Playtime

Nothing thrills me quite the way live theater does. The first play I ever saw was a high school adaptation of the movie David and Lisa. With no standard of comparison, I thought it was great, even though the student actors kept waving to their friends in the audience. Things got better when I saw my first musical in 1972, a national touring company production of Godspell. I was in awe of the cast's ability to memorize all those lines, and I experienced the visceral thrill of real people on a real stage, so much more powerful than anything I'd seen on TV or at the movies.

I've seen A Chorus Line in four states, Wait Until Dark in three. The latter was a rare case of the movie being better than the play, but I'm a pretty indiscriminate theatergoer. Two of the best performances I saw were by Hardy Rawls in Death of a Salesman and Maria Fazio in The Hot L Baltimore, and they were both non-professionals(!) -- drama majors at Florida Atlantic University. Moving to New York in the 1970s meant real Broadway shows and lots of autographs, and I mean back when shows were still affordable. I saw more than I can count today – A Chorus Line at the Shubert, its original home, Evita (Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin), Sweeney Todd (Angela Lansbury), Whose Life is It, Anyway? (Mary Tyler Moore, Tom Conti – two separate productions), Fifth of July (Judd Hirsch), The Elephant Man (Bruce Davison), The King and I (Yul Brynner!), Mummenschanz (an amazing mime troupe), Da (Barnard Hughes), and on and on.

The worst production I ever saw was A Chorus Line at a dinner theater in Wichita, Kansas, where the stage-long set of dance mirrors was made of Mylar. The funniest play I saw was The Producers, in Seattle. I had low expectations because the movie was a classic, but that night I almost wet myself laughing. The only play I ever shed a tear over, actually more than one, was also in Seattle -- Hair.

For this list, I've focused only on favorite plays I've read, not seen (except for the ones I'll point out). Reading plays is great fun for me because I like dialogue anyway, and I've noticed plays seem to have a lot of it. Remember, I'm rating these strictly by how much I enjoyed reading them. I mean, really, if this were an objective list, would Hamlet really come in at #14?

15.  Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw): I'd never read Shaw before and couldn't get over how funny it was. This was the most flesh-and-blood Joan I'd ever met.

14.  Hamlet (that guy): My favorite of all his plays, the one I keep going back to and seeing new things. The most fascinating, complex character in all theater. In his book The Heart of Hamlet, critic Bernard Grebanier maintains that the melancholy Dane wasn't at all conflicted and knew exactly what he was going to do from the start. Who knew?

13.  The Piano Lesson (August Wilson): This is the fourth entry in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of ten plays set during a different decade of the twentieth century and focusing on the lives of black Americans. This is my favorite play in the cycle, dealing with the conflict between a brother and sister over the family piano, an heirloom they both share. This play won several major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

12.  Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller): This is so powerful and never seems to age. I only saw it performed once live, and I sure wish I could have seen Brian Dennehy when he played Willy Loman – especially when he broke character one night to chew out an audience member for talking on a cell phone (or maybe she came in late and was making too much noise in one of the front rows, I can't remember now). My question is, how do you get back into character after that?

11.  The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams): This and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were the first two plays I ever read. I read it and knew that if I ever became an actor, I'd want to play Tom Wingfield, Amanda's son and Laura's younger brother. The character really spoke to me. I never became an actor, but I still reread the play and dream. It's my favorite Williams, up there with Streetcar, only heartbreaking and more poignant.

10.  Buried Child (Sam Shepard): In my next life, I want to be a good-looking movie star and important American playwright like Shepard. His plays are powerful and yet contain much humor, and this is the one that really connected with me and freaked me out, moreso than True West, which I believe is his most celebrated.

9.  The Nerd (Larry Shue): This is just the funniest play I've ever read. I mean I laughed out loud so much that I became concerned for my breathing. One day I hope to see this one on the stage.

8.  Biloxi Blues (Neil Simon): The Odd Couple is, I'm guessing, everyone's favorite Simon play. It was mine, too. In fact, as a kid I once stole two library books, and Odd Couple was one of them. (Yes, I confess! I wanted to learn how to write comedy, but I was deranged from drinking too much Yoo-Hoo at bedtime!) But I always go back to Biloxi Blues, maybe because I enjoy military humor in small doses. Sgt. Merwin J. Toomey is a zany character, a true original, and Christopher Walken did him justice in the film version. Favorite moment: when Wykowski reads Jerome's diary aloud for the other guys in the barracks to hear.

7.  The Norman Conquests (Alan Ayckbourn): Six characters, one weekend, different rooms in one house – this trilogy of plays from the early 1970s is both hilarious and touching, but for me mostly hilarious. I saw it on public television later that decade. Tom Conti as frisky Norman was perfect, as if the role had been written for him. The plays read as well as they play.

6.  The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Edward Albee): Two words: Albee. Bestiality. But not in a lurid or exploitative way. A man has fallen in love with a goat, and his wife and son try to wrap their heads around the idea. I hadn't read plays for a while, and this one brought me back. It's funny, but, in the final scene, truly shocking. Just think of Gene Wilder and the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) – only elevate it to the realm of art as you might expect Albee to do.

5.  Trifles (Susan Glaspell): This is the only one-act play on the list, but it's as fascinating and powerful as any of the others. First performed in 1916, it's about the murder of a farmer and how the evidence at the crime scene points to his wife as the suspect. But what makes the play intriguing and so ahead of its time isn't the crime itself, which has happened prior to the start of the story. In fact, neither the farmer (in flashback) nor his wife is ever seen. It's how two female neighbors in the farmer's kitchen, and not the male lawmen elsewhere in the house combing for clues, figure out what happened simply by noticing things the men never would have (“trifles,” as one man puts it). They approach the situation through the mindset of the wife herself – how would she have acted, what would she have thought? This play has long been a favorite of feminist readers, and it's easy to see why. Everyone would enjoy it

 

4.  Sleuth (Anthony Shaffer): An insanely clever mystery that takes the whole convention of detective thrillers (think Agatha Christie) and turns it upside down. I must have read this one half a dozen times in a row. A British, middle-aged writer of detective fiction invites a young Italian hairdresser over for drinks. The hairdresser, we learn, is having an affair with the writer's wife. The writer doesn't want to kill him; instead, he's devised a way to get his wife out of his hair for good. Whatever your expectations, shelve them, because you won't know where this is going. As perfect as the ending is, it's the midpoint twist that will send you reeling. (Skip the movie – the first one, as I haven't seen the second – not only because it's inferior to the play, but because there's one scene that can only really work on the stage and is, I believe, unfilmable. I can't be the only one to have noticed this. I wish you knew both the play and the film so I could tell you and see if you agree.)

3.  Our Town (Thornton Wilder): I probably don't need to add anything to what you already know. Just that it's as good to read as it is to watch; it's minimalist theater in its purest form. I'm sure that's why high school drama departments like it so much. That must be the reason, because, with no disrespect intended, I can't imagine young people being able to grasp the enormity of what's being said here. It couldn't have been written without the wisdom and perspective of someone considerably older, and I know that when I was 16 I never could have appreciated what Wilder was saying.

2.  The Collection (Harold Pinter): Pinter's two most celebrated plays, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party, elude me, frankly. I'm much more in tune with this one, with its cryptic-but-only-for-a-while plot, devastating dialogue, and the silences Pinter is so famous for. It's just four characters and two sets, and the low-level suspense that occurs is totally transfixing. Plus, there's a phone booth, and I like phone booths.

1.  Antigone (Sophocles): I'm convinced this is the most important play ever written, and it's one that should be read not just by humans in general, but particularly by anyone in power and especially anyone who seeks to subvert that power in the name of justice. The Thebes' civil war has ended, and two brothers who fought on opposite sides are dead. Creon, Thebes' new ruler, will make a hero of Eteocles, who fought for the state, while the other, the rebel Polyneices, will remain on the battlefield, unburied, as a mark of shame. Antigone and Ismene are their sisters. Antigone plans to bury Polyneices' body, defying Creon's order, even though Ismene tries to talk her out of it. Antigone is the greatest hero in the theater, and Antigone is the one play I hope you read if you haven't already. (I like the Richard Emil Braun translation myself.

