Questions and Answers

As the crow flies or maybe the American Eagle, it is 953 miles or  1,582 kilometers from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Portland, Oregon, USA and GertrudeandAlice are about to embark on this journey just in time for Alice’s 134th birthday on April 30th, as the stage is set for another Stein production.

This production, Now Repeat in Steinese , originated in New York and was written about on this blog in May of last year,  Stein ‘n Wine, a Night of Steinese. What better tribute to the Mistress of Repetition than to repeat  Now Repeat in Steinese! And what better birthday gift could Alice ask for, other than maybe a well-ostrich-feathered chapeau!

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GertrudeandAlice were never in Canada…until the last few weeks  and their arrival in Edmonton, Alberta will effect the city for a long, long time!

Just as the scrolling text in New York’s Time Square heralded their arrival in 1934, the Timms Centre for the Arts on the campus of the University of Alberta in its own way welcomed the Two Ladies from Paris with open arms with this extraordinary production, “The Gertrude Stein Project.”

There was a there there amid winter's last snow!

I was so fortunate to be there to join the welcoming party for a preview and for opening night! (I only regret that I didn’t have an armload of yellow roses, Gertrude’s favorite flower, and an armload of lilacs, Alice’s favorite flower, to toss at the feet of the team that made all of this happen!)

I generally don’t like reviews because in a review a critic often feels obligated to write about the good, the bad and the ugly. In this case there is no “bad” or  “ugly” and as you’ll see in a bit, I will provide full disclosure because all the “good,” is so, so good, you may wonder “What did they pay this guy?!”

Instead of a “review,” I call this a ” tribute”  to everyone who made “The Gertrude Stein Project” the phenomenal event that it was.

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Last year on this date, the anniversary of Alice’s death, I posted a blog emphasizing the importance of Alice’s middle initial.  If  you’d like to revisit it, just go to March 2010 in the Archives.

This year, thought, I would like to keep it brief and simple with a tribute collage I once made. On this date it honors the woman who helped Gertrude Stein be Gertrude Stein.  The photo is followed by one of the hundreds of love notes Gertrude sent to Alice.

Baby looked so pretty with a big hat on

lovely black hair,

Baby looked so pretty with no hat on

lovely black hair,

Baby looks so pretty with its little head

and its lovely black hair sleeping sweetly

on its hard pillow,

Baby looks so lovely, precious baby, baby

looks so lovely precious precious baby

The gift giving holiday season  drew  to a close several weeks ago with Epiphany,  January 6th, the day that according to legend the Magi arrived to give the Christ child their gifts. Two of the regal visitors brought somewhat useless gifts, frankincense and myrrh, and one gift, that small chest of gold, must have come in handy for his young, homeless parents. But come to think of it, all three gifts were far more useful than the 12 lords a-leaping that end that dreadful “Twelve Days of Christmas” dirge!

The Epiphany a la Lego!

Although this year’s holiday “must-have” electronic devices proved to be diverse, from this “I-thing” to that “I-thing,” one of the best-selling, non-I-things, was amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader.

The Kindle I have was handed down to me when an I-Pad entered our household. (The days of hand-me-down itchy sweaters or too short corduroy  pants are long gone!)

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It’s Thanksgiving time and time to talk “food,” as if many of us need a holiday as an excuse to talk food!

In the annual food issue of The New Yorker magazine this past week, there is an article by Laura Shapiro, “The First Kitchen,”  about the cuisine in the White House during the tenure of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  Apparently the food was quite horrible, but not because of the Depression or World War II, but because of the cook that Mrs, Roosevelt had hired, a Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt.

I couldn’t help but wonder if during their visit to the White House for tea in December, 1934, GertrudeandAlice encountered any of Mrs. Nesbitt’s culinary curiosities.  And if they did, were they the perfect guests NOT whispering in Eleanor’s ear that “This Mrs. N. has got to go, for the health of the country!”

FDR carving the Bird!

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year, let’s turn to tastier things.

