Present

In preparation for Christmas, my husband Dave and I almost always trade wishlists. They’ve gotten shorter over the years, down to just one or two items. For 2021 Dave wanted a non-duck bird sculpture, something to add variety to his collection of wooden ducks. I asked for a pair of binoculars.

I wanted binoculars to enhance my walks. When my treadmill died in early 2020 (a sad, sad day) I started walking outside more. In 2021 I managed to get to every street in my town. I kept relatively fit, enjoyed the scenery, and came home with a new question every day. Why are the Blue Hills blue? What kind of person puts 47 gnomes in their front yard? What’s up with five white cars in that driveway? Why are these streets named after robber barons? Why do robins hop so much? What’s the name of that droopy white flower? Can turkeys fly? What’s the name for the roof that looks like a boat? What would it be like to spend a night in that huge treehouse? I often found myself wishing for better eyesight. Stupid rabbits, hopping away before I got close enough to watch.

On Christmas morning I unwrapped a pair of binoculars, as anticipated, and Dave opened the pair of folk-art birds I’d found at an antiques store, plus a field guide to the birds of eastern North America. Dave retrieved his own binoculars from the back of his closet and helped me with the calibration of my present. He ruffled the pages of the field guide.

“I’ll always remember this moment from second grade,” he said. A lady was giving a presentation about birds. She had been astonished and impressed when Dave correctly answered her question about what young birds are called. “Juvenile,” he’d said. That’s the term for “fledged birds not yet in adult plumage.” Little did the lady know that Dave’s father had a cherished and frequently consulted book of Audubon prints and regularly took his son bird-watching.

Dave opened the guide at random. “Titmouse,” he said. Flipped some pages: “Bobwhite.” Flipped more: “Grosbeak…I can’t believe I remember this so easily!”

Bird-mad young Dave was a new story to me. (We’ve been together nearly 30 years; we’ve heard many of each other’s stories, so new stories are an extra delight.) Due to many family trips to the Smithsonian museum of natural history as a kid, I’d also been interested in birds, along with insects and animals, but my parents weren’t bird watchers.

 Later on in the week, David and I visited a nearby Audubon Society wildlife sanctuary. Woods, swamp, meadows. It was chilly and slightly rainy. I’d messed up my binocular’s straps and forgotten to bring gloves. As we made our way to the trailhead a bluejay crossed the path. The woods consisted mostly of pine and oak trees. There were baby pine trees just a couple of feet high all over the place, as well as fallen tree trunks covered with the greenest moss I’ve ever seen. Lots of bird calls. We tried out the binoculars and got crisp, clear views. We passed a couple of vernal pools. These are small ponds that form during the rainier season and dry into ditches when the rains slow. As they don’t contain fish, they provide a kind of bassinet for amphibians and insects that the fish would otherwise eat. Underneath our feet were tree roots, pine cones, pine needles, and dry winter grass.

Dave saw a couple of birds on top of a rock, but they flew away before he could identify them. I saw just that first bluejay, but that didn’t matter. My fingers froze a little; no matter either. Next time I’d bring gloves. Next time I’d see more birds.

We found a little breakfast place down the street—three rooms in a basement, blown up photos of ‘50s movie stars, fabulous food. Dave and I ate eggs and toast, warmed our chilly hands on coffee mugs, and talked about when we might do this again. It felt like an extra Christmas present. The best kind. 

Friday night fright

Friday night, Christmas Eve. Almost time to leave for my singing job. The house was warm and bright and busy. “Smells good,” I said on my through the kitchen, past the stove loaded with pans as Dave worked on a feast of pasta, red sauce, meatballs, and garlic bread. Sonny channel surfed for their dinnertime movie. Maybe one of the Diehards. I did a few vocal slides and hummed while I put on my coat and gloves. 

“Good luck,” Sonny said. 

“Enjoy your dinner, guys!” I said.  “Save a plate for me!”

The services went well. My voice held out just as long as I needed it to. On the drive home I chose the scenic route and switched the radio from genteel NPR to ‘80s rock as a bit of a palate cleanser, arriving a bit after 11. The house was dark. This wasn’t surprising; I’m used to being the only human awake in our home at that time of night. Sonny’s shift starts at six a.m., and Dave gets up around five in order to fit in a 25-mile bike ride before work. (Even on no-work days Dave gets up at five, since Capone the cat, our lord and master, has decreed that hour as his breakfast time.) I stepped carefully and quietly through the back door and into the family room, where Dave is often dozing on the couch.

