HOLLY NADLER
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In the Gilded Age, the nouveau snobs used to say “tout Paris” when everyone (meaning everyone in the Astor 400) was following the same trend, as in “Tout Paris in Newport is eating turtle soup for a first course.”
Now here on the Vineyard, tout Paris is raving about the best movie ever, Midnight in Paris. (And thank God our local theatres have squeezed it in between all the superhero comic book movies coming down the pike). For those of you who haven’t seen Midnight in Paris, I won’t give away anything apart from mainstream descriptions of the film: It takes place in modern-day Paris, with Owen Wilson in the Woody Allen role (Woody, of course, wrote and directed this masterpiece), on a visit with his fiancée who has only extreme gorgeousness going for her, and her parents, who have extreme obnoxiousness crowding out all other traits.
Alone at midnight on a rise of ancient stone steps, the Owen Wilson character hears a spooky church bell tolling the hour. A shiny yellow Bugatti (or some luxury car of that stripe) pulls up. Our protagonist is invited into the back seat, and whisked off to a party where Cole Porter tinkles the ivories, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald introduce themselves.
Okay, no more. Go and enjoy it for yourselves. If you’ve already seen it, then you’re standing in stores or on the lawns of cocktail parties telling everyone you meet that they must rush out and see Midnight in Paris. A lot of us will be there in the theatre for our second or third viewings.
The reason I mention this is that last March I met Aldous Huxley. Yes, I know he died in 1963, but my brush with him occurred in 1957. Admittedly this took place in a dream, but the dream was so realistic, each moment so vivid and memorable, that when I woke up, I fixed the experience in my mind so I would never forget it, I couldn’t avoid the impression that a brush of the supernatural had intersected with the dream.
Aldous Huxley was already on my mind from the preceding afternoon when my mom and I drove westwards on Highway 101 into the San Fernando Valley and she pointed at the Hollywood Hills towering over Glendale. “Aldous Huxley lived somewhere up there,” she said, knowing about my decades-long devotion to the writer. Then she told me about a party she and my dad attended at a friend’s house, a movie director named Richard Wilson. Aldous Huxley was among the guests.
Later, driving on the city side of the mountain range with my son, Charlie, and before cruising past the Griffith Park area, we spied a road on our left named Huxley Street. “Hey, maybe he lived at the top of that lane,” I mused out loud.
So you see, I’d sort of triangulated my hero’s house: He was most definitely lodged in my imagination when I settled down to sleep that night.
In the dream — or the Midnight in LA experience — my parents brought me to that aforementioned party. I was nine years old. I had a single mission, to talk to A.H., and I singled him out from the photos on the backs of his books. He was tall, with a head of dark hair. His cheekbones were gaunt and he wore bottle-bottom glasses, being tremendously nearsighted. I marched right up to him and declared, “I loved The Perennial Philosophy!”
This book, written in 1941, a comparative religion study of all the mystic traditions, is tough going even for a passionate reader of a grownup, so now Aldous looked down, way down, at me and said with a chuckle, “Oh, did you? What else have you read lately?”
Well, now I was consciously messing with him, and I said, “Oh, you know, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys . . .”
We laughed, but suddenly I was anxious to get us on the same page. I leaned in and whispered, “I know I look like a nine-year-old girl, but in actuality I’m a 63 year-old woman visiting from March 19, 2011.”
I could tell he was simultaneously skeptical and intrigued. He asked, “So what happens in those last decades of this century and in the first decade of the 21st?”
I told him in a rush about big computers in the 80s and small ones in the 90s, cell phones, iPads, all the tech gizmolas. I rushed through the breakup of the Soviet Union, but then when it came time to narrate the destruction of the Twin Towers, I stopped to consider: Why make him sad? In my mind I catalogued all the rest of it — George Bush, the rush to two wars: Jiminy! I knew Aldous had only six more years to live, why not let him go in peace?
The next chunk of the dream felt like an actual dream in that it whizzed past in a haze. On the other side of the haze, however, Aldous had attached himself to my side, obviously beyond-intrigued by this 63-year-old midget from the future. When my parents were ready to leave, Aldous and I followed them down the pathway to the hillside street where they’d parked their red and white Mercury.
Suddenly, staring at their backs and the Mercury, I clapped both hands to my cheeks and said to my new boon companion, “Oh, shoot! I’m not stuck again in my childhood, am I?”
He glanced me, and raised an elegant dark eyebrow.
You can see why I believe I’ve spent some quality time with this man.
On the home front, for those who’ve been thinking good thoughts about former Oak Bluffs animal control officer and friend Sharon Rzemian, she’s recovering from a stroke and disastrous bout of pneumonia and is now in rehab. Her two loving sisters have been at her bedside constantly, and they’ve reported how ecstatic Sharon has been to receive cards, all of which are pinned to a bulletin board. To write her, send your note to Sharon at Sinai Rehab Hospital, 150 York Street, Stoughton MA 02072.
Susan Wilson sent out a press release announcing the 2011 summer season of Trinity Episcopal Church (that tiny gem across from the Steamship Authority and wedged in behind the police station). Services continue this Sunday, June 26, and Sunday July 1, at 9 a.m. with the Rev. William Heuss presiding.
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