It was like watching two superheavyweight Sumo wrestlers who’d been living on a diet of Kentucky Fried Chicken and could only vaguely paw at each other. It was like watching mold grow on bread. It was like watching the raptors chase the little kids in Jurassic Park (Missouri Quarterback Brady Cook was sacked six times) It was like watching the road gang clear weeds in Cool Hand Luke (thirteen penalties). It was the Futility Bowl, the Dreadful Bowl, the Boring Bowl, the Trench Warfare Bowl.
At the end of the third quarter, it was 3-0, Ohio State.
I had by then deserted the game. I missed the fourth quarter because I was watching our favorite ghost show, The Dead Files. And then I fell asleep. Luckily, Elizabeth woke me for the last three minutes of the game—Mizzou had done its damage by then, two touchdowns, but at least I got to see the game’s celebratory end. I slept the sleep of the Well-Satisfied If Slightly Guilty.
Here are the highlights, again, from the fourth quarter. Quarterback Brady Cook (#12) and the phenomenal but not-very-big running back Cody Schrader (*7) were the heroes, but it was the defense, which bent and bent and bent but did not break, who were probably just even more heroic.
Go, Tigers!
“Tipperary” makes up part of the Mizzou fight song.
The loss of comedian/musician/yo-yo artist par excellence Tommy Smothers reminded that their act, which began at San Francisco’s Purple Onion in 1959, was part of a marvelous revival of folk music in the late 1950s into the mid-1960s.
By 1960 my big sister, Roberta, was at Cal Poly. There was a popular television show, Hootenanny (1963-1964) that showcased folk music, and Mom, Roberta and I loved it. I think several events converged to create the rediscovery of our music, including the idealism of young people (e.g. The Peace Corps) sparked by a youthful president, John Kennedy.
Some of those young people belonged to the so-called Silent Generation, kind of taken for granted, sandwiched as they were somewhere in between the World War II generation and the Boomers. Folk music, I think gave them a voice and a way to assert themselves.
The Civil Rights movement was a key factor, too, because so much music in the genre has it roots in the South and in the experience of Black Americans.
The gang that brought you films like Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap also did a wicked sendup of the times in A Mighty Wind, but I perceived, just beneath the wickedness, a hint of nostalgia. The creators of the film series and the actors therein—like Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Catherine O’Hara and my favorite, Eugene Levy—were about the right age for Hootenanny. The film ends—a reunion concert featuring three folk groups—with its eponymous song and its tragically obscene and very funny final line:
But putting A Mighty Wind Aside, the Highwaymen’s version of this song remains lovely, I think. The man who first wrote down the lyrics heard South Carolina slaves singing it as they rowed .
Harry Belafonte was both key to the revival and its precursor. We had both of his Carnegie Hall concert albums, both double albums, and played them on the old Zenith cabinet record player so often that I swear you could almost see through them. A wonderful element in those Belafonte albums was their international flavor. The man sang songs from Jamaica, of course, but also from Venezuela, from Israel and, in this example, from Mexico. I love this—a different “Bamba” from Richie Valens’— because Belafonte, maybe the most gorgeous man Our Lord ever created, dances a little, too. (And his Spanish is flawless.)
Another border-transcending song: The lyrics for this 1961 hit by the Tokens—this later version includes The Mint Juleps, from London’s tough East End, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, from South Africa—were from South Africa in the late 1930s, and they were in Swahili.
The New Christy Minstrels were on Hootenanny regularly and I particularly loved “Green, Green.” The lead singer with the gravelly voice, Barry McGuire, was the most popular Minstrel, but, sadly, he would go on to record “Eve of Destruction,” a review of current events as they were in 1965, and the song conclusion seemed to be that we were all going to die, and pretty darned soon. The Minstrels and the music of their contemporaries was damnably optimistic, which is what made A Mighty Wind so funny.
The absence of that optimism today—and of a healthy sense of national pride—isn’t so funny.
I think I love the images of the kids in the audience, singing along, almost as much as I love the performances. The same goes for this performance, about five years earlier, by Mahalia Jackson, at the Newport Jazz Festival. She is sublime.