“Hi,” he said.

How sweet. He’d stayed up past his bedtime to wish me a Merry Christmas.

“I need to explain.”

My stomach clenched.

My husband proceeded to unfold a tale that—as the Ghost warned Hamlet—made my two eyes “like stars start from their spheres.” And froze my young blood. Half an hour of head-banging along with 80s hits had already caused my knotted and combined locks to part, but on hearing I need to explain it felt as though each particular hair was indeed “[standing] on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”

One of the burners on the stove had been turned on, but hadn’t lit. I’d walked past it on the way out. Gas hissed out of it on the “medium” setting. Neither Dave nor Sonny had noticed anything wrong until more than two hours later. Capone the cat hadn’t raised an alarm. After dinner Dave had gone upstairs to his office. When he came back downstairs, the air smelled funny. Felt funny. Sonny and Capone had been in the living room the whole time. It being December, all the windows were closed. 

Dave turned off the burner. He and Sonny opened every window on the ground floor and turned on all the fans. They went upstairs and opened more windows. What Dave needed to explain was why I’d find a window open with the fan blowing funky air into the night. Also, more importantly, why I probably shouldn’t light any candles up there.

“Wow,” I said. “I must have walked right past it.”

Everybody was okay, Dave reassured me. Neither of us could quite understand how one burner stayed on for hours without causing a fire or an explosion. That no one had passed out was more comprehensible. It’s a relatively spacious house, with older windows that are less air-tight than the up to date kind, to say nothing of the gap under the dishwasher that lets in plenty of outside air. It was a near miss, one of those freak incidents. “Could’ve been worse,” understated Dave.

 I poured a glass of wine and tried to write myself to sleep. All in third person. She’d walked right past the stove. Never even noticed. The Ghost sets off the revenge plot by triggering Hamlet’s imagination. Imagination can lead me terrible places. My hand wouldn’t stop fleshing out other scenarios. She comes home to find the house filled with gas, the family lost. She comes home to the fire brigade, flames outshining the Christmas lights, everything gone. She sets off an explosion by flipping a light switch. A serpent’s nest of poisonous what-ifs. At some point I crawled under the covers.

“Want more coffee?” Dave asked, some hours later.

“God yes,” I said. The tepid morning light filtered through the kitchen shades. My eyes hurt. As he poured I wiped down the counter, glancing—surreptitiously, I hoped—at the stove. All four burners were off. 

“I checked this morning; everything seems to be working fine,” said Dave. From the living room I heard an ornament clatter to the floor. Evidently Capone was at his full mischievous strength.  

Sonny grinned over his waffles and assured me he felt great. “I guess it was A Christmas Miracle,” he said.

A cliche barely worthy of a Hallmark movie. When I was 10 years old I slept through a house fire. We kids only knew it had happened because we awoke with black stuff in our noses from the smoke. That event always felt like just a story. This wasn’t the case for my parents, who’d doused the flames with fire extinguishers and wet blankets. Decades later my imagination, and my sense of what’s at stake, were more developed. Sonny’s phrase felt a little embarrassing, but it switched off the hisses of the snakelets. “A Christmas miracle,” I agreed.

The morning of the night before

December 24. I’m happy to wake up to snow. That reaction may surprise readers of this blog, since I’ve written often about my problems with the white stuff. It’s pretty enough, I concede that. But years of dealing with the practical hassles of shoveling and driving in it, plus the lost work from having students and shows canceled, outweigh the aesthetics. By the time the snow piles at every corner and driveway edge have made it impossible to get onto the road safely—aka the entire month of February—everyone hates the snow along with me. But this morning the world looks soft and pretty, and I don’t need to get in the car until this evening.

Because…all of my Christmas preparations are finished. !! Presents bought, wrapped, and placed under the tree. House relatively festive. All the food and drink ready to go. Christmas cards delivered. No last-minute crowds to fight. Just two Christmas Eve services to sing tonight and then, like the couple in the poem “The Night Before Christmas,” (TNBC) I shall “settle [my brain] for a long winter’s nap.” The poem is inescapable at this time of year, and frankly, I don’t want to skip it. It’s interesting all the way through, the language is vivid, and something new jumps out at me every time I reread it. This year I looked up the original version at A_Visit_From_St_Nicholas_-_Troy_Sentinel.png.  Boy howdy!

