Questions and Answers

Last week was the beginning of fall (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) or by its more sophisticated sounding name “autumn.”  Fall used to mean that a new school year was beginning, new television programs were about to start or old, successful ones entered a new season, and the end-of-the year holidays would be here again. (My Jewish friends have already begun the rounds of holidays as Rosh Hashanah,Yom Kippur  have just passed and Sukkot is now finishing up.)

But now as I am no longer a student or teacher (in the formal sense), the school calendar means little. Television seasons now begin whenever a rating boast is needed or shows need to replace programs whose ratings are just too low to get sufficient sponsorship from ED or acid reflux pill manufacturers.  As for the Holidays—Thanksgiving is fine as it’s all about eating and sharing food, while the gift-giving ones are a pain, and don’t even ask me about my feelings about New Year’s Eve–ugh!

But let’s talk about a new season of posts on this blog. When I began the blog about 16 months ago, I didn’t promise readers a post every week or every two weeks or every month because I wasn’t sure how often I’d be able to come up with something of interest about GertrudeandAlice. It has amazed me how subjects for posts come to mind at all hours of the day and because of the way the Word Press site is set up, I create a draft which I can come back to when I’m ready to flesh out an idea. Some friends have even suggested that the blog is book worthy, a very high compliment, but then your friends are your friends because they make you feel good!

(For the movie version of the blog a la “Julie and Julia”, let’s have Meryl Streep play Alice B. Toklas, Stanley Tucci can play me and for Gertrude Stein, let’s have an open casting call with actors required to memorize TENDER BUTTONS which will have to be presented with gusto and appropriate gestures!)

Currently there are four drafts waiting. Here is what you have to look forward to in the next few months, but that’s not to say other drafts might not preempt any of these.

• “Kukla, Fran and Gertrude Stein” is another trip down memory lane for this aging, Baby Boomer–sorry! This journey was prompted by an article I read about puppetry which highlights a 1930s production based on a piece by Gertrude Stein. I assume GertrudeandAlice pulled many a string in their lives keeping this artist in line or that servant hopping to or that German officer in place during WWII, but this is about a serious production that was hailed by Thornton Wilder:

‘This play should make you think and should make you laugh…As Miss Stein always says of her work: “Be natural and you will understand it.”‘

• “William Cook,” is a tribute to the American artist who was a good friend of GertrudeandAlice’s (they were even witnesses at his wedding) who among other things taught Gertrude how to drive enabling her and Alice to do their patriotic duty visiting the doughboys during WWI. You can get the full story in a lovely, little book COOK BOOK by Roy R. Behrens.

• “Summer Reads” is a post whose title will obviously have to change unless I wait until next June to write it.  It is a listing of some recent books which feature GertrudeandAlice.

and lastly

• “Life is Not a Paragraph” is about the unpublished memoir of Alice’s cousin, Annette Rosenshine, which is in the collection of the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley.  In it Annette, who would become an accomplished sculptor, gives a detailed account of her life especially her early years in San Francisco and the time she spent in Paris a few years before Alice arrived in the Stein household.

So, don’t mark your calendars in anticipation of these yet, but do stay in touch and I promise that there will be something new to read here soon, not to mention a new gallery of photos gleaned from the magical collections hovering about in the ether on the Internet.

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Annette Rosenshine, Gertrude Stein, Meryl Streep, Roy R. Behrens, Stanley Tucci, Thornton Wilder, William Cook