CedaRound: Kingston Square

Incorporated on the west side of the Cedar River as the town of Kingston in 1852 and annexed by Cedar Rapids in 1871, this long-neglected neighborhood is making a slow but gorgeous recovery after drowning in almost 10 feet of water in the 2008 flood.

 
There is a layered boxiness that visually links the architecture in the area, from the 1911 People's Bank Building designed by Louis Sullivan in his fortressy "jewel box" style to the post-war brutalist commercial spaces clad in corrugated concrete to the new mixed-use residential construction profiled with broad crenellations and proud cornices.

 
That boxiness creates a relentless horizontalness to the neighborhood's rooflines and setbacks, and someone somewhere in the neighborhood's recent revitalization decided to trace all that horizontal geometry with simple lines of bright white lights. And the effect at night is at once austere, majestic and stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I go out of my way to drive through the neighborhood every time I'm in the area at night. I've stopped and parked and wandered around with my iPhone a couple times to try and capture the magic, but I could never find the right spot to frame the full expanse of everything I find so beautiful.

 
But I finally captured it a year ago tonight when I discovered I was parked in an ideal location to capture most of it, which—since I've finally accepted that all that grand horizontalness is just too horizontal to squeeze into one picture—is still perfectly breathtaking.

The lights are a small touch, but they beautifully unify a relatively small neighborhood and help make it a smart district set along the river and embedded in our modest but friendly skyline.

CedaRound: Cedar Rapids History Center

The building that for a glorious moment was the architecturally contextual Cedar Rapids History Center was built in 1935 as a Quonset hut encased in industrially horizontal blond brick for the Rapids Chevrolet car dealership, and it stood resolutely as what seemed to be a permanent, demoralizing architectural stain on First Avenue at the edge of downtown until after I was out of college.

It was an exceptionally dreary example of early 20th century prefabricated architecture that was probably seen as austerely noble in its day and was unfortunately built to last well past its visual expiration date a decade later as the architectural world rediscovered the soul-nourishing properties of ornamentation.

So you can imagine how the city aesthetes rejoiced with great jubilation when the building started to be torn down in the 1990s, and then we waited with surprised but hopeful trepidation when we realized that what had brought devastating visual and emotional blight to the city for over half a century was not disappearing entirely but was instead being partially repurposed into delightfully contextual architecture: Ghosts of chipped-away pillars, arcs of corrugated metal and jagged geometries of pre-war brick suddenly stood with beauty, grace and a touch of fun as part of the endlessly clever new Cedar Rapids History Center building. And I quickly learned to stop sighing and looking away every time I drove past it. The new concept was quirky and invigorating and created a meaningful architectural dialogue between antiquated visual efficiencies and Post-Modern plays on scale, material and embellishment.

In 2017, the Cedar Rapids History Center moved to Cedar Rapids' historic 1896 Douglas Mansion—whose adjacent carriage house at 5 Turner Alley was transformed in the 1920s into an apartment and studio by American Gothic painter and Cedar Rapids homeboy Grant Wood—and the History Center building was renovated to become the new Cedar Rapids Day School. I'm kinda sad that the History Center abandoned its delightfully contextual hybrid-architecture home, but I still rejoice with civic pride every time I drive by it.

Movies: Room 237

If you like super-duper-crackpot conspiracy theories presented with neither irony nor shame; violently forced metaphors that leave marks warranting assault charges; relentless fantasias on the numbers 42 and it goes without saying 237; gratuitous reasons to keep showing the clip of the fully naked woman emerging from the Room 237 tub (side note: it the totally cool vintage seafoam-green bathroom); clear and inarguable proof that a stack of papers on a desk looks exactly like an erection to demonstrate the hotel manager's perverse thrill about something or other AND to reinforce the hard (ahem) and fast fact that there are sexual organs hiding IN PLAIN SIGHT in the basic shapes in a carpet pattern; a poster showing a skier that's CLEARLY actually a Minotaur that when paired with a poster of a cowboy on a horse across the room is CLEARLY an indication that the movie is actually about the Holocaust, and an authoritative exegesis based on a rock-solid foundation that Stanley Kubrick staged the moon landing because the guy telling you about it has a friend who's a graphic designer or something who told HIM that it's clearly staged if you know where to look PLUS the letters in ROOM NO. 237 can be rearranged to spell MOON ... then I have a movie for you.

Happy 91st birthday, Stephen Sondheim!

Thank you for redefining musical theater. For redefining music. For redefining theater.

Thank you for composing music that's at once asymmetrical and balanced, halting and fluid, atonal and lush, messy and perfect.

Thank you for finding lyrics that explore the outer limits of rhythm and structure and rhyme, that tell a story or define a character or celebrate a moment or break a heart in sometimes just a handful of words, that always seem fresh, that always seem timeless, that always seem effortless.

Thank you for creating an apotheosis of creative and intellectual order, design, tension, composition, balance, light and harmony.

Thank you for inspiring as only you can an enraptured young writer to think outside his own thoughts, to feel outside his own feelings, to never stop searching for the perfect word or the lyrical phrase or the essential defining idea in a universe of creative entropy, to always make sure he's proud of how he creates and proud of what he writes.

