tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68256358909967129482023-11-15T05:50:06.593-08:00Hildegarde DolsonHildegarde Dolson Lockridge was born and raised in Franklin, PA. She grew up in the age of flappers, attended Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, and started her work life in Depression-era NYC. And she wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote, thereby becoming Franklin's most successful published author. Articles, novels, and even a play, from the 1930's through the 1970's. As I write this, there is real Dolson scholarship going on out there. But in the meantime, enjoy these tidbits from her work.Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-82183003625628279032020-01-19T15:02:00.001-08:002020-01-19T15:02:03.131-08:00<i> Working as an artist's model.</i><br />
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I was especially nonplussed by old Mrs. Ramspeck's treatment of me. She always brought pieces of bric-a-brac or flowers to the class and stuck them around my chair. Then she'd concentrate on painting these objects in the most elaborate detail, sketching me carelessly in the foreground just to be polite. The method played ducks and drakes with my anatomical structure. The time Mrs. Ramspeck made my hands much bigger than my head, I ran to Mother and whispered anguished protests of this modernistic technique. She reminded me that Mrs. Ramspeck preferred still lifes, and I mustn't be rude.<br />
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-- from<i> We Shook the Family Tree </i>(1941)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-27134568756640492252016-02-28T05:15:00.001-08:002016-02-28T05:15:12.169-08:00"Well, her new husband certainly drinks. I saw him yesterday in the liquor store. Talk about divine-looking men!" Liz Carmody was a golf widow shaped like an outsize golf ball but without the little holes punched in. "Mr. Fenner told me, 'That's Madame Velanie's husband,' and I swear my nipples stood up and saluted when he passed us. He walks like a prowly tango."<br />
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- <i>Beauty Sleep</i> (1977)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-31283726482329837712016-02-07T15:00:00.000-08:002016-02-07T15:00:13.424-08:00A soft-footed maid ushered me into the chintzy, many-windowed living room of the Post apartment, where the World's Leading Authority on Etiquette held out her hand and said, "How nice of you to be so exactly on time." Having sat up half the night with her book, cramming my tousled pate full of such edicts as "A Lady Is Always Punctual," I had been so hell-bent on punctuality that I'd arrived in the downstairs lobby of the big hushed co-operative apartment building a full forty minutes early. Then I'd crouched, waiting, so that as the clock struck the hour, I could pop out like a cuckoo.<br />
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"Spilling Tea with Emily Post" (Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-178483450396935242016-01-17T13:56:00.002-08:002016-01-17T13:56:44.938-08:00Just as she showed instinctive skill with the plants, pruning, pinching, disbudding, grafting, feeding or not, she went at the pages with a sure hand and eye, attacking flabby transitions, misplaced prepositions, and the bevy of exclamation points she considered in a class with women who squeal, "You don't say!" "Imagine that!" In Chapter 4, she gouged out "eyes like lustrous pansies" that had been "glinting sapphire" six pages earlier, and substituted "sapphire" throughout because at least it was preferable to "lustrous pansies."<br />
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When she had finished ridding a manuscript of all these blights, she often felt the virtuous satisfaction of a gardener who's spent the day weeding and squashing bugs. But there were times, especially with bad novels, when it was hard to keep from putting on rubber gloves and ripping out whole hunks of a book like poison ivy, and in Chapter 5 she found a section that made her fingers itch. The lovers were talking baby talk in bed, making up playful nicknames for their intimate parts. If they had beaten each other with pink and blue ribbons, she couldn't have been more revolted.<br />
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-- <i>Open the Door</i> (1966)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-13877159119291368602016-01-15T18:21:00.002-08:002016-01-15T18:21:50.958-08:00While I was thus polluting the blank pads of paper intended for Art, the art teacher in grade school continued to have hopes for me, in the dogged belief that, being my mother's child, I just couldn't be that bad. Once a week, on Wednesdays, she came to the Fourteenth Street School, and we had a whirl at Art. While the other children were drawing houses with doors and chimneys and neat spirals of smoke coming out, the most I could manage was a lean-to. No smoke, no symmetry. I was equally wobbly on Halloween pumpkins, spring flowers tastefully arranged in a vase (which the teacher called a vawhse) and Christmas trees with a star on top. Stars, with all those points, drove me crazy. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I was the only child in class who became an artist's model.<br />
