Julie and Julia

Julia Child, Graham Kerr, Moss Hart, and Kitty Carlisle

I don't think I ever watched Julia Child. I did watch The Galloping Gourmet long ago. My sister was amused by him. All I remember was one episode where he was cutting up some green onions.

"These are called onion sticks," he said. Then he added, "I don't know why I said that," and the studio audience laughed. He wrote a cookbook called The Graham Kerr Cookbook by The Galloping Gourmet.

Well, Graham Kerr survived a heart attack and the Galloping Gourmet switched to more healthful cuisine. He and his wife had a number of terrible things happen to them, and they became very religious.

But I'm sitting here with the movie Julie and Julia on TV. A frustrated writer named Julie begins a blog. She sets out to cook one recipe a day from Julia Child's book on French cooking. This is intercut with scenes from Julia Child's life, all the stuff she goes through to get the book written and published.

The movie's kind of annoying. People reading their own internet writing in voice-over is just awful. Like the movie You've Got Mail. It made me ashamed to converse with people on the 'net.

Julie goes overboard. Begins to feel that she knows Julia Child, which might be fine, but she feels free to express these feelings. And she's hurt when Child is asked about the blog and she says she thinks it's stupid.

It should be a lesson to all of us not to get too caught up in these things.

Something I heard on This American Life

Long ago, on the radio show This American Life, a woman talked about her obsession with the author of another book.

The book had belonged to her grandfather who had been a playwright and a teacher. She read it when she was 11. It was Act One by Moss Hart, a writer and director and the husband (even though he was gay) of game show denizen Kitty Carlisle.
Moss Hart

The girl tried to follow in Hart's footsteps. Moved to New York. She developed a weird sort of crush on Moss Hart even though he had died before she was born.

"It definitely turned from kind of a mentor--a make-believe mentor--to a pretend husband-to-be... Somehow I think I decided that time had completely screwed up and sent Moss to Kitty Carlisle, and that if he just hadn't died two years before I was born, then me and Moss might really have had a chance."

Finally, Hart's widow, Kitty Carlisle, spoke at the girl's university.

"She was very active in the New York arts scene, and she was...a huge advocate of the arts in our country.... And I stood in line [to meet her] after she spoke... And there were all these people around me, and they were like, 'you were really good on that game show.' And I was just disgusted, like, oh please, she was in A Night at the Opera. She's like a singer. She's not just a game show lady.
Kitty Carlisle

"But by the time I got to the front of the line, and I went up to talk to her, I said what I wanted to say, sort of, which was, you know, Moss changed my life and I moved to New York to be a playwright like him. And I think I said something along the lines of, your husband meant so much to me. And she just looked at me, and she was so elegant and so classy, and she just said, 'I don't understand, darling. Did you know him?' She was just terrified.

"... I think she probably heard some kind of ownership or possessiveness in the way I said 'your husband meant so much to me,' as if I knew him. So I think it was confusing, since she probably could figure out that he probably was dead before I was born.

"But it was disturbing, and I felt terrible. And it made me realize how just far from reality this thing had taken me. And it was just scary to scare her...."

Don't get caught up in these things. It can only turn out badly. At least have the good sense to conceal it.

And after you humiliate yourself, you probably shouldn't share the anecdote on the radio,

Something else I heard on the radio

A Mexican politician was at a book fair. A reporter asked him to name three books that changed his life. He wasn't able to answer.

People took this to mean that he was some sort of illiterate, but that's nonsense. How much are books supposed to change your life?

Cookbooks probably have more influence on people's day to day lives. Bits of advice I heard over the years that came from How to Win Friends and Influence People actually came in handy once in a while.

I've read great literary works that had little influence on me. And I've read stuff that was just crap that had significant influence. There was the book on cartooning----they discussed when to stop working on a drawing, when to stop adding detail. You don't want to over do it. Their advice: When in doubt, do nothing. Words I've come to live by. But if I were a politician asked that question by a reporter at a book fair, I wouldn't mention that book.