Tag: Anecdote

The Power is in the Stretch

Hunter was skeptical that the music world was ready to be introduced to a new fortysomething rapper. He encouraged Floyd to stop looking for quick fixes and instead find a steady job in which he could develop some lasting skills. He tried to use a sports metaphor to get the idea to sink in.

“Every time you come up to the plate, you try to hit a home run,” Hunter said. “But sometimes, you just need to make sure you can get to first base, you know what I’m saying?”

Given Floyd’s people skills, Hunter suggested he find a service job, perhaps working at FedEx or UPS. He tried to encourage Floyd to believe that something good would happen if he just stuck to the plan—any plan—to make an honest living. Hunter was a Christian, and he recalled a church sermon about Jesus healing a man whose hand had withered. Before the Lord performed the miracle, he asked the man to take some initiative and stretch out his hand.

“It’s in the stretch,” Hunter told him. “That’s where the power is.”

His Name Is George Floyd
Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa

Rita Hayworth – Anecdote

I visited publicist Tom Miller in Mexico on the set of “The Wrath of God,” Rita Hayworth’s last completed movie, I assume the one on which Mr. Langella had the brief affair with her (not his only affair on the film). One evening we had a nightcap with Rita. (Rita’s idea of a nightcap was a vodka and tonic to which she kept adding vodka to keep the glass filled and flavored. Tom decided thought she was drinking to give herself an excuse for not remembering, for already, as he saw in retrospect, there were signs of encroaching Alzheimer’s.)

Tom staged some of the last glamor shots taken of her , but they were never used because MGM threw the film away. (It wasn’t all that great, but what Ralph Nelson film ever was? But it wasn’t all that bad either. And what with her and Mitchum in their latter years and Frank Langella playing Rita’s son (!), it really deserves a decent video release.)

One night in Mexico City Tom dined out with Rita, and when they got back to her hotel,they discovered the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars being presented in one of the meeting halls. Rita was tuned on. “Let’s go!” Rita said. Tom replied, “Rita, we don’t have an invitation!” She looked at him and said, “But I am Rita Hayworth!” Tom said, “So you are.” He spoke to an attendant at the door, who ran up the MC, who announced to the crowd the presence of a surprise guest. She went up on the stage to a standing ovation. I wish someone would discover footage of that moment.

Theater Talkback: Frank Langella Telling Tales
BY CHARLES ISHERWOOD

From the comments section.

Having a Critic Over for Dinner – Pauline Kael Anecdote

But I have a favorite memory of her, from an occasion years earlier. Maria, Lizzie, and I were spending the weekend at the house in Sheffield, Massachusetts, that Janet Malcolm and her husband, Gardner Botsford, had built, and Pauline, who lived nearby, came to dinner, arriving by taxi (she didn’t drive) in her little white sneakers. By the time she left, she had managed to insult every one of us except ten-year-old Lizzie. Gardner had been her long-suffering editor for years, so the bile she directed at him made some kind of sense for someone who resented authority as much as Pauline did (she liked to refer to him as the Ripper). But she’d never met Maria or me. For instance, she said to Maria, “I was in your family’s apartment once. Your father was carrying on, and I remember that your mother was a particularly ugly woman.” This was not only gratuitous, it was nuts, since Laura Tucci was a famous beauty. Pauline’s aggression was so gratuitous that all of us, including Janet’s daughter, Anne, then about sixteen, and even Lizzie, went around for the rest of the weekend remembering more and more disagreeable things she had said. I don’t even think it was deliberate—it was just who and what she was.

Avid Reader
Robert Gottlieb

Henry James Asks for Directions

James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur – perhaps Cook was on a holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting to him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. “Wait a moment, my dear – I’ll ask him where we are”; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer – so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to . . .

“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah-? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the aged face at the window.

I found this here:
The Writer’s Voice
A Alvarez

The source is:
A Backward Glance
Edith Wharton

Marvin Gaye’s Impromptu Musical Convoy

“You should have been on the rest of the tour,” Big John told me, referring to Marvin’s last cross-country excursion before leaving America behind.