OK, and now a big shout-out to Anton Chekhov, who didn't make the list only because I was unable to decide among his four major plays and I couldn't bring myself to declare a four-way tie. For years I couldn't crack Chekhov, because he himself said they were comedies, and I could never see any humor in them (or even a plot). I still wouldn't exactly call them chucklefests, but I did come to love them, and not through a play but rather a film – Louis Malle's Vanya on 42^nd Street. Explaining what makes this film so original and memorable would take more space than I want to give it (in fairness to the 15 plays already noted), but let's just say it convinced this jaded viewer that Chekhov is indeed one of the great playwrights. The film is a contemporary interpretation of Uncle Vanya, and I was lured in my the promise of Julianne Moore, an actress I kinda sorta like a little. I like his short stories even more than the plays – way more, actually. These are stories Jesus would have written if all those crowds had just given him some quiet time. Chekhov reminds me of Christ because of his awesome compassion and empathy for the human condition. I guess he's my favorite writer, period.

Well, shoot. I've written too much after I said I wouldn't. Just as well I don't write short stories.

People I Want to Be When I Grow Up

I thought of calling this post “Heroes.” But then I thought, “Not everyone here is exactly a hero.” Then I thought about “My Role Models.” But I don't actually model myself after anyone. My third choice was “People I Admire.” But “admiration” seems too weak a word. So finally I came up with the title you see – for want of a better one.

Note: The names are listed chronologically in the order in which that person affected me in my lifetime.

Note: Since I'm certain any Christian would put Jesus as #1, this believer will just leave him out and consider it a given.

Note: You won't see any sports figures here. I know that some have been heroic on as well as off the field, but they just haven't made that kind of an impact on me. If I had to choose one right now, maybe Floyd Patterson, who brought grace and humility to boxing. I'd like to have known him.

BIG HONKIN' NOTE: I ascribe to no political affiliation, so I'm not endorsing the politics of any politicians you see listed here.   You'll find that my admiration in each case has nothing to do with their platform or their party.  Enjoy!

Steve McQueen

I call him my generation's Bogart. Talk about cool. I was 10 when I saw him trying to outrace the Germans on a motorcycle in The Great Escape. My friends and I all thought that was the coolest thing we'd ever seen. I was 15 when he traded the bike for a souped-up Mustang in Bullitt and became the King of Cool. I'm pretty certain Bullitt was the only film he ever swore in (just a single but devastating, well-timed word to Robert Vaughn in the airport). See it again and notice how he uses silence and underplaying to such great effect.

Clifford Parks

My junior high school science teacher remains the one person I've tried to emulate over the years. He didn't brook any disrespect, but he was the funniest and most compassionate teacher I ever had. I once saw him outside a department store wearing a priest's garb. I was so surprised that I walked up to him and called him by name just to see if he was really Mr. Parks. Turned out he had a twin brother! Yet I wasn't surprised that it might have been him. Twenty years later, I'd been thinking about those days and decided to write him a letter. Two weeks after that, my wife told me I had a phone call. He'd gotten my letter in the midst of a blue funk and my words lifted him out of it. We became correspondents for several years. Then one day, I got a letter from him that was unusually affectionate, addressing me as if I were one of his own sons, and signing off with “Love.” There was a postscript at the bottom from his wife: Cliff was lapsing into dementia and was no longer certain who people were anymore. I never heard from him again.

Bobby Kennedy

The first and only politician I ever campaigned for (basically stuffing envelopes). I was 15 and liked him because he was funny and idealistic, just like I thought I was. I honestly didn't know much about politics or what a hardass attorney general he'd been, though I trusted him to get us out of Vietnam. When he was assassinated, that ended my involvement with politics and my political affiliations of any kind. (Please keep that in mind when reading about other political figures below.)

Morton Clark

He was the opposite of what I thought a boot camp company commander should be like. Soft-spoken and respectful (of us!), he made us all feel like he and I were all involved in a program he was still learning about himself. Nothing could have made us more committed to excellence than feeling valued in the first place, while other CC's were much more conventional – I'll never forget hearing one of them in the galley say to a recruit, “Move it, worm.” It felt like pure bully-hatred, not discipline. Clark taught me a lesson I've carried throughout my life: At a gangly 120 pounds, I was the last guy to cross the finish line on the obstacle course. The next time we went out there, he put me in front of the pack. I was certain I'd get trampled, but I wound up still ahead of everyone at the finish line. I learned I could do anything if I just confronted my fears. (It was just like him that I should be allowed to sit out the obstacle course under a tree one week because I had a cold.) Our company ended up with far and away the most flags in the whole platoon, which meant we were the most accomplished – and also the most proud.

John McCain

All that matters to me is that he served us proudly as a P.O.W. in Nam, so much so that he turned down the chance to go free because he refused to leave the others behind. P.O.W. bracelets were popular at the time, and mine said “John McCain,” although the bracelets were random and I had no idea who he was.

William Packard

Packard taught a poetry class at what was then called the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. I learned a lot from him not just from his teaching, but from his own poems – he showed me that a poem could be expansive and almost prosaic, yet still beautiful and profound, and he gave me the courage to try that myself. (The only poem of mine that really reflected his influence went on to win my first poetry prize later in grad school.) He was the founder and editor of the New York Quarterly, an eclectic poetry magazine that featured a craft interview with a major poet in each issue. I admired those interviews because the subject was always the work itself, no personal fluff. I served on the editorial staff for about two years; we once rejected some poems by Charles Bukowski but printed his cover letter because it was just so Bukowski. One night when one of the other staffers and I had been slogging through entries for a few hours, Packard dropped in, the ubiquitous cigarette hanging from his mouth, and asked me, “How's it going?” I told him what I thought of that day's intake so far, and he replied, “No, I meant how's it going – with you. How are you doing?” If you're able to find his “Ty Cobb Poem” anywhere online, that's the work of his I admire most.

William Brady

I have all kinds of admiration for people who survive great odds (particularly assassination attempts) and then go on to become figureheads of reform. Doesn't matter the issue. (See farther down for more).

Rudy Giuliani

He wasn't even on my radar, really, until the twin towers came down and he became SuperMayor, not only the reassuring figure New York needed at that dark hour, but also the take-charge leader who remained downtown in the thick of the immediate aftermath. I can't even begin to imagine attending all the funerals he went to, so many of them people he knew. I hoped every U.S. mayor was taking notes.

Steve Buscemi

I've always liked Buscemi onscreen. But on 911, when all available help was needed, Buscemi, a former New York City fireman, returned to his old station and suited up.

Hilary Clinton

I've liked her and I've hated her. But still, I have to hand it to any First Lady who can survive her husband's very public sex scandal, then go on to win a Senate seat, run for President, and become Secretary of State. How she fared in those positions isn't at issue here. Like I said, like and hate. The fact is, she took off her dainty First Lady gloves and made history.

Gabby Giffords

See William Brady. She's handled herself with strength and grace, and I include her husband Mark in this assessment. A warrior and half of a model marriage.

Malala Yousafzai

See Brady and Giffords. Malala has my highest admiration by far. Shot in the face by the Taliban for wanting other girls in her country to get an education, surviving, and then becoming an outspoken champion for oppressed girls everywhere, she is simply awe-inspiring (not to mention winning the Nobel Peace prize).

Zach Roderick

Zach is a 23-year-old Maine resident and friend of the family who was riding in a car that struck a tree last November. He was paralyzed from the waist down and is dealing with some pretty big obstacles, but it's Zach's heart that gets me. He was on life support for a week, and ever since then he's worn a smile, attacking his PT with a fierce determination and lifting the spirits of everyone who comes in contact with him. He's not the reason I began this post, but he's as worthy as anyone here. So many individuals and organizations are reaching out to help with his rehabilitation – here's my plug for Zach's contribution site: www.gofundme.com/hd557s.

Movies from Afar

I originally wrote a long intro about how foreign films are better than American films and why and blah blah blah. But it comes down to this: Get over the subtitle thing and enjoy some great flicks.

Note: These are strictly my favorites and in the order I like them; I realize some great ones are missing. Also, I haven't chosen more than one by any single director. Otherwise, I'd have been here all day. (I know I can sound definitive with some of my comments, as if these weren't simply my opinions, but trust me, they are only that. I just get carried away.)

15.  Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954, Japan): The greatest Eastern action movie is also the greatest Western ever filmed. It's funny and thrilling at the same time, and the characters take on a grandeur that's almost Shakespearean. Toshiro Mifune is a force of nature.

14.  M (Lang, 1931, Germany): Peter Lorre is a child murderer, and not only are the police after him, but underworld gangs who want the cops off their backs. For me, this is easily Lorre's greatest performance. His humanity makes him both more pathetic and more frightening. Too bad he wasn't given material as rich here in the States. Favorite moment: a child's balloon caught in some telephone wires.

