Created by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer in 1930, Betty—envisioned not as a cartoon version of any single performer, but rather as an archetype of Jazz Age culture—appeared in animated shorts throughout the Great Depression. She was an instant success. Publications compared her to such stars as Greta Garbo, calling her an “overnight hit” and “the most popular personage on the screen today.”
At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.”
Then, after a bit of banter about the sounds of snacking, the actors nimbly slipped into character, adapting the mien of the four troubled Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning classic, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
With just a few performances left of their intimate, searing revival at the Minetta Lane Theater, a small Off Broadway house in Greenwich Village, they were now a half mile east, at the Cutting Room Studios, futzing with headsets and repositioning microphones as they recorded the production for the company that had underwritten the it: Audible.
Booth is at its most affecting, though, when it’s at its most imaginative. The novel’s climax tells not only the familiar story of John Wilkes’ shooting of Lincoln but the unfamiliar—and, it seems clear, often invented by Fowler—stories of how all his family members receive the news. One by one, Fowler’s narrator settles in each of these minds, watching them as they absorb the fact that the drama of their lives has been turned into the tragedy of a nation. We land, finally, upon Rosalie, miserable Rosalie, whom we know has had every reason to bemoan all that has come before. But now she can’t remember any of that. “How happy, how rich her life once was!” Rosalie thinks. “John has murdered them all.”
The Man Who Tasted Words is a deep dive into the world of our senses — one that explores the way they shape our reality and what happens when something malfunctions or functions differently.
Despite the complicated science permeating the narrative and the plethora of medical explanations, the book is also part memoir. And because of the way the author, Dr. Guy Leschziner, treats his patients — and how he presents the ways their conditions affect their lives and those of the people around them — it is also a very humane, heartfelt book.
Not everyone will agree with Brian's decision, or with Bloom's agreement to support his wishes. Bloom understands that euthanasia is a controversial subject, and she addresses it with the gravitas it deserves. At various points, she worries "that a better wife, certainly a different wife, would have said no, would have insisted on keeping her husband in this world until his body gave out." In Brian's sharper moments, she worries that they're acting too soon. She also, rightly, rails at a system that allows animals to be put out of their misery, but not human beings.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Maybe?
That’s the general sentiment evoked by “Woman: The American History of an Idea,” by Lillian Faderman, an ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. “Woman” is exhaustively researched and finely written, with more than 100 pages of endnotes.