April 22 in History: In 1876, Tchaikovsky completes the composition of “Swan Lake.”
In its debut, the ballet was a flop. But, so it goes, was the film “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
Elizabeth studied ballet as a little girl and, when she was in college, met some members of the Bolshoi backstage in L.A. They all smoked Marlboros.
I cannot imagine, less the smokes, more incredible athletes than those dancers.
We once went to a 49ers game, Old-Timers’ Day, and the only veteran who wasn’t limping was Joe Montana.
The price that dancers pay, in blunted toes and bleeding toenails, torn ligaments, stress fractures in the lower vertebrae, something loud called snapping hip syndrome, in stress fractures, and in so many more injuries, rival those of NFL players.
Ballerinas are warriors.
My mother and my wife taught me this, taught me how to admire young women who dance.
My Mom had several Classical 45’s–records, yellow vinyl–and I had a big indestructible record player inside a kind of suitcase, so I’d take it out and play the yellow records when I was five or six, when we lived on Huasna Road.
I played this passage, and the Russian dance from “Nutcracker,” over and over.
And, a year later, on Dutch television, with Melanie:
Pope Francis died today. I needed these voices—one song a spiritual, the other, about Woodstock, secular– to remind me that in a world so beset by venality and cruelty, we are called to higher purpose. We are called to beauty.
The Jesuits are a proud bunch: intellectually rigorous, disciplined, some say arrogant.
They are superb teachers. While they take a vow of poverty, some younger Jesuits, college professors, are marked by their fondness for sports cars.
Twelve years ago, a Jesuit chose the Papal name “Francis.”
I was amazed by that.
St. Francis, that tiny, gentle but driven man from the thirteenth century, identified with the poor. He lived a humble life–he rejected the wealth his father had intended for him–and, of course, is known best for his love of animals and for the natural world.
So Jose Mario Bergoglio, Jesuit, changed his name to “Francis.” And then he lived up to it.
This remarkable documentary was on IndiePlex–that’s, I think, Channel 76 on Charter Spectrum. It’ll repeat on Friday, but early in the a.m., so set that recording thingy.
I am so technologically adept.
It’s about the love between old, old men–my age–and their dogs, truffle-hunters (I have never had a truffle in my life!)
Big business has intruded into truffle hunting, and these old men, who’ve been doing this all their lives, as have their ancestors, as have the ancestors of their dogs, are facing competitors not above setting out bait laced with strychnine to kill the old-timers’ dogs.
But the love between these men and their dogs–not to mention the delight that spreads across the faces of those who taste the truffles, with beautiful fried eggs–is such a joy to watch.
I realized that the trailer is scored by Offenbach’s Beautiful Night, Oh Night of Love,” from an 1881 opera, his last. I had to look that up; I know nothing about Boccherini, except that I used to show my AP Euro students the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Picture. The film is devoted to the Holocaust, but even that is transcended, once again, by love. Here’s the trailer.
And here’s the film’s ending which, in a different way, is about love, too. In this case, it’s my love for my country, now in such great danger.
What had kept the little boy alive in the concentration camp was his father’s promise that the two of them were involved in a secret contest. If they won, the little boy would get his very own tank.
The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival has given SLO Review the opportunity to preview some of the narrative and documentary films on the festival’s April 24-29, 2025 program schedule. Follow the links to purchase tickets to see these notable films for yourself.
A 250-Year-Old Musical Mystery
I once found, in my family tree, my ninth great-grandmother, now vanished beneath pavement in what was once a London churchyard. She died three years before the Armada. I imagined her as a girl:
At puberty, Lady Elizabeth [Gelsthorpe Gregory] would’ve been enshrouded in clothing almost as barbaric as the not-yet-invented whalebone corset: linen petticoat surmounted by a stiffened bodice, or kirtle, that mashed the breasts and stifled breathing and then, over that, the gown for noblewomen, made of dense and elaborate fabric (velvet, or even cloth of gold for prospective noble marriages); the gown would’ve been nearly as heavy as the chains sported by Marley’s ghost. English or French hoods—the latter, Anne Boleyn’s innovation—covered most of a woman’s head. Lady Elizabeth, like most Tudor women, grew up in a cocoon.
Two hundred years later, in the Enlightenment, despite the brilliance of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges and Abigail Adams, the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet and the astronomer Caroline Herschel, women remained cocooned.
In the one-woman play The Other Mozart, playwright/actress Sylvia Milo appears as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s older sister, Maria Anna (1751-1829). Surrounded by a sea of fabric—petticoats and a vast court dress—she appears in the center, inside a wooden corset and pannier, the latter intended to support the fabric that extended the width of a woman’s hips.
She, too, is cocooned. Because of that, Maria Anna Mozart is hard for historians to find.
The documentary film Mozart’s Sister makes that attempt but fails to find a “smoking gun,” a composition that reveals, definitively, that it was written by Mozart’s sister.
What director and screenwriter Madeleine Hetherton-Miau does reveal is that Maria Anna hasn’t completely vanished.
Maria Anna is believed to have been a composer as well as a masterful keyboardist.”