“We drove to Denver and Milwaukee and New York and Chicago—all over,” said Cammon. “Marvin could relax on the bus. It was his method of getting away. One time, I remember, he got on the CB and started talking, telling people that he was Marvin Gaye. When they asked him to prove it, he started singing. Well, they sure-enough believed him then, and soon we were leading a caravan of thirty cars and trucks. This went on for a hundred miles. Finally he had me pull over at a truck stop, and everyone stopped along with us. He broke open a half-dozen bottles of champagne, and we had a beautiful party.

Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye
David Ritz

Small Town Scandals


What was the biggest scandal in your small town? from AskReddit

All-Seeing Upvote
DARE officer selling drugs that were evidence.

aliensweare
My fifth grade DARE officer hit on me at a high school football game while I was still in high school and while we was on duty. I’d smoked and drank to pregame right before too. While flirting he asked if his DARE education worked. Buddy NO. On all counts.

Yarnprincess614
We had a US Marshal come to health class my sophomore year of high school. He gave us Starbursts when we got questions right. It was awesome!

Emperor_Cartagia
Mayor and several city councillors were taking kickbacks and bribes from demolition/construction/cleaning companies for clean up contracts after a hurricane, funded by FEMA.

The companies would give the mayor and city councillors like a couple grand, then the company would get FEMA funds in the tens of thousands to clean up/destroy a hurricane damaged property, only the address given to FEMA and listed on the contract were fake, or already cleared, so the companies got paid to do nothing.

mountsunrise
College professor was found tied to a tree and burned months after he disappeared. Police ruled it a suicide

KhaleesiDoll
Our english teacher *raped half the boys track team in high school… AND slept with the vice principal… AND the gym teacher.

Everybody knew about it and we were all fairly certain one of the kids was the actual father of her kid, not her husband.

When I came home and told my dad that a teacher had been arrested for sleeping with students, he responded:

“So they finally caught up with Marcie? Two of my apprentices have her nudes and keep showing the rest of us when we’re trying to work.”

I don’t miss my hometown, lol.

MooKids
Probably the Brown’s Chicken Massacre, where 7 people were murdered at the restaurant over a robbery. Case was cold for 9 years until the girlfriend on one of the murderers went to the police that he had confessed to her. He and his friend were eventually convicted through DNA and a confession.

venomousvee
There was an anesthetist, who worked at our local hospital and another hospital in a different town. He was rather well known among other doctors and known to be good at what he was doing. He only had a small problem with being addicted to pain killers and anaesthetics.

So to feed his addiction without getting caught he shot up part of his patients’ drugs before injecting the same needle into his patient.

Thus went unnoticed until it was discovered that over 60 of his patients got infected with hepatitis. And that he was the source for it.

He was fired and his license revoked as far as I know. But the hospital’s image still suffered quite a bit.

The Power of Art and Self Expression – Example of, Anecdote

Ask a little kid to tell you about a painting they’re working on. It’s a miraculous thing. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to aspire to that level of artistic liberation. I believe it’s still there in all of us. I wrote about this in my first book, but I think it’s worth emphasizing: During my stay in a mental hospital some sixteen years ago now, I witnessed this childlike superpower reassert itself, take hold, and transform a woman who was virtually catatonic in an art-therapy class. I think about it almost every day.

A sixty-something heroin addict who had spent the better part of the previous thirty years in and out of institutions and living on the streets – and whom I had not heard make a sound in any of the group therapy sessions, or even in the smoking room – drew a simple picture of herself. It wasn’t great. But it looked like her.

When she held it up for the class to see, I heard her voice for the very first time. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she had held a pencil. She smiled! And cried. Everyone clapped and gathered around to hold her. It was such a stark, amazing, healing thing to see someone’s eyes light up – become human again – when they realized they had the power to make something that wasn’t there.

How to Write One Song
Jeff Tweedy

Author vs Imagined Author – Bertrand Russell Anecdote

I remember meeting for the first time one of the leading literary men in America, a man whom I had supposed from his books to be filled with melancholy. But it so happened that at that moment the most crucial baseball results were coming through on the radio; he forgot me, literature, and all the other sorrows of our sublunary life, and yelled with joy as his favorites achieved victory. Ever since this incident, I have been able to read his books without feeling depressed by the misfortunes of his characters.

Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness.

Music Connecting People, Example of – Joe Jackson Anecdote

I’M SITTING at the counter in my favorite New York diner, tucking into eggs over easy with hash browns—very English, the breakfast fry-up, but very American, too. I’m washing it down with cranberry juice—caffeine is probably the only vice I don’t have—and someone turns on the radio.