Trios were popular, probably the Kingston trio most of all. “Tom Dooley,” about a man about to be hanged, has to be the most depressing song of the folk movement, so let me try M.T.A., which is funny and charming, instead:
The Limelighters (I love me some banjo, prominent in both these trios) perform a song that I’ll always associate with the CBS Baseball Game of the Week, brought to you by Falstaff Beer. When the game got slow or was approaching a blowout, announcer Dizzy Dean (his more restrained partner was Pee Wee Reese) would begin singing this song. Dean, by the way, horrified English teachers when he conjugated verbs, like this one: “HE SLUD INTO THIRD!” And Glenn Yarborough of the Limeliters, on the right, had a voice like syrup and would strike out to make a successful career on his own.
Peter, Paul and Mary were the giant trio of the folkies, and their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” perhaps their most prominent hit. But I love the lyrics of this song, from 1966, near the folk revival’s end (Dylan and groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Seekers would keep the tradition prominent in the music they performed), The man who wrote these lyrics became popular just a little bit later, too. He was Gordon Lightfoot.
And, of course, PP and M reminded us of the debt American culture will aways owe to Woody Guthrie. The men’s voices are sweet, but Mary Travers’ voice soars, and you can see its impact in the faces of this audience, older now than they were in 1963, but in this moment young again.
The grandfather of the movement, along with Woody, was Pete Seeger, and much to my delight, Bruce Springsteen revived him, too, with a marvelous recording, “The Seeger Sessions.” This is from a performance in Dublin. Folk music, again, knows no boundaries.
The Smothers Brothers rarely got through a song without an interruption, with a befuddled Tommy getting corrected by the straight man, his brother Dickie. Their act carried over into their CBS television show, which featured guests like Buffalo Springfield and The Jefferson Airplane.
The show was too edgy and too clever for the censors and it was canceled. Vietnam, for example, came up far too often in the dialogues that interrupted their songs. The cancellation was typical of the times, with those in power trying to keep the lid shut on a pot of boiling water. But, of course, the Smothers remained popular anyway. Here they are, more than a few years later, with Tommy reviving another talent introduced during The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—his prowess with a yo-yo.
He and Dickie remind me of a time, I guess, when folk music evoked in us a love for our country. The Smothers Brothers loved our country so much that they weren’t afraid to call America out when they believed it to be in the wrong.
…I can be as shallow as any other male-type human being. While looking for something else (as usual) I ran across the trailer for the new Color Purple, based on the Broadway play that’s based on the 1985 film that’s based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel. Dancing and singing? YES. How’d it do on the Tomatometer? 88%. Outstanding. Who’s in the cast? This is where I was halted in my tracks. The cast includes Hallee Bailey (left), whom I don’t know, and H.E.R., whom I do (here, she’s Belle in Beauty and the Beast) because I have a crush on her. So I am going to see this movie.
Then, thank goodness, I got my juvenile male plunge arrested by another video, not the trailer for the film, but highlights from the performance on Broadway. Dear Lord (thank you!), what voices! I’ll see the film now as much for the music as for the beautiful young women above, but nothing will ever forgive me for missing Jennifer Hudson on Broadway in The Color Purple.
I guess I need to get back to work on the time machine I’m building in the garage.
…cry. Our friend Sandy got misty at the end of Field of Dreams, and we concur, especially the catch between father and son. My Dad and I used to have catches, too, in the front yard that faced Huasna Road, so that scene set off my personal sprinkler system
For me Glory also came immediately to mind. Here’s the closing scene, after the failed attack on Fort Wagner:
In Finding Forrester, Sean Connery is a reclusive writer—a J.D. Salinger archetype—who grudgingly takes on a student, Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown). Their relationship becomes a friendship when Forrester appears, to the total shock of all, at Jamal’s university to read a manuscript aloud. Jamal has been ejected from a professor’s class (F. Murray Abraham) for insubordination, a charge that’s been leveled against me more than once. He is awaiting an expulsion hearing.
The scene picks up after Forrester has finished his reading.
Yep. I wept buckets at the closing credits, just after Jamal reads a letter from Forrester, who has died in Scotland.
Yes, I was blind-sided—AND misty-eyed—at The Sixth Sense’s reveal, when Bruce Willis’ character realizes that he’s dead. The way that Shyamalan reveals it stunning. You first clue comes from hearing, not seeing.
One more comes to mind. I lose it when Maximus starts to glide in Gladiator.
I have no idea why all these films just happened to appear in 1999-2000. Was I extra susceptible because of the Millennium’s end? I don’t know.