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The exotic role came to me at the age of eleven, when the Saturday morning art class ran out of subjects. The class had been organized by Mr. Ward, a small, gray-haired man who looked as though he'd break if you bent him in the middle. He had lived abroad for many years, but now he'd come back to Franklin, to squeeze out his last years, like dried up paint from a nearly empty tube, in doing portraits of citizens whose forbears had struck oil. On the side, he'd started the art class for twelve ladies, including Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck, all of whom paid two dollars a week for the privilege of studying under Mr. Ward.<br />
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They must have been terribly hard up for models, to choose me, and I must admit they tried my pretty sister first, but she squirmed too much. I had always had a talent for sitting static as a corpse, but it had been considered a rather unfortunate, negative talent until the art class got ahold of me.<br />
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-- from <i>We Shook the Family Tree (1941) </i><br />
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<br />Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-66900014864699850932014-06-09T18:06:00.002-07:002014-06-09T18:06:59.851-07:00I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what is symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my one impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.<br />
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-- from "Look, I'm Framed!" (1949)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-33849248005703649422014-06-08T16:22:00.002-07:002014-06-08T16:22:52.003-07:00In this spirit, she had phoned and invited her neighbor over for drinks: "Bring your houseguest. Are you going to marry him?" She was old enough to say whatever she wanted to, although age had very little to do with it. She had usually said what she wanted to, from the age of eleven months on.<br />
<br />
Men seldom objected to Lucy's frankness. She had been a beauty, and now, in her sixties, she still had the finely whittled bones, the flash and fire-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of an indestructible belle. But not a Southern belle; Lucy was much too direct. Women were more put off by this then men. Grace Dillworth had shied away from the head-on frankness of "Are you going to marry him?" And she had gone on to commit the unforgivable (to Lucy) stupidity of refusing the invitation with top-of-the-tongue phrases like "take a rain check." One did N O T take a rain check for a command performance. Lucy, a solipsist, took a dim view of this."<br />
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-- from <i>A Dying Fall </i>(1973)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-62678463252689609952014-01-11T18:27:00.001-08:002014-01-11T18:27:14.641-08:00Mother always hoped that at least one of her children would be an artist. and since I was the oldest, she hoped hardest for me. Her method of encouraging this was to leave plenty of scratch pads and pencils and crayons around the house, but it soon became apparent that I am one of those who can draw a straight line-- and nothing more. Instead, I used the pencils and paper for my literary output. One day after I'd heard Mother reading the <i>Jungle Book</i> to Sally and Jimmy, I went up to my room with a new ambition. Soon my wails of agony reached through the house, and Mother came running upstairs frightened nearly silly. "What happened? What is it?" I pointed to an almost blank sheet of paper and wept anew. Mother stared at it anxiously, but she still couldn't make out what ghastly thing has befallen me. "I c-c-can't write like Kipling," I sobbed.<br />
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-from <i>We Shook the Family Tree (1941)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-18450221774072018342013-08-16T07:32:00.001-07:002013-08-16T07:32:32.672-07:00As Lucy Ramsdale said when the news reached her, "If Grace's papa could hear this, he wouldn't just turn over in his grave-- he'd levitate." <br />
<br />
Grace Dilworth's papa was buried under the largest marble edifice in Wingate's cemetary, but anybody who had tangled with Sam Dilworth wouldn't quite put it past him to crack through a marble tombstone and commandeer a passing hearse. He had been a very forcible man. And he had kept his daughter in loving thralldom from the time she'd teethed on his platinum cuff links. Grace had been thirty-nine when he died, and the betting was that, when she went off on a long cruise afterward, she was still, as Lucy put it, "untouched by human hands."<br />
<br />
If Grace had come home from her trip with an ocelot or a two-foot pygmy, it wouldn't have caused much talk. The people of Wingate, Connecticut (population seven thousand, not counting masochistic summer commuters), took oddities in stride. But Grace Dilworth did not come home with an ocelot or a pygmy; she had brought home a six-foot man and was keeping him right on the premises. According to the best reckoning-- and Wingate ladies were very shrewd at this sort of higher mathematics-- he was at least six years younger than his hostess.<br />
