Taking Down the Christmas Tree on Presidents' Day Weekend

Yeah, you read that right. I did not put away our mid-size artifical Christmas tree until this weekend. So sue me, to quote Nathan Detroit. I got better things to do, like stay in bed and complain, to quote Judy Tenuta. (Whatever happened to her?) I have not been to our upstate place in a while so we just left the tree standing. Removing the ornaments brings back memories because so many of them are from trips we've taken: a lobster from Provincetown on Cape Cod; a pineapple from Honolulu; a stuffed doll figure of Henry VIII from the Tower of London; Spongebob Squarepants and Capt. America from Universal Islands of Adventures and a Mickey Mouse from Disney World; a crayfish and some Mardi Gras beads from Santa's Quarters on Decatur Street in New Orleans. There are also a set of portaits of Batman, Robin, Catwoman, and the Joker, as well as Sylvester carrying a load of presents with Tweetie on top. There are also figures of Spiderman and several different Santa Clauses as well as Renaissance-type archangels. On top is a Father Christmas figure. I remember a Presidents' Day weekend about three years ago, I should have been working on my book about George C. Scott, but I goofed off and watched a Project Runway marathon. It was from season two, before I was obsessed with it. I watched several episodes I hadn't seen before.

Presidents' Day also had me thinking about Richard Nixon. Jerry went to see the Met HD broadcast of Nixon in China and I had seen the premiere live just before we went to Florida. From age 9 to 16, Richard Nixon was president and how I hated him. I remember my sister saying if he were elected in 1968 he would make us go to school on Saturdays. During the Watergate scandal, I yearned for his impeachment and we wathced the hearings avidly all during that summer of 1974. He was the boogey man, the evil villain taking advantage of his power and betraying the trust of the American people. I remember several years after he resigned--I was so angry that he stepped down rather than allowing us the magnificent spectacle of a trial in the senate--he showed up on Nightline with Ted Koppel. I screamed as if I had seen a ghost and I had. His hair was white and he was noticably older.

Now John Adams' opera shows a more human figure, pathetically singing of his days in the navy running a snack bar and selling the guys hamburgers and beer, desperately wanting them to like him. In 100 years, is this how Nixon will be remembered? Yes there is Oliver Stone's movie with Anthony Hopkins as a troll-like co-conspirator, but the opera may survive it and be performed around the world. How will this era be seen?

Nixon in China got me interested in hearing more modern opera and I looked up Einstein on the Beach on YouTube. It is hauntingly beautiful, but I doubt if I could take five hours of it. Robert Wilson's productions look fascinating, but I think his main esthetic is visual since he is also a designer, and not dramatic, so his productions look good but don't move you.

A Christmas Yule Blog

It's Christmas Eve and something has been bothering me. You know that song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"? You usually hear Andy Williams singing it while you're shopping for last minute gifts for people you don't really like at the K mart around the corner or on that lite music station that goes all-Xmas all-the-time on the day after Thanksgiving. Anyway, there's this one line: "There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of old glories of Christmases long, long ago." Who tells "scary ghost stories" on Christmas? Did the lyricist get yuletide mixed up with Halloween like in that Tim Burton movie? That's always bothered me.

In a similar vein, there was one Christmas when my family was visiting us upstate and we didn't tell scary ghost stories, but we did watch Westerns. American Movie Classics was showing a marathon of westerns. I think they called it Cowboys at Christmas or something. This was when the network actually lived up to its name and showed old movies instead of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and 1980s movie bombs. I'l watch a Western if it's good--like The Searchers, High Noon, or Stagecoach. But my dad likes anything with horses and guns--literally, he will watch the worst piece of crap you can imagine as long as there is a shoot-out in it somewhere. So after turkey dinner, we gathered round the electronic fire and viewed Winchester 73 and Bend in the River, both starring Jimmy Stewart.

Winchester 73 has everybody you could think of in it--Stewart, Shelley Winters, Tony Curtis (when he was still Bernie Schwartz), Will Geer (Grampa Walton as Doc Holliday), Dan Dureya as a snivelling coward (his usual role), Rock Hudson as an Indian brave, and that guy who played the studio head in Singin' in the Rain.

Bend in the River was later in Stewart's career. Big, technicolor epic. You can picture seeing it at the drive-in with the whole family on a Saturday night and being overwhelmed by the color and the wide vistas. Stewart co-starred with another big cast, agin with Rock Hudson (he was still doing second leads), Arthur Kennedy as the villain, Henry Morgan before Dragnet and MASH,and Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffin Show. It was almost like we were out on the plains, because it gets really dark upstate.