1) After a week away I’m used to going through a stack of mail, especially after Christmas. Returning from a week away in February, however, I was surprised to find five to seven handwritten notes among the bills and junk mail. Such bounty! I am not ungrateful. It was pure delight to open each envelope.
1a) One was from a friend of Mother’s, with news clippings from the Old Hometown Newspaper that mentioned my father, and some other things, and it was like hearing from Mother Herself.
1b) Two others, from that Fascinating New Personality, could be classified as love letters.
1c) In addition, a large padded envelope from an Interlochen friend yielded . . . every letter and card I’d sent him in the last 35 years. This is the sort of thing that used to happen when people died; letters were returned. That’s how James Fox was able to write his book Five Sisters about the legendary Langhorne sisters of Virginia, including his mother Phyllis Brand and his notorious aunt Nancy Astor. I believe they found their letters to each other in a trunk in Phyllis’s bedroom long after she died. But . . . gurrrrlllll, if I don’t write my story, no one else will!
2) I have never missed Begonia and Estonia, my housemaids AWOL since 1994, more than I have today. But with a Fascinating New Personality arriving tomorrow for a long weekend, well . . . as Sir Roderick Bland said in Noel Coward’s “Bon Voyage,” “The moment is urgent!”
3) Today I have veered between Charlie Chan and the 1990 Live from Lincoln Center performance of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with my beloved Sally Ann Howes as Desirée and Regina Resnik as Madame Armfeldt. I am particularly obsessed with the song “Soon.”
3a) Long ago, when I was a tender sweet young thing working as a concierge at the Vendome, one of the tenants cleaning out his vinyl passed on to me a boxed four-record set of Regina Resnik in the title role of Carmen. I think one of those records was scratched. I’ve never forgotten that recording, not least because Dame Joan Sutherland Herself played Micaela.