Thurber Tonight: "Pythagoras and the Ladder" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

"Happy living, [Professor Pitkin] confidently asserted, could be attained by at least six or seven people out of every ten, but he figured that not more than one person in a thousand was actually attaining it."

-- from "Pythagoras and the Ladder,"
the first piece in the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series

by Ken

In this last week I think we'll try to fill some gaps and tie up some loose ends. For example, in Let Your Mind Alone! and other more or less inspirational pieces, from the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series I plucked out two pieces I especially love, "Destructive Forces in Life" (remember that infamous joker Burt Scursey?) and "Anodines for Anxiety." I regret having skipped over the first piece, "Pythagoras and the Ladder," in which Thurber explained the premise of the series. So tonight let's plug that gap.


FOR "PYTHAGORAS AND THE LADDER," CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series:

2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
6. "Anodines for Anxieties"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Curb in the Sky"

AN ANTHOLOGIST CAN'T PLEASE EVERYONE, BUT --: As you can see from this June post, I wasn't pleased to discover that Garrison Keillor, editor of the Library of America Thurber volume, had omitted "The Curb in the Sky" (along with the whole of "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Polite English Usage"). -- Ken

Again,* from "The War Between Men and Women"

(and again, you can click on it to enlarge it)

[*The previous night's post, noted below, which featured "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," had also come with a drawing from "The War Between Men and Women." -- Ed.]

"When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down."

-- from "The Curb in the Sky"

by Ken



Tuesday night I described "The Curb in the Sky" as "seriously amusing but also strikingly, ineffably poignant." As compared with last night's "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," another tale of a, shall we say, "unintact" marriage, this one falls on the other side of the invisible line that, as I put it, "once you've stepped over, you've overstepped."



I noticed in Keith Olbermann's "Fridays with Thurber" reading of "The Greatest Man in the World" that he announced at the outset that he was reading as always from the Library of America edition of Thurber Writings and Drawings edited by Garrison Keillor. I guess it's a useful book, with so much swell stuff included, but one of the first things I discovered when I finally acquired a copy a year or two ago was the omission of what I consider one of the most essential Thurber texts, "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage" (from The Owl in the Attic).



Now, looking at the online contents listing for the LoA volume (somehow or other I quickly managed to misplace my copy), I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that "The Curb in the Sky" is omitted! Now I love Garrison Keillor immoderately (didn't I just quote him at length the other night?), but jeepers, to not include "The Curb in the Sky"? What the dickens was he using for brains?





DON'T LISTEN TO THAT DOPE KEILLOR! TO

READ "THE CURB IN THE SKY," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "No Standing Room Only" -- with a note on the early career of Vincent Price

THIS FEBRUARY "THURBER TONIGHT"

POST WAS ONE OF MY FAVORITES --



Not just for the piece itself, though I really love "No Standing Room Only." (Thurber himself records that he "brooded about this affair for quite a few days and nights," which was probably never a good thing for people in the potential line of fire when the brooding exploded.) But for "value added," I think DWT readers really got their money's worth here. Unless folks no longer know or care who Helen Hayes and Vincent Price were, which I realize is entirely possible. -- Ken





Ventures Thurber: "I somehow have the idea that Harry Essex, the company manager, didn't really understand what Miss Hayes said." (In this Bernard Hoffman photo for Life magazine, the 37-year-old Helen Hayes works on her makeup during a costume change for a March 1938 tour performance of Victoria Regina.)



"Just how many bewildered people were turned away in all on this sentimental occasion, I don't know, but I'm glad I wasn't the box-office man."

-- James Thurber, in "No Standing Room Only"

by Ken



"No Standing Room Only" appeared originally in The New Yorker of March 20, 1937, and in book form later that year in Let Your Mind Alone!; and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces.



A 1937 New Yorker reader would surely have known that playwright Charles MacArthur (1895-1956) -- co-author with his frequent writing partner Ben Hecht of the raucous Chicago-newspaper comedy The Front Page -- was the husband of Helen Hayes (1900-1993). (Their son James, who died just this past October, became the busy actor best known now for playing the busily-booking-'em Danno in the original Hawaii Five-O, and their son John was the "John D. MacArthur" of the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation that gives the genius awards.)