“The Night Before Christmas” was published on December 23, 1823 in The Troy (NY) Sentinel.  A remarkable three-sentence paragraph introduces this “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas.” The first sentence is 60 words long. Boiled down to essentials, it says here’s a poem about Santa Claus from an anonymous author; thanks, Anonymous.

Nearly two centuries later, people are still arguing over Anonymous’s identity. Most commonly the authorship is attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who took credit for TNBC in 1837. He said he’d composed it in 1822 at the request of his young daughter. Moore was a serious man of letters, and it was relatively common at the time for authors protective of their reputation to anonymously publish works aimed to entertain the hoi polloi. Many poems also circulated privately to friends and acquaintaces through letters and commonplace books. Sometimes these friends sent those poems to the newspapers. It happened to Emily Dickinson! By 1837 the night-before-christmas poem was widely popular, and Moore’s literary reputation was more firmly established, so it wasn’t embarrassing for him to admit to being the author.

The other major candidate for Anonymous is Henry Livingston, Jr. Like Moore, Livingston published many poems, usually anonymously or under the initial “R.”  He never claimed authorship to TNBC. However, having died in 1828, he wouldn’t have heard of Moore’s claim. Livingston’s relatives said he’d written it and averred that they possessed handwritten manuscripts to back their story. So far these manuscripts remain lost. Modern analysis of word selection and phonemes seems to come down on Livingston’s side, but there’s still plenty of controversy. Whole books have been written on the subject! I don’t know if either of these guys wrote the poem, although on grounds of character alone I’d prefer Livingston (Revolutionary War veteran) to Moore (slave-owner, unrepentant anti-abolitionist).

The newspaper article’s second sentence takes 36 words to convey that this is a charming story. I agree. It’s action-packed and suspenseful, with a sweet ending. Everything is smaller and faster than the images of today. “A miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer.” “More rapid than eagles.” “In a twinkling.” St. Nick is vividly described. Small, jolly, bearded, a pipe-smoker, and filthy:  “his clothes were all tarnish’d with ashes and soot.”

The idea of Saint Nicholas haunting the New York area may originate in Washington Irving’s 1809 History of New York, which is a satire of New York history and politics. Irving (writing in the persona of a fictitious Dutch historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker) relates a tale of  Saint Nicholas appearing in a dream to Oloffe Van Cortlandt in the 1600s. The saint comes “riding over the tops of the trees” in his wagon, smokes a pipe, “[lays] his finger beside his nose,” as in the poem, and gives Van Cortlandt “a very significant look” that helps Van Cortlandt decide to found New Amsterdam.

The final two reindeer names in the original, “Dunder and Blixem,” are also Dutch, words for thunder and lightning. Vixen and Blixem stands is the most strained rhyme in the piece. A later editor changed the Dutch to German (Donder and Blitzen) to fix it.

The article’s third sentence is 118 words long. Here’s a wee bit from the middle: “…a token of our warmest wish that [the children] may have many a merry Christmas; that they may long retain [their] beautiful relish for those unsought, homebred joys, which derive their favor from filial piety and fraternal love, and which they may be assured are the least alloyed that time can furnish them…”  Apparent meaning: Merry Christmas, Kids, stay happy if you can.

I’m confounded that anyone made it through this sentence without a long winter’s nap, or least a mug of strong coffee. It’s a testament to the poem’s strength of narrative and mechanics—a complete story in 56 lines of anapestic tetrameter—that it became so successful. An anapest is a poetic foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one: “’Twas the NIGHT/before CHRIST/mas.” Tetrameter means that each line has four feet, just like a horse, and this helps the poem gallop along. Another contributor to the poem’s effectiveness is that when it gets to the message, the author keeps it short and sweet: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”

I like the wishes for happiness and a good night and the repetition of “all.” Tonight I’ll be getting back from work near midnight. Santa Claus time. It’ll be cloudy, so I won’t have a “moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,/[giving] the lustre of mid-day to objects below.” But with street lights, holiday displays, and a sprinkling of snow, if Saint Nicholas and crew are anywhere around, I should spot them.

