Third Girl from the Left

Third Girl from the Left
Christine Barker
Delphinium Books (March 14, 2023), 316 pages
Kindle edition $11.99, Amazon hardcover $23.99

I have long been a lover of theater, and of musical theater in particular, so when I read about Third Girl from the Left, it went straight to the top of my reading list.

Christine Barker grew up a Navy brat, living with her family in a variety of locations around the world as her father was transferred from base to base. He finally gave up the financial security of the Navy for physical stability when he moved the family to Santa Fe, New Mexico and entered the real estate business. Christine had a passion for dancing, but while other arts were well-supported in Santa Fe, dance was not. She therefore took the bus to Albuquerque on Saturdays to get what dance lessons she could.

Participating in a national dance competition gave her visibility to the theater program at UCLA, where she enrolled, as her father insisted she spend two years in college and maintain a B+ average before considering entering the world of professional dance. The moment she finished her second year she headed off to New York City.

In New York she trained in Alvin Ailey’s studio, but it was Michael Bennett who opened the door for her when she didn’t make the cut there. He gave her the opportunity to participate in the national touring company of one of his early shows, which led to her being cast in the London production of Bennett’s then-new show A Chorus Line, which opened in Toronto before heading to London. When an agreement between the actors’ equity groups in New York and London required that the American performers give way to British, she returned to New York. There she got the role of Kristine, the dancer who couldn’t sing, in the Broadway cast of A Chorus Line.

Barker writes in detail about her life in theater, discussing the trials and tribulations of her lifestyle choice. She describes trying to advance her career by taking acting lessons and auditioning for television commercials. She discusses the stress of performing in a Broadway musical. Barker became frustrated when friends and family didn’t understand what she did. Various iterations of “eight shows a week” becomes a mantra in this portion of the book.

The author is candid about her relationships. She had two failed marriages, the second breakup being especially traumatic as she bought a condo loft with her husband in partnership with her brother John, an artist. Husband number two was out of work, didn’t want to look for work, and didn’t want to agree to a divorce, although he finally did. She also discusses the difficulty of professional relationships. I learned that Michael Bennett could be arbitrary and a real jerk, but Barker fully gives him credit for her entry into professional theater.

Barker was in the show in the eighties when interest rates were high (adding to the condo loft mortgage woes) and the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge the reality of the AIDS epidemic. (She does not hide her feelings about Reagan.) Many of the men with who she worked in the theater were gay, one of the few safe places for gay men in the seventies and eighties. Another brother (she had four) named Laughlin, a successful attorney, came out to her as gay, insisting that she not tell the rest of the family. The last portion of the book chronicles Laughlin’s battle with AIDS and his partner’s denial. Barker eventually gave up her role in A Chorus Line and supported herself by doing television ads while she looked after Laughlin until his death. This was the early days of the AIDS epidemic, long before it became the manageable disease that it is today. Laughlin’s partner succumbed soon thereafter. Martin, Bennett’s chief lieutenant with whom Barker had a close relationship, died of AIDS later, as did ultimately Bennett himself.

That final portion of the book is grim in the extreme, but for anyone interested in the realities of life in musical theater, or for anyone interested in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York, Third Girl from the Left is indispensable reading.

Humanly Possible

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
Sarah Bakewell
Penguin Press (March 28, 2023), 464 pages
Kindle edition $15.99, Amazon hardcover $27.00

I rarely buy a Kindle book where I don’t first download and read the sample. Humanly Possible is one of those exceptions. Not only did I want to read the book because of its subject matter, but the author made the book all the more appealing to me. I thoroughly enjoyed Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, so I knew this book would be good reading as well.

Bakewell covers a lot of territory here. She begins with Petrarch, who was born in 1304 and takes us up to the present day. The book is arranged by topic, and is roughly chronological, but not entirely so: there is some overlap with respect to time periods.

The author is firmly in the humanist camp and is quite upfront about the fact. She is, however, not at all hostile to religion. She ungrudgingly discusses the role of the church in preserving knowledge and learning during the Middle Ages. She writes about how Petrarch, when he found a manuscript in a monastery that he wanted would sit down and copy it by hand.

In some respects Bakewell covers similar territory to that which Martin Puchner discusses in his recent Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop, but while Puchner takes a global perspective, Bakewell stays strictly in the West. This makes sense because she is documenting a certain way of thinking that is peculiarly Western.

Although Bakewell generally maintains a positive outlook, she does not shirk from addressing the unpleasant in her account. In particular she documents the thought and philosophy behind the fascist movement in both Germany and Italy in the years before World War II. It’s a part of that time period with which I was not familiar, and it is disturbing, to say the least.

Bakewell documents the “God is dead” movement, and despite that famous Time magazine cover from the sixties that distorts our perspective of this line of thought, it was not of twentieth century origin. Charles Swinburne wrote about it in 1870.

The author devotes a good deal of space to Bertrand Russell, and rightly so. He lived to be ninety-seven and was active right to the end. In addition to his work in philosophy and in political and social causes, Russell had quite the busy personal life and was not a believer in monogamy.