And thank you for the phrase that I rely on almost daily to turn an undefined someday into a compelling now ... to pull me out of inertia and propel me sometimes through a bipolar fog and sometimes just through my own complacency to run a marathon, broaden my perspective, take on a challenging writing project, upgrade to a difficult tap class, find a solution, emerge unscathed or at least unbroken, or some days to just show up.

Careful the things you say; children will listen. And sometimes they'll turn your inspiring lyrics into kick-ass tattoos.

Feel the flow,
Hear what's happening:
We're what's happening!
Long ago
All we had was that funny feeling,
Saying someday we'd send 'em reeling.
Now it looks like we can!
Someday just began ...

Family: Ruthie Bjonerud

Robert, Edna, Neva and now Ruthie Bjonerud were finally reunited three years ago today on the hereafter family farm, where the pastor at Ruthie’s funeral declared that all the cats are nice.

Ruthie was my mother’s cousin and the undisputed keeper of all the family history and lore on the seven-brother-and-two-sister Bjonerud family tree, the diaspora of which came from across the country to reunite at her funeral—probably for the last time—in our easy, loving, treasured geniality to reminisce about Ruthie and catch up with everyone else in our extended Norwegian family. 

Ruthie had been in deteriorating health and had finally agreed to move into the Aase Haugen Home for Lingering Norwegians, where less than a week later she by all accounts died peacefully in her sleep. It’s all anyone could want as far as a way to go, and in her memory her beloved—but now aging, far-flung and busy with our big-city lives—extended family buried her in the Calmar Lutheran Cemetery family plot among the generations of sturdy Norwegian ancestors whose lives in rural northeast Iowa extend back to America’s Civil War. 

And then we—as did those generations before us—gathered at Calmar Lutheran Church for sandwiches and slices of cake prepared by the church ladies and enjoyed the fellowship of family, old memories, new stories and remembrances of the woman who'd spent her life tirelessly, lovingly chronicling it all for us.

So apparently we have a new recliner

My family buys nothing—NOTHING!—more important than a package of socks without first going through the Ten Steps of Painfully Indecisive Covetousness:

1. Oh, look! There’s the thing I’m actively looking to buy and it’s right here in front of me right now so my search is over and I’m going to buy it.
1a. or: Oh, look! There’s something I just stumbled on in a store that two seconds ago I didn’t know existed and now I desperately want it so I’m going to buy it.

2. But am I sure about this? 

3. Maybe I can find a cheaper and/or better version of it somewhere else.

4. But first let me take 72 pictures of it on my phone so I can remind myself in perpetuity that I don’t have it every time I scroll through my photos. 

5. It’s totally worth it to drive to five similar stores scattered across town and then to spend 30 minutes researching it online if I can save five dollars when I inevitably buy it.

6. It goes without saying that it’s also totally worth it to go back to visit it nine or fifteen times at the store where I first saw it, just to be sure I really want it or to see if it goes on sale.

7. But I’m not obsessing about buying it or needlessly delaying this inevitable purchase or anything.

8. OK, two weeks have gone by and my life is empty and chokingly meaningless without it so I’m just going to go buy it.

9. Well, shit. It’s gone.
9a. or: Now that I have it home, I’ve decided I really don’t like it so I’m going to return it.

10. I’m just going to run in to Target for a few quick things.

SO! Imagine my surprise when—mere hours after we realized that we’d probably need to buy an easy-to-use recliner with a tall back for my dad because he’ll have problems sleeping in a flat bed when he comes home from the hospital so we were going to split up and start multiple Step Ones at all the recliner stores in town this afternoon—Mom sent me an urgent text telling me to come to the first recliner store she’d visited because she’d found the perfect recliner and she’d put a hold on it and wanted me to come test it before she bought it. 

Which I did. And then which SHE did. 

Let me type this slowly for you so you can comprehend its tectonic shiftiness: My mother, the High Priestess of the Ten Steps of Painfully Indecisive Covetousness, BOUGHT AN EASY-TO-USE-RECLINER WITH A TALL BACK ON JUST THE FIRST STEP. Without even blinking.

Behold its new-reclinerness:

I’ll give you a moment to lift your jaws up from the shifting tectonic plates beneath you. 

What’s more, our awesome, truck-having neighbor Dan just happened to be free and willing to transport the recliner home for us ... and within 90 minutes start-to-finish we became the proud owners of a new easy-to-use recliner with a tall back. WITH NINE UNUSED STEPS JUST HANGING OUT IN SPACE IN A FOG OF ABANDONMENT AND CONFUSION. But maybe I can sell them individually on Etsy. 

Anyway! I had to do some major furniture shuffling to fit our new easy-to-use recliner with a tall back into our living room, but I think it’s now in a primo spot where Dad can be comfortable and not feeling like he’s jutting out into the room as he entertains visitors. And he has a bunch of medical stuff—in addition to his boombox for his books on tape—that he’ll need to keep near him, so I repurposed some decorative chests to become decorative side tables for him. Plus I cleaned them all with Liquid Gold, which those of us who like our wooden antiques to be alarmingly shiny know takes 17 days to dry. So that’s why I’m posting this artfully composed, judiciously-cropped-so-you-can’t-see-what-a-mess-the-rest-of-the-room-is photo at 7:42 instead of 4:00. 

But doesn’t my dad’s new man-corner look handsome? 