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--from <i>A Dying Fall (1973)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-89176987915727567102013-08-04T12:58:00.002-07:002013-08-04T12:58:43.868-07:00On the rare occasions when Mother had time to paint, her favorite accomplice was an indomitable old lady of over seventy, Mrs. Ramspeck. Mrs. Ramspeck had the only electric carriage left in town, one of those genteel, high-bodied affairs that should have moved at a snail's pace, but somehow the old lady managed to drive it in the spirit of a Stutz bear-cat, with a hey nonny nonny. Once when she was driving Mother to the outskirts of town, so that they might spend the afternoon painting a nice clump of pines, the electric stalled on the railroad tracks. According to the account we heard later, Mrs. Ramspeck was fiddling with the steering bar when Mother heard the screech of an oncoming train, and begged her friend to abandon the carriage. "Now don't be rattled, Kitty," Mrs. Ramspeck said briskly. "We'll just push it off the tracks."<br />
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They got out and pushed, while the train swung around a curve and started down the track straight at them. The electric refused to budge, and so did Mrs. Ramspeck. Just as Mother, in desperation, was about to knock the old lady over the head, in order to drag her unconscious form to safety, the electric gave an apologetic hiccough, yielded to their shoves and lurched off the tracks. With the hot breath of the engine on their backsides, Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck leaped for it as the train pounded by. Mother was so shaken that she told her friend she couldn't possibly paint that afternoon, but Mrs. Ramspeck gave a sturdy slap at the dust on her long black skirts and said, "Oh, fiddlesticks, Kitty. The light will be just right on those pines."<br />
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--from <i>We Shook the Family Tree (1946)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-7808703996577579422013-02-17T16:26:00.000-08:002013-02-17T16:26:14.759-08:00When winter came to the already dank basement, I developed a cough as loud as Camille's, and it was this that finally proved my undoing, or my doing. The director and the calisthenics instructor decided I was run down; I was too thin and round-shouldered, and I didn't sit up straight. They knew I spent my mornings off writing, and they said that was bad for Posture. They very nicely agreed I could go on writing, but I'd have to do exercises to combat it. I could take part of my lunch hour, or come in early and use the gym. Several times they even got me into the billowing bloomers, but I weighed ninety pounds, and on me the bloomers came down like harem trousers, only thick serge, which is a fabric no sultan would stand for. In desperation, I enrolled in a one-night-a-week copywriting course at New York University, and the professor there got me a job in advertising. It was five dollars less a week than Anne Morgan paid, but the atmosphere was full of pipe tobacco, and I found that infinitely healthier than Physical Education without men.<br />
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-- from "Unmixed Company"Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-86501117617824356652013-01-27T16:56:00.000-08:002013-01-27T16:56:09.804-08:00Two of her three listeners shuddered pleasurably. The third, Lucy Ramsdale, snorted. For a woman who looked as fragile and exquisite as Meissen china, Lucy had a very strong snort. "I told Jeanette Eckert if she sold to those ghouls she deserved to be their first customer and I'd dance at her funeral."<br />
<br />
None of her fellow volunteers questioned this statement. Very few people in Wingate would have questioned it. Lucy had never been twiddle-tongued. She had been a beauty, and she still had the finely whittled bone structure-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of a beauty. Recently she'd been involved in investigating several local murders, and unlike those sleuths who believe in keeping their mouths shut, she was still apt to speak her mind. The trait was, at times, the despair of her tenant, Inspector James McDougal, the retired head of homicide of the Connecticut State Police, who lived in the studio behind her house three miles outside Wingate. The studio had been her husband's; Hal Ramsdale had died several years before, and nobody since had been able-- or brave enough-- to curb Lucy's tongue.<br />
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"Where the hell's the dagger?" she said now.<br />
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-from <i>Beauty Sleep (1977)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-46351009961654480162013-01-01T07:44:00.001-08:002013-01-01T07:44:23.454-08:00...Janet snorted with amusement, then twisted around to glance at the electric clock on her bedside table. It was a present from a grateful author of historical romances, and Janet regarded it ungratefully, remembering how muzzy the woman had been on dates and epochs-- once she'd sent Marie Antoinette to a ball with Charles the Second-- and whenever she was corrected, saying, "But the mood is so much more important, I always think." It was typical of her well-meaning muddleheadedness to have chosen an expensive modern clock of the no-hands variety. At that moment, it was either ten minutes after twelve or two o'clock, and Janet plumped wishfully for the latter because she was paid by the hour for copy-editing.<br />
