dual personalities

Tag: Our Town

March 13, 2024

Saints and poets

by chuckofish

The other night I watched the old movie Our Town (1940), starring a stellar cast which included William Holden, Martha Scott, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, and Frank Craven as the Stage Manager. He originated the role on Broadway.

I don’t know what it is about this movie but it just destroys me every time I see it. Once again I cried through the whole last act. Part of it is that Aaron Copland score. But most of it is the plain truth of it.

Wilder explained in his preface to the play that “‘Our Town’ is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village or as a speculation about the condition of life after death. . . .It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life.” Well, I get that. The movie plays up the romance angle and it changes the ending, but for Hollywood, it does a pretty good job of conveying the message of the play.

I was in the play once–in eighth grade. I played Howie Newsome, the milkman. I saw it performed in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in a production by the Peterborough Players that included James Whitmore as the Stage Manager. (Wilder wrote some of Our Town at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, as well as in Zurich and on Long Island and all over.) And I’ve seen several versions on TV. But I do like the black and white movie, sets and all.

Here’s “The birth and life of an American classic: ‘Our Town’” from the Pulitzer files. Some people just don’t get it and write it off as folksy and sentimental. How wrong they are!

Reading the play is good, but seeing it is better. After all, it’s a play. For convenience sake, I recommend the movie.

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November 14, 2023

A quiet mind

by chuckofish

Today we toast Aaron Copland (1900-1990) on his birthday. Born in Brooklyn of Lithuanian Jewish parents, he wrote some of the most deeply “American” music of the 20th century. I have loved his music since being introduced to it in childhood. Recently daughter #2 read the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder so here is Copland’s “Our Town Suite” which was used in the 1940 movie.

Here’s a reminder that Christians are to use their gifts to serve one another, but also that the testimony of Scripture demonstrates that “throughout redemptive history, God’s people have used their gifts not just for those within the covenant community but for others as well.”

And here’s a little reminder about the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans.

And here’s a prayer that I’ve included before, but it bears repeating:

“Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety, and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.”

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Grace and peace to you!

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