’Tis the Season for Red, Green…and Blue

Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but seasons of forced jollity tend to evoke the opposite emotions of sadness and loss. I know I’m not alone. Blue Christmas is a universal phenomenon.

My partner and I were reminded by the season that for the past four years we have lost family members during the holidays: a brother each, a mother, and an ex-brother-in-law. More than a decade ago my father died on Christmas Eve. Loss, though purely coincidental with the festive season, is nonetheless more keenly felt when all about you is supposed to be joyful.

Music is the emotional marker, and everyone has a selection of popular sad-song favorites this time of year. I’ll limit myself to three.

The oldest is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” first recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943. The lyric represents a letter home, written by a serviceman posted overseas during World War II. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the lyric goes, “if only in my dreams.” Bing’s rendition was a top-ten hit, and the song seems to have been recorded by a new artist or two every year. It probably resonates with me because my father was a serviceman, posted overseas during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Most military families have endured missed Christmases. And because this country is perpetually at war, it seems, there's no end in sight.

“Blue Christmas,” written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson, was initially recorded by Doyle O’Dell in 1948 but more memorably by Ernest Tubb a little later. Tubb’s rendition occupied the #1 spot on Billboard magazine’s Most-Played Juke Box (Country and Western) Records for the first week of January in 1950. However, the most popular version came nearly a decade and a half later, when Elvis Presley recorded it for the album, Blue Christmas, which was released in November 1964. The album was among a cluster of “comeback” recordings during the years following Elvis’s stint in the military from March 24, 1958, to March 2, 1960, when he was discharged with the rank of sergeant.

Interestingly, Presley was stationed in Friedburg, Germany, beginning October 1 of 1958. Our family was posted to Butzbach, Germany, that year; I was ten years old when Mom, my brother, my sister, and I arrived to join Dad in what was then West Germany on December 14. While Elvis was in Germany, he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.

The last of my three is “Hard Candy Christmas,” written by Carol Hall for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Who’d have thought that a song sung by the evicted prostitutes of a Texas brothel would become a sad Christmas standard? In the movie version Dolly Parton played the madame and released her version of the song in October 1982. It climbed to #8 on the U.S. country singles chart. The film adaptation also featured some songs added by Dolly, including “I Will Always Love You,” which later became a hit for Whitney Houston, although I’ve always favored Dolly’s rendition.

Others can add their sad favorites for this season, and I could mention a few more. But three are sufficient.

Holiday Movie, Anyone?

Everyone has some favorite holiday movies, so why shouldn’t I trot out my Top Five list? The season is made for nostalgia—for good or ill—and so I find that most of my favorites are, as they say, vintage. Here goes:

1. Miracle on 34th Street may be my all-time favorite. I’m talking about the 1947 black-and-white film that stars Edmund Gwen (as Kris Kringle, shown), Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and a very young Natalie Wood. The remake pales by comparison. The original was one of the first films to be “colorized”—a crime against art if there ever was one.

2. The Lemon Drop Kid, 1951, gets a vote because Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell introduced my favorite Christmas carol, “Silver Bells,” in it. Holiday Inn, the 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire vehicle that introduced “White Christmas,” is a runner-up and better, in my view, than the movie with which it’s often confused, White Christmas, a 1954 film that starred Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen.

3. Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, has been translated to film repeatedly, apparently so that every generation can have its own. Well, for me, it’s the 1951 version, starring Alistair Sim. Another black-and-white classic.

4. The 1944 Judy Garland film, Meet Me in St. Louis, isn’t a holiday movie per se, but Garland did introduce “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which has become a holiday standard. Another non-holiday film with a favorite Christmas song is Mame, in which Lucille Ball sang “We Need a Little Christmas,” though the film was a less successful vehicle than the original stage musical, which starred Angela Lansbury.

5. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993, features such haunting music paired with innovative animation that I cannot help but enjoy it time and again. If it were a feature film, I’d also throw in the television favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! This Dr. Seuss book was made into an animated film for TV in 1966, starring Boris Karloff as the narrator and the voice of the Grinch. I watch it every year and it’s always magical.

Granted, I fudged the list to mention more than five films. There are many others that make popular lists that I haven’t included. They simply don’t resonate with me; they may with you. Winter weather makes this time of year perfect to cuddle up with someone you love, share a hot chocolate, and watch a holiday favorite. That’s what I plan to do.

Walking

In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau writes:

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day…sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements…. I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon, too…. I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

Of course, most of us are like those mechanics and shopkeepers. We don’t have the luxury of spending our days walking away our cares in woodland rambles. But Thoreau’s point should not be lost for our lack of time. There is much to be gained from walking—physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Thoreau walked away from civilization, making much of avoiding towns and settlements. I have spent many pleasant hours walking in woods in all seasons. During twenty years in Wisconsin, the Kettle Moraine State Forest was a frequent destination, particularly in winter when a light snow had salted among the leafless trees and evergreens.