<br />
She looked at her wrist watch and saw that was no help--4:13-- having stopped at the hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she'd wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.<br />
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She had become so adept at shutting off her awareness of people that now that the odd noises had aroused her, she was as restless as someone who's been awakened suddenly, inexplicably, and can't get back to sleep. After deciding it was only 12:10 she wound her watch and thought crossly, How did it get to be so early? The sun feels more like July than October. The soil around the mums will be baked, and just when the buds are starting. A mirage of cracked, parched earth was so menacingly clear she jumped up from the desk just as another burst of noise overhead gave her an added excuse.<br />
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--from <i>Open the Door (1966)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-12477755480973887052012-12-23T15:35:00.000-08:002012-12-23T15:35:36.626-08:00I was looking around dreamily. "I worked here twenty-five years ago. In the basement."<br />
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"You worked in the basement!" Edward exclaimed. "What did you do-- shovel coal?"<br />
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"I was the receptionist. All I had to do was look cordial."<br />
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He said it was the first time he'd ever heard of a receptionist being kept in the basement, and he even looked more skeptical when I explained it was Anne Morgan's idea. "You mean J.P.Morgan's sister?"<br />
<br />
That was who I meant all right. She was noted for her philanthropies, and as a fighter for women's rights, and I guess she lumped the two together when she founded the New York Working Women's Association and built a combination hotel-clubhouse for members, most of them single women in business. Officially, it was called the W.W.A., but many of the people who worked there referred to it simply as Anne Morgan's Club.<br />
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She was a great believer in keeping fit, which is how I happened to be in the basement, sneezing and smiling. The entire Physical Education Department was down there: swimming pool, gymnasium, and locker rooms with billowing serge gym bloomers and grey tank suits as shapeless as ectoplasm. Anne Morgan used the pool sometimes, but more often she just brought visitors down to show them how we were teeming with healthy physical exercise. She was a tall, wide-striding, briskly good-humored woman in hand-knit suits that must have been blocked on a barber pole. she wore her white hair neatly chopped, and when she spoke, at least to minor employees like myself, it was like a cannon firing a friendly salute, boom, boom, boom. In a basement, a cannon sounds louder and longer.<br />
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-from "Unmixed Company"Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-37593647489815923202012-12-09T14:08:00.000-08:002012-12-09T14:08:18.460-08:00Every Sunday morning, Culbertson McClintock and the strong, agile Johnny would finish up the farm chores early. Then they all piled into the lumber wagon, with a picnic lunch, and went off to spend the day at the little Seceders' church-- a meeting house-- deep in the woods. The Seceders were old style Presbyterians, and their services resembled the early settlers' "meetings." farmers hitched their horses to trees around the grove, and the children played quietly while the grownups gossiped. Boys, their hair slicked down with marrow grease, eyed demure young girls in linsey-woolsey. Sunday School was from ten to eleven; for the next two hours, Elder Slentz hollered and pounded on the pulpit in the tiny church, in a sermon reeking of brimstone for sinners. Johnny, raised in the strict, devout McClintock household, had learned his Catechism, the first four Gospels, and most of the Acts, almost before he could spell. But the long Sunday sessions were hard on even the most docile children, and Johnny, an exuberant normal boy, got a warning pinch from his aunt whenever he fidgeted.<br />
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The picnic bench was a blessed escape, but all too brief. Afterwards, men, women and children went back inside for another hour, or sometimes two, of the Elder's damning the Devil, and offering the Kingdom of Heaven like a bribe for model deportment. Prayers were a droning filibuster to keep Satan at bay. To please his aunt, Johnny, who could carry a tune as well as a tree toad, even sang in the choir.<br />
