We’ll Sing in the Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

We'll Sing in the Sunshine by Gale Garnett.

Another near-perfect if delightfully cool afternoon here in the boonies of the Chicago metroplex.  On my daily stroll I found myself singing an old song that I fell in love with back in 1964 when I was a nerdy Cheyenne teenager—We’ll Sing in the Sunshine by Gale Garnett. It was a big hit that summer but both the song and singer seem to have faded from popular memory.

Gale Zoë Garnett was a 22 year old Canadian singer when she broke out with her own original song.  What made the song so memorable, besides the catchy hook were the lyrics which stood a traditional male love ‘em and leave ‘em trope on its head.   Medieval bards and Childe Ballads through American folk music, blues, and pop to rock and soul were all filled with charmingly roguish and romantic foot-loose roamers who dally with comely lasses and move on with just a twinge of regret because, well, that’s just the kind of man they were.  Sometimes, just sometimes, a line or two might consider the girl heartbroken and/or ruined as an afterthought.

Garnett’s song about a girl promising only to dally with lad before she will “be on my way” turned the tables.  It was a directed product of the post-Pill Sexual Revolution of the mid-‘60’s and she was in her mini-skirts and long black hair was the perfect messenger.

Garnett was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and moved to Canada with her family when she was 11. She made her public singing debut in 1960, while at the same time pursuing an acting career, making guest appearances on TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip. She made her New York nightclub debut in 1963 and was signed by RCA Victor Records that same year.  The next year RCA released her debut album My Kind of Folk Songs and We’ll Sing in the Sunshine was the run-away hit off of the LP.

A re-issue of Garnett's first album more prominantly featured the title of her big hit.

The song hit #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, #2 in Canada,  #1 on the Adult Contemporary singles chart for seven weeks,  and a Top 50 Country hit.  The record waltzed away with the Grammy for Best Folk Recording.

Garnett never matched that success again although she did continue to record with more success in Canada than south of the border.  In the late ‘60’s she made a leap to psychedelic folk rock her new band The Gentle Reign.  She has continued to act, most notably voicing the character Sharon in the 1967 Rankin-Bass animated TV special Monster Mash Party and as Aunt Lexy in the 2002 sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Garnett was a perfect '60's groovy chick with big talent.

On stage she starred in a Canadian production of Hair and in 1975, co-wrote with Tom O’Horgan the music for Starfollowers in an Ancient Land, an Off-Off Broadway production at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City’s East Village in addition to appearing in the play. She also wrote and performed two one-person theater pieces, Gale Garnett & Company and Life After Latex.

Garnett  has turned increasingly to writing in recent years branched out into journalism, writing essays, columns, and book reviews for various newspapers and magazines.  She published her first novel, a romance, Visible Amazement in 1999. She followed with Transient Dancing in 2003, the novella Room Tone in 2007, and her latest release Savage Adoration in 2009.

She is still alive, well, and active at age 77.

Eugene O’Neill Checks Out

O'Neill and 3rd wife, actress Carlotta Monterey.

Note:  A version of this first appeared in this blog on October 16, 2010.

Eugene O’Neill was born in a trunk, or pretty close to one, in a cheap theatrical hotel right on Times Square in New York City on October 16, 1888.  65 year later O'Neill died in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston, on November 27, 1953.  As he lay on his death bed, he reportedly murmured, “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room.”

His father was James O’Neill, an Irish born actor who had early success as a matinee idol leading man, but settled into staring in an adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo in more the 6000 performances on stages great and small.  He was constantly on tour, except for an annual summer hiatus at Monte Cristo House, a comfortable summer cottage he built in New London, Connecticut. 

Young Eugene toured with his family until he was old enough to be sent to Catholic boarding school.  He hated the experience and soured on the Church, but found solace in reading.

At his father’s insistence, O’Neill enrolled at Princeton but was suspended for drunkenness and rowdyism before completing this first year.  To escape his father’s ire, he headed to Honduras to try his hand as gold prospector.  That ended with a bout of malaria.  

After recovering O’Neill signed on the first of several tramp steamers.  He spent a few years as a merchant seaman, a brutally arduous job—especially in the hellish boiler rooms where men spend hour upon hour hand stoking coal into the burners.  As evidence from the plays he set in this milieu suggest, O’Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who were fighting kind of a guerilla war for livable conditions with quick on the job actions and direct action.  During his down time on board these ships he battled depression, read, and began to write.  He also fell into the sailor’s life style of periodic, intense, binge drinking in port, going broke and having to return to sea to eat.  He did find enough time “on the beach” to marry Kathleen Jenkins in 1909 and father a son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr.

