A friend was once very diplomatic and supportive when I mentioned to him that I was concerned that I posted to my blog so infrequently. “I like your blog because you only write something when you really have something to say. That’s what makes it enjoyable.” Now, that’s what real friends are for!
It is now almost three years since I posted a blog, filling the intermittent years with photos and holiday greetings. And it took our world pandemic and the requisite sheltering-in-place for me to get it together. Some friends from around the world, who I got to know because of our mutual interest in GertrudeandAlice, have kindly hinted that they missed my posts. Once again, thanks is due to real friends for the gentle prods!
I didn’t stop posting because I no longer had anything to say about GertrudeandAlice or my interest in them had lessened in anyway. I just seemed to stop and when WordPress changed the formatting of their program, I just didn’t have the patience to try to learn it – once I did, in the silence of my shelter in place, I discovered it’s very easy and very user friendly.
Illustration by Maira Kalman from the new edition of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”
Lots has happened in the last three years in the worlds of GertrudeandAlice. Interest in them has not waned and I believe that it’s even increased based on the notices that I continue to receive through my Google Alerts. Productions of Stein’s plays are produced around the world; new works about them in all media are created; research papers just keep coming; and books, both scholarly ones and ones for young, potentially new fans are being published. (Hard to believe that the picture book I produced with Tom Hachtman will be ten years old next year and we’re still selling copies!)
So, I promise to get this blog on track again. Some posts in the next few weeks will serve as exercises in catching up and some will look ahead to the future, something most of us are doing a lot of right now.
I have no idea of the number of readers of this blog there still are, but once you receive this resurrected effort, I’d really like to hear from you at hansg@gertrudeandalice.com.
So, off we go with more questions and answers with Gertrude in the driver’s seat with Alice navigating and Basket II watching the world go by!
Theatrical productions about GertrudeandAlice, whether play, musical or opera, just keep coming! The newest is The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein by New York writer, Edward Einhorn presented at the HERE multi-arts center in New York City through May 28th. Einhorn also directs the show.
The play is a farcical frolic with members of GertrudeandAlice’s charmed circle – you name them, they’re there: Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, Virgil Thomson, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Vechten, Alfred Lord Whitehead, Francis Picabia, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder and the Steins, Leo, Michael and Sarah. Then there are nods to the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Moses and Solomon and assorted wives and mistresses – it is a farce after all, with some serious moments.
The happy couple: Alyssa Simon as Alice, Mia Katigbak as Gertrude (Photo Richard Termine)
It’s Alice birthday time again and the years certainly do flit by!
It was fifteen years ago that I organized an exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library to commemorate Alice’s 125th and then packed it up to be shown at the American Library in Paris. In the spirit of time marching along at a steady pace and looking back – let’s make “Throw Back Thursday,” “Throw Back Birthday” – here is my Alice birthday post from seven, short years ago. Happy Birthday once again, Alice B.!
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alice B. Toklas in Paris, one event in a memorable 1967.
In a post several years ago, I used the title “That Was The Year That Was,” a variation of the mid- 1960s television show called “That Was The Week That Was.” The program, a predecessor of “Saturday Night Live,” and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” took a humorous, satiric look at the news of the previous week.
To commemorate Alice, I’m looking at “…The Year That Was,” 1967. (She lived without Gertrude for twenty-one years.)
One of my goals when I began this blog was to bring as much recognition to Alice as to Gertrude. Though my use of the term “GertrudeandAlice” implies a symbiotic relationship, which it was, Alice still often plays second fiddle to Gertrude’s first chair violin for some people.
I think I have been able to rectify this disparity of wellknownness over the years and I must think that even Gertrude would not be upset to know that Alice has gotten her due as so much more than chief cook and bottle washer!
In the next few months I propose giving Alice even more due !
March 7, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of Alice’s death, so I’m declaring the six month period from now until Alice’s 140th birthday on April 30th ALICE B. TIME! And by chance, there are a lot of Alice related things happening during ABT. » Read the rest of this entry «
This year is the 5th anniversary of my book GERTRUDE AND ALICE AND FRITZ AND TOM. I know it’s a cliche, but I must say it anyway – “Where has the time gone?”
The book has found its way to readers around the world and just last week I shipped another five copies to Shakespeare & Company in Paris, which has sold more copies of it than any other bookstore or online retailer, which I find so appropriate and gratifying.
Would I do it again? Yes! Do I have more tales to tell, yes! But for now, here is my post from five years ago, as I awaited the first shipment of books from Singapore:
Wasn’t it Lady Macbeth who said “What’s done is done,” at some point either before or after that bloody dagger scene? (Just checked, it’s after the dagger scene – that would be logical !)
…the deed is done!
Well, I’ve done it too and feel a bit like a parent dropping off his first child at kindergarten hoping for the best as tears well-up and Miss Crabtree leads the young one away to join the other rascals.
Miss Crabtree in charge
So what is it that’s been done – the children’s picture book which I’ve been working on for…let’s just say many,many years is on its way to a printer in Singapore!