Missing Jane

Once a week I volunteer at my local library. I shelve a couple of carts’ worth of books and magazines and browse, reminding myself of authors that I haven’t read for a while and writing down the names of books I might want to look up on Hoopla. Hoopla is a library app that lets me borrow up to 15 books a month and automatically returns them three weeks later. I almost never check out physical books anymore—no worrying about library fines or lost books, the chaotic stuff that sneaks up on me.

Some days it seems as though every other book to be put away is on an inconvenient shelf. Up at the tippy-top, so I have to get the stepstool. Down at the bottom where I have to sit on the floor. (“Always have a plan to get back up,” semi-jokes Dave, and too often–I don’t). One too many of the brackets holding the books on the shelf being hard to adjust or making that squeal that sets my teeth grinding. My back aching, I took a little breather in the Hs and noticed a Jane Haddam novel. There was an author I hadn’t read for a while.

Haddam writes mystery novels. Her sleuth is a former celebrity FBI detective, Gregor Demarkian, who lives in an Armenian enclave in Philadelphia filled with colorful characters. I hadn’t read the series for maybe five or six years. I’m a binger and completionist, but once I catch up on an author’s backlist I can miss her current books. The world is full of good writers and I may have moved onto the  next obsession. And sometimes there’s a bigger issue in play. Favorite songs can be fragile—listen one too many times and the song is ruined for a year, or decades, sometimes. This can happen for me with authors sometimes too. The last Haddam I’d read, 2015 or whenever, I’d wanted to throw across the room, since I had a big problem with a fundamental plot point. Sonny was still in high school then. Still, I’d always enjoyed the multiple viewpoints, the sardonic tone, the community on Cavanaugh Street. Time to revisit this author.

Hoopla had many Gregor Demarkian mysteries, plus another series, five “Pay McKenna” mysteries. The  latter’s covers read “Jane Haddam aka Orania Papazoglou.” I’d read one of the McKennas in the early 2000s, at that point credited to Orania Papazoglou, with no mention of Haddam that I remember. The series had been out of print for more than a decade. Eventually I’d connected it to Haddam because Orania Papazoglou was on the copyright pages of all the Demarkian books. I’d enjoyed the novel, but it was the only Pay McKenna book my library contained. 

I had nine borrows left on Hoopla, so I downloaded the first two books in the McKenna series, Sweet, Savage Death (1984) and Wicked Loving Murder (1985) and settled down for a long winter’s read.

The books are set in the New York romance publishing industry of the 1980s. Pay (Patience) McKenna is in her 30s and is a romance author who writes under a couple of pseudonyms while also freelancing as a journalist for prestigious magazines. If it’s revealed she’s writing romances, her serious-writer cred will be in shreds. She discovers an aptitude for blundering into and then solving murders. The books are busy and humorous and narrated in first person by McKenna. She pokes fun at readers, writers, editors, and agents. The plots stretch, but they’re properly constructed, and the characters are memorable. The books also provide a vivid picture of Manhattan in the 1980s.  The narrator is observant, WASPy, sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying (she smokes too much and is often on the verge of fainting from exhaustion of some kind or other). And she seems, to me…autobiographical. So I googled Haddam to find some clues.

  Orania Papazoglou was born in 1951 in Connecticut, the same year and state she assigns to McKenna. Like McKenna, Papazoglou had a WASPy background and an Ivy League education (Vassar College, as well as University of Connecticut and Michigan State University). In the early 1980s Papazoglou was working in magazine publishing in New York and writing romance and other novels under pseudonyms such as Nicola Andrews and Ann Paris. Her first published novel, in 1983, was a romance by Nicola Andrews called Forbidden Melody.

The Pay McKenna series ends in 1989. I haven’t finished all of the books yet, although that will happen soon. These are quick reads. The first three books have landed McKenna with various dead bodies and perilous situations, plus a cat, a pre-war 12-room apartment, a new boyfriend (later fiancé), and an eight-year-old adopted child. Papazoglou had around a dozen novels published during the 1980s and got married in 1984 to the mystery novelist William DeAndrea. He makes a brief appearance as himself in book number three, Death’s Savage Passion, which came out in 1986. The couple had two boys, Matt and Gregory. Matt DeAndrea is also an author. So on the autobiographical thing, I’m going to vote a qualified yes; there are a lot of similarities.