13.  Face to Face (Bergman, 1976, Sweden): Choosing just one Bergman film is tough, and so many of them are more highly regarded than this one. But this story about a psychiatrist's own struggle with mental illness just chewed me up and spit me out. Liv Ullmann is breathtaking, giving what I consider best performance. Her breakdown is so real, you want to stop the projector and comfort her. (This is the movie Woody Allen and Diane Keaton were going to see in Annie Hall until he found out it had already started.)

12.  Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966, France): A film about the life of a donkey in the French countryside. Bresson imbues Balthazar with a kind of humanity that's missing in some of his human characters, and that's by choice. Critics have compared the donkey to Christ, and I think I see what they're getting at. Favorite scene: the last one, as moving as can be.

11.  Diabolique (Clouzot, 1955, France): The movie that did for bathtubs what Psycho did for showers. I spent years hearing how unnerving this one was before I finally saw it, and I was afraid my expectations might have been too high. Fat chance. This is edge-of-the-seat stuff all the way, and the ending is as wild as anything Hitchcock ever did.

10.  Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969, France/Algeria): I think this was the first foreign film I saw as a teen. I had no idea a movie could be so thrilling (only North by Northwest excited me as much up to that point). It's the true story of an assassination and coverup in Greece, and it perfectly mirrored the political unrest that was going on in this country at the time. But it's not dated at all. Favorite scene: the assassination itself and subsequent fight in the back of a moving truck bed.

9.  Forbidden Games (Clement, 1952, France): A little girl (Brigitte Fossey) is orphaned during the Battle of France and befriended by a farm boy and his family. The two children cope with the trauma of war all around them by burying dead animals they find and marking the graves with little crosses. Only Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata, 1988, Japan), about a young brother and sister trying to survive amid the ravages of war, comes close as a powerful anti-war statement. (Fireflies, though animated, is devastating; don't see it if you're planning to party afterwards.) In the final scene, Fossey will rip your heart out. Favorite scene: apart from that ending, the moment the girl realizes her dog has died in the battle and what happens next.

8.  The Dreamlife of Angels (Zonka, 1998, France): Two disparate young working-class women become roommates in a drama that took me by surprise -- I didn't expect it to have nearly the impact it did when it ended. Eloide Bouchez and Natacha Regnier shared the best actress award at that year's Cannes Film Festival. Favorite scene: a gut-wrencher – Isa writing a goodbye note to Marie and what happens next.

7.  The Bicycle Thief (De Sica, 1948, Italy): I've sometimes thought of this as the greatest film ever made. The story is simple: a husband and father needs a bicycle in order to get a job to support his family. When his bicycle is stolen, he sets out with his young son to find it. Getting the bicycle back means the difference between sustenance and poverty. The Italian neo-realist look, and the levels of humanity and universality in every scene, make it beyond powerful. It's amazing to know that the father and son (the son looks a lot like a young Jay Leno) were both non-actors. Favorite scene: the close-up of the boy's face as his eyes follow his father passing by on another bicycle.

6.  Children of Paradise (Carne, 1945, France): No, wait, this is the greatest film ever made. It's a panoramic spectacle of street life and theater folk set in Paris during the early 1800s. What's impressive and almost hard to believe is that this three-hour movie was made clandestinely during the German occupation of France during WWII! Jean-Louis Barrault is heartbreaking as the lovestruck mime Baptiste. Favorite scene among many: Baptiste's first appearance, where he uses mime to reconstruct for the police a purse-snatching he witnessed.

5.  La Strada (Fellini, 1954, Italy): No, no, this is the absolute greatest film ever made (I think. . . .)! Like Bergman, Fellini is hard to narrow down to just one film, but this has always been my personal favorite. Giuletta Masina (Fellini's wife) is the homeless waif who takes to the road (“la strada”) with Anthony Quinn, a brutish strongman named Zampano. They give street performances in villages to earn money (most of the small crowds are made up of citizens actually seeing the act for the first time), Zampano breaking chains with his bare chest and Gelsomina banging a drum or tooting a trumpet. Zampano treats Gelsomina like dirt, but she won't leave him. She meets The Fool (Richard Basehart), who, stuck by her childlike countenance (he likens her face to an artichoke), takes a liking to her and explains why her life has meaning, and she takes this to heart. But The Fool is a trickster who needles Zampano every chance he gets, with tragic results. The music she plays on her trumpet and the ending are both famous. Favorite scene: gosh, where to begin? Maybe the sight of Gelsomina sitting on a curb at night, forlorn, as a white horse slowly passes by without a rider.

4.  A Separation (Farhadi, 2011, Iran): A middle-class Iranian couple living in Tehran decide to separate, but it's not that easy. I came to this expecting the plot to focus on the usual complications of impending divorce between a husband and wife and their young daughter. But the plot is more than that, and I was completely enthralled. Like De Sica, Farhadi does an amazing job of creating empathy for every character. I did have one problem, though – Leila Hatami, as the wife, is so strikingly attractive in such an intelligent and understated way that I had trouble focusing on the subtitles. It's the first Iranian film to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

3.  Cousin Cousine (Tacchella, 1975, France): This might be the only comedy about adultery that I've ever stayed in my seat for. It's not my favorite subject, nor one that I think can or should be played for laughs. But Tacchella has done the seemingly impossible – made a film so sweet and carefree with such funny and personable leads that it's irresistible. The affair itself is so understandable that it's hard not to root for the couple. You see, their spouses are having an affair with each other, and it's a dirty secret. The spurned pair, cousins by marriage, find consolation in the friendship that develops between them, and rumors soon begin to fly within the large extended family. Since they're attracted to each other anyway, they decide to give the rumormongers something to really talk about, only they don't keep it hidden in the shadows. Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux are completely captivating as the friends who become lovers. Favorite scene: the final image, hilarious and perfectly loopy, as befits the movie as a whole.

2.  The Story of Adele H. (Truffaut, 1975, France): Wow, the eighth French film on this list; you'd think I was a Francophile or something. This was a hard one for me because Jules and Jim is a Truffaut classic that I'm very fond of as well. But this is my pick. The gorgeous and obscenely talented Isabelle Adjani (just 20 at the time) plays Adele, daughter of the celebrated French writer Victor Hugo. When she is jilted by Lt. Pinson (Bruce Robinson), a British officer who moves on to Nova Scotia with his regiment, she follows him, unable to believe that he doesn't want her. (He doesn't.) We watch as her obsession (was it ever love?) slowly morphs into madness. “Haunting” isn't even the word for this film or for Adjani's performance. Favorite scene: When a genuinely concerned Pinson finally sees her on the street, she walks past him, oblivious to everything around her.

1.  La Promesse (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 1996, France-Belgium): The film that brought the Dardenne brothers, documentarians up until then, worldwide acclaim. It's the story of a teen (Jeremie Renier) whose father (Olivier Gourmet) and he make a living by exploiting the undocumented workers the father brings into the country and puts to work illegally. When tragedy befalls one of the workers, the boy is faced with a moral dilemma that ultimately pits him against his father and leads to a powerful epiphany of grace. The use of handheld cameras and lack of a musical score give the film a documentary feel that makes it seem all the more immediate and real. My friend Dave and I saw La Promesse in a little theater in the University District of Seattle when it first came out. When the lights came up, we were speechless, and we didn't say a word for two blocks.

Places I've Lived and Why I Left

This isn't an entirely negative post, but the title is catchier than “Good and Bad Things About Places I've Lived.” Why would anyone but me be interested in such a list, I asked myself. Well, maybe because you've lived there, too. Maybe you'd thank me for taking you back down memory lane (or else curse me for dragging you kicking and screaming to places you'd just as soon forget). Some of these recollections have little to do with the places themselves, but maybe my memories will strike something personal in your own life. (I've tried to limit each location to one good thing and one bad, not always successfully.) Anyway, the past is a nice place to visit, but only that. For me, part of growing up meant learning to accept the fact that nothing lasts and everything changes. As the title of Simone Signoret's autobiography says, “Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.”

North Bergen, New Jersey (1953-1958)

Good: My family – mother, father, me, and, for the last eight months, my new baby sister – lived upstairs in a modest, three-family, red brick house. My parents were close friends with the landlords, and my first friend in the world was their daughter Gail, who is still my friend today. Just inside the front door was a small vestibule, very small. It was ringed with stained glass on the tops of the walls and in the front door. I used to sit on the tile floor and feel the sun come through in the morning and wash all those colors over me. The neighbors got used to stepping over me. That little space became primal, a touchstone without which I would be adrift in the world. But I'll have to get used to that, as not only am I nearly 3,000 miles away, but the building was sold last year.

Bad: The kindergarten teacher who made me stand behind a piano and recite the Pledge of Allegiance because, as I'd heard my father say, I asked her if I could “take a leak.” I never made the connection.