But I would equally advocate walking in more civilized environs. I am a town walker, a city saunterer.

Unlike driving or even bicycling, walking allows the solo pedestrian opportunities to observe his or her fellow inhabitants, both the two-legged and the four-legged varieties. Not long ago, for instance, I rounded a corner in the early-morning semi-darkness only to find that a deer and I were mutually surprised by one another’s presence.

Anyone who enjoys architecture—domestic or commercial—gardens, trees, clouds, indeed whatever the world has to offer can enjoy a walk. And even daily walks in the same general area produce a variety of sights, sounds, and smells. Plus, each day the walker carries different thoughts. Walking is an effective way to stimulate the subconscious to tackle old problems and come up with new ideas.

Having a destination, even if it’s only a coffee shop or the local library, helps motivate my walks. But, in the end, they are as Thoreau describes them: “Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out.”

Street Theater, Now and Then

Public protests are a type of street theater, scripted or impromptu to varying degrees. It’s been interesting to watch the Occupy Wall Street protest “go viral” and spread to other cities and towns. Largely a libertarian, leftist protest, with smatterings of sympathy across the political spectrum, it may or may not effectively awaken the populous to the ever-increasing threat that America, since the late-twentieth-century assault on the middle class began, is becoming a pseudo-democratic corporate oligarchy. From Reagonomics onward, the “99%” have been losing out to the “1%,” and it’s uncertain whether the Occupy movement—or the libertarian, rightwing Tea Party movement, for that matter—will do more than riffle the water in the stream of history.

A recent Indiana University production of the 1968 Rado-Ragni-McDermot antiwar, sexual revolution era, rock musical, Hair, evoked another age of public protest as theater. The students onstage and peppered throughout the audience undoubtedly viewed the show as ancient history. The rock score may have resonated with some, making the production perhaps a little more relevant that other antiwar stage vehicles, such as Bertolt Brecht’s World War II era Mother Courage and Her Children or Aristophenes’ Lysistrata, which played in Athens about 411 BCE. But for those in the audience who, like me, were in college in 1968, Hair brought back memories of public protests far more strident, wide spread, and ultimately effective.

After all, America in the Sixties was embroiled in the Vietnam War, a conflict that many saw as unnecessary (at least in terms of U.S. involvement) and unwinnable—which, in fact, we were not winning. Moreover, America was conscripting thousands of young men to fight in this war, and many of them would be killed doing so. Death tolls were rising, and grizzly scenes of battle played nightly on televisions everywhere. Still, Hair today might seem to be merely a quaint memoir of a bygone era. This is particularly the case, given most American’s blasé response to the more recent Bush era, knee-jerk response to the terrorist attacks of 2001: invading Iraq as part of a so-called War on Terror. No one would argue that the horrific acts of terrorism deserved a response. The war in Iraq simply was the wrong one. But there have been no wide-spread public protests, certainly nothing on the scale of the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era.

Hair is a reminder of the power of public protest—theater of the people with a political purpose. The War on Terror and its domestic counterpart, an economic war on the middle and lower classes, have given us the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Occupy movement may spur a broader awakening to the corporate takeover of American democracy—or not. Time will tell. For the moment, it’s street theater worth watching. If it changes the public conversation about America’s increasing disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, then it may one day be worth viewing in retrospect as well.

Architecture as Sculpture

Architecture often has a sculptural quality. Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut Chapel at Ronchamp in eastern France spring to mind as Modernist examples. But in the American Southwest stands an equally impressive, though spatially more modest structure, older than these but still archetypically Modernist in its form and line: the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

Built between 1772 and 1816, this adobe church was constructed by Franciscan Fathers, whose patron was St. Francis of Assisi. It is located southwest of Taos, an artists’ colony in the high desert of northern New Mexico, near the Taos Pueblo, the 1,000-year-old settlement of the Taos, or Northern Tiwa, Native American Pueblo people. Nearby the Sangre de Cristo mountains provide a backdrop.

What distinguishes this church sculpturally is not its entrance, which is fairly conventional, but its rear structure. The asymmetry of the exterior of the apse (in conventional terms) and the use of stunted, lump-like buttresses give the building a decidedly Modern sculptural appearance, much as some ancient Chinese ceramics, say, from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE), look as though they might have been thrown yesterday.

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970, the mission church was recognized much earlier as something special. It has been captured as art by the likes of Ansel Adams and Paul Strand (photography), Georgia O’Keeffe (painting), and Gustav Baumann (color woodcut). O’Keeffe, in fact, called the church “one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards.”

One would be hard-pressed not to be captivated by this early example of adobe architecture. I know I was. So on a recent visit to New Mexico, I also found myself digitally capturing the image of this church, as shown above. The combination of adobe, blue desert sky, and the influences of sculpture, architecture, and religion made the opportunity to record an impression irresistible.

Finding My Father

I find my father in museum exhibits. Dad and I were not especially close. He was, at least for me, easy to admire but hard to love. Maybe that’s why, since his death in 1997, I keep looking for him.