Jane Haddam was by far the most successful of Papazoglou’s pseudonyms. Initially organized around holidays, with a light-hearted tone similar to the McKenna books, the Demarkian series began taking a darker turn after William DeAndrea died of cancer in 1996. Papazoglou eventually moved to small-town Connecticut and lived there relatively quietly, continuing to write books and essays, teaching sometimes, and giving interviews. She didn’t like the wild turkeys that wandered outside her window. She wrote a blog (blog.janehaddam.com). The thirtieth Demarkian mystery, One of Our Own, was published in 2020. Posthumously.

I felt shocked and sad when I learned that she had died from cancer at age 68 in 2019. Gone too soon, and another terrible thing added to the pile. But I’m so glad that my aching back slowed me down enough to give her another read, and I’m looking forward to revisiting Demarkian’s world and completing that series…once I’ve learned how things go for McKenna.  

Red

My mother made punch once a year, on Christmas Eve. She spooned raspberry sherbet into the punch bowl, poured ginger ale and a fruit juice product such as Hawaiian Punch on top, stirred, and added pineapple rings fresh from the can as the finishing touch. We three kids waited as quietly and calmly as we could. Mom kept strict control over the ladle and allowed us two, or at most three, of the little cups each.

Foodies such as Martha Stewart might have a stroke just contemplating this beverage. Martha’s recipe for Christmas punch includes pomegranate and cranberry juice, club soda, lemon juice, Simple Syrup, ice cubes with cranberries frozen inside, vodka, and cointreau. In truth, it sounds pretty tasty. Looking back it’s hard to believe we survived this ritual. Sugar on sugar on sugar, with a little extra sugar sprinkled on top. That punch would be undrinkable with my current set of taste buds, but my siblings and I lived for this treat. Some years my mom substituted Kool-Aid for the Hawaiian Punch, but Hawaiian Punch was the go-to family favorite. Amazingly Hawaiian Punch is still on the shelves; more amazing still: there are 14 flavors available.

Like its rival Kool-Aid, Hawaiian Punch used comic violence in its commercials. Punch is, after all, strong stuff. It’s good that punch glasses are tiny. I YouTubed a few of the old ads this morning. Hawaiian Punch’s main characters are “Punchy” and “Oaf.” Punchy’s the one who carries the glass of Hawaiian Punch around, singing “fruit juicy, fruit juicy.” Hawaiian Punch contains about 3% fruit juice, so that’s a bit of a stretch, but oh well. Oaf is the tall one with the nose who always gets punched in the face. Of course Oaf never learns. Punchy asks, “Hey, how about a nice Hawaiian punch?” Oaf always says “suuure” and gets punched.

Silly Punchy. He should know that punch is meant to be shared; it’s an especially communal drink. The word itself possibly has a Hindi origin (panc), which may be a reference to the five ingredients often used to make it: alcohol, water, spices, fruit juice (originally lemon or lime), and sugar. Punch concoctions featuring arrack or rum became popular among sailors working for the British East India Company in the mid 1600s (the citrus juice also helped prevent scurvy) and soon were a hit throughout British Empire.

By the mid 1800s, though, when Charles Dickens started putting it into his stories, punch was considered a bit old-fashioned. The tipple is featured in “A Christmas Carol” and David Copperfield, but my favorite Dickens punch scenes involve the characters of The Pickwick Papers. Dickens’ letters give insight into the kind of punch he had in mind. In one he gives a recipe that includes lemons, a double-handful of sugar lumps, rum and brandy—both spirits to be set on fire for several minutes, at one point—and boiling water. Dickens preferred his punch hot rather than cold. Mr. Pickwick gets into some serious trouble after he drinks cold punch, passing out in a wheelbarrow and waking up in the village jail.

Someday maybe I’ll give the Dickens version a try, but I believe I’ll always like the cold version  better. (Just in case, though, I always check to make sure there are no wheelbarrows nearby when I indulge in cold punch.) Something to show off a colorful cold punch was in my mind when I started looking for a punch bowl of my own, shortly after Dave and I got married. I eventually found one at a secondhand store. The bowl, made of tempered glass, came with a set of cups. Bowl and cups are embossed with grapes, peaches, cherries, and pears.

