car ticket to prove it.

Jasmina: The 8:13 from Gillingham doesn't have a restaurant car.

Tony: Oh, er... did I say the 8:13, I meant the 7:58 stopping train.

Lady Partridge: But the 7:58 stopping train arrived at Swindon at 8:19 owing to annual point maintenance at Wisborough Junction.

John: So how did you make the connection with the 8:I3 which left six minutes earlier?

Tony: Oh, er, simple! I caught the 7:16 Football Special arriving at Swindon at 8:09.

Jasmina: But the 7:16 Football Special only stops at Swindon on alternate Saturdays.

Tony: Oh, yes! How daft of me. Of course I.came on the Holidaymaker Spedal calling at Bedford, Colmworth, Fen Dinon, Sutton, Wallington and Gillingham.


The Monty Python Agatha Christie Time Table Sketch is one of my all-time favorites. There was a time when the tradition of the British rail service meant something. Their trains ran efficiently, and on schedule, and everyone knew and loved particular schedules the way we might know baseball stats for a favorite team.

There are those who still kindle the rail passion, serious collectors of the classic British/Commonwealth time tables, as we see in the Sydney Morning Herald: “He and other members of the Australian Association of Time Table Collectors (there are branches in most states) find great pleasure in analysing timetables of any vintage.” You’ve got to love people who put “great pleasure” and “analyzing timetables” in the same sentence.

The Father of the Time Table
Now let us praise George Bradshaw, the 19th century cartographer and printer who is the father of the printed time table. British literature is littered with references to Bradshaws, particularly in Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie who loved the idea of complicated alibis based on train schedules (hence Monty Python). The great Dame Agatha seemed particularly smitten, writing the ABC Murders for Poirot, where an ABC Railway guide is found by each body, and the 4:50 from Paddington for Miss Marple.


This focus on train times is no mere folderol. I am going to England next week for a few weeks, and looking to get here and there on the rails. Unbelievably, I’m being boxed out by the Midland time tables. Sure, you can get from Kings Cross, London to Peterborough on National Express, then change to Midland trains to Oakham (where the Tallis Scholars Summer School takes place). But just try going from Oakham to Swaffham, the Mutt and Jeff of market towns. You can get to Swaffham, via Peterborough, but the trains only run late in the day—-not very helpful at all. This poor scheduling would not have happened in the heyday of rail travel.


When I went to university at Southampton, I enjoyed direct service into the great Waterloo Station, the terminus of the London and South Western Railway, near Waterloo Bridge. In a Wizard of Oz reversal, I imagined whenever I stepped off of the train that the station was in glorious black and white, straight out of every World War II movie. For just an instant the throng appeared as a sea of men in hats and women in stoles, before the late 20th century technicolor and Gap fashions clicked into focus.

Steed and Mrs. Peel on Track


The most famous current fictional train is the Hogwarts Express, from track 9 ¾ from King’s Cross railway station. The Brit love for their iron horses lead to two rail-themed Avenger episodes. It’s so ethnically distinct for a tv series. From the b&w era, "The Gravediggers" brings Steed to “The Sir Horace Winslip Hospital for Ailing Railwaymen" and Mrs. Peel tied to the tracks to the sounds of silent era tinkling piano. And in the color Emma Peel year, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Station” has the villains trying to blow up the private rail car that will carry the prime minister. It features the station of Norborough, which I believe is just down the line from my Peterborough. (At whose cathedral the body of Mary Queen of Scotts was originally buried. My world is so connected.)

* * *
I am going on my blog break now, to have time to learn the music for the Tallis Scholars Summer School (TSSS). If I get the hang of it, I may tweet from Oxford. I’ll be back middle of July, in time for the tributes to that other moon walk. I hope you’ll come back too.

But now, watch Monty Python and the fabulous Agatha Christie Sketch.

"Placet." A lot.

A voice proved to be a powerful madeleine for me last Sunday night. I am a big David Suchet/Poirot fan, and I was thrilled that Mystery! will be playing 2 new Poirot stories in their Six by Agatha. I thought Suchet had sworn off the role, but never say never.

