A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early November, 1980 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early November, 1980 | Thought Catalog

Tuesday Afternoon in the Theater District: Kitty Carlisle Hart Memorial at the Majestic Theatre

At noon today, we stood on a long line outside the Majestic Theatre to get into the memorial service for Kitty Carlisle Hart, singer, actress, TV personality, (extremely) longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, and an icon of Broadway and NYC life from a different era. In the 1950s and early 1960s, we used to watch her on To Tell the Truth and sometimes What's My Line? and often saw her greatest movie role, as a supporting member of the cast (the young female romantic lead, though) in the Marx Brothers' funniest movie, A Night at the Opera. Broadway-loving kids like us idolized her late husband Moss Hart, playwright, director of My Fair Lady and many other hits (and plenty of flops) and author of perhaps the most fascinating theater memoir ever, Act One, which entralled us when we read it in junior high.

We sat up in the nosebleed section of the highest balcony -- but then again, it's about the same spot we were sitting our first time in the Majestic 43 years ago, watching Sammy Davis Jr. in Golden Boy. We could tell when our family walked into the Saturday matinee, the people around us looked nervous when they spotted three boys ranging in age from 13 to 3. But we were the kind of kids that sat quietly if not silently and didn't fidget. We started taking our youngest brother Jonathan to Broadway shows and museums when he was two -- even to the show at the Hayden Planetarium, where the people in charge expected a 2-year-old would cry in the dark. But Jonathan just sat there and looked up at the Christmas "Bethlehem star" show.

We met Ms. Hart only once, at an AIDS benefit at the 92nd Street Y sponsored by the writers' organization PEN in the fall of 1987. We were introduced by our friend Gregory Kolovakos, the late great translator who worked for Kitty as head of the Literature program at the Arts Council. (Gregory was the one that told us about her relationship with almost-U.S. President Thomas E. Dewey [and he also disabused us of the notion that Elizabeth Taylor was seeing Malcolm Forbes, who preferred younger guys].) The next summer, we got a letter from her saying we'd won a $3,750 Writer-in-Residence Award at the Rockland Center for the Arts in suburban West Nyack; in the fall and winter of 1988-89 we spent several months doing creative writing workshops with schoolkids (from third to twelfth grade) in Rockland County.

Anyway, Kitty's memorial - which we're sure the New York Times will cover so we don't have to, at least not in detail - was a terrific "show" and a great sendoff. The best speakers were her son and daughter, who told great stories about their irrepressible mother, who well into her mid-90s was running circles around people one-third her age. Barbara Walters told some good stories too, and others that spoke included Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization and Mario Cuomo. Kristin Chenoweth and Michael Feinstein sang some of Kitty's songs, and they showed clips from her on the TV quiz shows, on a PBS documentary and from the movies.

Our personal favorite Kitty Carlisle song was the one she sang in Woody Allen's Radio Days, about the lack of eligible men in wartime, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old":

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

We know the feeling ourselves, but we imagine that in real life, Kitty Carlisle Hart never did.

Kirkus Discoveries Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kirkus Discoveries reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson on July 14:



HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES
Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: JULY 14, 2006
Publisher:Dumbo Books (178 pp.)
Price (paperback): $12.95
Publication Date: 2006
ISBN (paperback): 1-4116-5796-9
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: FICTION

An audacious and wickedly smart comedic writer brings his full weight to bear in a collection of his early work.