Like my mom’s punch bowl, mine sits on display and gets used once or twice a year at most. A bit to my chagrin, most of the use has been for eggnog. It tastes okay but it doesn’t look as pretty in a punch bowl. I can’t quite bring myself to resurrect my mother’s monstrous recipe, but this year I need things to be cool, refreshing, and festive. I peek at the pictures of Martha’s punch. A clear red sea studded with cranberry icebergs. Beautiful! I get out the punch bowl. The trickiest part seems to be getting the cranberries into the ice tray. Surely I can figure that out…

Beulah, Belva, and Maurine

“They say she’s the prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago.” — Maurine Dallas Watkins, writing about Beulah Annan for The Chicago Tribune.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you a week of cognitive dissonance! a-5-6-7-8! On Sunday we sing carols about comfort and joy. Monday through Saturday we accompany the catchy confessions of the merry murderesses of the musical Chicago. Next Sunday it’s carols in the morning, jazz babies in the afternoon. As usual Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly will try to get away with murder.

Come on babe, why don’t we paint the town

…and all that jazz?

“All that Jazz,” Chicago (all lyrics by Fred Ebb)

The stories in Chicago seem too cynical, too modern to be true, but the musical is rooted in reality. The stars are Roxie, a dissatisfied housewife, and Velma, a vaudeville performer, each on trial for murder. Roxie is based on Beulah Annan; Velma, on Belva Gaertner. These women, incarcerated on Cook County Jail’s infamous Murderess Row in the spring of 1924, were profiled by the  journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins. Her beat on the Tribune was women’s interest, and she wrote numerous stories about Annan, Gaertner, and other prisoners, including Sabella Nitti and Katherine Baluk. 

He had it coming.

He had it coming. 

He only had himself to blame…

If you had been there—If you had seen it,

I bet that you would have done the same.   

“Cell Block Tango”

Beulah (Roxie) was reported to be age 23 (she may have been a couple of years older) when she shot Harry Kalstedt, with whom she’d had an affair. Beulah told police several versions of what had happened that night, from attempted robbery and rape to an argument about ending the affair that turned violent. With her celebrity lawyer’s help, she eventually settled on a story of self defense, saying that she and Kalstedt had reached for a gun at the same time. She also claimed to be pregnant with her dear husband Albert’s child.  Photos of her show that she was, in fact, very pretty, with bobbed auburn hair, big eyes, and a heart-shaped face.  Her trial was speedy. Beulah was charged on April 4, 1924, and she was acquitted just seven weeks later, on May 25, 1924.

Belva (Velma) was a cabaret singer. She was a bit older and less photogenic than Beulah, but the public fell in love with her all the same. Belva, age 39, was divorced from wealthy businessman William Gaertner. An affair with Walter Law, who was 10 years younger than she, went wrong. Law’s body, dead of a gunshot, was found in Belva’s car, along with an automatic pistol and a bottle of gin, on March 11, 1924. The police tracked Belva down through the car registration. Her defense was even flimsier than Beulah’s: Belva claimed that she’d been so drunk she didn’t remember what happened. However, as she told Maurine, “No woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren’t worth it, because there are always plenty more.” Belva was acquitted on June 6.

Maurine, just a little older than Beulah and much younger than Belva, spent just eight months as a Tribune reporter. Her stories about the accused murderesses had a skeptical edge, but also provided plenty of humanizing details, along with head-to-toe descriptions of each woman’s outfits. She believed Beulah especially to be guilty and wondered whether her reporting had influenced the outcomes of their trials. Maurine had been writing plays since she was a teenager and worked out her ambivalence at the Yale School of Drama after she left Chicago, producing a satirical drama called “The Brave Little Woman” that explored murder, notoriety, and media.   

Maurine’s stories had made Belva and Beulah celebrities for a while. In Chicago Velma and Roxie form a vaudeville act after their exonerations. The actual Beulah might have been up for that—she wanted to try a performing career—but Belva had other plans. She remarried William Gaertner and the two left for Europe.  They eventually divorced again. Belva spent most of the rest of her life living in Pasadena with her sister and died in 1965.