She grew up loving and admiring Wolfgang, younger by four years, and the feeling was reciprocated. Their father, Leopold, gifted her with a musical notebook from which she practiced at the harpsichord, and both her recollections of their childhood plus the later four-hand piano pieces composed by her brother suggest that they played together. They suggest, from the margin notes, that she, as well as their father, might’ve taught the little boy.
Mozart Family Portrait, Johann Nepomuk della Croce, 1780-81. Maria Anna and Wolfgang, with their father Leopold, in front of a portrait of their mother, Anna Maria.
Leopold took the two, aged 10 and six, on a tour of Central Europe that culminated with a performance at the Hapsburg Court in Vienna. Two years later, Wolfgang wrote Symphony No. 1 in E Flat Major.
The symphony is made up of three movements, the first and third exuberant and playful, the middle part slower and elegant. Conductor Paul Dyer is convinced that this part of Mozart’s first symphony belongs to his sister: “The wisdom of an older child really comes through” in the middle passage, Dyer insists.
Wolfgang, of course, would come through, renowned as the composer of more than 600 pieces of music in his 36 years. Maria Anna wouldn’t.
The change came when she turned 15. By then, their father, always impecunious, had turned more and more toward teaching his son, hoping someday that he would find a steady living as kapellmeister for an archbishop or prince. There was no future in Maria Anna.
This was, of course, the product of the misogyny that thrived even in the Enlightenment. Rousseau, for example, argued that “women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.”
In conservatively Catholic Austria, girls were not taught to be musicians (the cello being a particularly horrifying instrument), and women artists performing professionally were equated with prostitutes. Composition, too, was out of the question.
But Maria Anna is believed to have been a composer as well as a masterful keyboardist. In its attempt to establish this, the film uses four conductors, musicologists and even a forensics handwriting expert. One tantalizing piece of solid evidence comes in a letter from her brother, who praises a minuet, now lost, that she’d sent him.
An estrangement from Wolfgang emerged about the time of the letter; he’d urged her to come to Vienna but then married unexpectedly. His sporadic employment as a performer and conductor meant that supporting a sister was impossible.
Too much of Maria Anna remains to be learned. What ‘Mozart’s Sister’ does is to validate the search for her.”
So Maria Anna did what women had to do: At 34 she married an older man and moved to a lakeside town whose sole culture consisted of her devotion, three hours a day, to playing at a clavichord whose tuning became impossible in the damp air.
There was a kind of comeback. As a widow, independently wealthy, she returned to Salzburg and re-established herself as the piano virtuoso that she’d been since her childhood. She moved into an apartment from whose windows she could see the distinctive yellow apartment building where she and her brother had grown up.
In another part of the square, facing the Mozart home today, there is a bakery whose window is graced with impossible pastries, many filled with cream or jam. They are airy and crispy, and crumbs fall down your chin as you reach the soft center.
This film is like that: beautifully photographed, beautifully scored, intelligently written. But it disappears as quickly as a Salzburg pastry. Too much of Maria Anna remains to be learned. What Mozart’s Sister does is to validate the search for her.
Editor’s Note: Screenings ofMozart’s Sister (Australia, run time 97 minutes, rated G, in English, US premiere) at the SLO International Film Festival is sponsored by Festival Mozaic.
Jim Gregory taught history at Mission Prep and at his alma mater, Arroyo Grande High School, for 30 years and was Lucia Mar’s Teacher of the Year in 2010. Growing up in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley and attending the two-room 1880s Branch School was integral to his becoming a history teacher and figured, as well, in the authorship of five books on local history. Three have won national book awards.
From yet another letter that won’t make it into the Los Angeles Times.
To the Editor:
I grew up in Arroyo Grande, in San Luis Obispo County, and I remember going to the Coliseum in 1958, aged six, to see the Dodgers play the Cardinals, once upon a time the Gashouse Gang, my father’s childhood team during the Great Depression.
My father and I were not close, but we were that day, and we were every time Vin Scully called a game.
We’d huddle close together as Dad barbecued a weekend dinner. For Koufax’s perfect game, we were inside the kitchen with a big shortwave radio atop the stove, and we weren’t breathing much.
I became a high school history teacher in part because Scully taught me how to tell stories. His only equal was my father. My mother, Irish American, loved Sandy Koufax because he wouldn’t pitch in the Series during High Holy Days.She admired integrity.
I admired everything about Koufax.
But that was a long time ago. The Dodgers, after making meek discordant noises, visited with the crude and brutal man who claims to be Abraham Lincoln’s successor. Lincoln and Koufax and Jane Goodall were my childhood heroes, and so they remain. Those are not bad choices.
But the team I adore–a team of immigrants, Italian and Irish and Polish and, finally, African American, Dominican and Cuban and Mexican– the team I have adored since I was six, has let me down.
This is not a matter of “Republican” vs. “Democrat.” It is, more properly, a matter of truth vs. falsity, integrity vs. venality, patriotism vs. betrayal, of good vs. evil.
“Evil” can be registered in the decision to delete a Department of Defense web page about Jackie Robinson, a decision reversed only because of public outrage.