A few years of this broke O’Neill’s health.  He spent several months in 1911 and ’12 in a sanitarium recovering from consumption—tuberculosis.  While hospitalized, he invented his own regime of reading the Greeks, Shakespeare and other classic drama and then the daring new European realists—Ibsen,  Strindberg, and Chekhov.  He began writing furiously, crafting mostly one act plays based on his experiences at sea.  Within a few years he would have “a trunk load” of scripts.

After leaving the hospital, O’Neill soon shed his wife and settled in the fertile, bohemian environment of Greenwich Village, where he mingled freely with other writers, artists of all sorts, and passionate radicals.  Among his closest friends was the young Oregon born journalist Jack Reed.  In 1913 Reed produced the Patterson Pageant which brought hundreds of actual strikers from the great IWW silk workers’ strike in Patterson, New Jersey to the stage of Madison Square Garden to re-enact dramatic episodes of their on-going struggle.  O’Neill was involved and may have written unaccredited dialogue.  He also had a brief affair with Reed’s lover and future wife, the radical writer Louise Bryant.  Despite the proclaimed commitment of all three to the free love promoted anarchist Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman—who was also Louise’s editor as a regular contributor to The Blast—the triangle was emotionally draining for all of them.  O’Neill’s dalliance ended when Bryant married in Reed in 1917 and the couple went to Russia to cover the Revolution.

But before Reed left, he invited O’Neill to join him and Bryant in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1916.  It was to be the second season of the Provincetown Players, an ambitious, avante guarde theater project meant to bring new work to the stage.  Several other Greenwich Village writers and artists also made the trip including painter Marsden Hartley, artists William and Marguerite Zorach, the Hobo Poet Harry Kemp, editor of The Masses Max Eastman, and critic and novelist Floyd Dell.  They joined George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and others who had begun producing plays on a ramshackle pier the year before.

The group had already rejected plays that O’Neill had published privately with the help of his father.  But he had plenty more stashed in that famous trunk.  One evening in Cook and Glaspell’s home, O’Neill pulled out Bound East to Cardiff, a one act play about a dying sailor.   One of the group read the play aloud in the front room as O’Neill paced nervously in another.  The group was stunned by the simple power of the play. 

It was produced on the pier that summer, beginning O’Neill’s long relationship with the Provincetown Players.  That fall, the Players launched a New York City venue on a makeshift stage in a Greenwich Village brownstone at 139 MacDougal Street.  Bound East to Cardiff was among the first plays produced.  Over the next two years O’Neill had six one-act plays presented: Before Breakfast, Fog, The Sniper, ‘Ile, The Long Voyage Home, and The Rope.

The Provincetown Players, although a great nursery for new ideas and playwrights, was limited in its early years by amateur acting.  After Reed left for Russia and other founding members drifted away, however, new attention to performance and acting improved the quality of productions and began to get the attention of Broadway producers. 

In 1920 his first full length play Beyond the Horizon opened on Broadway.  It was a domestic tragedy of two very different but devoted brothers in love with the same woman.  The play was not only a success, it won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama awarded for his work.

O’Neill was now engaged in intense, non-stop writing and would produce an astounding body of work over the next few years.  At his side in the early ears were his second wife, writer Agnes Boulton who he married on April 12, 1918 and their two children Shane and Oona.  Oona grew up to marry Charlie Chaplain.  The marriage was troubled by O’Neill’s heavy drinking and obsession with his work.  In 1929 O’Neill abandoned the family and married actress Carlotta Monterey who had appeared as the object of obsession in his play The Hairy Ape.

Meanwhile, O’Neill’s plays triumphed.  His first big commercial success was The Emperor Jones about the rise and tragedy of a sleeping car porter to dictator of a Caribbean Island that was obviously Haiti opened in 1922.  His devastating retelling of the prostitute with a heart of gold cliché, Anna Christie, won a second Pulitzer in 1922 despite O’Neill’s dissatisfaction with it as “too easy.” 1924 brought Desire Under the Elms, in which he used the conventions of Greek drama for the first time. 

O’Neill’s most experimental play yet, Strange Interlude opened in 1928 starring Lynn Fontanne.  The four hour play was produced with a dinner break and Greek masks and featured the inner dialogues of a woman playing out all of the roles of her life—daughter, lover, wife, friend, mother.  Its heavy use of Freudian symbolism and frankness about sex shocked audiences, but it won yet another Pulitzer.

Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 returned to the Greek drama for form.  It is really a cycle of three plays based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus but set in the Civil War era in a small New England town with the Townspeople acting as a Chorus.  The plays were performed in one very long night of theater.

The next year, O’Neill set out to prove that he could also write comedy.  Ah, Wilderness! was almost a fantasy of what his own youth might have been—if his father had been sober and wise.  The play landed an unexpected star—George M. Cohan in one of his last parts and one of his few appearances as a dramatic actor in a play he did not write.  Young Elijah Cook, Jr., now best remembered as the gunsel in the film The Maltese Falcon, was the stand-in for the youthful O’Neill.