WHAT EXACTLY WAS MISS HAYES'S UNUSUAL IDEA FOR

CELEBRATING THE PLAY'S ANNIVERSARY? CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

BEFORE WE FIRST MET WALTER MITTY, IN DECEMBER --



I wrote a note about Thurber's considerable displeasure with the making of the film version, in connection with the obvious connection between the fable "The Unicorn in the Garden" and his other most memorable piece of short fiction, the altogether dazzling "The Catbird Seat" -- and I included a link to the complete text of "The Catbird Seat" online.





The opening of MGM's 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye as the intrepid fantasist and Fay Bainter as Mrs. Mitty. Thurber, who was not a fan of the film, wrote in a 1949 letter: "The trouble with the Goldwyn picture was that you could see no difference between Walter's dreams and his accomplishments."



by Ken



"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which first appeared in The New Yorker of March 18, 1939 (and was subsequently collected in My World and Welcome to It and The Thurber Carnival), isn't anywhere near my favorite Thurber piece, but of course I love it. How could anyone not? I'm not sure Thurber ever reached more resolutely into readers' deep consciousness, nor have many other writers traveled there as confidently or fearlessly.



I've mentioned how disillusioned Thurber became during the writing of the screenplay for the film, which wound up being primarily a vehicle for Danny Kaye's broadest brand of humor (in the early stages of the project Thurber thought he might actually be a good piece of casting), a poor reflection of the author's funny and sad secret journey into these little-noted recesses of the quietly despairing everyday mind. But the film retained just enough contact to touch that secret place in a lot of moviegoers. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.





TO ENTER "THE SECRET WORLD

OF WALTER MITTY," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning"

AGAIN WE BRACKET "A RIDE WITH OLYMPY" WITH THE

SEMENTZOFF FAMILY SEQUEL, "JOYEUX NOËL, MR. DURNING"



[Note: It's largely on the strength of the "Ride with Olympy" connection that I chose "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning" over the other great Thurber "correspondence saga," "File and Forget." But since we're not going to be reprising the latter, at least not this week, I want to make sure everyone remembers about it. -- Ken]







Last night we made the acquaintance of Maria and Olympy Sementzoff via Thurber's 1938 account of the famous "Ride With Olympy" on Cap d'Antibes. Now we jump over World War II and several years beyond to this sort-of-sequel, which appeared originally in The New Yorker of July 2, 1949. -- Ken





IT STARTED AS AN INNOCENT CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM ABROAD.

IT TURNED INTO "JOYEUX NOËL, MR. DURNING" -- CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "A Ride with Olympy"

AS I WROTE ORIGINALLY, IN DECEMBER:



"A Ride With Olympy" first appeared in the New Yorker of April 30, 1938. It was collected in My World and Welcome to It (1942) and then appeared in The Thurber Carnival. As we'll see tomorrow night, there's a reason -- apart from the story's own considerable pleasures -- why we're visiting it. -- Ken





FOR OUR ENCORE PRESENTATION OF

"A RIDE WITH OLYMPY," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Night the Bed Fell" from "My Life and Hard Times"

Some nights she threw them all.

by Ken



We eventually covered most of Thurber's 1933 fictionalized autobiography My Life and Hard Times (see the series index), starting with the "Preface to a Life." The book, which was reproduced in whole in the invaluable 1945 anthology The Thurber Carnival, may have been too successful for the author's eventual liking, because for a lot of readers it set the tone of inspired goofiness which they then wanted him to sustain the rest of his career, while there were lots of other kinds of writing he wanted to do -- often very funny, yes, but not quite as uncomplicatedly zany as My Life and Hard Times.



Still, I can't think of a better place to start our week of Thurber "encore presentations" (with apologies again to Car Talk's Tom and Ray) than with the first of the autobiography's ten chapters, "The Night the Bed Fell."





