Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Ambrose of Canterbury, on Justice and Angels)

“The angels are separated between those who adhering to justice enjoy all the goods they wish and those who having abandoned justice lack any good they desire.”—“Doctor of the Church” and “Father of Scholasticism” St. Ambrose of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), Three Philosophical Dialogues: On Truth/On Freedom of Choice/On the Fall of the Devil, translated by Thomas Williams (2002)

Quote of the Day (James Burrows, on His Classic Character-Driven Sitcoms)

“The concept is never what attracts me; it’s the execution. There are lots of shows about bars, news and radio stations, cabdrivers, and shrinks. I want to see what the characters that are put into these situations do. I’m concerned about believability and the economy of the comedy, the shortest distance between the character and the laughter, and the best way to get there. When I direct an episode, I have a lot of notes. I am apt to tell writers, ‘Fifty percent of what I say is gold and fifty percent is garbage. It’s your job to figure out which is which.’”— James Burrows (1940-2016), the “Steven Spielberg of TV Sitcoms,” with Eddy Friedfeld, Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and More (2022)

The subtitle of the memoir by James Burrows, who died yesterday, says it all: more than 1,000 episodes of the best-loved sitcoms of our time. The son of Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-director Abe Burrows, he sharpened his considerable comic instincts in association with sitcom stars and showrunners Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Glen and Les Charles, Chuck Lorre, Marta Kaufman and David Crane.

Oscar-winning film director Christopher Nolan put it more succinctly—the way Burrows would have liked it—by terming him “the modern master of the sophisticated comedy.” In employing four cameras on sets, he recorded each actor constantly and selected among their reactions for the final cuts.

No wonder he told those he filmed, “always be ready, always be funny.” And no wonder the likes of Jennifer Aniston (pictured, from Friends), Tony Danza, Ted Danson, Woody Harrison, and Sean Hayes, among many others, shot to stardom under his careful guidance.

Theater Review: ‘David Copperfield,’ at 59E59 Theaters, NYC

Contemporary readers recognize Charles Dickens as a novelist of astonishing productivity, but Victorians also knew him as an enthusiastic theater amateur—writing and directing his own productions among friends, and acting the roles of his major characters in hugely profitable author readings.

He would surely have been delighted in the dramatic possibilities realized of the most autobiographical of his fictions, David Copperfield, in this Guildford Shakespeare Company import for the current “Brits Off Broadway” series.

Abigail Pickard Price, who directed the show and wrote it with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches, has magically compressed the novelist’s sprawling doorstopper into two hours and 15 minutes of nonstop action in 59E59 Theaters’ Upper East Side venue, sidelining subsidiary figures to focus on Copperfield’s growth from fatherless child to husband and famous writer.

Even so, 19 characters appear onstage, brought to life by a talented trio of actors who won Best Ensemble Performance Award at the London Fringe Theatre Awards 25/26. Eddy Payne ably anchors the show as David, skillfully evoking his boy-to-man transition.

Even more extraordinary are Luke Barton and Louise Beresford, handle nine roles each, including both sexes. The transformations are always startling and sometimes hilarious.

As David’s devoted childhood nurse Peggotty, the rangy, long-faced Barton suggests John Lithgow in drag from The World According to Garp, and he’s not afraid to burlesque Mr. Micawber’s melodramatic denunciation of Uriah Heep.

Beresford, having proven her comic skills in Britain in plays like Noises Off and Bedroom Farce, wrings every laugh possible here as Miss Betsey Trottwood and David’s annoyingly childlike first wife Dora.

The actors accomplish this feat of invention and endurance through a whirlwind of quick-change costumes, puppets, and accents, supported by set/costume designer Neil Irish and movement/associate director Amy Lawrence. Props do double duty, including:

*a set of trunks morph into a stagecoach and a portable bar;
* a tall hat and long coat on a coatrack represent the unbending Murdstone;
*a baby blanket unwraps in a later scene to become David’s jacket;
*Emily’s dress unfurls to suggest the sea just off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

At the matinee I attended, another theatergoer told me she wanted to see this clever show because she had caught the Guildford troupe’s similarly delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last year. Now, with this affectionate adaptation of Dickens (running through June 28), this immensely talented British theater company has built an eager audience for its next stateside visit.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on a Surprise at a Graduation Party)

[At her college graduation party, Rory Gilmore is stunned by a marriage proposal from longtime boyfriend Logan Huntzberger. Her rich grandmother Emily and nonconformist mother Lorelai discuss this surprising turn of events.]