O’Neill and Carlotta lived, fought, separated and reunited in various retreats where he tried to stay sober and write.  First was a chateau in the Loire Valley of France, then a home at Sea Island, Georgia called Casa Genotta.  In 1937 they moved to Tao House in Danville, California using the prize money from his 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A Tao House, O’Neill began work on his most ambitious project—an 11 play cycle chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were ever completed.  Other plays exist only in fragments, outlines and notes.  As he worked, O’Neill’s health deteriorated badly.  Not only did he continue to suffer from depression and alcoholism, but his lungs had been damaged by tuberculosis.  Most devastating of all, he was developing a Parkinson’s like tremor that was making it hard to hold the pencil he used to compose in longhand.  In despair he abandoned the play cycle and turned to introspective pieces, all of them plainly autobiographical.

He completed and published The Iceman Cometh in 1940, but it was not produced for seven years.  Set in a desperately rundown Greenwich Village saloon in 1912, the play is famous for the long, confessional soliloquy of Hickey, the charismatic salesman.  Many consider it to be O’Neill’s masterpiece.  It has competition for that honor with O’Neill’s next play.

Long Day's Journey Into Night was not produced until 1956, when it created a sensation.  It is the reality flip side to the comedy Ah, Wilderness! and is transparently autobiographical.  Set in the summer retreat of an actor—obviously O’Neill’s father—and his family in 1912, the period just before O’Neil entered the sanitarium for treatment of his tuberculosis.  The father and the two competitive sons are all alcoholics.  The mother is addicted to morphine.  In one long night the family disintegrates amid mutual recriminations, self-denial, and occasional flashes of anguished affection.  The play earned O’Neill a last, posthumous, Pulitzer.

O’Neill never finished a final draft of Moon for the Misbegotten, a sort of sequel to Long Day’s Journey focusing on the character based on his older brother.  Despite O’Neill’s instruction that the manuscript be destroyed, the play was produced on Broadway in 1957, and like the other last plays, has often been revived.

In 1943, O’Neill’s palsy had progressed so far that he could no longer hold a pencil.  To his despair, he discovered that he could not compose by dictation.  He left Tao House and began living in isolation in San Francisco hotel rooms.  The last ten years of his life, one of his children dead and estranged from the other two and in an evermore tenuous relationship with his often absent third wife, were literal horrors. 

Kurt Vonnegut—A Life Skating on the Edge

Note:  Portions of this post were taken from a memorial entry made on April 17, 2007.

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut

I almost missed Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday yesterday.  How could I?  Born November 11, 1922 in Terre Haute, Indiana, he died on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84.

His death was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)  He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling in his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.

And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the announcement in Washington the same day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by another 120 days.  He despised the war and the men who started it.  Leaving behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him.

“But I myself feel that our Country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.  Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.”  (From A Man Without a Country.)

Unitarians Universalists, in our insecurity, are always making lists of “greats.”  Having dominated 19th Century American literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in contemporary writers so as to keep up our cultural bona fides.  Vonnegut shows up on these lists. 

He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as honorary chair of the American Humanist Association. A Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in a world corrupted by fake Christianity.  It was largely assembled from his essays in the Chicago based socialist magazine In These Times.  We all know that Humanism has also found a home in Unitarian Universalism.

Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American free thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference  at the turn of the 20th  Century.  Vonnegut’s parents were married by a Unitarian minister and the family belonged to the congregation in Indianapolis.  Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for the congregation.  Although not much of church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No Hell!” (surely a Universalist sentiment.)  He sometimes referred to himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly.  He was also asked to speak on the occasion of William Ellery Channing’s 200 birthday at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—and idealist and a cynic, a humorist who’s satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the gravest savageries of the 20^th Century.  He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.  Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the Depression, and his mother sink into mental illness and suicide.

Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s 3rd Army.  In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines before being captured.  As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment of his life, he survived the allied firebombing of the historic city of Dresden and was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses of the old city.  This was the central event of one of his most famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm.  The incident also figures in at least 5 other novels.

In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York.  The job didn’t last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance lingered.  Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia.  The book was a publishing failure in 1952, but slowly gained a cult following as paperback editions followed.

Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.  In Sirens of Titan gave us The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness and kindness.  In it Eliot Rosewater says:

 “Hello, babies, welcome to Earth.  It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It’s round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you’ve go about a hundred years here.  There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it in his swan song A Man Without a Country. 

He had his heroes.  His fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein.  He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech attacking the Mexican War he wrote “Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!” He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute native—Eugene V. Debs.  He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with the Beatitudes.

Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any war and all injustice.  He despised hypocrisy.  He despaired for humanity.  People like that are hard to come by.