And God Bless Us, Everyone, Especially Adam Gopnik

The dining room at the Last House 12.25.10- Christmas Dinner, Done and Dusted. Half an apple pie remained...

Another Sunday night draws to a close and we have survived Christmas. Ours was nice at the Last House, thanks, snowy and cold as befits our latitude (see previous posts and comments if you have a moment). Kids = happy. Food = good. Company = fine. I hope yours was also lovely.

So, part of my long Christmas weekend involved catching up on The New Yorker. Issues of the New Yorker come at me the way those assembly-line chocolates once came at Lucille Ball... I love it, but there always seem to be a backlog - a few lurking under newspapers on the footstool, or in with the bills on the dining room table. And since I mostly read it in bed, it takes me a long time to work through each issue. (I am forever finding crumpled issues on the wall side of the bed, where they have slipped after I have lost consciousness. They rest there in the dust [slut's wool, they used to call it] until I get around to changing sheets, which can sometimes be a fair stretch).

I found one of these neglected issues the other day and read a lot of it in snatches between cooking, cleaning and wrapping. I believe the issue of August 30. It included a critic at large piece by Adam Gopnik about Winston Churchill and books about Winston Churchill. Q.v.

This was doubly enticing for me because I have always felt a certain something for Winston Churchill and, if you have been following along, you know I have included Adam Gopnik in my personal (short) list of brushes with greatness.

On the Churchill connection, Winston died the day before I was born - or basically the day I was born because of the time difference between the U.K. and the U.S. east coast. I have known this all my life because my mother dutifully filled in the blank in my baby book (which I started poring over as soon as I could read) that asked for the day's headlines on the date of my birth (January 25, 1965). "Churchill Dead!" Perhaps not the most auspicious day in the world's calendar. When I learned as a kid about the Buddhist theory of reincarnation and rebirth of the Dalai Lama I have to admit it crossed my mind. But, nah...

As I got older my admiration for Churchill grew with every quotation I read. In my 20s I actually posted on my desk the bit about:

"We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

My job at the time (writing for an alumni magazine in placid upstate New York) wasn't much like defending civilization from Nazi hordes, but, young as I was, I saw corollaries - and it was just so stirring! When I finally got to England a couple of years ago, I made it a point to get to Blenheim Palace, ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough (Churchill's ancestors) and Sir Winston's birthplace.

The friend who brought me to Blenheim also bought us Roy Jenkins' book about Churchill. I read a lot of it (OK - I didn't finish it, yet, but I have explained about that). There was a bit that I read there that I have thought about many times since: something Winston said early in his political career. Gopnik must have been struck by the same bit because he recorded it in his article:

Churchill, on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Manchester, [said], with his odd and signature mixture of real empathy and inherited condescension, “Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever! ”

I suppose that reveals a lot about Churchill's character as a young man and doesn't reflect so well on him today, but I know exactly what he meant and I agreed absolutely. How awful to be trapped someplace (geographically and socially) where the blindly uninquisitive reign. (Aside: That's why liberal arts education - education not in furtherance of anything, necessarily, beyond personal acquisition of knowledge - needs to be defended like England was defended against the Nazis.)

As I read on in Gopnik's article I was repeatedly gobsmacked by Gopnik's own brilliant writing. I mean, The New Yorker sent the right Critic-at-Large to review the reviwers of Churchill E.g.:

Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has nicked Churchill without really drawing blood.

To be born both at the top of the tree and out on a limb is an odd combination, and that double heritage accounts for a lot of what happened to him later.


It may seem mysterious that jingoism should appeal so overwhelmingly to the working classes, easily trumping apparently obvious differences in interests between them and the economic imperialists. Why should conquering Burma be of significance to a Cockney? But imperialism is the cosmopolitanism of the people, the lever by which the unempowered come to believe that their acts have world-historical meaning.

Well. All I can say is, wow.

When I interviewed A.G. back in a former life, I remember him telling me that he had learned from another New Yorker writer, the late Whitney Balliet, to give the reader something extra at the end of an article, something more. (I am paraphrasing and may not have that exactly right) but I thought I got a lot of something more here. See what you think.

OK. Back to work tomorrow so I must get to bed! Here's my poor version of a little something extra for any stoppers-by here: a few shots of our Christmas weekend (sledding today).



Whusband drags an old deck chair to the sledding hill behind the Last House. The bluish speck is Shackleton...







Ta for now!