Most of the time, I don’t hear music. My brain just tunes it out. We’re all bombarded with some sort of music on a daily basis—in shops, TV commercials, restaurants, lifts—most of it simply noise pollution, deadening us to the real joy of music. So I only listen when I really want to. But the Puerto Rican waitress has turned on a Spanish channel, and a seductive salsa rhythm seeps into the room. It’s a charanga band—a traditional group that uses flute and violin over the standard latin rhythm section of congas, bongos, and timbales—and now I’m half-listening. Then the violinist takes a solo, and I’m hooked. He’s a great, inspired player. The band is playing a simple three-chord vamp, and he follows the chords closely, and yet still manages to come up with witty, ingenious, melodic twists. And the way he plays with the time! Dragging a phrase, and then ending it right on the beat. Setting up syncopations—accents that go against the beat—and then turning them around, playing them backwards. Then he hits an unexpected high note, and it’s like a shaft of light going right through my body, filling me with warmth. Without even thinking, I cry out—“Yeah!” or “All right!” or something—and I marvel at the way that music, after all these years, can still surprise me.

The guy next to me just goes on munching his cheeseburger. But something special has happened, even if I’m the only one who knows it. The band on the radio are most likely second- or third-generation Puerto Ricans who were raised uptown, way uptown—in the Bronx—in a different world from me. But through the music, they’ve connected with an Englishman way downtown, in a way that would otherwise never happen.

A Cure For Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage
Joe Jackson

Playing Music for Angels and Devils, Clapton Anecdote

Eric Clapton, whose “Crossroads” with Cream is the only later version to include the line about Willie Brown and achieves an intensity and power of its own, must have thought long and hard about the Johnson legend. After an extended bout with heroin addiction, he reemerged in the early seventies playing in a more restrained, less bluesy style. In 1974, Rolling Stone interviewer Steve Turner asked him if the change in his music reflected a change in attitude, and instead of answering the question directly, he told Turner a story. “Once with the Dominos [a post-Cream Clapton group] , we dropped some acid in San Francisco,” he said, “and apart from the fact that the guitar was made of rubber, every bad lick I had, every naughty lick, blues lick whatever you want to call it, turned the audience into all these devils in sort of red coats and things. And then I’d play a sweet one, and they all turned into angels. I prefer playing to angels, personally.”

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta
Robert Palmer

James Joyce Anecdote

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1979/10/07/112126187.html?pageNumber=102
(page 105 in the microfiche)
Letter to Book Review, NYTIMES, October 7 1979

To the editor:
The review of “Portraits of the Artist in Exile” (Aug. 26) stirred memories of James Joyce in Trieste. My father was the American Consul charged with protecting British interests. He came to like and respect Joyce without the slightest inkling of what he was up to besides teaching at the Berlitz school and tutoring.

My father went so far as to suggest to my mother that they invite Joyce and Nora Barnacle to dinner. This led to words, and my mother’s Victorian upbringing prevailed.

The remote possiblity of social amenities between the two families vanished in 1915 when British subjects began to face internment, a prospect Joyce did not relish. He turned to his friends for help to get him to Switzerland. My father did the paperwork and with others made it plain to the Austrian authorities that Joyce would be a troublemaker to British officialdom. This indeed proved to be the case. Tom Stoppard makes it clear in “Travesties.” Joyce had nothing to give his friends but unsold copies of “The Dubliners.” The copy he gave my father is inscribed
To
Ralph Busser
James Joyce
18 Feby 1915

Joyce left for Zurich in June and within two years we were in the war. As our train from Vienna rolled into the station at Zurich one lone figure stood on the platform. It was Joyce come to meet us. As he took hold of the handle of an aged suitcase it broke, but he nimbly tucked it under his arm and led us out. With another simple gesture he had expressed his gratitude.

I never saw him again.
Ralph Busser Jr.
Philadelphia, Pa.

Stoner Orders Pizza – Best of Craigslist

To The Stoner Who Works At Cottage Inn Pizza
You: the guy who answers the phone at cottage inn pizza
Me: Hungry and stoned out of my gourd

I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.

When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.

We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We’ll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.

It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aaa/425529349.html