FOR OUR ENCORE PRESENTATION OF

"THE NIGHT THE BED FELL," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role "in shaping the modern 'New Yorker' cartoon"

This is the cartoon with which, Bob Mankoff says, Thurber changed the course of cartooning "in one fell swoop" in 1932.

by Ken

I indicated in my first quick take Sunday night on the celebration of Thurber earlier that evening at the 92nd Street Y ringmastered by Keith Olbermann that I would probably want to come back to it, and even after sort of doing so parenthetically in my Tuesday post about Keith's Rolling Stone interview remarks about Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, I knew that there was lots of important stuff still left out.

Most importantly, perhaps, I hadn't more than mentioned the presence of New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Happily, Bob gives us his take on the event in his Cartoon Desk blogpost this week. As I've mentioned, you can also sign up -- for free! -- to have Bog's weekly blogposts delivered directly to your e-mailbox, and those blogposts are probably the happy-makingest thing I can look forward to finding there. Let me repeat my previous instructions, "On the home page, look down on the right side for a tab that gives you checkboxes for two weekly NEWSLETTERS: "This Week" and "Cartoons," and this time add a link for the home page, newyorker.com. Also, it's been a full four days since I blogged about Bob's blogposts ("The results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption").

First let me say that seeing and hearing Bob in person was a treat and an insight. In his blogposts he seems so calm and logical; in person, he's kind of a wild man -- though an extremely calm and logical wild man. I'm delighted to have his account of Sunday's program. More important; he's made it possible for me to share with you the presentation he offered, which I was dreading having to try to characterize in clumsy paraphrase.

"I gave a little presentation," he writes, "claiming that, important as Thurber was to humor writing, he was even more influential in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon."


AND HERE IS BOB'S PRESENTATION

In the early twentieth century, cartoons were illustrated anecdotes.


The same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker.


Even this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928 cartoon from 1928 comes from the same template:


Something more refreshing was needed, and James Thurber provided it in one fell swoop in 1932.


That year, Thurber published an astonishing forty-two cartoons in the magazine. Other swoops -- by Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and others -- would follow, but Thurber’s was the earliest and the swoopiest. His minimalist but expressive style, later adopted by such diverse talents as Charles Barsotti, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), and Michael Maslin, turned out to be the perfect vehicle for delineating the small things in life which loom so large.


It was also suited to permitting the interplay between fantasy and reality that let cartoons go anywhere the imagination could take a cartoonist. Thurber created the prototype for this genre in that annus mirabilis, 1932:

* * *

BY THE WAY, WE'VE HAD BOTH THURBER'S AND E. B. WHITE'S
ACCOUNTS OF THE SEAL-CARTOON -- OR SO I THOUGHT

Thurber's appeared in an "author's memoir" he wrote in 1950 for a new edition of his first published collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments (1932), which I reproduced in this October 2006 post. White's more detailed account appeared in his introduction for a new edition of the book he cowrote with Thurber, Is Sex Necessary?, originally published in 1929. I'm assuming that I reproduced it in the promised follow-up post to the above, but I'll be darned if I can find it, and I'm wondering whether this was one of those follow-up posts I promised and somehow never got around to writing.

I have found a December 2010 post in which I claimed to be linking back to the post that contained the White version, but on checking that link, it turns out to be to the post I've just linked to. So for the moment you'll have to do with Thurber's more limited account. I think we'll have to schedule White's Is Sex Necessary introduction for an "E. B. White Tonight" post. (First I'll have to find the replacement copy for my missing one which I was so thrilled to have acquired online for a penny.)

OH YES, A FOOTNOTE TO THAT THURBER CARTOON
ANNUS MIRABILUS OF 1932

Bob Mankoff is amazed by that year in which Thurber published 42 cartoons in The New Yorker. In Sunday's panel, that great writer Calvin Trillin recalled having discovered in the magazine archives that in one year (if he mentioned which year, I didn't catch it) he published 51 casuals, the magazine's term for what we would call humor pieces. Trillin recalled being impressed with himself the year he topped a fellow writer by breaking their tie and having his sixth published. "One a week?" he mused.