Agatha Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons is set in girl’s English boarding school. Poirot is invited by the cofounder and headmistress Miss Bulstrode to bestow an award and advise her in choosing a successor.

It turned out that I was not giving the screen my whole attention, indeed I was puttering about, when from the kitchen I heard Miss Bulstrode’s voice: “Our guest of honor and a person of international renown.”

That voice. It struck my ear with all the import of a memory of something that was once important to me. I went in to see who it was, but there was no instant recognition from the image of Miss Bulstrode. She continued speaking, and my mind was searching, searching to place this voice that . . . .

HARRIET VANE.

OMG. It was Harriet Vane from the Edward Petherbridge Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery series of the late eighties. I had not thought about her, or them, in twenty years, but I had loved that series and the novels. Can you be jealous of a tv representation of a fictional character? I was.

Harriet Vane had everything. She was an independent woman who was a published writer, of mystery stories. She is arrested for poisoning her lover when Lord Peter Wimsey comes into her life. Their banter was catnip for the literary set, which I was hoping to join. And Vane, as played by Harriet Walter, was not beautiful. She was smart and interesting and independent (did I already mention that?). I found her a wonderful role model as I was starting out on my own quest to be a writer with an independent lifestyle. I barely noticed the actress, Harriet Walter, except for the confusion about them both being Harriets; I was just interested in the character.

I was so surprised by this Poirot appearance of Harriet Vane on my tv, that when I realized that Harriet Walter was still appearing a mere 60 blocks south of my apartment in the Broadway play Mary Stuart, off I went to pay homage.

The play is a reworking of Friedrich Schiller’s fictionalized meeting between Queen Elizabeth 1 and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s a thrilling production, but it’s not for everyone. The first act particularly is extremely talky, but never has England’s history and its religious wars come so alive and been so easy to follow. Both leads were compelling, but I was there for Harriet Walter, Queen Elizabeth. She brought that woman to life as effortlessly as she had created Harriet Vane.

Harriet Vane/Harriet Walter was such a lovely memory to revisit. I have ordered the Strong Poison/ Have His Carcass/Gaudy Night DVDs through the pbs website to enjoy as a midsummer treat. Petherbridge's Wimsey is beautifully limned, a great piece of casting filled out by an authentic sensibility for this Lord who's an ass, but not really. I can’t wait to work my way through them, and see again the most literary of all marriage proposals in Gaudy Night:

“Placetne, magistra?”
“Placet.”

As I said, Harriet Vane had it all.

The Sidekick, the PinUp, and the King of Pop

The Sidekick, the PinUp, and the King of Pop walk into a bar . . .

Ed, Farrah, and Jacko meet up with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates . . .

I can’t help it: the clumped deaths of three such A-mur-i-can pop culture icons of the twentieth century is a great set-up for a joke (if only I could write jokes).

Is it true that a country gets the pop culture it deserves? Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson were each part of the very fabric of pop culture over the last 40 years, but it was not a piece of the fabric that I myself paid much attention to.

Farrah Fawcett was the first one I knew, as a girl in the seventies. I didn’t watch Charlie’s Angels, but that hair. It wasn’t just on the poster---it was everywhere. In every magazine. Feathering. I wanted my hair to feather. I had it cut to feather. But it did not feather like hers. I don’t think it was a crushing body image moment, but there was a genuine, deep longing for that hair. I look at the poster now, and the smile seems oddly skeletal—-her jaw is squared and harsh, not all that pretty. She is the first famous person I remember who hyphenated her last name when that started happening in the seventies, Farrah Fawcett-Majors. I thought it was the most fabulous name.

I just read that the iconic poster was first seen in 1976 in Life magazine. Who even remembers that Life magazine was still around in 1976?


Next came Michael, obliquely for me. I didn’t buy "Thriller," but somehow I had a 45 of "Rockin’ Robin" in grade school, I don’t know why. Completely by chance I caught the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever on TV on May 16, 1983, and even without a prior connection to MJ, it was a thrilling performance.