Beulah’s husband Albert had run through his assets to pay her celebrity lawyer. She dumped Albert the day after the verdict and tried to turn her notoriety into cash and career, with little success. The newspapers always had a new story, new characters. Beulah married again and soon took ill. She died of tuberculosis in 1928.

“The Brave Little Woman” was renamed “Chicago” and debuted on Broadway in 1926. The property was also turned into movies in 1927 and 1942. Maurine went on to travel the world and to write more plays and screenplays in Hollywood. She had a successful and lucrative career. Over the years she came to feel that her articles had produced too much sympathy for Beulah and helped a murderess go free. She resisted selling the rights to Bob Fosse during the 1960s out of this sense of guilt. 

Give ‘em the old three ring circus

Stun and stagger ‘em

When you’re in trouble, go into your dance

Though you are stiffer than a girder

They let ya get away with murder

Razzle dazzle ‘em…

“Razzle Dazzle”

In a twist that would fit well in the musical, her heirs sold the rights after she died in 1969. Fosse made the property into an energetic, engaging musical with lots of catchy tunes. Sometimes—as I bend and growl and smear on the clarinet, far above the treble clef—I feel a little guilty myself. But I keep on playing as Roxie, Velma, and company dance.

Naughty list

So this winter holiday season has started off with a whimper. Said whimper being the sound I made on Tuesday when I awoke to texts and emails from my bank notifying me that someone had used my credit card number to fill up their Christmas stockings with goodies from Nike and Walmart. I spent half the morning making the fraud claim and coping with various electronic ramifications and hoping I didn’t forget anything important that was tied to the card.

Added to the whimper has been the whine of the soprano sax, which has been being especially bratty for the past couple of weeks. Deservedly so, perhaps—I always neglect this instrument until I absolutely have to perform something on it. A lick that should take ten minutes to get into my fingers takes half an hour and then needs to be relearned the next day. The lower register sounds even more duck-like than normal. Sticky palm keys, heavy pinky keys. There’s nothing to do but practice and hope that by showtime (a few days from now) I will remember how to play.

Between the credit card thing and the sax issues, I forgot about Christmas. I know, it’s early December. Still, this is not good. Someone—probably not Einstein—said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Someone else—maybe Robert the Bruce of Scotland—said that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Splitting the difference, after a failure I try again, but change things up. This may be its own version of crazy.  Most years around early November I decide that this—this is the year that we will thoroughly enjoy the holidays. In mid November I make a plan. I write it down somewhere and then keep the list in my head. This year’s plan was to take small steps. Bring up a couple of decorations from the basement, every day.  Dig out Robbie the Reindeer and other fun DVDs. Research free events and put them on the calendar. String lights on the banister. Put candles everywhere.

By now I should have been a week into my small steps. However, what with all the whimpering and whining, my task pedometer read zero. Then came the worst moment: remembering that I’d forgotten. Thursday was a warm day, more like September than December, but as dark descended the holidays were inescapable. Lights wound through the branches of every sidewalk tree on Main Street. Angels and reindeer and creches and penguins and Santas stared reproachfully as I passed. I’d made the naughty list. Again. 

Back home I tried to wind down. Forgetting stuff bugs and unnerves me. Am I stressed or sliding into dementia? Suddenly there was a tremendous boom that rattled the bric-a-brac on the mantlepiece. I rushed to the window, thinking that something in the neighborhood had exploded, but it was just thunder. A few minutes later rain began to fall; true December was blowing in.

The storm’s interruption re-railed my thoughts. When things get busy I feel daunted by my to-do lists, and a daunted Jean is a forgetful Jean. The prospect of arranging something as complex as a holiday season can feel frightful, but there are benefits to being the person in charge. I thought about my Chicago grandma, whom we visited for several Christmases. She played piano and smoked and seemed to subsist almost entirely on walnut coffee cake. For holiday guests, she kept ribbon candy in a cut crystal bowl in the living room. That candy was beautiful. Red, gold, white, green, twisted into tubes and squares and ruffles. People could take as many pieces as they wanted, but the bowl stayed full. That’s because the candies were weirdly sticky and didn’t taste very good. I made my own version of that bowl today, but better. I filled a glass jar with Reese’s bells and Hershey’s kisses wrapped in red, gold, white, and green. A feast for the eye and the palate, and something to remember in lieu of home-baked Christmas cookies.