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From Keith Olbermann comes a perspective on Tim Russert which really alters my perception of him

Keith O, from the Rolling Stone interview

"I don't know that there's going to be anything hugely different that's visible to the viewer. It's not going to be like, 'I'm going to do the last half of the show topless.' But the freedom from the wear and tear of having to get past a bunch of people mumbling, 'Oh, I don't know . . .' It's the key to the operation, it really is."

-- Keith Olbermann, in Rolling Stone,
on the new Current TV incarnation of Countdown

by Ken

I don't mean to become a shill for Keith Olbermann, although I suppose there are worse things a person could become a shill for. But I really was surprised by how satisfying the Thurber celebration he ringmastered from his wheelchair (for his broken foot) Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y was. His own reading, with projections of the drawings, of the whole of the "parable in pictures" The Last Flower, one of the supremely great books ever to find its way into print, left me kind of shivery. (It was, by the way, E. B. White -- I couldn't remember whether it was White or Thurber -- who pronounced this his favorite Thurber book.)

ONE THING I MEANT TO MENTION SUNDAY . . .

Rosie and Keith backstage at the 92nd Street Y Sunday

The Last Flower also has one of the all-time great book dedications. Published as World War II was breaking out, it was dedicated: "For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine." What I didn't know is that the latest edition of The Last Flower, from the University of Iowa Press, was designed by Rosie's daughter, Thurber's granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. Both she and her mother signed copies afterward.

Rosie, by the way, among other contributions, read the great fable "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (which we read here), which she recalled first reading at about the same time she found out that Thurber was her father, when she was eight, and was delighted to find that it was her father who had written the moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," and understood this about what little girls understood.

I do want to make sure everyone knows that the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuts on Current TV this coming Monday at 8pm. How many people will be able to watch is another question, and one that Keith is clearly agonizing over. In the question period of the Thurber program, an audience member expressed the hope that he would soon be able to see Current TV on Cablevision, and Keith wished him luck. Evidently there have been discussions with "Mr. Dolan" and his people which haven't been terribly fruitful.

NOW, ABOUT KEITH O AND TIM RUSSERT (AND
ALSO, NOT TO HIS CREDIT, TOM BROKAW)

Anyway, none of this is why I brought Keith up again. It's because of some things he says which I found fascinating in a recent interview with Mark Binelli in the June 23 Rolling Stone. If you haven't read the interview, you really should -- and also the selection of "outtakes" from the interview published online. 

Here's the thread that particularly got my attention:

When did things start to change for you at MSNBC?

It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. He used to go to them and say, "Leave him alone, we can handle the blowback, I'll take care of it." After he died, Maureen, his wife, told me that she used to have to wrest the channel-changer away from him every night, because he loved to watch the show. She said, "You deal with this all day and you have to watch it again?" He said, "I have to see what he's saying about it, it's the best." I teared up and said, "I didn't know that." She said, "He thought you already had a big enough head."

Mark asks Keith about Tom Brokaw's public criticism of him "for 'going too far' in injecting commentary into your campaign coverage," and apparently before he gets Brokaw's name out, at the words "during the 2008 election," Keith is fetching a piece of paper from his wallet.

Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is -- it already came apart. March 5, 2008, Wednesday morning, 9:45 a.m. "Keith, game ball goes to you for last night. I've been at this for 40 years and have a full appreciation for how tricky it is to go from commentator to anchor, get the news out, manage the many egos, make sure lots of different points of view are represented, maintain your own place in the proceedings, you did it all splendidly." You can see the name of who sent that [Tom Brokaw].

So there you have it. I've never shared that with anybody before. Now you have a private comment that he didn't seem to remember when he made his public comment five months later.

Originally, Keith says, he carried this note around because --

it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for. What he said there was that you can be a commentator and an anchor, you can get your points across and yet be neutral when you're supposed to be neutral. From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Then what it meant to me is, "Wow, things change fast after people like Russert die."