Grayson, no stranger to experimentation, here assembles four of his most engaging chapbooks, which merge nicely as an eclectic anthology of intriguing short stories. The author, who breaks nearly every literary rule in an obsessive effort to be unique, is both maddeningly and hilariously self-aware. “Narcissism and Me” leaps dizzyingly between the author’s presence and the actual story like a snake eating its tail, while “Sixteen Attempts to Justify My Existence” reads like a blog from another planet, and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp” waxes poetic on the rise and fall of 1980s greed. No business is safe, either, as Grayson mocks traditional publishing’s buzzed-based marketing with caustic sarcasm in “The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was.” In “The Facts Are Always Friendly,” the action is narrated through a series of terse, date-stamped factual statements. Grayson opens up in the meatier “Eating at Arby’s,” a clever spoof written in childlike prose. It details the absurd dichotomies of South Florida as a pair of retirees fall prey to consumerism, political exiles and even gunplay on their way to the mall. With a keen eye for highlighting the high anxieties of the modern world, and many of the sensibilities of a sensitive urban writer, Grayson is occasionally compared to Woody Allen. But Grayson’s stories here recall no one so much as Richard Brautigan, who walked a similar line between wit and warmth in his more eccentric novels. Though certainly unconventional, Highly Irregular Stories are refreshing because of their aloofness, which allows the author to indulge his peculiar point of view.

An iconoclast sways to his own beat, making beautiful music along the way.

Kaye Trout Book Reviews reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kaye Trout's Book Reviews has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson:

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Dumbo Books of Brooklyn
72 Conselyea Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://dumbobooksofbrooklyn.blogspot.com
www.richardgrayson.com
Genre: Fiction/Humor
Rating: Unusual
ISBN: 1411657969, $12.95, 177 pp, 2006

Highly Irregular Stories is, indeed, a most appropriate title for this compilation of prior writings: Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s, The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was and Narcissism and Me.

Richard Grayson opens with: "The anarchist’s bomb that killed Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg in 1881 led to the Russian pogroms and the anti-Semite May Laws of 1882. To these events we Americans owe countless things: the comedy of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce; the popularity of psychoanalysis . . ."

It’s interesting that Woody Allen and psychoanalysis are first among his list and that’s just what I was feeling as I read this book. Grayson has taken that Woody Allen-type New York humor about a self-deprecating, neurotic, talented man one step further into the twilight zone.

As I’m not a New Yorker and never could fully appreciate Woody Allen’s humor, I’ll let the book stand on its own. My experience of reading Eating at Arby’s about Manny and Zelda in downtown Miami brought back memories of learning to read with Dick and Jane. It almost has the same rhythm and meaningful depth. We were just missing "See Spot run."

But to be fair, I would like to quote from "Myself Redux" which I particularly enjoyed: one, for the historical perspective and two, for the Kurt Vonnegut-flavor of humor:

""On Wednesday, the thirteenth day of October in the year many people call 49 B.C., Caius Julius Caesar, a Roman general, crossed the ancient watery boundary between Cisaplin Gaul and Italy known as the River Rubicon, thus making immortal the phrase "to cross the Rubicon," meaning "to take a decisive and irrevocable step."

Precisely two millennia later, on Wednesday, the thirteenth of October in the Christian year 1951, my Jewish parents took a decisive and irrevocable step in a room of the Quality Courts Motel outside Corning, New York. Within a week, the embryo that was to become the person writing these words was as large as one of Caius Julius Caesar’s fingernails. A tube formed within the embryo. This enlarged at a certain point, and then it began to pulsate. Eventually this pulsating tube developed into a four-chambered organ which circulated the fluid known as blood throughout my body.

On Sunday, October 17, 1971, 185 years and one day after the establishment of the United States Bureau of the Mint, I decided that my four-chambered pulsating organ had been broken because I had found the 18-year-old female whom I described as my "girlfriend" in bed with my 16-year-old brother, their four-chambered organs pulsating rapidly.

One week later, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations, I attempted to stop the pulsating of my four-chambered organ by making a three centimeter incision with a razor blade across my left wrist.

The following Monday, October 25, 1971, known that year as "Veterans Day" due to federal legislation enacted to give citizens a three-day holiday weekend, I found myself in the offices of the clinical psychologist Marilyn Wertheim, crying into a tissue.""

The story goes on to tell us: his girlfriend becomes pregnant, his brother is killed when hit by a bus, he marries his girlfriend, she has the baby, he doesn’t know whether he’s a father or an uncle, the baby dies, and they annul the marriage. There’s more but that will give you an idea of the beginning.

