The Past Comes Up to Haunt Me: The New Yorker and Looney Tunes

While searching for last year's tax return--cause you never know when you're going to need it--I came across some New Yorkers from 2007 and 2008. Jerry has a subscription for his office and he brings home old issues. I rarely throw them out because I rarely read them right away. Reading The New Yorker is a mjor commitment. It's like reading a book. So I stockpile them and sometime take them upstate. It might be years before I will read an article. I did throw some three-year-old ones out because there was nothing in the table of contents that caught my eye. I kept one from Nov. 19, 2007 with a fascinating article on Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, comparing their stabs at popularizing Shakespeare in the cinema and on stage. The author cites Welles' Chimes at Midnight as a better film than Olivier's Henry V. I think I saw Chimes at the Theatre for the Living Arts in Philly while I was in college. It was an impressive, though raggedly kind of movie with a certain offbeat charm. Welles scrambled to put it together on a limited budget in Spain, dubbing half the voices of the Spanish actors. According to the article, it's not available on DVD. I will have to check Netflix.

Another article from 2008 I'm now reading consists of Norman Mailer's letters from 1945 to 2005.

That reminds of some recent incidents that involved bits of pop culture which bubbled up in the presence of my friend Diane. We used to work together at Back Stage and one of my catchphrases was: "Nothing like this has happened to me since the boys got back from Gettysburgh." This is a quote from Granny in the Bugs Bunny cartoon where she has inherited a lot of money and Yosemite Sam woos her for the cash. Bugs disguises himself as a French nobleman and pretends to be Sam's rival, thus Granny's line about two men (sort of) after her at once. Anyway, I uttered this witticism when things were slow. Flashforward a few years: Diane is attending an outdoor summertime movie in Bryant Park. They normally show a cartoon before the feature like in the old days. It's the cartoon with Granny. She says the line about Gettysburgh and Diane laughs in recognition hysterically. Her friends look at her as if she's nuts. "It wasn't that funny," one says. She later explains the source of her excessive mirth.

Another thing I used to say a lot was Mr. Owl's line from the Tootsie Pop commercial about how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop: "Let's find out--One, Twoo-ooo, three (he crunches into the center), Three."

Diane told me she recently heard some teenagers on a subway quoting Mr. Owl. It was all she could do not to guffaw and be declared a lunatic.

The past resurfaces in mysterious ways.