I have to say, what Keith has to say about Tim Russert really does change my view of the guy. Not of his performance on the air, which still seems to me to have been cowardly and self-serving, but of what we learn here about his impact behind the scenes, where he really does seem to have extended himself to make it possible for NBC News people to be, well, less cowardly and self-serving than the pressures of the business would otherwise have permitted.

Is it possible that this effort was so heroic as to confuse him into thinking he was being heroic on the air? Because my very strong image of Russert as a journalist is that he was the consummate, perhaps even ultimate, Village Insider, using those considerable smarts and that quick verbal agility to enforce the conventional wisdom of the status quo. In fact, the very fact that he came to Big Media from the political world (first as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later as counsel to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) seems to have helped cement the alliance of Beltway politics and media.

I don't suppose Russert was necessarily beloved of the pols who trooped onto Meet the Press and ran into his "gotcha" buzzsaw. But I think even the stumblingest victims understood that he was on their side, that they were in it together -- and unfortunately they were in it together largely against us, the unwashed and unserious masses. That he was as good at what he did as he was made it on the whole worse.

Nothing Keith says here changes my opinion about any of that. But that there was more to what Tim Russert was and did, that someone like Keith thought of him as both an inspiration and a protector -- well, this really adds a dimension to my image of him.

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Thurber Tonight -- special edition: At the 92nd Street Y Thurber "do," Keith O gives a virtuoso performance

"I am trying to use reason and intelligence," said the strange new mongoose.

"Reason is six-sevenths of treason," said one of his neighbors.

"Intelligence is what the enemy uses," said another.

-- from Thurber's "The Peacelike Mongoose"

by Ken

I'm just back from the "celebration" of Thurber I mentioned the other day, with Keith Olbermann and friends Rosemary Thurber, the author's daughter (who is extremely wary of public events, and hadn't been in New York in a lot of years before coming for this event); Bob Mankoff, the cartoonist and cartoon editor of The New Yorker; and longtime New Yorker reporter and humorist Calvin Trillin. The moderator, political comic Scott Blakeman, noted that with Keith's new version of Countdown going on the Current TV air a week from tomorrow, June 20, he was taking time out from what is probably the busiest week of his career -- and that on top of having to wheel himself out in a wheelchair as a result of breaking his foot.

It was actually, to my surprise, really nice. There was even a stretch -- when Keith read Thurber's The Last Flower (which either Thurber or E. B. White, I forget which, declared his favorite Thurber book) while the crucial drawings of this words-and-drawings book were projected. I couldn't imagine that this would work very well, The Last Flower being such a "booky" kind of book, but the projections of the drawings projected them surprisingly successfully, and in combination Keith read the text splendidly.


I'll probably have more to say about the event, but for tonight, I'm pushing back the scheduled "Perelman Tonight" in order to bring you the story that has become one of Keith's most important readings -- and, as we'll see, non-readings. It was the fable "The Peacelike Mongoose" that was the first Thurber text Keith read on Countdown, at the urging of his hospital-bound father, to whom he had been reading everything he could think of, including (much to his father's pleasure) Thurber, going through (he said) pretty much the whole of the big Library of America Thurber volume.

Keith launched the on-air Thurber reading with great trepidation, but immediately won some important supporters. It was how he discovered that both Rosemary Thurber and her daughter, Sara Thurber Sauers, were regular Countdown viewers, and had seen the reading, and were thrilled. Keith had worried about the copyright situation, and Rosemary solved that by granting him permission to read whatever of her father's works he wished.

What's more, the timing proved eerily fortuitous. It turned out that at that very moment Rosemary was negotiating with an English textbook publisher for the right to include "The Peacelike Mongoose" (from Thurber's second volume of fables, Further Fables for Our Time) in a textbook, something she hoped to be able to accomplish, because she likes the idea of students reading Thurber. However, the publisher was insisting on the right to edit the text, which is pretty silly in the case of a writer who writes as meticulously as JT (earlier, Keith had read a long-time favorite piece of his, "A Box to Hide In" from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and noted that while it was written for the page rather than performance, it couldn't be more successful as a performance piece if it had been written for it -- the sentences, the cadences, the words all being calculated with astounding precision for maximum performance effect). The bottom-line sticking point was what most readers would describe as one of the piece's particular glories, the word mongoosexual. Once Keith had uttered the dreaded word on the air, it became a non-issue.