But here’s one that bucked the trend. Places in the Heart (1984) ends with a communion scene in which characters, both living and dead, have a moment of reconciliation. The film’s so evocative of my father’s childhood in the Depression-era Ozarks, but, like The Sixth Sense, the reappearance of the dead was unexpected. It was also comforting. The reading from Corinthians and the hymn “In the Garden,” which is beautiful, comfort you just as much.
I’d have to say that if a film made you cry or get misty-eyed, Mission Accomplished.
I don’t have a lot to say in this blog post. I know I’ll miss some, but these are my favorite Aretha Franklin songs.
This version of the Burt Bacharach song is nearly a religious experience to me. Its context is important, too. She recorded it in 1968, the deadliest year, for young Americans, in the Vietnam War, the year of the Tet Offensive.
A little Soul Train, introduced by the Ultra Cool Don Cornelius. What it is what it is. Sublime.
“Stand on up and party if you want to.” OKAY!
Yeah, it’s MTV-tailored, but it’s also fun. Clarence Clemons on sax: Frosting on the cake.
Everybody knows the Blues Brothers version, but let’s go back to the roots of the song, one she wrote. 1968. She’s twenty-six.
I’ll choose a different film to showcase Aretha. John Travolta plays an errant archangel in Michael. Three magazine reporters are trying to take him back to their editorial offices when they make a road stop at a rural honky-tonk.
Of course, there’s this song, written by Otis Redding.
This was her first hit. I’ve heard versions where she sounds like a female B.B. King—very bluesy—she is here, too, in this early version in an Amsterdam concert. But then, she’ll just…soar.
Her roots were in the church—her father was a minister—and she shows it in all her work, but particularly in this interpretation of “Didn’t It Rain?” This is one of my favorite spirituals.
I don’t know why I love this so—her dropping the fur has something to do with it. So does Carole King’s reaction to this interpretation of her classic song. And the president’s.
She was, by the way, a masterful pianist.
And finally, at the end, look and listen to the audience. I love this part, too.
My big sister, Roberta, was fond of The Avengers, the British spoofy secret agent series that ran, I believe, on ABC in the 1960s. I joined her and we watched it together. She loved the droll British humor. I loved Diana Rigg, sadly, no longer with us, who played John Steed’s sidekick, Emma Peel, from 1965 to 1968. To be totally honest, I also developed crushes on Steed’s convertible, a 1930 Bentley, and Peel’s Lotus Elan.
The shows were campy, sometimes improbable, but always engaging. Steed was unflappable and dashing, with a seemingly perennial bottle of champagne on ice. Emma was capable of beating the holy crumpets out of any evil villain you’d care to throw her way. She became known for her leather jumpsuits (which she despised) and her off-duty Mod fashions, but, other than her beauty, she brought a sense of humor to the role that was appealing, too.
As usual, I was looking for something else entirely when I was stunned to discover that there seem to be at least ten and maybe more tribute videos to Mrs. Peel on YouTube. So naturally, while crediting the original posters, who had to have put in a lot of work making them, I used clips from some to make my own tribute video. Hey, I’m retired.
So here it is:
The banter between Patrick McNee’s Steed and Riggs’ Mrs. Peel was frequently flirtatious. She was, after all, a widow—I had to look it up, but evidently her husband was lost in a plane accident somewhere over the Amazon—and I guess they did kiss once. If they did, either I missed it or was so horrified that I’ve blocked it out of my memory.
Another series, also charming, Moonlighting, was ruined when the characters played by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd finally got together; it was the sparks between them that had made the show fun. One show went Shakespearean, a spoof on The Taming of the Shrew, which led to this wedding scene. Take it away, Bruce:
When Rigg decided to move on from The Avengers (she would play in a film alongside George Lazenby, the most forgettable 007), Mr. Peel suddenly reappeared, a la the Cary Grant film My Favorite Wife, and—I had to look this up, too, because I am sure I’ve blocked it out of my memory—Emma leaves Steed, presumably forever. According to that unimpeachable source, Wikipedia, Mr. Peel only appears in the distance as she walks away from Steed and toward her husband, who looks suspiciously like…wait for it…John Steed.
So it goes.
