Shavian

[poliphilo]

1960-61- approx. My Dad brings a portable reel-to-reel tape-recorder home. A toy to keep the kids amused through the Christmas holidays.

I say portable- but it's the size of a small suitcase and housed in lovely polished oak (or mahogany or something)

So my sister and I record a couple of forgotten one-act plays by George Bernard Shaw. The Inca of Perusalem is a satire on Kaiser Bill, in which a lovely, intelligent English lass persuades him of the error of his ways. I like it because it allows me to show off my manic German accent.

I have wispy hopes of becoming the next Alec Guinness.

They blow away once we hit play-back.

Oh well. I'll be the next W.B. Yeats instead.

I guess it's this early exposure to Shaw that convinces me that loonies can be argued out of their looniness by logic and good-natured wit.

I still believe it- against all the evidence.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I had a full set of cowboy clothes.

When I outgrew them, I cut bits out of the trousers to make myself manly moustaches!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I cut bits out of the trousers to make myself manly moustaches!

How funny! Were they handlebar moustaches, like the old cowpokes wore, or were they fancy elegant ones like David Niven's?

We played cowboy all the time. And Superman. And Dick Tracy.

In fact, there was construction going on across from us, so my brother and I would find some odd boards and use them for horses. We'd pretend the construction site (houses) was an old Western town, and we'd take turns being the mean saloon keeper, the mean cowboy who rode into town lookin' for trouble, or the hero cowboy who rode into town to save everybody.

I liked the sounds of the cowboy shows--the muffled horses' hoofs on the trail, the whing of the bullets, the click of the silverware on the willow ware plates in the Fort dining rooms. When we played at the construction sites, the dust and dirt seemed just like the Old West.

Well, it was Kansas. It was the New West.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess I wanted to look like a British World War One fighter ace- so yes, it was pretty much the David Niven look.

I would sit under this folding card table and pretend the table top was the upper wing of my biplane and the legs were the wing struts.

And I would have one of my cowboy rifles laid across the table- in which position it became a wing-mounted Vickers machine gun.

Rat-a-tat-tat.