Miami/Miami Beach, Florida (1958-1971, 1975-1977)

Good: My second-grade teacher took the class on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. When we got back to the classroom, everyone had to write a short essay about the experience. Instead of a grade, she gave me a nickel. My first paying job as a writer!

Bad: Humidity. Palmetto bugs – picture oversized cockroaches that can fly – yikes!! I still try not to.

Pensacola, Florida (1971-1975)

Good: (1) The extraordinary white sands along Pensacola Beach. (2) The downstairs apartment I shared offbase with two other Navy pals. It was on a quiet street in an almost idyllic neighborhood, just one other apartment upstairs. Two bedrooms, furnished, $125/mo. I drove there more than a decade later to revisit the place, and the new downstairs tenant was surly and suspicious until I convinced him I really had lived there. I understood his hostility years later, when I could do research on the Internet – at some point between '74 and '85, it had been a crack house.

Bad: The racism of a small city in the Deep South (at the time, anyway). We were generally immune to it on our naval air station. But one Saturday night our black race relations counselor went to a bar on the outskirts of the city with a white enlisted woman and one other couple, both white. They hadn't been sitting at their table for very long when this white redneck at the bar walked up to him and said, “You got more nerve than Jesse James.” In the chaos that followed, the other guy and his date managed to get to their car with the other woman and take off, which I understood, as they were all in real danger. My black friend was beaten and badly outnumbered but somehow managed to get away, with a bunch of goons behind him. He ran for miles until he reached the base in the dead of night. He resigned from his race relations position the next day, and the bar was immediately put off limits to all personnel.

New Jersey/New York City (1977-1981)

Good: (1) Discovering that the apartment building with the vestibule has a vacancy, and the landlords are the same folks my family had known before. Reading poems aloud in Greenwich Village hangouts and church basements around the city, trying to get my name known.

Bad: It was the late '70s. One word: disco.

Wichita, Kansas (1981-1992)

Good: (1) One of my college students, Gino Salerno, used his chainsaw to make beautiful sculptures out of dead tree trunks. A popular attraction throughout the city's parks, until after a few years when vandals started to notice them. (2) Knowing I could drive 15 minutes out of the city in any direction and be in the middle of practically nowhere.

Bad: Tornadoes, of course. You never forget the way the clouds turn a kind of turquoise and start roiling around overhead. The Andover Tornado killed 23 residents of a trailer park that basically wasn't there anymore. I joined Mennonite Disaster Relief in trying to salvage whatever we could for the survivors. Oh, and don't underestimate the hail. One summer, a tornado heading straight for Wichita from the nearby city of Hutchinson turned into a hailstorm en route and cost the city three-quarters of a billion dollars. Sounds incredible, but that was the stat I heard. For the rest of the summer, you could find residents on any given block working on their roofs. Auto glass repair businesses were booked up for months.

 

 

Seattle, Washington (Eastside) (1992-2006)

Good: (1) The Olympics to the west, the Cascade Range to the east, Mount Rainier looming just to the south (on a clear day we'd say “the mountain is out”) – like living in an IMAX nature documentary. (2) Safeco Field, beautiful home of the Mariners! (I was there during the Ken Griffey Jr. and the Ichiro years. Around that time, Alex Rodriguez left Seattle for Texas and a bigger paycheck. When he returned to Seattle for the first time and stepped up to home plate, people threw Monopoly money from the stands.)

Bad: Traffic and the occasional earthquake.

New Gloucester, Maine (2006-2011)

Good: Remote rural community.

Bad: Remote rural community.

Boise, Idaho (2011-present)

Good: (1) Unbelievably friendly people here. Smile at strangers and they might tell you the story of their lives. (2) Skiing, hunting, fishing, camping – it's hard to find friends in town between May and October.

Bad: No hurricanes or tornadoes, but every now and then a stray mountain lion will mosey into town from the foothills.

CDs from the Vault

I don't have anywhere near the number of CDs I used to – too many moves, too much purging along the way – but I value the survivors and play them regularly. It's been the most difficult list for me to rank – I change my mind about these every minute or so.

20.  Miranda Lambert, Revolution: I used to like country music more than I do, mainly because so much of it has strayed so far from its roots and become diluted by pop. (My admiration for country reached its peak in the 1980s, when I became so addicted I had to enter a two-step program.) But I like Lambert because she's the real deal, and there isn't a cut on here I don't enjoy. Favorite cuts: “Only Prettier,” “The House That Built Me.”

19.  John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: The only love letter to God by a jazz master that I'm aware of.

18.  The Very Best of Nanci Griffith: I was smitten the first time I heard her voice on a promo for Austin City Limits years ago. To call her a folk singer is too limiting, but it's the best I can do. Favorite cuts: “Once in a Very Blue Moon,” “Gulf Coast Highway.”

17.  American Graffiti soundtrack: I once had scads of movie soundtracks, and I regret each and every loss. My favorites were the scores for Jules and Jim and especially Interlude, both by Georges Delerue. But of the remaining few, American Graffiti is an easy choice. I think it's the best rock and roll compilation, not just for a movie, but period. I liked the movie enough that reliving it through its songs is always a pleasure. Heck, I don't even mind Wolfman Jack's occasional intros. Favorite cut: The Beach Boys, “All Summer Long.”

16. Bach, Cello Suites: One of the few composers I can listen to while writing at the same time.

15.  Loudon Wainwright III, So Damn Happy: As much as I like John Prine, Wainwright is hands-down my favorite witty folksinger. Not only witty, but often introspective and profound. Seeing him perform in Seattle was sheer delight. This is a live CD that really captures his personality and also some of his best work. Favorite cuts: “The Picture,” “4x10,” “Tonya's Twirls” (his ode to Tonya Harding that starts out funny and then turns into something else).

14.  Hole, Live Through This: Released not long after Kurt Cobain's death, this is rock at its most lacerating. With this CD, Courtney Love surprised and impressed me with her ferocious lyrics and a voice to match. Favorite cut: “Doll Parts.”

13.  The Best of Simon and Garfunkel: The soundtrack of my youth (I'm sure I can't be the only one). Favorite cut: “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.”

12.  The Best of Ken Burns Jazz: I always want to put a possessive apostrophe after “Burns” when I see that, but whatever. This is an abbreviated selection of songs from his popular documentary and takes us on a journey from Louis Armstrong all the way up to Miles Davis. Favorite cuts: everything.

11.  Emmylou Harris, Luxury Liner: I only recently started collecting her earlier recordings after realizing how much I liked her and yet didn't have a single CD. It's all good, but this one edges out the others for two cuts I was already familiar with: “Pancho and Lefty” and “You Never Can Tell” (the Chuck Berry song that Uma Thurman and John Travolta twisted to in Pulp Fiction).

10.  Caedmon's Call, Share the Well: I like Amy Grant, I like Steven Curtis Chapman, and I like Jars of Clay, but this was my absolute favorite Christian CD from the first moment I heard it. You'd have to listen to really understand why; I can't explain it.

9.  Frank Sinatra, No One Cares: No one did heartbreak like Sinatra, not even Hank Williams. He's been credited with making the first “concept” albums (way before Sgt. Pepper), and this compilation of songs about lovelorn loneliness is great for wallowing. Stephen Bishop nailed it when he wrote, “Puts on Sinatra and starts to cry.” Favorite cut: “Why Try to Change Me Now.” (Funny that I mentioned Williams, as “Why Don't You Love Me” is thematically the country version of that one.)

8.  Three-way tie (sorry): Dave Brubeck, Take Five, Art Tatum, Live 1955-1956, Erroll Garner, The Original Misty: There's no end to my admiration of jazz pianists. I don't know how they do what they do, but I don't need to. I saw Maynard Ferguson live in Seattle once, and his pianist, whose name I no longer remember, just blew me away. All these performers do.

7.  Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon: In a just world, Mitchell would be as venerated as Dylan. (If you ask her, she'll probably tell you herself.) No one writes a song like she does, and her voice (which took me some getting used to when I was younger because the notes seemed to have a mind of their own) is beautiful. Favorite Cuts: “Willie,” “Rainy Day House,” “The Circle Game.”

6.  Stevie Wonder, Original Musiquarium I: There's just one word I can think of that perfectly sums up Wonder's unique gift: joy. You'd have to go back to the early Beatles to come close, but when I listen to “Sir Duke” or “Living in the City,” I just feel all kinds of happy. Where would we be without him?