I have one minor quibble with Bakewell. She refers to the Unitarian movement as “quasi-religious.” In fact, the Unitarian Universalist Association is fully recognized as a church. I spent several years in the Unitarian Church in the eighties, and I know from personal experience that there is a wide range of thought within the organization: from atheist to agnostic to fully believing in God.

The final chapter is a sort of rundown of various humanist organizations currently in existence and reads rather like an advertisement. That aside, Humanly Possible is a valuable contribution to the subject of humanism. It is both readable and informative.

Inventing the Truth

Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
edited by William Zinsser
Mariner Books; 3rd ed. edition (May 20, 1998), 236 pages
Kindle edition $9.99, Amazon paperback $11.19
purchased during a BookBub sale for $1.99

When I saw the Kindle edition of this book on sale for $1.99 and noticed the subtitle I immediately grabbed it. It didn’t hurt that the editor is William Zinsser, author of the highly regarded (including by me) book On Writing Well.

In 1986 William Zinsser hosted a series of lectures sponsored by the Book of the Month Club at the New York Public Library entitled “The Art and Craft of Memoir.” Five of the chapters in this book are transcriptions of the authors’ discussions about their experiences writing their memoirs. In 1995 Zinsser sat down with his tape recorder and spoke to four additional authors to get their reflections on the same topic.

All of the conversations included here were interesting but I particularly enjoyed the reflections of two authors whose memoirs I have read. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood when it first came out in 1987. I have been a big fan of Dillard’s ever since reading her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the seventies. It was enlightening to read about what she chose to include and what she chose to omit (and why). It was only in the past few years that I have read Alfred Kazin’s 1952 memoir A Walker in the City, though I read and loved his book New York Jew shortly after it was published in 1978. Kazin discusses how the book he planned to write was not the book he ended up writing.

Toni Morrison’s contribution is somewhat different. Rather than discussing the process of writing her own memoir (I don’t believe she has written one), she talks about the structure of the books published by former slaves. We all know about Frederick Douglass, but many other freed or escaped slaves wrote their own autobiographies or memoirs, and she discusses the common threads in those works.

The bibliography is a treasure trove. The authors who contributed to the book offer their list of memoirs and autobiographies that influenced them. It’s enough to keep one immersed in memoir for a long time.

This Kindle edition of Inventing the Truth has its problems. There are typographical errors and in one case a line of type that simply doesn’t belong. But that’s not enough to prevent enjoyment of an interesting and at times enlightening collection of interviews.

Earthquakes and Gardens

Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus
Virginia Burrus
University of Chicago Press (February 19, 2023), 211 pages
Kindle edition $20.49, Amazon paperback $27.50

The structure of Earthquakes and Gardens is somewhat unusual. Author Virginia Burrus provides a summary of Jerome’s hagiography of St. Hilarion before offering a series of essays on related topics, some closely related to Hilarion and others less so. Each essay begins with a quote from Jerome’s work.

Burrus’s interest in Hilarion derives from his close association with the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Although Hilarion was well-traveled (he spent time as a disciple of the renowned ascetic St. Anthony in Egypt and lived in the Holy Land) he spent the last years of his life on Cyprus. Jerome writes about the ruins of Cyprus caused by an earthquake years before Hilarion’s arrival (hence the “earthquakes” in the title), and he describes how Hilarion moved from his first home on the island to a more remote one next to a garden (hence that part of the title.) The garden was near a ruined temple, perhaps dedicated to the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

In a marvelous essay entitled “Poetry and Place,” Burrus writes about how ancient poets wrote about Paphos, the principal town on the island, and about Aphrodite. From there the author writes in detail about earthquakes, and what we know about earthquakes that occurred in antiquity. In that same essay she segues into a discussion about a modern art exhibition in rural Texas. She then writes about the archaeology of Paphos, and how parts of buildings that were destroyed by earthquake or other means were used in the construction of newer works.

In other essays, Burrus writes about the geography and landscape of Hilarion’s garden, and the comparisons Jerome makes between Hilarion and Anthony. Jerome takes the trouble to note that Anthony cultivated trees and ate from their fruit, while on Cyprus Hilarion left the trees in the state in which he found them and did not eat their fruit (perhaps because the trees were in a garden dedicated to a pagan goddess).

This was not the book Virginia Burrus intended to write. Her plan was to visit Cyprus and write about her experience there. But COVID disrupted those plans, as it did those of so many others. So she wrote the book without the travel. She plans, she tells us, to make it there yet. Perhaps by the time of this writing this she will have done so.

From the beginning of the book I knew that Burrus and I shared a bond. She opens the book writing about experiencing the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. I was at work in a small software company in Mountain View, California on the San Francisco Peninsula when the quake hit. I knew she would be a fine tour guide on this Cyprus trip. I was not disappointed.

With respect to genre, Earthquakes and Gardens is hard to classify. It’s not really a religious book, but those interested in saints and hagiography will find much to appreciate. Certainly there is plenty here for those who enjoy the study of antiquity. There is material for people who enjoy reading about agriculture and horticulture. Certainly those who like geology and are interested in the study of earthquakes will find plenty to appreciate. Most of all, however, the book is simply good reading for anyone who loves fine writing and a well-constructed essay.