Ed McMahon was the last I noticed, when I started watching Johnny Carson around 1987. I didn’t watch Star Search, I vaguely remembered seeing Ed on the Jerry Lewis MD Telethon. The idea of a couch sycophant wasn’t very appealing, and his forced guffaw laugh was creepy.

Taken together, the culture was enriched by an old school emcee, a talented musician before Neverland, and sweet cheesecake.


Of the three, Jacko was given the 3-column banner in the NY Times online when the news broke. It started with this exuberant image from the Dangerous era, perhaps the last time Michael looked healthy. I don’t know what power Michael Jackson had as a live performer, but his truly global fame meant that he spoke across cultures and generations. There are shades of Sammy Davis in his dancing, a comparison that would have been anathema to him as he grew more and more horrified in his own skin. He went from a precociously talented boy soprano, to a sexy young man, into a dark, tortured limbo of dementia.

Andrew Sullivan has an excellent appraisal of the pain behind Jacko:

"Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell."

What strikes me about these three is their obvious desire for fame, which wasn’t the case when, say, Paul Newman died. Farrah had it early based solely on her looks, and she struggled to parlay that into a more satisfying and sustaining career. Ed McMahon was a last bit of Old B-list Hollywood. He had a niche, and he didn’t try to better himself beyond it. But he had a sense of entitlement to being “famous.” Michael of course is in the league of Marilyn, and Elvis, and James Dean. Fame came to him, and then devoured him. Are we collectively to blame for that? Is our culture that dangerous to its stars?

Let’s not forget that amidst this pop cultural swirl is the 12-day courageous strivings of the Iranian people in the midst of a cultural revolution who want to be freer to create their own broad cultural icons. And that makes me appreciate mine—-even though I didn’t love them-—all the more.

(Ed McMahon photo: AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac/file 1992)

Black Pride: “The Public, Not the Pro, Rules at Bethpage”

Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots - but you have to play the ball where it lies.
—-Bobby Jones



Long Island pride is running high right now. Bethpage Black. Farmingdale’s contribution to world-class golf. 2002 was the year the Open came to town, paying $3 million to spruce up the Tillinghast 1936 WPA project via contemporary golf course architect genius Rees Jones. A very quick 7 years later and the Open is back to the only public course on its roster. The NY Times has written several articles about the carnival atmosphere at the Black. Well, yeah. You got a problem with that?

The rain plaguing the play is seeming of Biblical proportions, which is too bad, but maybe to be expected given the origin of the town name: St. Matthew's Gospel (21:1). ''And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed Him, and when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem and were come to Beth'phage, unto the Mount of Olives.'' And then came Moses. Robert Moses, the man who preferred cars to people but had the vision to create the New York State parks, including Jones Beach, ensuring that its pristine sand never became ravaged like the Jersey Shore.

Family Ties
My brother worked at Bethpage State Park for a summer when he was in high school. Those State park jobs are hard to get, and are mostly awarded to kids within the Machine as favors for State government donors. It seems there was some mistaking of our family last name for some major player in the Democratic party. . . .

It was a lucky break for my brother, who spent the summer driving around the Yellow, Green, Blue, Red, and Black courses (colors connoting the easiest to the hardest course) in the truck, changing out cups, and generally having a good time. He played a bit himself, having a young man’s golf phase.

Thinking about that brought me back to our family outings of miniature golf. Well remember, we lived in suburbia. The earliest game I remember I think I was about 6, playing a nearby course with my dad and brother. The windmill! The clown’s mouth! The pond!

I have such a vivid memory of that one particular Sunday that the 3 of us played. When we got to the end, I had the highest score! I was SO HAPPY that I had won. I couldn't believe it. Then they both told me that I had lost. I could not understand this. How could the higher number lose---that’s not the way it goes. It really upset me that what I thought to be true—high score wins---now wasn’t true. And that they had not told me about this when we started the game. I was completely crushed, as only innocence can be, sitting in the back seat of the car, crying all the way home.