But that early on-ar reading of "Mongoose" was only half the reason for its significance to Keith. Because he had planned to read it again the night of his last MSNBC Countdown. Only he was asked by people at MSNBC not to read it. He left it to the audience to imagine what nerve the piece might have touched with his former employers.


WHAT SPOOKED THOSE MSNBC EXECS ABOUT
"THE PEACELIKE MONGOOSE"? CLICK HERE


TOMORROW IN PERELMAN TONIGHT: Part 1 of "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Attention, NY-area Thurber fans: Sunday evening Keith Olbermann & Friends are celebrating our guy at the 92nd Street Y

From "The War Between Men and Women" (yes, you
can click on it to enlarge it!) [from DWT, June 1]

by Ken

I was working furiously on some hopefully final thoughts on Weinergate, having already put off the results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption to tomorrow, when I realized that I really should have mentioned this Sunday-evening event, which I should have done in last night's "Perelman Tonight" post, but I just didn't think of it. I don't normally think of myself as being in the event-promotion business. Still . . .

Since it was a "Your perfect weekend" item by Time Out New York's "This Week in New York" Editor Amy Pitt which jogged my awareness yesterday to the point of springing the credit card out of my wallet, here's a TONY link, although it's not to the Amy Pitt item, which I'll be darned if I can find online!

Here, for the record, is the "Your perfect weekend" item (disclosure: I had to make my own graphic, not being able to reproduce TONY's creepy itty-bitty cutout of Keith O's head):

Even though Keith Olbermann (92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave between 91st and 92nd Sts; 212-415-5500, 92y.org; 7:30pm; $29) is starting his new gig as the host of a relaunched Countdown with Keith Olbermann on June 20, it's unlikely that he'll delve into the show too much tonight. Instead, the former MSNBC talking head will discuss humorist James Thurber, who regularly penned pieces for The New Yorker before his death in 1961. Olbermann isn't the only one celebrating Thurber tonight: New Yorker contributors Calvin Trillin and Robert Mankoff will also be there, as will Thurber's daughter, Rosemary. -- Amy Pitt

For what it's worth, the TONY item I've linked to above lists "comic Scott Blakeman" as a participant as well. No, I don't know who that is. I'm sure he's very comical, though, in addition to having much to say about Thurber.

Normally I would just provide a link to the 92nd Street Y website, but as it happens, 92Y.org is in hibernation till Monday, as the org transitions to a new and presumably much-improved site. All that's accessible at the moment is the 92Y Online blog, which advises that you can still purchase event tickets by phone, but even with additional customer service representatives on duty, "call times might be longer than usual." The box office is open Saturday 5pm-9pm and Sunday from 10am. (Oh wait, I guess it's not obvious from the name "92nd Street Y" that it's a YMHA.)

I finally broke down yesterday after being confronted by the TONY item, and via the still-operational Y website shelled out my $31 ($29 for the ticket plus the "online discounted" $2 fee for buying the damned ticket, something that once upon a time was assumed to be, you know, part of the price of the ticket -- ah, days of innocence!). I'm a really, really huge fan of Calvin Trillin (I may have mentioned at some point that he's probably my favorite living writer), and as readers may have noticed I'm a growing fan these days of New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor Bob Mankoff (he of the quest for the universal cartoon caption, my report on which is now shoved back to Sunday).

But I think maybe what sealed the deal for me is the scheduled participation of Rosemary T, James Thurber's only child. If I'm reading my source right (and have done the arithmetic right), she turns 80 in October, and it may sound corny, but I think it was the thought of being in the same auditorium with her that turned me into a customer. As of yesterday, at least, there were still tickets available. Remember, the box office reopens tomorrow (Saturday) at 5pm.

Again, from "The War Between Men and Women" (again,
you can click on it to enlarge it) [from DWT, June 2]
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