And lest you still think I’m a little cuckoo over this infatuation, even Harry Potter (okay, Daniel Radcliffe), who played an amorous teenager in the Ricky Gervais comedy series Extras, had a thing for by-now Dame Diana Rigg:
The Santa Barbara progressive rock band, Dishwalla, even wrote a song, erroneously titled “Miss Steed,” about Emma:
Miss Emma Peel Black boots kick high at his face One last look at the grace of Miss Emma Peel
Catch the curve of your leather heel Before he blacks out That’s another one down For Miss Emma Peel
I sit beside her in the evening And watch her rerun secrets by my ears Cat eyes watch with British humor ‘Cause she’s a mod-feel sixties savior
Sadly, it’s not that great a song. I don’t want to end this blog post with something mediocre, so, even though it’s off-topic, Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars” is one of my favorite songs, So, by way of misdirection, this goes out to you, Dame Diana Rigg. Maybe one of those blue cars was Mrs. Peel’s Lotus.
While I’m not exactly Chef Jee-Mee, I do enjoy the eating part, too.
Music by Booker T. and the MGs–“Green Onions” (1962). Still a cool song.
“Green Onions” reminded me of other instrumentals that were popular when I was growing up. Oh, damn. Now I’m in trouble.
The Surfaris (I think we favored the Ventures’ version): “Wipeout,” (1963). Look! These guys can play electric guitars without having them plugged in!
Speaking of The Ventures, I am fond of The Surfajettes, a cover band. They got it goin’ on: Big hair, short skirts, go-go boots. The drummer is a hoot–full of pep!
This is always my low-water mark for rock and/or roll music: “Telstar,” by the Tornados (1962). This song celebrated as satellite that allowed you to make long-distance phone calls to France or Moldova, for example.
Three years later, things got jazzier. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, “A Taste of Honey.”
This was the album cover, which we had in our very own personal home on Huasna Road. I was thirteen. I played that album often. Okay, I might have stared at it a lot, too. Album cover experts (where can you find a job like that?) now consider this a classic. If they say so, it must be true.
1968 saw two big instrumental hits. Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” is still on my MP3 playlist.
[Insert Pepe Lew Pew accent here.] This song is not on my playlist, but “Love is Blue” was very …oh, how do you Americans say…? Romantique, no?
“Nadia’s Theme” (I looked it up!) started out as a theme for the soap The Young and the Restless, but in 1976, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comenici so enthralled Americans watching the Olympics—she was the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect “10”— that a single version with her name in the title became a hit. Watch her stick the landing on the parallel bars. Coemnici, by the way, supplanted Soviet sensation Olga Korbut, the darling of the 1972 Olympics. And Nadia would be replaced in American’s minds by Mary Lou Retton. (And Simone Biles replaced everybody. Justifiably so.)
All glory is fleeting.
Korbut and Comaneci, 1976
And finally, in 1977, Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” was a big instrumental hit. My attitude was “Meh.” But when Mangione became a recurring character in the series King of the Hill—he was living in a big-box store in Arlen, Texas, hiding inside a fort made of toilet paper—I became a fan.
Here, exterminator Dale Gribble discovers Mangione in his fort (sadly, Dale’s voice, Johnny Hardwick, passed away this year.)
And—sorry, Olga Korbut—but my favorite Soviet at the 1976 Olympics was weightlifting Gold Medalist Vasily Alekseyev, who set eighty world records in the heavyweight class. Once you recover from the initial horror of seeing Alekseyev, you’ve got to admit he is one strong dude, both physically and mentally. We need an instrumental song for Vasily, too, darn it.
“Change is inevitable” is true, of course. But sometimes those words can be cruel and thoughtless, I’ve found, when they’re used as a rejoinder to us history types whose mission is to remember the past. It’s not that we want the past back—you can have your Bubonic Plague, for example.
What we want instead is that the past, and its people, have the chance to live on in memory, even in the second-hand memories of young people like the ones I taught.
And sometimes the past doesn’t smell good (the Thames in mid-Victorian London), doesn’t look good (a Klan Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1926) or doesn’t sound good (the premier of Stravinsky’s Firebird. Sorry. I probably would’ve booed, too, but I like Beach Boys harmonies and Strauss’s Emperor’s Waltz. I am admittedly bourgeois.)
