“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
The above quote has been attributed to a number of people and is as good an excuse as any for me not posting to this blog in so many weeks!
But as a matter of fact, I ‘m writing this in Johannesburg, South Africa, a good 21 hours flying time from home in San Francisco (our first trip to this corner of the globe where it is now winter.)
Have been here about a week and have already ventured to Kruger National Park for a mini-safari with sightings of leopard, lion, giraffe, hippo, crocodile, impala, warthog, hyena, ostrich, and an abundance of birds.
As close as the pet next door!
Though I have never seen the movie or stage version of “The Lion King,” I found myself humming some of the opening bars of one of the songs—don’t even know which one, but it contained African lyrics with a catchy tune.
So where do GertrudeandAlice fit in?
I know they didn’t venture this far south, though I’m sure that the African masks and other artifacts that were popular with Picasso and some of his contemporaries probably also intrigued them. And tales from the “Dark Continent” whether interpreted by Joseph Conrad or the newspapers of the day undoubtedly provided salon conversations from time to time. And Le Revue Negre with Josephine Baker was the rage of Paris in 1925 with its erotically charged productions of a romanticized, mythical Africa scored to the tunes of American jazz.
A trip so far afield also gives me time to catch up on reading. A couple of the books on my I Pad do include GertrudeandAlice including THE PARIS WIFE:A NOVEL by Paula McLain about Hadley Hemingway and OUTLAW MARRIAGES: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF FIFTEEN EXTRAORDINARY SAME-SEX COUPLES by Rodger Streitmatter which includes a chapter about Our Ladies of Paris. Then there is Gertrude’s THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, (it is now available as an e book,) should I wish to try my hand at finally finishing this massive e-tome cover-to-cover or more correctly screen-to-screen.
Hadley and Ernest and Bumby makes three!
A few weeks ago I met via e mails Christopher Blake, who was one of the hundreds of GIs who visited GertrudeandAlice at the end of WWII. Chris saw them regularly for a year during 1945 and has written a play “5 rue Christine,” which I have almost finished reading too. More on this in a future post.
To close with another quote which sounds a bit Steinian though it is from Nelson Mandela:
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
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