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One of the benefits of a blog is that it can be timely and even though a few posts ago I had listed upcoming things that I’d planned to write about, my recent trip to Japan got in the way.  (I began the draft of this post in our hotel in Kyoto, two days before our return, though I  verified a few facts in books I have at home before I published this.)

Leo Stein in a rakish pose

Just for fun while in Kyoto, I decided to do a Google search for “Leo Stein Japanese prints,” as I knew that Leo had an interest in this type of art.  These prints had come to the attention of Westerners as they were used to wrap Japanese porcelain which became very popular following the opening of the country in the 1860’s.  This art form also influenced the subject matter and composition of the Post-impressionists’ paintings.

Japanese print circa 1895. Is it a rose?

To my surprise (why am I still surprised at what turns up on the Internet – must be the fact I haven’t graduated to texting and tweeting and am still an old-school e mail writer!) an item appeared that is in the Stein collection at Yale – a note Leo wrote to Gertrude from Kyoto in December, 1895, giving her his address written in Japanese!

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Today is the first anniversary of the death of our Springer Spaniel, Ollie.  Though one year has passed, whenever we remember him our eyes still get misty, especially as we recall his last week with us.

We miss his talking, his grin when he greeted us when we came home, his love of his special diet of broccoli, sardines, tofu, and boiled potatoes and his eager anticipation at his window in the living room as he waited to be picked up each day by his walker to join his play group! A lot of  ‘his’ as part of  ‘ours.’

And so today we remember and are also thankful for his great-nephew Fritz who in a few weeks will be one-year old and has already started his list of joys and memories in our life.

Ollie posing during a Christmas past.

And as Gertrude or Alice should, as much as possible, have the last word or words in each post on this blog, I turn it over to Gertrude Stein once again this time from her work “Identity a Poem:”

I am I because my little dog knows me. The figure wanders on alone.
The little dog does not appear because if it did then there would be nothing to fear.
It is not known that anybody who is anybody is not alone and if alone then how can the dog be there and if the little dog is not there is it alone.
The little dog is not alone because no little dog could be alone. If it were alone it would not be there.
So then the play has to be like this.
The person and the dog are there and the dog is there and the person is there and where oh where is their identity, is the identity there anywhere.
I say two dogs but say a dog and a dog.

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!

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Today, one hundred years ago, the moving van arrived at 27, rue de Fleurus and Alice B. Toklas’s belongings were unloaded and she moved in with Gertrude Stein!  They had first met almost three years before to the day.  Since that meeting, coming to ’27’ on a daily basis became a part of Alice’s routine and though she had undoubtedly begun to assume some household responsibilities during that period, she had most notably become the primary typist of Gertrude’s manuscripts.

A picture postcard of Paris, 1910.

Alice had been living in an apartment on rue Notre Dames des Champs within walking distance of rue de Fleurus with her San Francisco neighbor Harriet Levy.  When Harriet decided to return to San Francisco, she asked Alice to handle shipping her furniture and paintings including a Matisse.

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For those of you who have been following the adventures of the birth and arrival of my English Springer Spaniel Fritz since last November, I  thought a short post would be appropriate as he passes the nine month old mark.

After his bath this past weekend, he surprised me with a most regal pose on one of our new sofas with its rose cushion, so how could I not feature him this week?!

By chance I also received an e mail and photo from a friend who had spent her vacation in a home on Lake Tahoe.  On the wall of one of the rooms was a framed California license plate with “Mr Fritz” on it.  She thought of me and thought of Fritz.

And then there was another dog who often posed regally both for photographs and portraits and thoroughly enjoyed the attention:

“Basket was a white poodle.  When I first came to Paris everybody every concierge had a poodle as they later had a fox terrier, then Alsatian police dogs came and then wire haired terriers and then we had a white poodle and we named him Basket.  The French children and the French men and women would all stop and look at him, they said each one as if it was a new idea one would think he was a lamb.

One day, Basket had just had just been washed, a little boy came along and said, one would call it a marriage he is so white…”

from EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Gertrude Stein

Mr. Fritz and Baskets I & II holding court in special places in everybody’s autobiography.