But sometimes the past is a place of comfort in a time of intense discomfort. Oh, hypothetically, like today. Even if change is inevitable, brief backward visits are harmless. They can even be sources of strength. I’ve been thinking that way the last few days about another visit to the past, in writing about the film The King’s Speech.
But since it’s Christmas, I’m not going to discuss George VI. Instead, I of course thought of the Santa at Riley’s Department Store at Marsh and Chorro in San Luis Obispo. Change there, in San Luis, is not only inevitable, it’s constant and fickle and remorseless. Now I get lost in what was once the big city of my childhood. What was a burger place ten years ago and a brew pub five years ago is now a Paraguayan Fusion restaurant today.
It’s bewildering. As much as I have always loved San Luis, I don’t go there very much anymore. (Note that I was restrained enough not to bring up the parking. Oh, damn! I just did.)
Since I was raised in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, San Luis was the Big City to me. Its bigness was superseded by by San Francisco’s. My Dad put us up in a high-rise hotel there when he was bidding a job for Madonna Construction, and a rare lightning storm was flitting about the skyscrapers. This is how I fell in love with the city I’ve loved ever since. But San Luis Obispo remains important to my life, and Riley’s is part of the reason why.
The ad above is from 1965, when I was a bit old for Santa, but I can remember visiting him once or twice in the years before, atop the mezzanine staircase inside the department store. He had a red crushed-velvet suit and his beard, fake or not, was immaculate. He was appropriately but not terrifyingly jolly. Even in 1965, when I was thirteen, I still liked seeing him up there in his chair with the line of kidlets waiting their turns.
In 1965, we would’ve gone to San Luis in my schoolteacher sister’s Pontiac Catalina, roughly the size of a World War II escort carrier.
Many years later, the closest approximation of that Santa, in spirit, came at a local pet store (In Santa Maria. Sigh.) when our late and dearly beloved dogs, Wilson the Basset and Mollie the Irish Setter, got to visit this Santa. In reality, “Santa” was a former student of Elizabeth’s at St. Joseph High School, and this may be my favorite Santa photo of all time.
Riley’s Santa was enthroned in this building, shown off in this October 1955 full-page ad in the Telegram-Tribune, just completed by another San Luis institution, Maino Construction:
And if change is inevitable, it’s also depressing sometimes. Chorro at Marsh today is, and has been for years, empty, a discrete bit of urban blight on a street corner where, holding my Mom’s hand as a six-year-old in an earlier Christmas, my heart quickened when we crossed Marsh to go inside Riley’s.
A Google Earth image of the empty Riley’s building today.
The ad’s a little misleading. This wasn’t the grand opening of Riley’s—just this incarnation of Riley’s. That department store, under one name or another, had been a San Luis Obispo fixture since the 1880s. It got its final name in 1914:
And change, in this case, a new store name, can be good. Note that Mr. Riley is staying at the newish Andrew Hotel, at the site of today’s city-county library. Nearby, in the 1890s, a bawdy house called The Palace fulfilled the carnal needs of the gandy dancers working the Southern Pacific as the track neared town. The Andrews represented the beneficial side of Progress, such a nice place that evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson once spent the night there with her lover, also her radio engineer, as the couple fled Los Angeles for what the papers called “a love nest” in Carmel.
Mercy!
I’ve written about the Perfume Ladies before, but Riley’s brought class to our area, too. Once we’d crossed Marsh and entered the store, the first sales area to the right was the perfume counter, my Mom’s favorite (Chong’s Candy was ours). The beautiful Perfume Ladies worked behind the counter there–classy, a a little reserved but also attentive to the point of devotion to my Mom. When she tried out a scent with a brief spray to her wrist, I asked for one, too. By the time she’d made her purchase from the Perfume Ladies, I must’ve smelled like the reception parlor for the girls who’d once worked The Palace.
Riley’s is also where Mom did a lot of her Christmas shopping, in those pre-Amazon days, when the only thing that “Bezos” suggested was a river in Texas with a similar name. Once she’d made her purchases, the sales clerk wrote them up, rolled the receipt into a canister that was inserted into a pneumatic tube (like the one at the Telegram-Tribune where I’d insert my story to go down to Composing) and shtoop! it would vanish. After a brief wait, shtoop! Mom’s carbon copy would return. It was pretty cool then, when i was five. Now that I am nearly seventy-two, it still is.