(It’d look mega-more handsome without that butt-ugly quilt and that why-the-hell-do-we-have-a-genuine-oil-painting-of-a-stranger-holding-a-gun-in-our-living-room painting. But rectifying those situations opens a whole new Ten Stages Of Painfully Indecisive Purging process. So let’s all just admire my alarmingly shiny wooden side tables for now.)

Theater: "Sunday," Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim

Never has a song captured me on so many levels and left me with goosebumps every time I hear it. Sunday in the Park with George is one of the first shows I ever saw on Broadway, and "Sunday" finishes Act I by bringing together all the characters we've met as individual people as they stand and relocate and adjust as a growing ensemble and ultimately form a living, singing, haunting, as-close-as-humanly-possible re-creation of Georges Seurat's defining painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The score of the entire show is peppered with quick little notes that evoke the peppered-dot painting style of Pointillism, and the dreamy lyrics meander through the endless combinations of colors Pointillist painters used to create light and shade and depth and movement in their work. And the last sung lyrics—"... on an ordinary Sunday!"—stand in gloriously stark contrast to the shimmering, fortissimo, every-possible-note chording in the orchestra that is powerfully, thrillingly anything but normal.

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

Written at the literal dawn of the 20th century, this delicious work opens with a gorgeous, watery, almost circular pulse that deliciously grows and evolves and eventually explodes in a brassy, anthemic, triumphant statement of hearty Scandinavian pride. Its ebbing and flowing between muted contemplation and rousing, full-brass glory are textbook Romanticism, though it was written (in 1902) two years after the Romantic movement in music is conventionally defined as ending. 

I discovered this symphony via a CD that was shipped to me in error from an order I’d placed from a CD club in the mid-1990s, and I was literally enraptured by it within hearing its first subtle, pulsing phrases. Since then, I’ve heard it live more times than I can count, including once from the chorus seats (which are sold to the public for performances that don’t involve a chorus) above the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s mighty brass section in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The experience was profoundly transcendent for me.

Fun fact: Sibelius is probably most famous for his stirring 1889 tone poem Finlandia, which was written as a covert protest against growing censorship against the Russian Empire.

Today's Moment Of Pure Ridiculous Joy: "I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance"

Fun fact: There is a 2001 three-act opera exploring, parodying, mocking and even sympathizingly understanding the cultural underpinnings and social normalizations of The Jerry Springer Show. It is called (if you can even believe this name wasn’t already taken) Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Its breakout song—at least for gay men at massive circuit parties in the early 2000s—was “I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance,” in which a stripper who is done being belittled and called a whore takes ownership of the actions and choices her circumstances have offered her and proclaims “I’m tired of all this trying / I wanna do some living / ‘Cos I’ve done enough dying / I just wanna dance / I just wanna fucking dance!”

Yes, there is swearing. It’s about JERRY SPRINGER.

But back to us gays and our massive circuit parties (which are massively massive dance parties with laser light shows, rampant shirtlessness, speakers the size of industrial refrigerators and deafening remixes of awesome dance songs, with the exception of Madonna’s appalling rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” which is in every conceivable way the polar opposite of awesome and you are to NEVER MENTION AGAIN). Anyway, we gays OF COURSE made many deafening remixes of “I Just Wanna Dance,” which is an awesome dance song. Plus it’s about wanting to dance. TOTAL TWOFER.

Speaking of twofers, here’s a super-awesome remix (though we're now long past the 15th anniversary) paired with dance clips from every awesome genre of awesome movie musical from Sweet Charity to Xanadu. IT. IS. SO. AWESOME. Watch it. Love it. Sing along with it. If it doesn’t make you wanna be gay, it will at the very least make you wanna dance. I mean wanna FUCKIN' dance!

Movies: The Boys in the Band

I tried. Again. But the plot has way too many illogical stupidities. And I quit within the first hour.

I get how it was groundbreaking 50 years ago when it put gay men front and center in a narrative that didn’t play us as one-dimensional faggot stereotypes. And I appreciate that it let the gay characters be messy and imperfect and complicated and unlikable for reasons any other character in any other narrative could be unlikable.

But the conceit driving the entire plot was illogical then and it’s illogical now—and we’re no longer in a zeitgeist where gays are so desperate for representation that we’re slavishly thankful for sloppy pop culture just because it mentions us.

Maybe in another 50 years a director or screenwriter will find a plausible way to keep nine arguably unhappy people from en-masse leaving a hostile, toxic, physically violent birthday party before the end of the first act. Until then, I’ll just appreciate the fact that this revival appeared on Broadway and now in this movie starring all out gay actors, many of whom are relatively famous. And for that, I am indeed slavishly thankful.

Movies: Of Two Minds

I stumbled on this documentary about bipolar disorder last night on Amazon Prime, and it is so well done that I didn't even pick up my phone as I watched it. Which says A LOT.

The film follows the lives of four people living with bipolar disorder for over a year and veers off once in a while to profile a handful of others, which I think leaves viewers with a robust understanding of the commonalities bipolar people all deal with but really underscores the fact that no two people's experiences are the same. Some people (like me) have hallucinations, some cut themselves, some find manic episodes to be thrilling, some (like me) find them scary and exhausting, some experience functional depression, some (like me) fall into depression so deep that it's past the point of functioning and therefore safely past the point of being capable of self-harm, some attempt and eventually succeed at suicide, some hate taking meds and even refuse to fill their prescriptions, and some (like me) can never forget how awful it is to be off our meds and therefore take them religiously.

