Crushed, or Howard Bannister Will Always Live in my Heart

 Wendall - every other Thursday

Ryan O’Neal passed away last week. This hit me particularly hard. Although many fell for him in Love Story, my crush, as an adolescent, came with his comic turns in in What’s Up Doc? and Paper Moon. I loved his character, Howard Bannister, so much, that I had Cyd Redondo name a Tasmanian Tiger after him in Drowned Under.

 

As Howard Bannister in What's Up Doc?

As Moses in Paper Moon

Norman Lear, another comic mastermind, whose sitcoms informed my youth, and who was articulate and hilarious to the end, passed away as well. As I approach a significant birthday during the holiday period, I’ve been thinking about what it means when your teenage crushes and early creative influences age and especially when they leave without you.

 

The groundbreaking Norman Lear

 

Everyone’s “growing up” crushes are different, although I don’t think I was the only one obsessed with Davy Jones in second grade. The Monkees, and their show, were so much a part of my elementary school years and my introduction to pop music, that it’s hard to comprehend that only Mickey Dolenz is still around.

 

Hey Hey We're the Monkees...

 

Other early crushes included Romeo and Juliet’s Leonard Whiting, The Goodbye Girl’s Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Grill of the Grassroots, and of course, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

 

My first "Romeo."

Who could resist "Midnight Confessions"?

Sigh.

Especially because I share a hometown with James Taylor, he’s always been an idol and happily, more than 50 years later, like Jackson Browne, he’s still recording and performing.

 

Think I wore through three of these.

 

As we age, part of us wants to keep our early idols frozen in time. Immortal. Exactly the way we remember them. Mainly, perhaps, because it helps us stay in touch with the innocent, giddy part of ourselves that had those crushes so long ago. So, when we see them aging like we are, see them as human, it has a strange, disorienting effect, not to mention giving us a reminder of our own mortality. 

 

JT in 2020.

 

So many of  the writing influences and idols who were bigger than life in my younger years have passed on—Sam Shepherd, John Fowles, Walker Percy, Susan Sontag. They’ve joined Henry James, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Dickens in the pantheon. And so they are frozen, in a way, and I still have all their work to revisit and fall in love with all over again.

 

John Fowles portrait by Tomas Watson

 

Of course, famous actors, musicians, and painters will always live on in their music, in their movies, in museums, in the images of them that we can all still find online. That doesn’t keep me from feeling the planet is too empty without Prince. Or Mary Travers. Or Billy Wilder.

 

Still leaving a hole in the world.

 

But I think maybe we should remember the gift it is to see the ones we admired in our youth who are still around, still writing, still singing, still acting, still living, despite physical challenges and everything else that comes with our later years--to see what a whole, long life well-lived can be.

 

So here’s to Joni Mitchell, Helen Mirren, Anne Tyler, David Hockney, Sally Field, Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Redford, Bonnie Raitt, Margaret Atwood, and all the other artists who are still creating and paving our way, letting us know it’s never too late for us to write/paint/dance/sing.

 

Joni Mitchell, performing this year.

 

Tonight, I’m rewatching What’s Up Doc?, delighting in Ryan O’Neal’s crush-worthy performance, admiring the late Buck Henry’s hilarious script, and being thankful that Barbra Streisand still has the stamina to write a 1000 page memoir. . .

 

"You can't fight a tidal wave."

 -- Wendall

Wendall's newest Cyd Redondo mystery, Cheap Trills, is now available here:

 https://amzn.to/3PVPuc1

You can hear her on NPR's "Dog Talk" podcast here on Apple here: https://bit.ly/3GuBT7b and on Spotify here:  https://bit.ly/41as0Fo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Minneapolis, Purple Still Reigns

Sujata Massey

dem atlas covers Prince this past weekend

Last weekend, when I was visiting the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I was hit with an unexpected surge of purple.

Purple was the favorite color of Prince, a Minnesota funk-rock star--and April 21 was the one-year anniversary of his untimely death in 2016 by overdose. I grew up in St. Paul and was just a few years younger than the man born Prince Rogers Nelson. Prince released his first album, "Soft and Wet," at the age of 17, and avidly followed his every move over the next several decades, as did my sisters.  Like Prince, we were young people of color living in a state that was predominantly white. There were no black musicians played on the radio except for on our sole "black" station,  KMOJ-FM.