5.  Godspell, original stage recording: The first stage musical I ever saw (1972), the only CD I play every Thanksgiving for some unknown reason (well, along with Alice's Restaurant), and lately the one CD I've been playing most often. I'd add this to the “joy” category along with Stevie Wonder and early Beatles.

4.  Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones: This wasn't a commercially successful venture for Simon, and although he came back strong with Graceland a few years later, I believe Hearts and Bones has some of his very best songwriting. I mean, just listen to the opening of “Song About the Moon”: “If you want to write a song about the moon/Walk along the craters of the afternoon.” Then the beginning of the second verse: “If you want to write a song about the heart/Think about the moon before you start.” That's not even the best song here. Favorite cuts: that one, “Hearts and Bones,” “Rene and Georgette Magritte With The Dog After the War.”

3.  Peppino D'Agostino, Venus Over Venice: I first came across his work in Barnes and Noble when I was sampling CDs in their headphones, and I chose Venus to listen to because I saw “Walk Away, Renee” listed there. One minute in and I was hooked. He's my favorite acoustical guitarist, and if my copy were vinyl, I'd have worn it out by now. Favorite cuts: “Renee” and “Ancora Un Istante.”

2.  Diana Krall, Live in Paris: My current favorite jazz pianist/singer. Listening to her is, as Mike Myers' Linda Richman used to say, “like buttah.” Too bad about her looks, though. . . . (Avoid her latest CD, Wallflower, I'm sorry to say. I'm not a purist by any means, but this collection of reworked pop favorites really disappointed me. Every song sounds the same, and her heart doesn't seem to be in any of them. Stick to her jazz recordings.)

1.  Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings: Made newly popular at Princess Grace's funeral and in the movie Platoon. I love it for its beautiful, elegiac tone. But something sets this CD apart from anything else I've ever owned: It's eight different versions of the Adagio by different artists – for instance, James Galway on flute with Hiro Fujikake on synthesizers, The Choir of Trinity College, Richard Stolzman on clarinet, and, most powerful, David Pizzaro on organ. All Adagio, all the time. It's one classical piece I could listen to over and over, and with this CD, I can.

There are so many CDs I wish I still had just so I could mention them here – Springsteen's Nebraska and Sam Kinison's Have You Seen Me Lately? keep nagging at me (I really do need to replace those). But here are three artists you might not be familiar with but might want to be (yes, I'm ranking these, too – I'm just a ranking fool):

3.  Doug and the Slugs: An 80s pop band with style and personality. “Real Enough” is my favorite song, though I forget which CD it's from. You should be able to hear it on YouTube (along with most of everything else I singled out).

2.  Baillee and the Boys: Country band from the same decade. You'd probably recognize “Long Shot” and “Oh, Heart” if you heard them. So talented, but I guess it takes luck, too – they really should have made it to the big time.

1.  Bonnie Koloc:  Well, I just get tingly when I think about her voice. She must have a couple dozen octaves in there. I first saw her in 1974 at what was then called Gusman Hall in downtown Miami. She was the warm-up act for comedian David Steinberg, and she so completely captivated us with her vocals and her infectious charm that when Steinberg came on, there was a palpable restlessness in the crowd – we wanted more Bonnie. I saw her again approximately six years later at Michael's Pub in New York. Her long hair was shorter, and she looked more homemaker than hippie, but there was no denying that voice. She's a mainstay of the Chicago music scene these days, and I'd almost travel out there to see her again. Favorite cuts from various albums: “Roll Me On the Water,” “Up Is a Nice Place to Be,” “Children's Blues,” and on and on and on.

My Desert Island (TV Version)

One month ago I turned off my television and, except for PBS and Turner Classic Movies (a guy's gotta live), haven't turned it on since. Basically, I just couldn't take one more ISIS video. Same with my computer. Email, Facebook, Twitter, my public library – all of them nice and innocuous. But I have to admit, like an absent lover, my Samsung keeps whispering sweet nothings from afar. So I've finally decided, not to capitulate, but merely to dwell on old times for a few minutes.

Here's a rundown of my top ten TV programs ever, not necessarily the great and hallowed, but some of the ones I would never tire of watching. Of course, this list is strictly subjective, likely to change from minute to minute, and based on affection, not Emmys (necessarily). Note: I'm omitting any programming from pay cable stations such as HBO. Do I have a valid aesthetic reason for this? Yes – I'm cheap.

My Top Ten TV Shows

10.  Austin City Limits: I've discovered so many great acts here that I might never have heard of otherwise. Nanci Griffith and Australian singer Kasey Chambers are just two of the performers who come to mind. Not household names, but that was the point. Gosh, there were just so many for so many seasons. The show isn't what it used to be – the last few times I've checked, the acts were pretty top-drawer, nothing intimate or revelatory anymore. The audiences were larger and a bit louder, at least the ones I saw. Hey, it might return to its roots yet. I just need to tune in someday when ISIS is defeated and I'm watching TV again.

9.  SCTV: I've been an SNL fan for 40 years, but I'll readily admit the show has always been hit and miss. Second City Television, on the other hand, was the Canadian blueprint for how sketch comedy should be done. The bits were truly creative, they didn't pander to tweens, and they knew when to end. The cast was uniformly great (Catherine O'Hara! Eugene Levy! John Candy!). My single favorite bit was a long sketch called “Play It Again, Bob.” Dave Martin was a jaded, smarmy Bob Hope, and Rick Moranis was a flawless Woody Allen who wanted his idol to appear in his next movie. I think SNL only ever approached that level of inspired brilliance a few times, back when it gave its players room to breathe. (I'm thinking of the Star Trek parody featuring John Belushi as James T. Kirk, trying to remain in command while the network is dismantling the set after the show's cancellation.)

8.  The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: Tom and Dick Smothers are up there in a comedy pantheon I reserve for the likes of Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, George Carlin, and pre-op Joan Rivers. The show was hysterically funny and controversial enough in the days of Vietnam and campus riots for CBS to cancel it after just two seasons. Besides the boys, Leigh French was a groovy hippie chick with her own segment, “Share a Little Tea With Goldie,” Mason Williams and John Hartford gave the world “Classical Gas” and “Gentle on My Mind,” Don Novello and Rob Reiner both made appearances before achieving fame later on, Steve Martin (!) was one of the writers, and Pat Paulson was the world's drollest and funniest Presidential candidate. It was good enough to give Bonanza a serious run for its money when no other show could.

7.  What's My Line: My favorite game show not just for its clever premise, but because it was urbane, witty, and about as far a cry from today's game shows as you could ask for. My favorite segment was when the panelists put on their black blindfolds so the famous Mystery Guest could enter and sign in, please.

6.  The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: I was raised on Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and The Invaders. But sometimes, if I was lucky, I could stay up to watch the Master himself host his own creepy anthology series. The hour-long seasons, which followed a long, successful run of half-hour episodes called Alfred Hitchcock Presents, were just about the scariest things I'd ever seen. To this day, the episode “An Unlocked Window” remains (just ahead of “The Zanti Misfits” from The Outer Limits and “Home” from The X Files) the most suspenseful, jaw-dropping hour of TV I've ever seen. I know, because I saw it again not long ago, and it still fried me. How did they ever get away with it back then?

5.  Twin Peaks: When that little guy in Agent Cooper's dream said, “She's filled with secrets” at the end of episode 3, I knew I was hooked. Even though episode 4 began with a real cheat that angered many viewers, I hung on because David Lynch and Mark Frost's surreal nightmare was the closest thing to brilliant feature filmmaking on TV. Great casting and acting, spooky photography, and Angelo Badalamenti's mesmerizing score (he also did great work for Lynch in the movies Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and others), added up to some real quality television. It might have run out of steam before the end of season 2, but I didn't care. I couldn't get enough.

4.  Hill Street Blues: This show was so groundbreaking, I didn't at first know what to make of it. But I ended up counting the days each week until the next episode would air. What I respected most about it was that the characters weren't your ordinary good guy/bad guy cliches. They could be heroes one minute and disappointments the next. I also respected the scripts for drawing on genuine moral dilemmas, a TV rarity. Just like the characters, the situations often weren't clear-cut, either. (One quibble, though: The character of Howard Hunter was such a one-dimensional buffoon. Why are there so many of those on TV? The Mary Tyler Moore Show had great characters who were fully fleshed out, except for Ted Baxter, a walking punch line. During that same era, M*A*S*H took its characters seriously even among all the laughs, except for Frank Burns – Larry Linville played him so broadly that I almost wept when Charles Emerson Winchester showed up. Movies aren't exempt from this trend: In The Silence of the Lambs, it's clear that the psychopath Hannibal Lecter is drawn more fully and thoughtfully than Frederick Chilton, the vain doctor who oversees Lecter's containment and whose awkward pass at Agent Starling is only a little less offensive than Buffalo Bill skinning dead women.