Emily Gilmore [played by Kelly Bishop]: “Why didn't she just say 'yes'?”

Lorelai Gilmore [played by Lauren Graham]: “I think she's not sure if she wants to marry him, Mom.”

Emily: “That's ridiculous! He's a Huntzberger! An offer like this doesn't come around every day.”

Lorelai: “It's a marriage proposal, not a sale on linens!” — Gilmore Girls, Season 7, Episode 21, “Unto the Breach,” original air date May 8, 2007, teleplay by David Babcock and Jennie Snyder Urman, directed by Lee Shallat Chemel

This Day in Literary History (Death of Scottie Fitzgerald, Dutiful Daughter of Jazz Age Dazzlers)

June 18, 1986— Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, who was instrumental in reviving the tattered reputation of her father, Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died of cancer in Montgomery, AL, at age 64.

“Scottie,” as everyone called her, was a talented writer in her own right, as readers of her contributions to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications could attest. 

Perceptive and self-aware from an early age, she also served as the model for Cecilia Brady, the teenaged narrator of Scott’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

But as the only child of Scott and his wife Zelda, and the executrix of his estate, she became the indispensable source for scholars and editors of his posthumous works, through her recollections and the massive artifacts she had saved: correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, revised proofs, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and recordings.

In the aftermath of her father’s death by heart attack at age 44 in 1940, males advising Scottie on the estate pressured her to dispose quickly of his collection of papers, even if it involved accepting a price that she regarded as too low. When Princeton University’s library offered her $700 for the whole thing and no provision to keep it intact, she balked.

In 1950, she got what she wanted: triple their original price, along with the crucial stipulation that the collection be retained in its entirety, so scholars could consult one source and weigh everything about Scott and Zelda’s lives in context. 

(The arrangement ended up beneficial to the university, too: as the first personal author archive, it served notice that the institution would be a leading literary scholarly repository, as noted in a 2007 exhibit at the University of South Carolina, "Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory.")

All of this happened at the right time: Zelda’s death in a fire in a mental institution only a few years before Scottie’s agreement with Princeton meant that, for the first time, biographers could write with greater understanding about the biggest emotional upheaval in the last decade of Fitzgerald’s life.

Those papers, along with friends’ reminiscences, created a whole cottage industry of Fitzgerald studies. The level of interest was so extraordinary that, by the end of the Seventies, the Fitzgerald papers were being used more often at Princeton than the university’s collection of the papers of Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal—two people with far more influence on 20th century history than Scott and Zelda.

As the guardian of her parents’ legacy, Scottie had to balance access and exposure of their work for a new generation against what she viewed as violation of their literary intentions or invasions of their privacy.

As I mentioned in this post from a dozen years ago, when Paramount Pictures set about on a big-budget remake of The Great Gatsby in 1974, Scottie was chary about overemphasizing the gangster elements of her father’s classic. 

It was also probably just as well that the studio and director Jack Clayton dispensed with Truman Capote’s draft, which would have annoyed Scottie with its depiction of narrator Nick Carraway as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian.

Zelda’s mental health aroused Scottie’s protective instincts even more than willful screenwriters and directors. Nancy Milford’s pioneering feminist biography, Zelda—the first full-length treatment of Scott’s wife—so distressed Scottie with its details about its subject’s psychiatric sessions and sexual orientation that she even threatened suicide, Milford noted in a 1980 essay.

At Scottie’s urging, the biographer toned down these references, though it provided grist for later scholars who portrayed Zelda as medically misdiagnosed and frustrated in her artistic ambitions by her husband.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, film and TV adaptations of Fitzgerald’s works—and biographies—exponentially increased attention to his life and work, bringing a steady string of royalties and subsidiary right revenues.

It was an unexpected source of financial security for Scottie, who lived at the Scarsdale, NY home of his literary agent, Harold Ober, while Scott tried to earn enough money to pay for her prep-school and Vassar education and Zelda’s ongoing psychiatric care.

Though more emotionally stable than her parents, Scottie couldn’t entirely avoid their heartaches, including her own affairs and those of the two husbands she divorced, as well as substance abuse (she had a fondness for alcohol, like her father and paternal grandfather, and her younger son was arrested for smuggling 325 pounds of marijuana into Arizona) and insanity (elder son Tim first horrified his mother by declaring his Nazi inclinations, then killed himself in 1973).