Robinson played with courage, both in his introduction to MLB, when he was forced to absorb the abuse, and in the ferocity with which he played after Branch Rickey removed the handcuffs. Scully spoke vividly, even worshipfully, about the player Robinson became when he was allowed to play with anger.
In their visit to the White House, the team I love so passionately abandoned Koufax’s integrity and Robinson’s courage. The man whom they surrounded, all of them grinning, is certainly no Lincoln.
Since my heart is seventy-three and therefore brittle, it can be broken as easily as it was when Sandy Koufax retired, when I was thirteen. I forgave Sandy because he did the right thing.
I will be brief and let the music tell the story instead.
Bruce Springsteen, in Dublin.
Harry Belafonte in Sweden, 1966.
The Supremes, a little adventurous, in Paris.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Take Five,” Germany, 1966.
Chuck Berry in London, 1972.
Dionne Warwick, Belgium, 1964. This is incredible.
The Duke Ellington Orchestra in Amsterdam, 1958.
Taylor Swift in Paris, 2024. They know the words. In English.
Melanie, 23, in the Netherlands, 1970, with the sublime Edwin Hawkins singers.
A generation or two before, this is what Americans meant to those who aren’t American: A Marine on Saipan feeds a little boy; a Frenchwoman greets an American soldier; an English family with a Yank at table for Christmas dinner.
My Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, or Mildred Jane Wilson, a name that has persisted, unfortunately ever since a collateral Gregory married the great man’s aunt, Mildred Washington. Even my Aunt Mildred Gregory preferred “Aunt Bill.” That’s Aunt Bill circa 1935.
But, you must admit, Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, was an enchanting little girl. She was born in Licking, Missouri, in 1884 and died in Yellowstone, Montana, in 1978.
So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)
So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)
What disturbs me a little is that Jennie, such a lovely little girl, looks more and more like Rasputin.
She did not get that from her mother—my great-grandmother, Sallie McBride Wilson. That’s Sallie, on the right, her sister on the left and my great-grandfather, Taylor Wilson, in the center. Sallie has such a sweet face; she died young and left Taylor the heartbreak he never got over. This photo, a tintype, was in a Texas County, Missouri root cellar for thirty-five years before it was restored to my father.
Then, good grief, I realized where Jennie’s expression came from. It wasn’t Rasputin. It was my Confederate ancestor, Gen. James McBride, for whom I am named. He was Jennie’s grandfather.
That’s the General’s look, which I always ascribed to chronic constipation.
However, Jennie evidently was a wonderful mother to Sally Ruth, and her brother, Jim Ed Wilson, was the police chief of Shafter.
Missourians like two names.
Three more Wilson brothers worked in the Taft oilfields–the top three in the photo. One of them, I think Cal, grew so frustrated with the camp cook that he threw him into a boiler. We have never ascertained whether it was lit. He must’ve been crabby, like the General.
Cal’s nephew, Robert Wilson Gregory, was stationed at Gardner Field in Taft—Chuck Yeager trained there—discovered that not only was the food terrible, but that the head cook was embezzling mess funds and serving substandard farm, when Army food was already awful, while pocketing the Army’s money. Busting the cook got Dad into Officers’ Candidate School.
Gordon Bennett, Arroyo Grande Union High School ’44, was one of my students’ favorite guest speakers when I taught U.S. History at AGHS. He was a gifted storyteller with a sense of humor as dry as vermouth. My students and I loved hearing his stories about growing up in Arroyo Grande during the Depression and World War II.
World War II was waiting for them when both Gordon and his cousin, John Loomis, joined the service. The two found themselves not that far apart during the Battle of Okinawa, which had begun April 1, 1945. John was onshore with the 1st Marine Division, Gordon offshore serving as a sailor on the fleet oiler Escambia (named after a river in Florida).
Gordon and his shipmates serviced escort carriers (small carriers that carried around thirty planes, like Emerald Bay (above), during the height of the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. Thirty-four Navy vessels were sunk and over 280 damaged during the last, desperate battle of the war. The little carriers that were Escambia’s responsibility escaped and launched a series of airstrikes on the island. Both Escambia and Emerald Bay were based at Ulithi, where Gordon, according to legend, experimented in the distillation of medicinal beverages.
Above: The Ulithi anchorage; Gordon in high school; USS Escambia’s logo, designed by a Disney artist.
Which, given the ferocity of the kamikaze attacks, I might’ve sipped. The carrier Bunker Hill after once such attack, below.
The sailors on the fleet oilers were tough men. Fueling at sea was smelly, dirty, and very dangerous. The two photos show a fueling operation between Escambia and the fleet carrier Ticonderoga in July 1945. The way Escambia sailors return to their ship, in that breeches buoy, does not seem safe to me, but my guess is that Gordon would have had his turn in the same kind of conditions.
Sadly, Escambia (below, about 1950) would be used by, of all institutions, the United States Army during the Vietnam War as an auxiliary power plant. Transferred to the Vietnamese government in 1971, Gordon’t ship was scrapped.
Happily, Gordon came home safe. So did his cousin, John. They had many years of storytelling ahead of them. Gordon, in my classroom, fueled the imaginations of the young people who were high-school juniors in 2003, just as Gordon had been in 1943.
A Work in Progress 