The people profiled are straight, gay and bisexual. Some are religious and some are atheists. Some have money and some are struggling so much that they can't afford their meds and rent and seriously consider leaving the United States for a country that can offer them healthcare. They live in cities all over North America. The documentary really does a deep dive into the environments and experiences that shape the way people manage their mental health—though my only criticism is that there are only three people of color, all of whom are just one-off side interviews, which I think really misses an opportunity to paint a more robust picture of experiences and contexts and cultures and personal decisions.

It's edited deftly to be thorough and intimately informational but not overwhelming. I was left feeling emotionally connected to everyone—to the point that I rooted for all of them but ended up angry at one person and genuinely disliking another.

If you or someone you love is living (or struggling) with bipolar disorder, I highly recommend watching this. 

Books: The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria

I tend to be obsessed with novels and documentaries about epic disasters—partly, like many people, to gawk at the sheer enormity of a catastrophic event, but mostly to find some level of personal, emotional understanding of what the people who were caught in it experienced.

The Andrea Doria was the epitome of Atlantic ocean-liner luxury in the middle of the century ... until 1956 when it was broadsided dead-on by the ice-cutting prow of the liner Stockholm in thick fog and then it slowly sank 45 miles south of Nantucket. And while The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria documents in great detail both the mechanics of the catastrophe and the harrowing stories of the passengers and crew, it does so with distracting clumsiness that's in desperate need of an editor.

There's a definite art to creating emotional, memorable relationships between a reader and even a handful of key players among the 1,100+ passengers on an ocean liner. Erik Larson (who wrote Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania and is perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City) sets the bar high with deftness, poetry and a smartly curated understanding of the human experience. Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria struggles and fails to reach that bar. To wit: Chapter 2 is little more than paragraph after relentless paragraph describing the lives and backgrounds and travel purposes of 100+ people. The paragraphs are all well-researched and filled with interesting information—but they're overwhelming, and they contain so many superfluous details and tertiary names that they become a numbing blur by the time they finish plodding by.

It's this clumsy, belabored lack of editing that makes the entire book feel somewhat like a high-school paper that's padded to reach a minimum number of pages. In perhaps the most egregious example, there's a paragraph that all but dominates page 72 with an excruciatingly detailed litany of 47 foods that may or may not appear on an evening's dinner menu. Honestly, does ANYONE find useful narrative value in knowing that First Class passengers "could choose from a variety of vegetables, including potatoes (mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried), cauliflower, roasted tomatoes, or sauteéd endive"? And for all the breathless descriptions of the ship's Mid-century Italian-chic décor, there isn't a single photo of its magnificent interior among the 16 pages of photos ... two of which are just full-page stylized print ads about the ship.

All that said, if you train your eyes and brain to skim past ponderous lists of beverages and games available in First Class—and, curiously, the names of the two helicopter pilots who eventually helped rescue the passengers—this is a gripping, detailed (though again: way too detailed in places), incredibly good read. It fully delivers in telling why-and-how details of the physical destruction of the collision and the passengers' and crew members' stories of terror, survival, heroism, cowardice and every attendant emotion in between—though because of the staggering volume of character introductions in Chapter 2 it's nearly impossible to remember who people are when they meet their fates on the sinking ship.

The Andrea Doria and its sinking were the last gasps of high-style ocean travel as passenger airplanes (literally) appeared on the horizon and dramatically cut transcontinental travel time and expense. To underscore this historical importance, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria nicely frames its narrative around the publication of A Night to Remember, which documented the sinking of the Titanic 40+ years before the Andrea Doria joined it at the bottom of the Atlantic. It's a clever, efficient way to compare and contrast both sinkings, offer historical and cultural perspective, and incorporate details of yet another epic catastrophe to keep me enthralled.

Happy 102nd birthday, Leonard Bernstein!

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its collision of overlapping themes; fearless jumps between walls of boisterous brass, swirls of tittering piccolos and swells of velvety strings; and headstrong, disobedient asymmetries that have no doubt awakened every conductor on the planet in cold sweats since 1956.

Here he is conducting his breathless juggernaut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1989. I know the musicians know the music. I know HE knows the music. But I fail to see any sense of dialogue between them as he conducts. It makes ME break out in a cold sweat, so I can't watch.

You can watch at your own peril. But do take four and a half minutes to just listen.

Books: Thunderstruck, Erik Larson

I've now read THREE WHOLE BOOKS since quarantine started. This one I read solely because I’ve loved everything else I’ve ever read by Erik Larson—from his gorgeously crafted prose to his exhaustive research to the deft triangulations he creates as he weaves disparate stories closer and closer to each other until their inevitable collisions into single narratives.

That said, this book starts out a bit slow and takes a tedious amount of time to pick up steam. But along the way, it provides a nuanced, meaningful understanding of the history and culture of Edwardian England and the early rumblings of the First World War. It parallels the invention of wireless communication with a gruesome murder that was at the time the international crime of the century—all as Germany breathes down England’s neck and Western Civilization is caught up in a collective fascination with the supernatural.

Larson writes sentences that are so evocative and beautifully cast that I often stop and re-read them multiple times just to admire their balance of artistry, exposition, insight and construction. I even read this one aloud—with no helpful context—to my parents because I loved it so much: “In the great conspiratorial tradition of Englishwomen of title, she invited Marconi to the island as well, this time as a houseguest.”