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--from <i>The Great Oildorado (1959)</i>Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-24207249366515417362011-12-30T11:56:00.000-08:002011-12-30T11:56:44.213-08:00The little fan whirring in the back room of the Thrift Shop was no more adequate for ventilation than a scrawny bird flapping its wings. The only thing it riffled was the sales chart thumbtacked on the wall directly above the fan and kept up to date by the volunteer who had a firmer grasp of arithmetic than any of the other ladies. She had filled in neatly, with black marking pencil, the weekly and monthly figures on the secondhand merchandise sold for charity; the totals for April, may, June and July had shot up so violently it looked as if the ladies had robbed a bank and added their loot to the take.<br />
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--<i>Beauty Sleep</i> (1977)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-75826128974091421272011-01-30T08:20:00.000-08:002011-01-30T08:20:10.130-08:00As an example of Mather's talents, Silas tells the rather ghoulish story of a mother who kept grieving because she hadn't had a picture taken of her teen-age son before he died. Six months after the funeral, she was still brooding about it, and a relative said, "I'll bet Mather could do it."<br />
<br />
The glass-topped coffin was dug up, and Mather, happy over this interesting challenge, ordered it propped up endwise, against a hitching post. Silas, who was there as a helper, ends the tale, "And you know, he no sooner got a good picture than that corpse crumbled into dust. That kind of bothered Mather. He said, 'I don't think I'll take another job like this-- unless I need the money'."<br />
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-- from <i>The Great Oildorado </i> (1959)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-72202216658887549512010-11-07T07:29:00.000-08:002010-11-07T07:29:15.067-08:00When I was a senior in high school in Franklin, Pennsylvania, avant-garde was still only a murky gleam in some foreigner's eye, and Lady Gregory was considered pretty far out as a playwright. What we wanted for our senior class play was a drawing-room comedy, or at least that's what the English teacher who doubled as our drama coach wanted. The fact that none of us on the play-reading committee had ever seen a drawing room, to our knowledge, was no handicap at all. We had the Samuel French catalogue to guide us, and it not only gave clear plot synopses, but even more vital, it told right off how many characters and which sex-- say, 5 m., 9 f. We had more females than males around-- perhaps a chronic imbalance of all amateur theater groups-- so the more f. the better.<br />
<br />
I wasn't in the actual cast-- I had a voice which has since been described as having "the timbre of a cuckoo clock"-- but I took a very active part in the production as left-wing prompter. If it hadn't been for me, the heroine, Olivia Dangerfield, would have wrecked one of the most important lines in the play, when she said to her negro mammy, "Old dear, don't forget to feed my doves." This established her character in a flash, showing as it did that although Olivia might behave like a madcap, underneath she was a romantic, well-born Virginia lady, the sort who kept doves to flutter with. Even her saying "Old dear" proved that her ancestors came straight from England.<br />
<br />
On opening night the girl playing Olivia read the line as, "Mandy, remember to feed my pigeons," which is not the same thing at all, as I was quick to point out in a carrying tone from the wings. Thanks to my helpful prompting, she had to go back and say, "I mean, old dear, forget the pigeons and feed the doves." For some reason, the audience took this for wit, and laughed harder than they did at some of the real bon mots in the dialogue, such as, "It's the motor car that makes country life possible-- and the Ford that makes it probable."<br />
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-- from "A Stage Full of Legs without Bodies"Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-21311467997053171402010-11-04T18:53:00.000-07:002010-11-04T19:00:18.379-07:00She didn't look like an advocate of revolution-- black, red, or even white. She looked more like the kind of woman who would clap for Tinkerbell. She was built like a bean pot, but a soft, melted-down bean pot, with short legs and a flattish lid sprouting gray frizzled hair. She was beaming at Chester so nicely, with such a ladylike air, he decided she was merely barmy. One of those barmy old maids of good family that New Englad overproduced. But the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with any crackpots, however harmless. His new public relations man had warned him on that. He turned away and made a show of listening to Four Elbows' windup: "...six lessons in teen-age POISE-- or conversational RUSSIAN made EASY." She folded her elbows to subside.<br /><br />The fixed-versus-floating-zone belligerents were still muttering when the chairman called eagerly, "Ah, Miss Washburn, there you are, just in time." He didn't add, "to create a diversion," but the thought hung in the air.<br /><br />--from <span style="font-style:italic;">Heat Lightning</span> (1969)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-9188354254552092192010-08-27T12:47:00.000-07:002010-08-27T12:51:23.597-07:00I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what it symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.