3.  Lonesome Dove: OK, now don't get me started. This was a six-hour CBS miniseries, and I must have spent the last two of those hours trying not to bawl like a baby (sometimes unsuccessfully). Robert Duvall gave the performance of his life, which is really saying something. He once described his character, former Texas Ranger Augustus “Gus” McCrae, as his Hamlet. I agree. Everything about this production is first-rate. When I heard about plans for a TV version after I finished reading the book, I thought it would just be another watered-down exercise in mediocrity. But it's as good as anything coming out of Hollywood, perhaps the greatest Western of all. I love it.

2.  The Fugitive: My parents knew if they didn't let me stay up for this, there'd be no living with me the next day. Four seasons -- one chase -- and any episode that promised Lt. Gerard or the one-armed man in the opening credits was not to be missed.  One series that just got better and better as it went on, with a final two-parter that was everything fans had hoped for.

1.  The Honeymooners: Nothing on TV has ever made me laugh harder or more frequently than the original 39 episodes of this show. Gleason and Carney had the moves, the timing, and the chemistry of any of the greatest comedy teams. Alice might have lived with Ralph, but she was no pushover, and we both knew he was all bluff, anyway. Their apartment was tiny and threadbare, yet it must have boasted the largest bedroom on television, because whenever one of them disappeared in there, the other had to shout full blast to be heard. Favorite episode: “Pal o' Mine,” which ends with Kramden in a hospital, prepping for a transfusion for Norton, who he thinks has been injured in the sewer. But Norton is fine, standing at the nurse's station as Kramden is wheeled past. He nods hello, Norton nods back, then we get not one but two classic double-takes – Norton's as he realizes who that was, and Kramden's, who rushes back onstage in his hospital gown in disbelief.

As long as I'm on a roll, here are my picks for seven of the worst shows I've ever seen. (No hard feelings if one of your favorites is listed here.)

7.  Two and a Half Men: I tried watching this sleazefest, but I should have known better by the promos, which were just lewd and crude. If it had bombed, I wouldn't be listing it, but its popularity far, far outweighs its value.  And, I mean, I like Jon Cryer, and Conchata Ferrell, too, a good character actress I'd been following for years.  I think the kid was right to bail.

6.  The Bachelor: And any other reality program that treats love as some sort of competition sport. I mean, seriously – so these woman all fall in love with this one guy, and he falls in love with all of them, and they get waaaay too intimate for contestants on what is ultimately a glorified game show, and finally you know that all but one woman is going to get her heart stomped on. I'd heard about this show for years and read about it online, but even when I got around to watching an episode, I was still gobsmacked.

5.  The Chevy Chase Show: Chevy Chase must be the bravest man on television, because he actually showed up for episode 2. I would have just gone into the FBI's witness protection program.

4.  One Day at a Time: A struggling single mother of two girls, one of whom should have been sent to reform school long ago, who can afford to buy them good clothes but somehow never gets around to buying herself a bra. Schneider, the super, is on hand to provide some cheap laughs at his expense.

3.  Candid Camera: When I was a kid, I thought this show was funny because my parents thought it was funny. But I cringe now when I see any of those old original episodes or any of its remakes (Punk'd being a recent incarnation for a new generation of suckers). Sorry, but I just can't laugh at the humiliation of others.

2.  Queen for a Day: Another show I never questioned as a kid because my mom enjoyed it. But yikes! Housewives vie with one another for prizes by seeing whose true story of despair is the best. The audience registers its measure of approval by some kind of applause-o-meter, the winner gets a cape and a crown and I think some flowers, and then of course watches from her throne as a new refrigerator or oven is wheeled out that will make her life all better.

1.  Hogan's Heroes: Wondering how this popular '60s sitcom could be worse than Queen for a Day?  It's easy.  Imagine a sitcom, complete with laugh track, about American POWs in Vietnam that debuts just 20 years after the war has ended. I'm not laughing.

Movie Phone Booths and Telephone Songs

In 1988, I drafted a multi-generational novel set against the backdrop of history – the history of the phone booth. (Yeah, I know, that's what my friends thought, too.) While the draft eventually went the way of the phone booth itself, I kept all of my pre-Internet research notes, including lists of songs for motivation and a list of movies just because. Finally, I can put them to some use. Of the 44 movies and more than 100 songs I compiled, here are my top ten favorites in each category.

Telephone Songs

The original list has some of everything – rock, pop, standard, country, blues, rap, humorous, spiritual, even a bossa nova number. These ten made the final cut.

10.  “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” (Primitive Radio Gods): While not destined for immortality, this song wins the prize for best title.

9.  “Call Me” (Frank Sinatra/Chris Montez): Both versions will do. It's a nice standard that's stood the test of time (what standards do).

8.  “Pennsylvania 6-5000” (Glenn Miller): The only instrumental on the list, except for that infectious phone number shouted out by the orchestra.

7.  “Shanghai” (Doris Day): Not the Nicki Minaj song (please, God, not that). This is a lesser known standard, but worthwhile because not many of the songs I found actually have phone booths in the lyrics (“I'm right around the corner in a phone booth/And I wanna be with you tonight”).

6.  “Jenny/867-5309” (Tommy Tutone): The most infectious and probably the most popular of all the pop songs I found. It's amazing how many people I've known have that number memorized.

5.  “He'll Have to Go” (Jim Reeves): This is my favorite of all the country songs. Between Reeves' voice and the plaintive lyrics, it's the kind of record I wish country music were making more of today (“Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone”).

4.  “As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone” (Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty): This is the kind of record we can be thankful country music isn't making today. But it's so irresistibly goofy in its earnestness that I never tire of listening to it. Twitty (the distant voice on a telephone) calls Lynn, whom he calls “Loretta,” to tell her it's over between them. He speaks his lines, while Lynn sings hers in a voice full of hope one moment and despair the next.

3.  “Obscene Phone Caller” (Rockwell): The flip side to his hit “Somebody's Watching Me.” Actually, the two songs aren't all that different thematically, as you can tell. But because it's one of a kind, and Rockwell's interpretation is so serious and tongue-in-cheek at the same time, this song is almost impossible to get out of your head.

2.  “If the Phone Doesn't Ring (It's Me)” (Jimmy Buffett): As silly as the title is, this is actually a serious love song that really resonates. It's my favorite Jimmy Buffett song, and one I still listen to from time to time.

1.  “Telephone Line” (ELO): The one song on the list that I would call gorgeous. The whole arrangement, including the perfect harmonies, lifts the whole idea of a telephone song into the stratosphere. Jeff Lynne and company outdo themselves with, for my money, the finest record of their career.

Phone Booth Movies

I've always been drawn to movie phone booth scenes. They're sometimes the best scenes in the movie. Here are the ten I never get tired of watching.

10.  The Happening: Not the one with Mark Wahlberg. This was a 1960s dud that I like just because it's so shameless (and because it was filmed very near where I lived at the time). It was Faye Dunaway's first movie (from which she made quite a leap to Bonnie and Clyde the following year), and the one movie I'm sure Anthony Quinn wishes he could forget. It starts out as some kind of hippie period piece but quickly turns into just another standard crime caper. Memorable for a scene in which an enraged Quinn takes his fury out on a bank of outdoor phone booths.

9.  The Graduate: Dustin Hoffman in a phone booth at the Taft Hotel, speaking to Anne Bancroft, who's seated just a few yards away, about their impending assignation. When she reminds him before he hangs up that there's something he forgot to tell her, he says, “I just want you to know how much I appreciate this.” “The room number, Benjamin, I think you should tell me that.”

8.  Duel: Steven Spielberg's first movie, made for TV, is what you'd find if you looked up “road rage” in the dictionary. Great moment: Dennis Weaver leaping out of a phone booth just before the demonic oil tanker slams into it. Truck 1, phone booth 0.

7.  Marty: Two lonely people, butcher Ernest Borgnine and schoolteacher Janet Blair, find love at the Stardust Ballroom. But peer pressure from his buddies almost destroys the prospect of happiness until the final scene, where he finally rejects his friends' callous attitudes and calls her up in a phone booth to reconnect. Based on a TV drama written by Paddy Chayefsky, who adapted his story for film. It went on to earn both Borgnine and the movie itself Academy Awards. The original poster showed an illustration of Marty inside the booth.