Theater program notes: End of the Rainbow

Judy Garland and a lifetime of chasing rainbows
by Jake Stigers

By December 1968, Judy Garland’s personal and professional résumé had amassed 30+ movies, hundreds of singles and albums, two Academy Award nominations, one Academy Juvenile Award, two Golden Globes, one Grammy, one Special Tony Award, two canceled studio contracts, four (and about to be five) husbands, three children, a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, multiple stints in rehab, crushing debt, and more highs and lows and crashes and comebacks than one lifetime can reasonably be expected to hold.

End of the Rainbow offers a theatrical take—and is there honestly any way other than theatrical to document Judy Garland’s life?—on the events surrounding what ended up being her final comeback attempt in a series of 1969 concerts at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub.


Once in a lullaby

Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to parents who had openly not welcomed their unexpected pregnancy, the future Judy Garland got her first enticing taste of performing at age 2 when she sang “Jingle Bells” on the stage of her family’s Minnesota theater. She and her two older siblings soon formed an act they called the Gumm Sisters, and they found a respectable amount of success touring the vaudeville circuit and even appearing in MGM movie shorts.

There’s a delightful theater legend that a Chicago playbill had misspelled their act as The Glum Sisters, which was the impetus for the girls to find a more glamorous stage name. The source of the name Garland has been attributed to everything from the character Lily Garland in Twentieth Century to drama critic Robert Garland to a casual comparison of the girls’ beauty to a garland of flowers. In any case, The Garland Sisters they became. And the future Judy went even farther by adopting a glamorous new first name from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.

The trio broke up in 1934 when the eldest Garland-née-Gumm sister eloped to Nevada with a musician and the rising-star Judy Garland found herself invited to audition for Louis B. Mayer in California. She belted her way through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!” and—as the stories go—was immediately offered an MGM contract without a screen test.

Judy was 13 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall (which she’d be for the rest of her life) and immediately made to be aware that she was nowhere near as beautiful or glamorous as the other up-and-coming movie stars—like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor—with whom she shared an MGM classroom. She was the cute girl next door with little in the way of major movie-star potential except for one thing: her voice. The cherubic, pint-sized teen had an impressive set of pipes and a natural aptitude for emotional performance that made her seem wiser and more worldly than her years every time she opened her mouth.

But to Mayer, her looks—specifically her weight—made her a hard sell to a movie-going public (he called her “my little hunchback”), and his studio put her on near-starvation diets of soup and lettuce to slim her down. And once young Judy had earned enough public adoration to make her a bankable star, MGM pumped her full of amphetamines to keep her awake long enough to work her to death and barbiturates to give her short fits of sleep at night.

In the process, they also gave her a lifetime of drug addictions and crippling self-esteem issues.


The dreams that you dare to dream

In 1939, Garland was catapulted from bankable child star to mega-bankable movie star by playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and—more specifically—by singing “Over the Rainbow,” a simple, soaring soliloquy inspired by Dorothy’s Auntie Em telling her to “find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.” The song became a breakout hit and a personal anthem of both hope and introspection for Garland that kept finding newer—sometimes profound, oftentimes heartbreaking—shades of meaning as her life and career careened through endless cycles of soaring successes, epic crashes and triumphant comebacks.

The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms—both released in 1939—earned Garland an Academy Juvenile Award, which surprisingly ended up being the only Oscar she ever won. But her star skyrocketed from there through iconic pairings with Mickey Rooney; iconic movies like Meet Me in St. Louis; and iconic affairs with other stars both single and married including Johnny Mercer, Tyrone Power and Orson Welles.

But her escalating problems with addiction and, later, mental illness eventually made her so unreliable and expensively absent from filmings that she was fired from three high-profile movies in pretty rapid succession: 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway (replaced by Ginger Rogers), 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun (replaced by Betty Hutton) and 1951’s Royal Wedding (replaced by Jane Powell). And in 1950, she was unceremoniously kicked out of MGM.


Troubles melt like lemon drops

Over the next two decades, Garland’s life and career raced up one mountain and careened down the next:

She headlined sold-out concerts and tours in London’s Palladium, Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Carnegie Hall—the last of which produced a two-record album that spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year.

She survived a number of suicide attempts, committed herself to repeated stays in mental hospitals, and developed acute hepatitis that threatened to leave her an invalid who would never sing again.

She made a grand comeback with her 1954 remake of A Star is Born, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was thought to be such a shoo-in that even though she was recovering from the birth of her son Joey, television crews set up cameras in her hospital room to televise her acceptance speech the night of the ceremony. They reported packed up and left her alone in her room before the surprise winner—Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl—even got to the stage to accept her trophy.

She signed a contract with Random House to write an autobiography with the working title The Judy Garland Story but was unable to stay focused and on-task to finish it in the nine years until her death.

She launched a successful TV variety show on CBS called The Judy Garland Show that received critical acclaim but was canceled due to poor ratings (it was slotted against NBC’s juggernaut Bonanza) and industry politics. While introducing a young Barbra Streisand to the nation on her show, she candidly told Streisand “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me. … Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a blizzard. An absolute blizzard.”

She was cast as the desperately aging, shamelessly man-hungry Helen Lawson in the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls, but her alcoholism and unreliability—compounded by her cruel treatment by director Mark Robson, who saw her only as a source of scandal-inspired publicity—got her fired soon after production began.