<br /><br />-- from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-12121640237940406862010-08-21T11:41:00.000-07:002010-08-21T11:48:44.807-07:00But like Brady, Mather was no see-the-birdie, smile-please sort of photographer. He advertised "Ambrotypes, Porcelains, Double Position (superior)," but his manner and methods weren't always guaranteed to flatter the subject. When an early customer brought in her small son with a bow tie stretched from ear to ear, she complained, after seeing the photographs Mather took of the boy, "They're homely."<br /><br />"Well, dammit, ma'am," Mather said. "Look at yourself and your husband. What can you expect of that union?"<br /><br />--from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Great Olidorado<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> (1959)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-72424870837217043232010-08-19T11:27:00.000-07:002010-08-19T11:31:03.261-07:00She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was no help-- 4:13-- having stopped at that hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she had wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.<br /><br />-- from <span style="font-style:italic;">Open the Door</span> (1966)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-67982650507871955672010-07-14T14:32:00.000-07:002010-07-14T14:39:21.356-07:00Another hazard of our mountainside croquet was the two goats. Mother had acquired them soon after we moved in, and had tied them casually to a post in the backyard. Give them enough rope and they'd clear quite a good piece of property, she figured.It's true that by dint of inexhaustible appetites they eliminated the worst grass clumps, which is more than my brother and I did. On the other hand, none of us children ate the clothesline and three suits of my father's underwear, so this makes us all about even. The goats were named Belle and Beauty, perhaps to delude the neighbors about the way they smelled. They had been given to us, along with a little red goat cart, by a family leaving Franklin who had managed to contain their joy as they bid the goats good riddance.<br /><br />Theoretically, one of the goats' chief duties, besides mowing the grass, was to pull Bobby, Sally and me, one at a time, in the goat cart. However, for some curious reason, Belle and Beauty were always confused and thought it was we children who were supposed to pull <span style="font-style:italic;">them</span>. After we'd ridden a few hundred feet, both goats would sit down and wait to be hauled home. It was an awful unsatisfactory arrangement, and nobody cried when Belle and Beauty were given to a farmer who came to sell us eggs each week and admired the red goat cart. After he'd had the goats a week, he stopped bringing us eggs, probably to get even.<br /><br />--from <span style="font-style:italic;">We Shook the Family Tree</span> (1941)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-55945587487242350562010-07-13T16:23:00.000-07:002010-07-13T16:28:40.534-07:00The chairman waved away these loose ends. He wore a red-jeweled ring on his little finger, and his sport jacket was so tight he looked rather like a sausage encased in madras plaid. "Fellow citizens, the PTA has asked me to make a top-priority announcement. Due to the sudden increase of child molesters, mothers are organizing volunteer watches at all school bus stops. This will continue till summer vacation, June twentieth. Volunteers may call Mrs. Hinck."<br /><br />"What if the mothers are molested too?" somebody asked.<br /><br />Mrs. Hinck stood up, or popped up. She looked very flushed and determined. "The mothers will go in pairs and they will be armed-- with paralyzing nerve gas."<br /><br />"But that stuff is illegal."<br /><br />"Not this brand," a man said. "It's on sale in the hardware store-- doesn't have much effect anyway except maybe make you sneeze." Somebody sneezed but changed it hurriedly to a nose-blow.<br /><br />"Thank you, Mrs. Hinck," the chairman said. "I'm sure you'll get more volunteers than you can handle."<br /><br />-from <span style="font-style:italic;">Heat Lightning</span> (1969)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6825635890996712948.post-60139072870175853132010-03-31T17:19:00.000-07:002010-03-31T17:23:34.857-07:00Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, a small, lively man with stick-out ears, cowlicked brown hair, and a shy, enchantingly sweet smile, sat having supper in the shanty-like hotel of a new oil settlement that would one day be named after him. Henry Rouse was thirty-seven years old, a bachelor, with the biggest following of children of any man around. The pockets of his rumpled suit bulged stickily with licorice and peppermints, and small friends surrounded him like the Good Humor Man. They scrambled up for rides on his big black mare, tagged him on foot, and listened saucer-eyed to his stories. With grownups, he was still bothered sometimes that had made him give up a law career, but with children it vanished magically.<br /><br />-from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Great Oildorado</span> (1959)Peter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.com0