My Tales of Hoffman

According to a number of tweets (where I saw the image atop this entry), The Graduate, premiered fifty years ago today on December 22, 1967, which happened to be a Friday, as it is now.

Monday's Musings OR Madness?

Where's a BIB when you need one?

Sometimes, on my Blogger Pages, I like to pick up where I left off on a given post before moving on to another topic. Perhaps this is because I've written novellas, short stories and even a play, all of which, to some extent require a continuity with a given character. "Your reader deserves to know if you got the part," Mr. C. Michael Curtis once said (in a letter) to me in response to an essay I submitted to the Atlantic Monthly. The essay discussed how an audition for a Broadway play (that I had with Dustin Hoffman) led to an understanding of a childhood trauma, and, no, dear reader, even though Mr. Curtis praised my writing, he did not publish my essay.

Remember, Sidney Lumet, darling: "Great work lives on with us forever, much more important than an Oscar. Ya-dig?"

In yesterday's post I expressed my appreciation for the sentiment expressed in the comic strip, Mutts, (hinting that if one was quiet, they could hear the flowers singing in the rain), and early this morning I was greeted in my garden by a few more new visitors, including the tulips that you see in the photograph posted at the top of this blog entry. 

They are at the northeast area of my terrace garden and almost a direct diagonal from the tulips that I wrote about in a previous post which included Sylvia Plath's poem about tulips, and it may be read (or reread) by clicking here.

I had come outside in the wee hours of the morning to water my urban garden and to write my Saturday morning blog entry. I had planned to write about Sidney Lumet, because he died four weeks ago today (after a battle with lymphoma), and I have been meaning to acknowledge his memory — or more honestly, my memory of him). However, when I saw these new tulip arrivals, I became very quiet within my heart, and I realized that not only could I hear my flowers singing in the rain, but they were also willing to act as a muse, so let me, without further ado, proceed with my recollections of  Sidney Lumet, the acclaimed film director whose last film, ironically, was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a film that took its title from an Irish saying,"May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the devil knows you're dead." 

I met Sidney Lumet in 1989 on the set of Family Business.

A Lesson Learned from C. Michael Curtis

Once upon a time, I wrote an article about a reconciliation of sorts that had happened with my father (he even sent me a card years later which I wrote about in a previous post). 

Our reconciliation was the result of what I'd learned when preparing for an audition that I had been selected to do by Dustin Hoffman, after I had met him in a chance encounter.