She found herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that she could never resurface from thanks to failed investments in movie projects, unscrupulous managers, gambling husbands, skyrocketing interest on back taxes and her own failures at managing her money. She even had to sell her Brentwood home at a loss to help dig herself out of it.


Happy little bluebirds fly

Garland’s lifetime quest for approval, love and stability also led to five marriages and four divorces with musician David Rose (she was 19; he was 31), director Vincente Minnelli (with whom she had daughter Liza), tour manager and producer Sidney Luft (with whom she had daughter Lorna and son Joey), actor Mark Herron (they both accused each other of domestic abuse and the marriage ended within six months), and disco manager and opportunist Mickey Deans (whom she married a month after her Talk of the Town concerts).


When all the world is a hopeless jumble …

So Garland approached her five-week concert engagement at London’s Talk of the Town—which inspired the narrative of End of the Rainbow—as a triumphant return to the adoring audiences of her 1951 Palladium concerts, as a yet-again comeback that proved she still had it … and as a source of desperately needed income to finally extricate herself from her crippling debt and start a new life with her children.

The concerts were—as End of the Rainbow playwright Peter Quilter describes it—an “emotional car crash.” She staggered and slurred—often in the sequined orange brocade suit she kept from Valley of the Dolls—through her performances. The sold-out audiences often threw food at her to show their anger over her on-stage messiness and infuriating lateness.

And the reviewers did not hold back. The Guardian said the shows seemed “like her 93rd comeback” and stated that “she evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. … In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius.” Time called the performances more “seance” than “concert” and wrote a year later in her obituary that they “turned out to be the biggest flop of her life” and that she looked like a “walking casualty.”


And the raindrops tumble all around …

End of the Rainbow—though now based on the Talk of the Town concerts—didn’t start out about Judy Garland at all. Playwright Peter Quilter had written a 2001 play called Last Song of the Nightingale about a past-her-prime diva inspired by an alcoholic cruise-ship performer he had known. It starred Tracie Bennett, who said her character felt like a roman à clef for Garland in her Talk of the Town performances. Quilter reworked the play, and End of the Rainbow premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. It won Caroline O’Connor three Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Garland. Bennett took over the role in 2010 when it came home to London, where the show won four Olivier Awards, including Best Actress and Best New Play. Bennett also received a Tony nomination when she brought the show to Broadway in 2012.

End of the Rainbow also inspired the 2019 movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Garland. While End of the Rainbow underscores Garland’s emotional and professional claustrophobia at this point in her life by confining the off-stage narrative to her Ritz Hotel suite, Judy builds Garland’s journey to catastrophe in slow claps with flashbacks to cruel adults, exhausting schedules, and a calculated, inevitable addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates.


When all the clouds darken up the skyway …

Garland made her final concert appearance on March 25, 1969—ten days after marrying fifth husband Mickey Deans—in Copenhagen, and she performed there with the same display of disorientation, collapse and horror she’d exhibited in London.

Three months later, on June 22, 1969, Deans discovered Garland dead in the bathroom of their run-down London rental. The death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was just 12 days past her 47th birthday.


There's a rainbow highway to be found …

Garland’s funeral was on June 27 in New York City, and an estimated 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects. That night, New York’s Stonewall Inn—a gay bar run by the mafia—was raided by police. Raids of gay bars were commonplace, and patrons always meekly and with shame let themselves be arrested and humiliated in the next day’s papers.

But this time the patrons fought back, throwing bricks and bottles, trapping the police in the bar, and effectively starting the march toward equality for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

Garland—in her personal story arc from fabulous screen ingénue to fierce survivor—had been an icon to gay men, who often used “friend of Dorothy” in reference to her Wizard of Oz character as code to clandistinely identify themselves to each other in public. Whether her funeral was an impetus for the Stonewall rising or just coincidentally on the same day is still passionately debated among historians and devotees, but it is nevertheless tied to the uprising in the minds and hearts of gay people to this day.


There’s a place behind the sun …

Of Garland’s endurance and resilience in the public’s—and not just gay people’s—hearts and minds, Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann once declared “I think Judy will always come back. She kids about making a lot of comebacks, but I think Judy has a kind of a thing where she has to get to the bottom of the rope and things have to get very, very rough for her. Then with an amazing inner strength that only comes of a certain genius, she comes back bigger than ever.”


There’s a place beyond the rain …

Of the profound endurance of the song “Over the Rainbow,” Judy star Renée Zellweger told Vanity Fair that people “have nostalgic feelings from childhood attached to that song, but in Judy’s life, it’s something different. She weathered so many insurmountable challenges in her life, and it’s about her maintaining hope. In spite of all her difficulties, she still carried on.”


Jake Stigers regularly writes about the arts for theaters in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and often makes his own triumphant comebacks on their stages.

1. 3.01 miles!