6.  Dirty Harry: A serial killer wants to be sure San Francisco detective Clint Eastwood isn't being followed as he carries a suitcase filled with ransom money, so Eastwood has to scramble from one pay phone to another throughout the city.

5.  Rosemary's Baby: Maybe the scariest moment in a movie filled with them. Mia Farrow is on the run from the husband and neighbors she's convinced want her unborn child for some sort of satanic sacrifice. She's rejected the doctor they recommended to her, convinced he's in on the conspiracy, and calls her own doctor in an outdoor booth while a man who looks much like the first doctor walks up to it and waits with his back to us. High tension, until she opens the door, he turns around, and it's just William Castle, who produced the movie.

4.  The Birds: Yikes! Tippi Hedrin trapped in a phone booth while a flock of seagulls smashes repeatedly into the glass, trying to kill her. Only Alfred Hitchcock could convince us this is really happening.

3.  Local Hero: A very sweet, very funny minor classic about an American executive (Peter Riegert) sent by his boss (Burt Lancaster) to buy out a little Scottish village so his company can build an oil refinery. The twist is that they love the idea. The centerpiece is a red outdoor phone booth in the middle of the village, which the exec uses to stay in touch with America. In the end, he returns to Houston but realizes the Scots' lifestyle might be better than his own. One night, he makes a call, and the final shot is of the red phone booth, the phone inside ringing and ringing.

2.  Phone Booth: I mean, come on, how can a thriller named Phone Booth not make this list? Almost the entire movie takes place in and around the last working phone booth in Manhattan.

1.  Wait Until Dark: Audrey Hepburn is a blind housewife targeted by three criminals who are convinced she has a doll filled with heroin. Because a little girl lives right upstairs, they stage an elaborate charade to convince Hepburn she should turn the doll over to them. (If this were made today, I'm sure they would have simply killed them both.) They keep watch across the street in a van parked beside the phone booth they use as part of their scheme. This was the movie that cemented my fascination with phone booths.

Goosebump Moments at the Movies

I like movies, and I especially like thrillers.  This is probably because I was raised on Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and liked being scared (but not too much).  Not slasher stuff or torture porn or Nelson Eddy-Jeanette McDonald musicals.  Just well thought out plots with at least one intelligent character and some genuine frights.  So I'm listing my favorite scary scenes, or in some cases mere moments, in ten of my favorite thrillers.  (Finally, I'm only using actors' names because I can't always remember the characters'.)

10.  Kiss of Death:  A young Richard Widmark (his first role, I believe) as a giggling psychopath who ties an old woman into her wheelchair and shoves it down a flight of stairs.  Yikes.

9.  Wait Until Dark:  Famous for the Big Moment between Alan Arkin (the leaper) and Audrey Hepburn (the leapee), but there's one that's even creepier in a more cerebral way.  Blind Hepburn has broken all the light bulbs in her apartment to put psychopath (yes, another one) Arkin on an even footing with her.  In a brilliant twist, she lights matches in the dark while Arkin has to feel his way with a cane.  It all makes sense, believe me.  But, as Arkin discovers to Heburn's horror, she forgot one bulb, and the moment it lights up what had previously been a blank screen is when we all hit our collective foreheads and go, "Of course!"  This is the one movie I've seen more often than any other.  Want to know how often?  The number of the pay telephone across the street from her apartment is 242-4598.  That, my friends, is often.

8.  The Window:  I wish more people knew about this nourish nailbiter from 1949.  In the scene I like most (among several), young Tommy has been locked in his room for telling what his parents believe are tall tales about a murder he saw committed by the nice couple upstairs.  He's the only one home, and he pushes the skeleton key out of the lock so that it falls to the floor on the opposite side of the bedroom door.  Now he slides a coat hanger under the door to try and coax the key back to him so he can get out.  But the guilty husband is standing on that side of the door watching all this, smiling but not with his eyes.  He bends over and places the key inside the hanger's range, and Tommy can feel it and pulls the hanger out of sight.  A moment later he opens the door.  "Hello, Tommy."

7.  Experiment in Terror:  Lee Remick is being blackmailed by yet another lively psychopath, Ross Martin (The Wild, Wild West), who wheezes with asthma and whom Remick has learned to take very seriously.  She's to meet him in a restaurant where FBI agents are waiting to nab him.  But time is passing, and no psychopath.  So she gets up to use the women's room.  While she's at the sink, an old woman, dressed in black and stooped over, enters and closes -- and locks -- the door.  He turns around, and it's  -- the psychopath!  Maybe anyone could have pulled this off, but Martin's face in those granny glasses is truly terrifying.  After he's done having his little chat, he puts the glasses back on, stoops over, and in a moment that really unnerves me, actually goes back into character as a harmless old woman as he leaves the restroom.

6.  Don't Look Now:  Another movie I think deserved greater popularity.  Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are in Venice mourning the accidental death of their little girl.  At the same time, a serial killer is lurking and striking throughout the city.  During the climax, Sutherland discovers a child running loose through the streets alone at night, wearing the same red raincoat his daughter wore the day she died, and he sees his one chance for redemption.  What happens next is just too freaky for words.

5.  Diabolique:  The famous French shocker that predated Psycho with the scariest scene in a bathroom.  Many believe it was the inspirational spark that lit Hitchcock's fuse, which led to the latter film.  I might prefer Psycho for sheer shock value, but boy, the bathroom scene in Diabolique is no chucklefest!

4. Blue Velvet:  David Lynch's love-it-or-loathe-it examination of the dark side of an American small town.  I loved it.  Dennis Hopper is possibly the most maniacal and surely the most profane of all our psychopaths so far.  But the creepiest scene-stealer to me has to be Dean Stockwell.  It's just one scene, but it disoriented me in a way no other film scene had or has since.  He plays Ben, a friend whom Hopper refers to admiringly as "one suave ****."  Ben, looking effeminate and acting stoned, switches on a very special lamp and begins lip-syncing to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," using the lamp as a makeshift microphone that eerily illuminates his face.  I had no idea where I was or what to expect next, so I had no choice but to let Lynch take me by the arm and lead me on to the next scene -- which was possibly even more surreal than the last.

3.  The Silence of the Lambs:  I don't think I had ever experienced the kind of sheer movie tension I did when Jodie Foster's FBI trainee found herself in the pitch-black basement of a serial killer who can see her, but she can't see anything. 

2.  Rear Window:  It was inevitable that Hitchcock should reign in the top two.  This is actually my all-time favorite movie shot, but I put it here because Psycho has it beat for sheer terror.  Grace Kelly is in Raymond Burr's apartment along with the police.  James Stewart has suspected that Burr murdered his wife, and now Kelly has the proof:  she sneaked into Burr's apartment while he was out and found the woman's wedding ring.  Burr comes back unexpectedly, mayhem ensues, and the cops arrive just in time.  The shot:  Stewart is looking through Burr's window from across the courtyard using a telephoto lens.  He focuses on a close-up of Kelly's hands behind her back, one hand pointing to the ring on a finger of her other hand.  Then Stewart's -- and Hitchcock's -- camera pans up just far enough to show Burr looking down at the ring, and then directly at us.

1.  Psycho:  Yes, the shower scene, but not that moment in the shower scene.  For me, the true stuff of nightmares is our view of the bathroom door opening beyond the shower curtain, and a figure approaching the unsuspecting Janet Leigh.  Sometimes what I fear most is not what happens, but what is about to happen.


OK, I can't resist -- here are some leftovers, briefly:


Vertigo:  The big plot twist as Kim Novak remembers it, and the movie isn't even over.

Jaws:  Those barrels, so much scarier than the shark itself.

Die Hard:  Some great writing -- bad guy Alan Rickman encountering good guy Bruce Willis for the first time.

No Country for Old Men:  Javier Bardem and the filling station scene.  "Call it."

Mulholland Drive:  The Cowboy.

When a Stranger Calls Back:  The opening sequence, a brilliant variation on the old babysitter-home-alone formula, much more frightening than the original film because both the babysitter and the stranger outside seem so intelligent and empathetic.

Dirty Harry:  Villain Andy Robinson's look of fear right before getting beaten up by the guy he paid to do it.  It makes him human just for a moment, which helps flesh out the character but also makes him too real for comfort.

Marathon Man:  Former Nazi dentist Laurence Olivier loose in the Jewish diamond district of midtown New York.

Charade:  George Kennedy and Cary Grant battling it out on a high rooftop, both trumped by Henry Mancini's barely audible but very tension-inducing score.  Less really is more.

North by Northwest:  Just a few seconds before the third pass the crop duster makes over Cary Grant, as both are hurtling toward the receding camera and we feel totally helpless.

