#471 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Saturday October 1)
Good morning,
POETRY
Today, a poem of irony and a story:
Richard Cory
By Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
THE CONNECTION WITH TONY CURTIS
The second stanza of this poem appears on the gravestone of Tony Curtis. Curtis was a rags-to-riches star, born Bernard Schwartz, who had remarkable successes in his career, a cooling off toward the end, when he became a character actor. Always larger than life, he also lived hard, on drugs and alcohol. He suffered from a medical school list of maladies, including cocaine addiction, COPD, and heart disease.
Not only did he choose this interesting, perhaps telling, stanza from a poem that suggests fame and fortune might not be as they appear, he was buried with any number of his favorite things, including a Stetson, shorts, the ashes of his dog, a DVD containing scenes from his movies, and eight packets of Splenda.
My Tony Curtis moment was some thirty years ago. I was in a restaurant with a number of my male friends when Curtis walked in with a gorgeous blond on his arm. He toward us with a smug and knowing look, as if to say, “look at me—I’ve still got it.”
MUSIC
A few weeks ago we attended a concert that ended with the 1812 Overture. This got me thinking about great overtures. Everyone has their favorites. Here are a few of mine, trying to share from a variety of musical eras:
“Carnival Overture,” by Antonin Dvorak
“Candide Overture,” by Leonard Bernstein
“Academic Festival Overture,” by Johannes Brahms
“Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture,” by Peter Tchaikovsky
“Egmont Overture,” by Ludwig van Beethoven
Have a great day,
Glenn
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