And Later with Steed
After the crushing realization of miniature golf, I gave up thinking about golf until my BFF was working at Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, at Duke University, many years later. For our birthdays we took a golf lesson with the club’s pro. It was an interesting peak into the traditions of golf teams in the South, and the only time I had hands-on knowledge of how complicated the swing is.

Given that the game was born in Scotland, it’s not so surprising that there’s an Avengers episode that is set on a course called "The Thirteenth Hole." Steed and Emma play through in a Cold War story about a Russian satellite that is over England every day at a certain time, which scientists are using to give secrets to the enemy.

My real Steed and I once enjoyed a quintessential Manhattan golf game. Artists Space, a nonprofit gallery in TriBeCa, mounted "Putt-Modernism," an installation of 18 playable holes of miniature golf created by prominent contemporary artists and architects, including Frank Gehry, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Graves. I found the score card to our eighteen holes the other day. I love its entreaty: “Please remember these are works of art!!” along side the more usual rules: 1 stroke penalty if ball leaves putting surface; Ball may be moved 6” from rail or hazard without penalty; 6 stroke limit per hole.

And then there were the scores: M.A. 57, Steed 49. This time at least I knew I had lost before someone had to tell me. And the tears were of a much more serious nature.

The Wearing of the Green

Happy Bloomsday everyone. The annual salute to James Joyce and the mother of all first dates of the last century that lead to Ulysses.

But the wearing of the green this year goes to the Iranians fighting for freedom in their lives. Andrew Sullivan has been covering this since Friday, showing the amazing power of the internet. And now Twitter seems less ridiculous. How amazing to witness history at this ground level.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin

Even when it is tiny and sits on a window sill in an apartment.

I hear echoes of The Little Prince every time I look at my charges.


Then one morning, exactly at sunrise, she suddenly showed herself.

And, after working with all this painstaking precision, she yawned and said:

"Ah! I am scarcely awake. I beg that you will excuse me. My petals are still all disarranged..."

But the little prince could not restrain his admiration:

"Oh! How beautiful you are!"

"Am I not?" the flower responded, sweetly. "And I was born at the same moment as the sun..."

The little prince could guess easily enough that she was not any too modest-- but how moving-- and exciting-- she was!

"I think it is time for breakfast," she added an instant later. "If you would have the kindness to think of my needs--"

And the little prince, completely abashed, went to look for a sprinkling-can of fresh water. So, he tended the flower.

* * * * *

"I should never have listened to her," he confided to me one day, "One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance."

"If some one loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, 'Somewhere, my flower is there...' But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened... And you think that is not important!"

He could not say anything more. His words were choked by sobbing.


Ah, the love and heartbreak of the gardener.

btw, NPH Rocks

“I’m tv. They’re movies.”

Ah, the Tonys. Living in New York I sometimes think I should go see more theater than I do. But the artifice of its storytelling doesn’t resonant with me as deeply as film does.

Or tv, for that matter. What I love about episodic television is that it brings plays into my home weekly. Neil Patrick Harris is on a clever little show called How I Met Your Mother. He and his colleagues must learn a new play every week for 26 weeks (or so). They have to not only enact the specific episode, but be aware of character development over time.

Sure theater actors perform live, but that’s not so difficult. So do classical musicians, opera performers, and rock stars.

The Billie Elliot kids were genuinely charming.

There are performers who are worth going to see in person. For me one is Angela Lansbury. What an amazing career. It’s surprising that she has never won an Oscar (nominated for her very first film, Gaslight, and The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Manchurian Candidate), or an Emmy. She was nominated for 12 consecutive years for playing Jessica Fletcher, and never won. But on stage, she has now won five Tonys. Brava!!

I liked NPH's 11:00 number at 11:03, but then I’m a Neil Patrick Harris fan. I think he did a good job as host. I loved his Dr. Horrible, where we got to see him sing and dance, and if it ever comes to Broadway, well, I’d go to see him.


(Tony photos Sara Krulwich/New York Times)