Oh - and one last thing. I just got an email this weekend from the BBC saying I had been granted a ticket to see David Sedaris read at Broadcasting House on January 16. I am taking a poll. Should I pull the kids out of school and take time off from work to go to London for a trip that would include January 16? I mean, there's other stuff we could do too...

Woolfoot's Celebrity Swirl: Ken Somebody, Jay Leno, Adam Gopnik, and More!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...

I have given up pondering the imponderables for the moment. I don't seem much good at it in any case. So let's get back to something more, hmmm, frothy - I mean "palatable". To wit, as promised, my brushes with greatness.

This will be a short post.

I can only think of one that involved anything like actual "brushing." More on that in a moment.

Disclosure note: this post is a pale sort of copycat, inspired by a much funnier and more impressive one, in terms of the celebrity involved and the parameters of the encounter over at the famous Fussy blog, written by blogging royalty, Mme. Eden M. Kennedy.

Eden (I will claim a first-name familiarity because I wrote her an email once and she responded - at least I think it was her - maybe she has assistants) was on a flight from L.A. to N.Y. recently. She learned, probably part way over Nevada, that the stylishly dressed yet nervous 50-something woman in her row was the mother of a pair of Very Famous A-list celebrities (q.v.) Another memorable celebrity post was written by my actual blogging friend and another member of the royal class of bloggers, Lulu Labonne. (And I mean "Royalty" not just nobility). If you are easily shocked, be careful before you click to Lulu's blog. This particular post involves, peripherally, some discussion of the use of *marijuana* by an iconic 1960s singer-songwriter whose name rhymes with "Stony Twitchell." (q.v. again). My personal opinion is that Lulu has lots more she could tell about many celebrities - but is holding back. Lulu?

OK. Here's my number one celebrity encounter:

When I was in about 9th grade I went to the Albany County Airport one evening to pick up somebody or something. It was back in the days when people without tickets could go to the gate areas. It was in the days before jetways. It was during the days when a TV show about a white basketball coach in a tough, inner-city school was a fairly popular program. The show was called, cleverly, The White Shadow. I remember that I liked it a lot. I can't remember, however, the name of the guy who played, nay, "starred" as "the White Shadow" - Ken Something or Keith Something. (I knew it back then). Anyway - you guessed it: Ken Something was in the airport that night. Waiting at Gate 7 or where ever to fly to N.Y. or L.A. Why was he in Albany? A mistake, perhaps? A family connection? Lucky for me.

I screwed up my courage and said "Excuse me" as I walked past him to the bathroom. He had less hair in person than he did on the show. He said:
"S'alright." He smelled like he had been drinking.

Well? Well? How's about that!?

I have had a couple of other encounters with famous people but this one actually kind of thrilled me. Maybe because it was just pure chance and because I was so young. The few others I have had were planned and somewhat canned but still kind of fun. So for the record, and since we're on the topic, here are the details on those.

I wrote for a local weekly entertainment magazine for a while after college and got, or could get, free tickets to just about everything that passed through our unfashionable part of upstate New York. Really, I suppose it says something about how hard it is to make a living as a performer that lots of really famous people had to play Albany. Anyway, me and my friend Tracey (also from the paper) got to meet Jay Leno backstage at Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady (which is near Albany) after his show once.

He was shorter than I thought he would be and wore a surprising amount of make up. He flirted openly with Tracey who had freckles and red hair and a lot of verve. She told him she was a "Harley Girl" and he smiled like the Cheshire Cat at her. Some Proctor's staff lady had baked him a cake or cookies or something and he pushed them to Tracey and asked her to take them away. He signed copies of our freebie newspaper for us. I have mine somewhere.

Also, during that interval I once interviewed Steven Wright, the comedian, (remember him?). It was a phone interview, but he was nice. He told me some jokes and I laughed at them like the star-struck 20-something that I was. My favorite, or at least the one I remember, was:

"I went into a diner that served 'breakfast anytime'. So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance."

Oh, and one time I wrote a profile of Adam Gopnik for the McGill Alumni magazine. I was actually admitted into the old New Yorker offices to interview him. Adam was as nice as pie. He told me he liked my article about him. He was,is, a well-brought-up sort of writer. (His parents stayed with us one night at the Last House long ago, so I am in a position to know). The New Yorker offices had the charm of Motor Vehicles, albeit without the lines.

OK. I think that's all of them. I am hoping to spur a few of you regular readers to share your own tales of fabulous encounters. Tell me if you do.