Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on How He’s Using His Time Not Watching the 76ers in the Playoffs)

“The time I haven't wasted watching the NBA has allowed me to start taking piano lessons and to polish off the first volume of Shelby Foote’s epic ‘The Civil War.’ I am already up to Antietam and pretty much in control of the A major chord. I know that Robert E. Lee wasn’t much of a strategist, that McClellan was a little old scaredy-cat and that everybody persistently underestimated Honest Abe. What’s more, I can now play ‘Shall We Gather by the River?’"—Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: The Joy of My Team Missing the NBA Playoffs,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 26-27, 2025

Houston Rocket fans will undoubtedly want to employ the same strategy—and, unless a huge upset is pulled off in this coming round against the Boston Celtics, so will the Knick faithful like myself.

Photo of the Day: St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

Over a month ago, I happened to be walking in Long Island City when I spotted from afar the spire, 150 feet high, of what turned out to be St. Raphael Catholic Church.

Though the parish was founded in 1865, it wasn’t until 20 years later that the current brick-and-sandstone structure was completed. The demographics of the parish—largely Irish and German immigrants in its early years—have changed markedly. Estimates for language speakers are one-third each now for English, Spanish, and Korean.

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Earnest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Pagan Ethos and ‘The Callous Tolerance of Cruelty’)

“The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function.”—Columnist David Brooks, “How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact,” The New York Times, May 2, 2025

Even without David Brooks naming Donald Trump within the first few paragraphs of this article, one would have guessed that the attributes that the columnist lists for “the pagan ethos”—"power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess”—have been projected by the President. All of these are the exact antithesis of the humility and charity that Pope Francis practiced daily.

All the more infuriating, then, that Trump posted to Truth Social an AI-generated meme of himself depicted as the pope. The act was so outrageous, even for him, that many social media users, even those who loathe him, refused to credit it at first, demanding proof.

By now, it’s hopeless to expect the President to recognize that this image has needlessly offended thousands of people, let alone apologize for it. As former GOP National Committee chairman Michael Steele has noted, the post just demonstrates “how unserious and incapable [Trump] is”—a 78-year-old acting like a 10-year-old.

No, my disappointment is with fellow Catholics, like Vice President J.D. Vance, who pass this episode off as a joke, handing Trump a moral get-out-of-jail-card they never would have provided Barack Obama and Joe Biden if they had pulled a similar stunt.

To its credit, the New York State Catholic Conference swiftly and correctly condemned the post, disputing that there could be anything “clever or funny about this image.”

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis,” the statement continued, “and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.”

I would not be surprised, however, if Cardinal Timothy Dolan stays silent, preferring to hide behind this institutional statement and the need to prepare for the upcoming conclave. As I noted in this prior post, he never came to the defense of The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde when Trump tweeted that she was “nasty” for urging him in January to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

My guess is that, like prominent lawyers and universities that have knuckled under to Trump’s legal threats, Cardinal Dolan will fear the President’s “retribution”—as un-Christian a behavior as one can imagine.

Quote of the Day (Laurie R. King, on Persistence, ‘The Most Common Characteristic of a Successful Writer’)

“Persistence is the most common characteristic of a successful writer; the refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. But also, keep learning. Keep reading other writers, to see how they do things. Keep thinking about the craft, and how you might do things better. Keep writing for the joy of the thing, not for what you're being told the market wants. But mostly, keep at it.”—American crime and science-fiction novelist and short-story writer Laurie R. King, asked for advice for aspiring writers, quoted by Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Laurie R. King,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXII (2024)

Photo of the Day: ‘Jean-Marc’ Statue, New York City

A little over a week ago, heading toward a film at the Museum of Modern Art, I was struck by this image—a permanent sculpture at the northeast corner of 53^rd Street and Avenue of the Americas.

Jean-Marc was created in 2012 by the Parisian artist Xavier Veilhan. For this, his first permanent outdoor work in the US, he used stainless steel and polyurethane paint to create this unusual image of fellow French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Andy Introduces a Farmer to Modern Medicine)

[Local farmer Rafe Hollister is refusing to take his tetanus shot, so Sheriff Andy accompanies the county nurse to change his mind.]

Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith] [showing Rafe different medical tools]: “That's a stethoscope. Know what it does?”

Rafe Hollister [played by Jack Prince]: “No.”

Andy: “Lets you hear your heartbeat. Wanna hear your heartbeat, Rafe?”

Rafe: “What for? I know my heart's beatin'!”

Andy: “Well, yeah...”

Rafe: “I'm alive, ain't I?”

Andy: “Well, yeah...”

Rafe: “Well, then my heart's beatin'!”

Andy: “Well, listen to it beat, Rafe. Here, put these two ends in your ear there. Stick 'em right in there. They won't hurt ya. That's right. Go ahead. Stick 'em right in there. All right? Now, now, listen. Listen.”

[puts the stethoscope eartips on Rafe's ears and the chest-piece to his heart]

Andy: “Huh? How 'bout that? Listen to mine.”

[moves the chest-piece to his own chest]

Andy: “Huh? Whadda ya think of that, Rafe?”

Rafe: “All right. Now we know we're both alive!”—The Andy Griffith Show, Season 2, Episode 24, “The County Nurse,” original air date Mar. 19, 1962, teleplay by Jack Elinson and Charles Stewart, directed by Bob Sweeney