In 1955, while visiting Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack during his first term in office. He recuperated in Fitzsimons Army Hospital in the suburb of Aurora, and my father was one of his caregivers. Once Ike was well enough, there was a photo shoot on the hospital roof. My father can be seen in many of the photos, standing in the background: hair almost black, hawk-like profile. He was thirty years old, a master sergeant, and already a veteran of two wars as a combat medic.

The photo shoot is how I find my father in museums. In the Smithsonian’s American History Museum I’ve even found a film clip from that day.

Recently I took a long-postponed road trip to Abilene, Kansas, to the Eisenhower Center. There in the museum, sure enough, was a tiny display of the 1955 photo shoot. And there was my father, forever young, the image of him I always carry in my mind from childhood. It’s rare to find my father credited—or any of the other bystanders, for that matter. But I know who they are. (In the photo above, Dad is on the far right, sharing a moment with First Lieutenant Lorraine Knox, one of Ike’s nurses.)

Apart from his military career, I guess I’m less sure who my father really was. There were swaths of time when he was away on duty throughout my childhood and adolescence, and somehow the time never got made up. I sometimes feel as though he was a stranger who just happened to live with us now and again. He wasn’t, of course. But between him and me, there was a disconnect. He even missed the wedding of my wife and me because he was overseas, serving a tour of duty in Vietnam during that war.

A couple of days after Abilene, my road trip took me to Denver. It seemed reasonable to look at where our family lived in the mid-Fifties. The Army post at Fitzsimons has been closed since 1999, and much of the old military facility has been bulldozed. But the soaring old hospital remains, now repurposed as a centerpiece of the sprawling and ever-expanding University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Originally Army Hospital 21, as it was first called, the building where that long-ago rooftop photo shoot took place was formally dedicated in the autumn of 1918. In July 1920 the facility was renamed the Fitzsimons Army Hospital after Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, the first U.S. casualty in World War I.

Little else of the Army post remains, except for the original gates and the post chapel. Long gone are the housing areas where Army brats like me lived, played, and went to school a half-century ago. Indeed, my sister was born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. According to what I’ve read, the Eisenhower Suite, where Ike recovered in 1955, has been restored to that period. I didn’t try to visit it. I wonder if they have any images of the photo shoot. If so, I bet I’d find my father in them.

On the Road Again

As I was contemplating a road trip that would take me through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas out to Colorado, then down along the Rockies to New Mexio, and back through Texas and Oklahoma, I was struck by a desire to recall some of my favorite road movies. A Google search will yield other folks’ top 15 or 30 road pictures, so why not drive down my own memory lane. I’ll limit myself to five:

The Wizard of Oz (1939). Four unlikely friends come together with the speed of Facebook, joined by a common need to seek the help of a wizard to cure their woes. Who says you can’t dance down the road instead of drive—and in ruby slippers? Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr are the friends: a Kansas girl, a scarecrow, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion. And a yellow-brick road.

Road to Morocco (1942). This is my all-time favorite among the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures. Dorothy Lamour co-stars, of course, and Anthony Quinn puts in an appearance. It was topical in 1942 because of the Operation Torch landing of American troops in Morocco. I wasn’t born when this film hit theaters, but I did see Dorothy Lamour in the late 1960s, when she was on the road in the title role of a touring production of Hello Dolly. And who says you have to drive a car when a camel will do?

Paper Moon (1973). Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, father and daughter actors, portray a con man and his, perhaps, daughter, trying to make their way in Great Depression-era Kansas. Moze Pray (Ryan) is Bible seller just one step ahead of the law. Addie (eight-year-old Tatum) is the orphan of a prostitute and so might be Moze’s daughter. Along the road they pick up a stripper (played by Madeline Kahn). Peter Bogdanovich directed, and the film features the song, It’s Only a Paper Moon, by Billy Rose, Yip Harburg, and Harold Arlen. Among the Oscars was one to Tatum O’Neal for Best Supporting Actress, the youngest person to win an Academy Award.

The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Disco isn’t dead in this celebration of drag in the Australian desert, as an aging transsexual (played by Terrance Stamp) and two drag queen friends drive a broken-down bus across the outback for a gig at a casino and, ultimately, to reunite “Tick” Belrose (Hugo Weaving), a gay father, with his eight-year-old son. The movie was translated into a Broadway musical—a costume and music extravaganza—that I saw in New York City in July this year. Great fun! The film has more substance. And it won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Go figure.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006). A dysfunctional family hits the road to a children’s beauty pageant with an odd-ball cast that includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell, Tony Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin (as the beauty girl), and Alan Arkin (as the grandfather who dies along the way). Disaster and hilarity ensure. The film earned a Best Picture nomination and three others, and won two Oscars. One went to Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor. An unheralded star is the Volkswagen minibus in which the family travels. A friend owned one in Germany in the 1980s; that yellow van also figured in a few memorable road trips.

Road movies are invariably tales of quests, some serious, some silly. What are your favorites?