Riley’s closed in 1993, and this story by my friend Carol Roberts and this photo by my friend David Middlecamp are evocative of the response:
The story focuses on the employees—I’ve been lucky enough to work at places like this—who were also like a family. The grief didn’t end with them. San Luis Obispoans were heartbroken, too. There were weeks of Letters to the Editor mourning Riley’s. (More recently, I wrote in a similar way about the closing of the burger/beer/country-line dance/Minor Madness venue The Graduate, where my wedding’s best man, Rob, and my AGHS colleague and friend, Randy, were once bouncers.)
Change is inevitable. That’s why it hurts so damn much. And I guess it hurts in this case because I associate Riley’s with my mother, who remains the most influential person in my life. This photo, sadly creased for many years, shows twenty-two-year-old Mom with my big sister, Roberta, in 1942.
Mom died when I was seventeen, and I still miss her. But thinking about places like Riley’s brings her closer. San Luis Obispo when I was a little boy—the Sno-White Creamery and its milkshakes, the way pipe tobacco smelled in the smoke shop that was once the Cigar Factory, the way you raised the miniature Bear Flag at your table in Corcoran’s when you were ready to order lunch, the severe steel bun in Mrs. Avila’s hair (the lady underneath was not so severe) at the City-County library, today, the Repertory Theater–we are a bookish bunch, and visits to the library were always good for at least an hour and more often two— and, finally, the way my Mom was treated when she shopped for Dad at Rowan’s, a memory that was so powerful that the late (great) journalist Don Pieper was kind enough to quote me in his early 2000s column, which also cites another journalist, Wally Conger, my friend and colleague from the AGHS newspaper, The Altair:
I know that I am a land line in an age of cell towers. I don’t mind that much. But I still believe that the past deserves to be remembered, even in the face of constant change, with the same attributes Dick Morrow and the Perfume Ladies conferred on my Mom—with dignity and respect.
“I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”
Edward VIII, after eleven months as king, abdicates. He does so because he has fallen in love with Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. The Church of England does not recognize divorce. The king is also the head of the church.
Edward as Prince of Wales. He was the world’s Most Eligible Bachelor in the 1920s and 1930s.
The story doesn’t have a happy ending. There’s a sadomasochistic twist to the marriage of Edward and Wallis, who chews him out within earshot of visitors, as if he were a little boy. She is a harpy and never forgives him for the couple’s exclusion from court and the perks of royalty. The two also develop a fondness for Adolf Hitler.
I apologize for cutting off Wallis’s image. However, that may be merciful. “David” certainly looks happy.
Maybe Kate in her wedding dress made up a little for Wallis. But just a little.
During the war, after they’d been given the honorary title Duke and Duchess of Windsor, they were installed as royal functionaries in the Bahamas, as far away from Germany as possible.
The happy ending isn’t Edward’s. It belongs instead to his little brother, George VI, who gets an entire film made about HIS speech, the one that earned Colin Firth an Oscar.
It’s a moving scene, but one that sticks with me, too, comes earlier in the film, when David (Edward’s family familiar) mocks Bertie’s (George’s family name) stutter. In an evocative piece of acting, you watch Firth’s character shrinks, deeply wounded, in the face of the abuse.
“David” and “Bertie,” the young princes, in naval uniform.
Royals, you may have noticed, are often shallow silly people. Edward was a bully, and he reminds me of Joe Kennedy, the eldest son, who blew himself in a B-24 bomber trying to outdo Jack’s PT 109 exploits.
Joseph Kennedy Jr., Kathleen (“Kick”) and Jack, in London before World War II.
But George, who I am sure had plenty of faults of his own, had courage, I think, and character. I do know that he loved his little girls, Elizabeth and Margaret.
He certainly had no grounding in familial love, between his big brother and his parents. Queen Mary, once Mary of Teck, holds newborn royals looking as if she’s about to dine on them. Terrifying woman. George V was a cold man. And Kaiser Wilhelm, who alternated between brimming with undeserved self-confidence and hysteria, was his great uncle. What a family.
The principles, a jolly bunch. George V, center, who predicted that his son would muck it up, Queen Mary, lower right, David (Edward VIII) at left, Bertie (George VI) behind Papa.
And so Firth’s performance in this scene, along with Geoffery Rush’s performance as his speech therapist, are to me indelible.
A Work in Progress 