Pam's Tall Tales

A Sickies Christmas with a Splash of Matisse

After the stress of Sandy destroying my lab, our dear old dog, Jack, dying, and having to write three grants amid the gasoline fumes that still pervade my “temporary” lab space, I was looking forward to a pleasant week of rest, feast and frolic. Unfortunately viruses always strike when you are down and they attacked in force on Dec. 21 during the 1^st act of War Horse.  So I staggered home from the theatre and spent Christmas in bed. Altogether Santa brought me a norovirus, a cold sore and an eye stye that makes me look slightly battered. 

As a child with glandular fever I was sick and spent quite a lot of time in imaginary worlds like the boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s lovely poem “The Land of Counterpane”.  As an adult it’s more difficult to acquiesce to sickness. But, once I gave in to languishing about, it was not so bad. The long-suffering husband rose to the occasion, delivering pots of tea and toast and hot water bottles and aspirin to the sick bed. He donned the apron, brandished his knives, and mustered the goose complete with trimmings, requiring instructions from me only for the sausage stuffing and my mother’s mince pie recipe. I lay in bed listening to my ancient scratchy record of Kings College Choir Carols and wallowing in my December issue of “Cheshire Life” that was replete with images of wintery gardens and stately homes decked out for the season.  During lucid periods I read Peter Carey's novel “His illegal Self” that Santa had brought, and - when concentration failed amid the fever - watched Netflix and discovered the medicinal benefits of liberal helpings of Glenmorangie.  As has become our tradition, we looked for a good old Broadway Belter to sing along to while recuperating from Christmas dinner, but, having seen them all, had to settle for John Wayne winning the west one more time.

After a week of this I decided I was getting up and going out regardless. We made it to a preview of Scarlett Johansson, giving Elizabeth Taylor a run for her money, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and the next day wrapped up warm and headed for the Met. Given the size of the eye stye it would have been more appropriate to go to see George Bellows paintings of boxing matches, but instead we chose “Matisse: in search of true painting” that has just opened and “Regarding Warhol: 60 artists and 50 years” that was just closing. Both were well worth the trip.

I should start by saying that my approach to art is the same as to wine: visceral rather than cerebral - I know a good one when I'm allowed to imbibe it. For example, I discovered my favorite wine by asking a waiter for "a glass of something with enough body to stain your teeth purple" and only later discovered that, in California, Joseph Phelps are considered a wine makers wine maker. I am perfectly willing to be “introduced” in this way to others but am not persuaded by wine connoisseur’s tedious discussions about grape variety. The Matisse exhibition took a similar type of reductionist approach, revolving around a curatorial dissection of Matisse’s method.  There was some interesting background. But for me the essence of Matisse lies in his sensuous luscious combinations of deep blue, turquoise, purple and green that cannot be captured by words.  Here are my favorites, feast your eyes: 

Interior with Goldfish, 1914. Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

 

Goldfish and Palette, 1914. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

AND ... for more on Matisse and why artists paint fish I reccomend

this blog 

by John Seed in the Huffington Post.

 

Ghosts of Christmas Past

We got into the Christmas spirit early this year. That is, the long suffering husband stocked up the drinks cabinet and I bought a tree, right after thanksgiving, from the Canadians who set up little fragrant pine forests on every street corner of NYC. 

http://www.thelibraryshop.org/

 

Since then I find myself homesick for pantomime. This is odd because when we were children my family never took us. The closest we came to theatre was chilly Junior School Christmas parties at the neighboring Reform School for naughty boys and orphans. There the hall was big enough to seat us and we would watch a crackly old reel of Charlie Chaplin while eating mince pies and Walls ice cream while the naughty boys played around in the snow outside.  

This week I was also sick (a nasty norovirus) and while lying in bed watching the warm little lights twinkling on my tree out on the balcony I tried to fathom the source of this Panto nostalgia. Then it came to me.  One year a troop of traveling actors came to Congleton County Infant School and performed “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”.  I was four years old and enthralled. The excitement was matched only when, the following year, the circus came to town and we were allowed to line the street to see the elephants walk down from the station to set up the big tent. 

I took my own children to the theatre for the first time when they were preschool to see “The Gingerbread Man”.  It was superb. But  when the “Old Tea Bag Witch” leapt out of the Teapot and I shouted out with the others “he’s behind you” they were embarrassed. They begged me not to, but I couldn’t help it. Later when my daughter was fifteen we took her to a midnight New Years Eve performance of “Twelfth Night” in a tiny theatre in the East Village. Again she was humiliated to be with her parents when she could have been up to no good at CBGBs with her friends. But Robert Hooke, an aging actor with the Pearl Theatre Company, saved the evening by playing Malvolio so superbly that she had to laugh – he was about 80, but an actor to his core, he played his heart out and now she too has the theatre bug.

Last year, the closest we could get to Panto was “The Lion King” on Broadway. This year it was “War Horse - the play”. The puppetry was magnificent in both. I can’t wait for my grandson to be three so we can go together and shout out from the rafters to embarrass his mother. 

 

War Horse Handspring Puppets