2. Or as they say in Allcapsland, THREE POINT OH ONE MILES!
3. I’m quite proud of this.
4. You know what else I’m proud of?
5. I’ll tell you.
6. Because it’s MY blog.
7. And I’m feeling braggy.
8. And I’m padding this list.
9. So I can get to 52.
10. Like my new age.
11. Anyway ...
12. This is what else I’m proud of:
13. I figured out how to make a map thingie of my running route!
14. Just like all the cool kids!
15. Finding the map view on my running app isn’t very intuitive though.
16. It’s not even in the menu on the help page.
17. This is stupid.
18. I’m talking to you, Garmin interface designers.
19. Ahem.
20. Anyway ...
21. You know what ELSE I’m proud of?
22. I’ll tell you that too.
23. Just as soon as I pad this list some more.
24. Almost ...
25. There ...
26. BAM! Halfway to 52!
27. Where was I?
28. (Though you and I both know I know exactly where I was.)
28. (Because I’m bragging about myself.)
29. (Who gets lost bragging?)
30. (Nobody, that’s who.)
31. (Plus I’m padding this list.)
32. (Plus I’m being all meta and telling you I’m padding this list.)
32. (And other parenthetical things.)
33. So I found this free meme-making/photo-editing app called piZap.
34. I highly recommend it.
35. If making memes and messing around with photos is your thing.
35. And I’m getting really proficient with it.
36. Because LOOK AT THE COOL COLLAGE I MADE WITH IT.
37. Because memes and rudimentary photo hacking are totally my thing.
38. In case you hadn’t noticed.
39. (Padding.)
40. (Padding.)
41. (Padding.)
42. (Because the Rule of Three.)
43. ((It’s a writer thing.))
44. Wanna know what I’m not proud of?
45. That 13:46 pace.
46. I might as well have been walking.
47. Backwards.
48. On my knees.
49. But still:
50. THREE POINT OH ONE MILES!
51. And also:
52. FIFTY TWO!

Theater program notes: Oklahoma!

Published November 21, 2019, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! brings a genre—and a country—up to date
by Jake Stigers

When the curtain rose for the first performance of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943, neither the creative team and actors nor the audience members knew they were literally at a new frontier—if I may grab an obvious metaphor from the source material—of American musical theater. Until then, musicals as the American public knew them were little more than collections of songs, skits, dances and Vaudeville acts assembled loosely around a generic theme—like love, patriotism or beautiful girls with their legs showing—or sometimes no theme at all.

Sixteen years earlier, Florenz Ziegfeld had launched Show Boat, a musical with a defined narrative and loosely contextualized songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern. It was a radical departure from the entertainment frippery that audiences were used to, and it was well-received enough that it ran for a year and a half. But the songs were written to be catchy and popular more than to drive the narrative, and some even got changed out for new songs that were better suited to new actors over time.

With Oklahoma!, Hammerstein—now working with composer Richard Rodgers—brought this concept to its full fruition; the show’s music and lyrics were fully integrated into the story, and instead of stopping the narrative for the sake of entertainment they advanced the plot, defined the characters and established context. And while some of the show’s musical elements seem quaint or ponderous to modern audiences, the concept at the time was nothing short of an artistic revelation.

Oklahoma! takes place in 1908, sixteen years after Oklahoma was declared a United States territory and one year before it was to become our 46th state. Inspired by Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play that was in turn inspired by a folk song of the same name, Oklahoma! is at its core the story of farm girl Laurie Williams and the two suitors vying for her affections. And while through modern eyes the narrative is problematic in its attitudinal subtexts about women, race and the mentally ill, the story’s overall themes of community, potential and the excitement of destiny will seemingly always resonate with its audiences.

In addition to its blockbuster redefinition of an entire genre, Oklahoma! marked a number of other notable firsts:

It was the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ longtime collaborator Lorenz Hart had fallen into a state of alcoholism and unreliability, and Hammerstein was looking desperately to redeem himself after six consecutive Broadway flops. Theirs ended up being a particularly symbiotic collaboration as well—Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before any music was composed so he could create the story he wanted, and Rodgers preferred to craft music to fit both the structure and sentiment of completed lyrics—and the two went on to create many iconic musicals together including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

It was the first musical-by-any-definition choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Her ballet Rodeo, choreographed the previous year to music by Aaron Copland, had pulled her from relative obscurity and brought her to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s attention. She’d constructed Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, an international company that had moved to the United States to compete with the rival company Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and the American-cowboy movement vocabulary she’d created for these classically trained international dancers became a useful foundation for her creation of Oklahoma! De Mille went on to choreograph decades of iconic Broadway musicals, most notably Brigadoon, for which she won the first-ever Tony Award for choreography when the awards premiered in 1947

The show had no stars. In keeping with their revolutionary idea to focus on telling a complete, holistic story through their fully integrated material, Rodgers and Hammersein took a bold step in hiring singers and actors who were dramatically appropriate for the roles instead of bringing in marquee names and bankable stars whose fame could be a distraction from the story’s rural, anonymous, hardscrabble setting.

Oklahoma!—originally titled Away We Go!—had done reasonably well with audiences in its New Haven and Boston tryouts, though producer Mike Todd famously walked out of a performance after the first act and predicted its failure with the words “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But it was an immediate and overwhelming success on Broadway and ran for 2,212 performances and then toured the country for another ten years. Interestingly, Florence Henderson—the eventual ’70s TV mom Carol Brady—played the ingénue Laurie in the last company on the tour. When she was also cast to play Laurie opposite Gordon MacRae in a 1954 TV tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, she was considered a shoe-in to play Laurie opposite MacRae in the 1955 movie. But she lost out to Shirley Jones, the eventual ’70s TV mom Shirley Partridge.