Scene outside First Avenue at Prince Memorial

 It was hard to make friends, or find someone willing to date you, when you were a few shades darker than the majority or had an unpronounceable name. It was exhilarating to see Prince—a small, light-skinned black man who wore lace and satin and high heels—fearlessly be himself.

Artists who perform at First Ave are celebrated in stars. Only Prince's is golden

Prince’s biggest local shows were at a large nightclub called First Avenue at the downtown Minneapolis. First Avenue remains one of the top national nightclubs that still showcases local performers. Prince’s first film, Purple Rain, is a fictitious story in which he plays "The Kid," someone very much like himself, trying to make it in show business, get the girl, and deal with some hard family issues. The 1984 movie was a hit, with Prince's artistry stealing the show. Watching it later, I notice how mixed-race his audience appeared. People seemed to forget about traditional boundaries and fell in love with his hypnotic beats and daring lyrics. I mark this as the start of a new Minnesota. 

Purple Rain, best film score ever

Prince shot to stardom shortly after I’d become 18, the legal age to go to First Avenue's night shows. When he came to Baltimore's Civic Center, I was a college student and bought a ticket to his show. I pushed my way to the edge of backstage and gave one of the roadies a note addressed to  my high school friend, Susan Moonsie, who'd become a singer one of his custom-made opening bands: Vanity Six. I was gloriously lucky to find myself escorted backstage, where I hung out with Susan all night and met the other Vanity 6 singers and the men of The Time.  However, I didn't get to exchange words with Prince. Susan didn't want to introduce me because the two of them were in an argument.

Brenda, Vanity and Susan of Vanity 6

Despite his superstar status, Prince  never abandoned Minnesota. He built a massive home and recording studio in the suburb of Chanhassen named Paisley Park, after one of his songs, and often opened it to friends and fans who came for private parties with performances. Prince sometimes showed up to play at Minneapolis’s Dakota jazz club or First Avenue. 

Paisley Park is now open to tourists

During Prince’s adult years, Minnesota diversified. The state became the chief home of refugees from Somalia. It became a leader in families with international adoptions and was said to be "the gayest city after San Francisco."

Last weekend St. Paul, Minneapolis and Edina lit their buildings and bridges purple honoring Prince

Was Prince a symbol of civic change--or was he an agent of change?

 I wondered about this as I walked through the Twin Cities last weekend listening to the top favorite 89 Prince Songs on The Current, a Minnesota Public Radio station that, like KMOJ, had a special relationship with the artist. Spring comes late in the upper Midwest—while the grass was green, the tulips were just popping and the trees were taking on a light haze of leaves. In many neighborhoods, the gardens sprouted yard signs: “Black Lives Matter,” and “Falcon Heights: The World is Watching,” a reference to the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile in my own neighborhood that came a few months after Prince's death.

The most popular sign was in rainbow hues, with the state of Minnesota on one sign and on the other, the phrase, “All Are Welcome Here." The overt activism reminded me of the growing political and spiritual content of Prince’s work in the years just before his death. He had his eyes on the world, and he wanted to keep building bridges.

In April 2015, I was living in Baltimore during a period that it seemed one black male after another was killed by police. In Baltimore, a young man named Freddie Gray was arrested on suspicion of carrying drugs; he died after a short ride to jail in a police van. During a two-day period after Freddie’s funeral, areas of Baltimore were filled with destructive protestors and hundreds of fires were set. We endured almost a week of curfew and a city takeover by soldiers with the National Guard.

We never dreamed that Prince's career would end a year later

As the city was stilling itself, the city had stilled—but hardly returned to normal—Prince announced he was coming to Baltimore to perform a free "Rally 4 Peace."  He booked the Royal Farms Arena at his own expense. He wrote a song called “Baltimore” that was compassionate yet had a happy,  bopping beat. The song will never be his greatest hit, but it seems a perfectly distilled essence of his style and dogged determination to share joy as the way forward.