(Much of her story is related in the 1995 biography by daughter Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter Of...)

Surrounding this dutiful daughter was a protective cocoon, an instinct not to unload her troubles on her family nor for them to do the same to her. Caught up in the Washington social circle and her tireless activism for liberal Democratic candidates, she, like Zelda, displayed little of the nurturing gene.

At the same time, she stayed silent on painful memories (e.g., dodging an inkwell hurled by her drunken father) and, as her health began to decline, the cancer that finally claimed her. At best an imperfective emotional defense mechanism, it may have been the only one that enabled her to live two decades longer than her more fragile parents.

Again like her father, any “partly self-inflicted torments” were outweighed by other virtues: “I knew that he was kind, generous, honorable and loyal, and I admired and loved him.” Many felt likewise about her.

Though she had moved to Montgomery in 1979 at least partly to look after her mother’s ailing elder sister Rosalind, she chose to be buried at the foot of the gravesite of Scott and Zelda in Rockville, MD.

It was a final act of family devotion, as she succeeded 10 years before in persuading the Archdiocese of Baltimore to rescind its denial of Scott’s wish to be buried in the same cemetery as his father.

Quote of the Day (Tom Wicker, on Exploiting Unhappiness for ‘The Amusement or Titillation of Others’)

“When I dragged myself into the [Sandhill] Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor — a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, and whose graying hair…was that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class. ‘Mr. Wicker,’ she said without preamble, ‘why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper?’ I have never forgotten that question — and I still can't answer it…. I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before. Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others. I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was — a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity. Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written. This is one of the besetting sins of journalism—sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience. I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin — not always successfully. And reading some of the more lurid journals, I've often thought that sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience. Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet. On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately.”—American journalist and novelist Tom Wicker (1926-2011), On Press (1978)

When I read On Press, it was halfway through the quarter century stint as a liberal New York Times columnist by Tom Wicker, born a century ago today in Hamlet, N.C. It also came during the heroic period of American journalism, flush with its newly extended freedoms from the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision by the Supreme Court and muckraking coverage of Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

Wicker’s sharp criticisms led to a long-secret FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (exposed not long after the columnist’s death in 2011 in this Politico piece) and placement on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was revealed during the latter’s Presidency.

How quaint that list seems now! That “master list” totaled some 220 people or organizations—a number probably exceeded in only two or three overnight tweet storms by Donald Trump against press “enemies of the people” and “traitors.”

Predictability constitutes an occupational hazard for anyone presenting their opinions to the public several times a week. For the longest time, in Wicker’s case, I thought that a reader could almost unerringly anticipate his conclusions even before starting one of his articles.

To his credit, Wicker acknowledged such dangers, telling attendees at a 1978 American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “I felt, almost from the beginning, that I was preaching to the converted. If people agree with me, they read my articles with enormous enjoyment. If not, they sit there and fume. I do not think it has much effect on what people do.”

I don’t think I was the only reader how, long after Wicker clashed with Nixon over Watergate and Vietnam, he gave the ex-President a more respectful assessment in One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, going so far as to praise a number of his domestic initiatives (including, surprisingly, for this candidate who implemented a “southern strategy” for wooing conservative Democrats, desegregation of the South). 

In fact, by barely considering Watergate, I felt that this analysis was a bit too respectful, losing sight of abuses of power that contributed to what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger called “the imperial Presidency.”

The humility that Wicker exhibited in my opening quote was kept in a delicate balance with a professional detachment that the journalist found necessary for press independence.

“Questions and criticism, though often inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, are necessary in a democracy and part of the responsibility of a free press,” he wrote in a March 1985 column that took Senator Jesse Helms and Reagan Administration officials for questioning the patriotism of the media.

Such “questions and criticism” of Presidents, increasingly undermined within the federal bureaucracy and abdicated by Congress and the Supreme Court, have become even more the province of the media. They won’t make reporters more popular but will make them more crucial for the maintenance of the American republic.

Quote of the Day (Studs Terkel, on the ‘Tonic’ of Community Action)

“I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You’re part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important. People say, ‘I’m helpless.’ Of course, if you’re alone. There are so many groups — environmental groups, other groups — but there is no one umbrella.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American oral historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel (1912-2008) interviewed for PBS “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Dec. 19, 2003