Oklahoma! premiered fifteen months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged our country from a neutrality to an active participant in World War II. Nobody knew at the time that the war would be over in a year and a half, but the tide had turned for the Allies by the show’s 1943 premiere—and if the country wasn’t feeling completely optimistic, it enthusiastically embraced this musical that was bursting at the seams with the promise of new life and new opportunity and new hope told through the lens of a small town in a territory on the verge of becoming an American state.

Like the theatrical genre telling the story, our country was in the throes of mighty change. And Curly McLain, one of Laurie’s Oklahoma! suitors, sums up the shared Zeitgeist in a particularly joyous speech he makes to her in Act II as he contemplates all the exciting possibilities:

“Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They’re gonna make a state out of this territory, they gonna put it in the Union! Country’s a-changin’, got to change with it!”

Movies: Midway

I think perhaps the most important purpose that historical cinema—even when it’s historical fiction or historical fantasia—serves is the time capsule of both the epic events and the mundane details of history it provides, with context and perspective that help people today and in the future better appreciate the people and events of our collective past.

To wit: Midway.

We in 2019 America probably all know the most essential fact of Pearl Harbor—that the Japanese bombed us—but even if we understand the larger significance of the event—that the unprovoked bombing of our Hawaii Naval base dragged us from being a neutral country to an active participant World War II ... and a participant who was crippled from the start with an overwhelming number of our Pacific Naval fleet destroyed—we’ve almost all but forgotten the subsequent battle of Midway, where through a LOT of strategy and a touch of miracle we managed to turn the tide of the war and keep the United States from becoming captured and controlled by the Japanese.

The new Midway movie, which opened this weekend for Veterans’ Day, tells this story with clarity, rich historical context and breathtaking CGI. But more importantly, it tells the human stories with CGI perspectives that bring to life the in-the-boots bravery and the terror and the sacrifice of our soldiers with heart-stopping clarity.

It’s so easy to see veterans of long-ago wars as the old, feeble, wrinkled people they’ve become from our current perspective. But historical movies like Midway help us see who they were when they were young and vital ... and exhibiting the bravery and the terror and the sacrifice that protected our country’s freedoms then and now.

The Midway movie is excellent cinema on its own, filled with artful drama and excitement and handsome movie stars, but more importantly it’s a documentation—again documentation through the lens of cinematic storytelling—of the historic events and lives and stories we as modern Americans really can’t afford to forget ... both as patriotic, informed citizens and as a nation grateful to the veterans who’ve served on our behalf.

Go see it.

Theater program notes: Hello, Dolly!

Dolly Gallagher Levi may very well have played matchmaker for your great-great-great grandparents
by Jake Stigers

Dolly Levi’s meddling, matchmaking story in Hello, Dolly! has origins so old that they predate the Victorian Era by two years: The 1964 musical was inspired by the 1955 play The Matchmaker, which was in turn inspired by the 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. Both were written by Thornton Wilder, who is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-winning play Our Town.

But Dolly’s genealogy doesn’t stop there. Wilder took his ideas from a play written almost a century earlier: the 1842 mega-titled Einen Jux will er sich machen (He Will Go on a Spree or He'll Have Himself a Good Time), which found Dolly’s original inspiration in A Day Well Spent, an English one-act written in 1835.

Though the Dolly we know and love today didn’t arrive fully formed at the dawn of this literary journey, her universally relatable joy, optimism, determination—and perhaps her employment of a little manipulation in the pursuit of love—have kept her in our hearts for 55 years … and have given her a Billboard-topping cast album, Oscar-winning movie and now four Broadway revivals along the way.

Hello, Dolly! was originally written for the brassy Broadway beltress Ethel Merman, who turned it down but six years later took over the role and played Dolly until the show closed in 1970. Mary Martin—star of South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music—also turned down Dolly and then ended up playing her in London.

So it fell to Carol Channing, a lesser-known veteran of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town, to bring our Dolly Gallagher Levi to life through Jerry Herman’s glorious music, Gower Champion’s direction (also not a first choice; he got the job after Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins turned it down), and what would become an iconic jewel-drenched red dress and matching feathered halo. The show ended up railroading past Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl that season to win a whopping 10 Tony Awards, a tie with 1949’s South Pacific that wouldn’t be broken until The Producers racked up 12 Tony Awards 37 years later.

The original Broadway production ran six years and 2,844 performances and saw its first revival—with an all-black cast led by Pearl Bailey—only five years after it closed. Dolly has been played by a pantheon of stars since then including Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Yvonne De Carlo, Betty White, Bernadette Peters, and (of course) Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. And she’s clearly listened to her eponymous song, because she doesn’t ever go away … and clearly nobody wants her to.

From her humble, generations-old origins to her enduring blockbuster musical, which was originally titled—and I am not making this up—Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman, Dolly Gallagher Levi looks to continue bringing hearts together and audiences to their feet for generations to come.


It’s worth noting that Thornton Wilder loved Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! so much that he promised to rewrite his Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth for her so she could play both female leads. He died before he finished the rewrite, but you as Theatre Cedar Rapids audience members will soon have the opportunity to see The Skin of Our Teeth in its original form in our downstairs Grandon Theatre. It runs April 3-19, 2020, so please don’t go away until you’ve gotten your tickets.

Books: Flesh and Blood

I read this book years ago in a book club in Chicago. Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then—and still to this day—preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And I almost never read a book twice.

Anyway: In Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy—mightily named Constantine Stassos—eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.