The Night of the Hunter:  The two children fleeing up the basement stairs with villain Robert Mitchum right behind them, arms outstretched before him like every child's worst nightmare.

The Dark Knight:  Two ferry boats, two bombs,. but the detonators are on the opposite boats.  A great moral dilemma from a superhero movie, something I never expected to see.

Notorious:  The moment Ingrid Bergman realizes she's not simply under the weather -- she's being slowly poisoned.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre:  More horror than thriller, but worth it for the very final shot: a man and his running chainsaw on a country road, twirling in a frenzy of death like two dancers set against a rising red sun.  We just know he's never going to stop killing, because he loves his work.

Books for My Desert Island

I'm sure just about everyone has a mental list of the books they'd take to a desert island.  (A friend told me the only title she would take is How to Get Off a Desert Island.)  This was a hard list for me to make, especially because my boat would have sunk under the weight of all my choices.  So, painful as it is, I'm limiting my booklist to just 12.  I'm excluding works by friends of mine; everything else is fair game.  (It's just a given that Shakespeare and the Bible will already be on board.)  In true Letterman style, I'm starting at the bottom with #12.

12.  The Confessions (Rousseau):  I'm not trying to sound erudite -- this book is awesome.  No one, not even the Kardashians, could write about their lives as frankly as Rousseau did.  I kept marveling over how a book centuries old -- what my sister would call something written "with feathers" -- could feel as modern as any current tell-all.

11.  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Thomas Merton):  I can't leave without something by Merton, the American Trappist monk whose wry outlook and plain style made him so widely popular (for an American Trappist monk).  His spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, must be his most popular and enduring work, but I'm going with Conjectures, one of several journals he published about his life as a monk and a writer.  This particular journal is his most topical and serendipitous -- his mind bounces all over the place on topics relating to issues that concerned him beyond the monastery walls.  It's a good portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s.

10.  A Moveable Feast (Hemingway):  I'm not too particular when it comes to books about writers, just as long as they're expatriate American writers living in Paris during the 1920s.  Hemingway, who had moved there with his first wife Hadley and son "Bumby," hobnobbed with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and other luminaries of that period.  (Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris pays a comic but affectionate homage to this period and is justly one of his most popular and best-reviewed films.)  Hemingway doesn't always play nice -- you feel sorry for Scott after reading about a road trip the two friends took -- but when he reminisces about writing in sidewalk cafes with rain falling beyond the steamy windows, using all those perfect and inimitable declarative sentences -- all is forgiven.

9.  5001 Nights at the Movies (Pauline Kael):  Ordinarily reading about movies on a desert island would be torture for me, but with Kael it's more than just the movies:  it's her irresistible, freewheeling style that I can't live without.  You couldn't always tell where she was going with an idea or exactly when the review would end, but it was just so much darn fun going along for the ride. Maybe the most valuable lesson I learned about movies from her is that even a bad movie can have moments of brilliance worth stumbling upon, that a trashy movie can be more worthwhile than some bloated Oscar bait.  (I mean, who lately has rushed to their DVD shelf to watch Gandhi for the twelfth time?)  Of all her collections, I'd choose this one in a heartbeat because it's a massive compilation of bite-size reviews covering movies that go clear back to the beginning of talkies.  Her excitement over movies she loves is as thrilling as Roger Ebert's despair over those he hates (and Ebert's negative reviews are some of the funniest reviews I've ever read).  Finally, I suspect she was just a really nice woman, considering she actually wrote me a reply once, and on New Yorker stationery at that.

8.  Emma Who Saved My Life (Wilton Barnhardt):  Barnhardt's not a household name, and Emma isn't up there with Don Quixote and Ulysses, but it's without a doubt the one novel that makes me laugh out loud each time I read it.  It's about a young writer seeking fame and fortune in Greenwich Village during the 1970s (just like me, but I'm in no way biased).  Emma is the neurotic poet he befriends.  Desert islands are no laughing matter, which is why this will be required reading.

7.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones -- A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (compiled by Paul Reps):  Back in the 1970s (again), in the midst of my Eastern Religion phase, I discovered this little paperback and gave it a place of honor alongside Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki on my spiritual bookshelf.  The title says it all: these very brief stories (most less than a page long) teach some valuable lessons in Zen living and thinking, but in a simple, almost entertaining way.  I've since moved on from Watts and Suzuki to Merton and C.S. Lewis, but I've never abandoned my original copy of this one.

6.  Anna Karenina (Tolstoy):  Boy, this was tough -- it was either Anna or Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  Tess is the novel closest to my heart, the story that keeps me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end and whose heroine I have real affection for.  But Anna Karenina encompasses a whole world, and that would last me longer out in the middle of the ocean.  As a kid, I pictured the name "Tolstoy" as a massive, impenetrable block of granite.  But this book, which I prefer to War and Peace (mainly because I think one should at least finish a novel before assessing it), proved to be completely accessible and as absorbing as any fiction I'd ever read.  Before the first chapter is over, you'll know all about these characters and want to know more right now.  The only curious thing, and I wonder if Tolstoy realized this might happen, is that I relate to and care more about Dolly and Levin than I do Anna and Count Vronsky.  But that's nitpicking.  I wouldn't change a syllable.

Now we come to my five favorites, and I stop to mention this only because numbers 12 through 6 are ultimately negotiable, whereas these final five are the books I will never be without, island or otherwise.

5. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry):  The only novel I've read three times, and it's big.  Robert Duvall, who portrayed Augustus McRae in the TV miniseries adaptation, said Gus was the best role he had ever played or ever would play.  He called the character Shakespearean, and I agree.  Gus and Woodrow Call, ex-Texas Rangers who embark on an ill-advised, epic cattle drive from Texas to Montana, are as vivid and memorable as anyone McMurtry -- or anyone else -- has ever created.  McMurtry has said he wrote the book as an antidote to our romanticized vision of the Old West.  He wanted to demythologize it, but instead gave us a whole new myth.  I don't know a friend who's read it who hasn't felt passionate about it (and in a good way), and most of these are people who don't like Westerns.  It's also the only book that ever made me cry.  When I got to the saddest of many sad parts while reading on a work break, I had to go outside and walk around the block so no one would see me.  OK, enough said.

4.  Franny and Zooey (Salinger):  You can have your Holden Caulfields -- I've had a crush on Franny Glass since I was a teenager.  "Franny" and "Zooey" were related stories printed in The New Yorker over time back in the early 1960s.  In "Franny," the shorter of the two stories, college student Franny and her beau Lane Coutell have an interesting discussion in a restaurant.  In "Zooey," Zooey, who is Franny's brother, and their mother have an interesting discussion in a bathroom while Franny lies on a sofa in the living room.  They're discussing Franny, who, at the end of "Franny," has suffered what appeared to be some sort of breakdown precipitated by a religious book she was reading.  Franny and Zooey is a small book that had a tremendous impact back then, especially on college campuses.  It's the book that dared me to write something anywhere near as good, which I've been failing at miserably ever since.

3.  The Habit of Being -- The Letters of Flannery O'Connor:  These letters should be as celebrated as the classic short stories.  O'Connor's intelligent, wry, and immensely likeable voice leaps from each page, and closing the book at the end is like saying goodbye to a new best friend.  People have tried to pigeonhole her as a "Catholic" or a "Southern Gothic" writer, but her works transcend all labels, and she has lots to say about this, too.  I taught a few of her stories to college freshman in some writing classes, and the students were actually, palpably livid when they got to the end of the title story in her collection A Good Man is Hard to Find.  How could an escaped convict slaughter an entire family and that be the end of it?  That never happened on The Cosby Show.  Never mind their reaction to "Good Country People," in which a Bible salesman steals a girl's wooden leg.  I mention these instances only because I'm sure they would have made O'Connor laugh and laugh, and then she would probably have said, "Good."

2.  The Stories of John Cheever:  I've heard that Alice Munro's stories are like novels in miniature, and that's the way Cheever's are, too.  His milieu is suburban New England and the Mid-Atlantic states during the seemingly benign postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s.  It's a world of tired businessmen and lonely housewives, resentful children and restless lovers, all of them coping with the emptiness of their sterile American lives.  What distinguishes these characters is that Cheever genuinely loves them, and so we do as well, or at least we certainly come to understand them.  If you want to start somewhere, read "The Swimmer," one of his most celebrated tales (adapted for the big screen in the 1960s).  It has a simple plot that is nevertheless unlike any other, and the conclusion is shattering.

1.  The Poems of W.B. Yeats:  I want his poems fed to me intravenously on my deathbed.  They're the only things that will keep me alive.