So, if you’re a Woody Allen fan and using the same stuff as Richard, you just might enjoy this book and a trip into the twilight zone.

Richard Grayson is a prolific writer and to appreciate who he is, what he has accomplished and what he has written, I refer you to his website: www.richardgrayson.com.

Reviewed by Kaye Trout - June 21, 2006 - Copyright

Richard Grayson column in Orlando Sentinel: "It's '101 Dalmatians' vs. Woody Allen's Neurotics"

Richard Grayson has a column in the Orlando Sentinel today (Saturday, February 17, 1996), ""It's '101 Dalmatians' vs. Woody Allen's Neurotics."

Richard Grayson reports on Legislators in Love Scandal in Miami Herald's TROPIC Magazine

Richard Grayson reports on his involvement in Florida's Legislators in Love scandal in the Miami Herald's TROPIC Magazine this Sunday (August 7, 1994).

The Ventura County News reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

The latest Ventura County News (February 4, 1980) features a review of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:

The Ventura County News

Book Beat
____________

A Superb Mixture

by Lynne Gagnon


With Hitler in New York, by Richard Grayson (Toplinger [sic] Publishing Company, $7.95)

Richard Grayson offers us a comc relief collection of timely, well-designed stories.

Grayson cite the anarchist's bomb that killed Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg, 1881, leading to many influences in America, namely "the comedy of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce; the popularity of psychoanalysis;. . . the fact that it is no longer considered good form to use the word 'Jew' as a verb meaning 'to bargain'. . . and to my being here in these United States, to my becoming a fiction writer, to my writing this book, and ultimately to your reading it."

The 27 stories in With Hitler in New York are a generous blend of Kurt , Vonnegut, Woody Allen, Erma Bombeck and Fran Lebowitz, combined with shell steak, Brussels sprouts, a case of shingles, therapy sessions, an uncle who speaks like Donald Duck because of radiation treatments, an ex-lover turned gay (probably because of you) and a Truffaut double feature at the Carnegie Hall Cinema.

Favorite stories include "Classified Personal," "The Art of Living," "Driving Slow," "Wednesday Night at Our House" and "Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol."

From "The Art of Living":
"You go to visit your grandmother in the hospital. . . In the next room you can hear people talking about you. 'He's a real prick,' somebody says. You can hear another person nodding."

From "Classified Personal":
"To Tired of Being Hurt: I'm a W/F 18 who loves, absolutely adores. . . The Eagles. Springsteen is great too! You appeal to me as a warm human being who wants to share that warmth. Come and be a part of a friendship that can stand up against the cruel stabs of the world. Reply to You'll Never Cry. . ."

"HELP!! I'm a guy trapped in a girl's body! I intend to change surgically. I need friends with the same problems. . . LOOKING FOR AN ECHO!"

From "Wednesday Night at Our House":
"What does David want his mother not to do?
David tells her not to drive his father's 1971 Buick Century, or at least to drive it to the Skyland Shopping Mall once a day and no more.
Why does he say this?
Because David's mother has had arthritis for many years and has not driven a car since 1971; because she is going deaf and getting senile; because David fears that she will kill herself or other residents of North Miami Beach."

From "Slowly, Slowly in the Wind":
"We watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors trying to sell us a car. 'Don't you think she's got a foreign accent?' Grandpa asks. Nobody answers him. We are all eating our junk food. . . Another teaser for the news: 'Coming up next. A building crane falls and kills a little girl.' 'Oh, look,' Great-Grandma Chaikah says, 'that's the one they didn't show last night at eleven.'"

Richard Grayson gets the prize for making us laugh at the ridiculous insanity surrounding our lives. But the award is two-fold, as he also forces us to examine people and what they do to us. And more importantly, what we do to them.

With Hitler in New York is a superb mixture of comedy, drama, satire and philosophy. This book will not remain on your bookshelf long. If it is not read several times, it will be passed on to others and others and others. It might be a good idea to keep two on hand.

(Lynne Gagnon is a local free lance writer.)