Recessional by David Mamet

Author:David Mamet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

My family was friendly with Syd Simons, the makeup artist, who primped Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 for the first televised presidential debate. He boasted that he is the man who got Kennedy elected.

I do not mean to slight the memory of either Sam Giancana or Jimmy Hoffa, but perhaps Simons was right. In any case, he probably contributed, as do you and I, to that which the religious understand as a mystery, and the Left “a series of loathsome mistakes”: life.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes of Prince Vronsky, sitting down, once a month, at his desk, to “do the laundry.” My particular discovery, in “taking stock,” was prompted by musing about Bernie Sanders.

Now, we are all suckers for a pretty face. One, with the best of will, cannot say he has one. Nor does he have a pleasant or indeed a bearable manner, but some, in this great land, found his crouched, finger-pointing yentism merely the performance of a deeper truth and moral imperative, reducible to “stop working, tax the productive until they stop working, and let the country go to hell.”

His party turn called to my mind one of my favorite statements by Mr. Twain. Asked to come to some gathering to meet unusual and interesting folks, he said he’d already met them before: he met ’em on the river. And I met Bernie Sanders and his like in Vermont in the 1960s and 1970s.

For I was one of them; my group were expat and, by mutual courtesy, intellectual Jews, refugees primarily from New York (myself from Chicago), who washed up in central Vermont in the late 1950s and early 1960s and found it good.

Why did we come? It was, and is, the most beautiful spot on earth, it is close to cities (Cabot, where I lived, is 25 miles from Montpelier, the state capital, and 175 miles from Boston), and the living was cheap.

My friend Andy bought his hundred acres and an 1800 post-and-beam farmhouse for ten grand in 1960; I bought a similar spread for fifty grand in 1978.

We expats lived much as did the Lost Generation in the 1920s in Paris. We were essentially remittance men. What money we had was made (by ourselves or our forebears) in wealthier economies and went a very long way in the end-of-the-farm-life villages of central Vermont.

Some canny souls started a hippie school, Goddard College, in Plainfield. I graduated from the school in 1969 and returned to teach acting there from 1971 to 1973.

We “year-round-summer-people” were all artists or artisans of some stripe or profession. Howard Norman and myself and Andy Potok were the writers, Charlotte, Andy’s wife, was a world-famous potter, Jules and Helen Rabin baked the world’s best bread, Steve Bronstein was a blacksmith, Gary Katz ran a nursery, and Ben Koenig ran the country bookshop. Our crockery, furniture, fabrics, and so on were largely locally made, and the stuff in our homes was pieced out through the auctions and barn sales held through the warmer months.

Our

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