Inner Light, Inner Life in Charles Addams

One of the best Christmas presents Mom and Dad gave me was an oversize collection of cartoons by Charles Addams, My Crowd, (1970). This big book was the prize of a collection that included small paperbacks Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, and the book I "read" literally to pieces in the days before I could even read the words, Homebodies.

A Christmas-themed cartoon from 1947 reproduced giant-sized in My Crowd both fascinated and disturbed me. Addams referred to it in correspondence with The New Yorker as "Boiling Oil."

While I could see the humor in the Family's upside-down ethos, I also felt strong sympathy for those cheerful neighbors and for what they're about to experience. There's a life in an Addams cartoon that comes from his technique.

His biographer Linda H. Davis explains how Addams layered his inked outlines with washes that gave his darks and lights a solidity and texture not seen in the line drawings we're used to. She writes that Addams made his Family's house real through interior and exterior views in the few dozen cartoons that feature these characters:

The Family mansion, into which you felt you could step, was constructed of splintery wood worn to the softness of velvet. Bent over his drawing table hour after hour, Wolff's pencil (then brush) in hand, Addams drew every wooden shutter, every carved baluster and warped floorboard, every silky strand of web, creating a fully realized world. Wednesday's room was decorated with a wallpaper border showing a scaly prehistoric creature in happy pursuit of a bat-child. (95)

With "Boiling Oil," Davis writes, "Addams's feeling for his subject and his mastery of technique reached sublime new heights: in the steam rising at an angle from the bubbling pot; in the shawl Morticia clutches against the winter night; in the bars of indoor light filtered through a shuttered window onto the snow." Cartoonist Ed Koren notices the "half circle of light which is mirrored by a circle of molten lead [and] the footprints in the snow ... a wonderful touch" (Linda H. Davis. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Nashville TN: Turner Publishing, 2021).

Those "bars of light filtered through" window shutters are incidental to the story of the cartoon, but essential to establishing the reality of that house. What's going on in that room, we wonder.

I've written before how Addams cartoons are at the heart of some of my earliest and warmest memories:

I could spend quiet hours peering into his cobwebbed corners, imagining what lurked down dark halls, finding little faces [spying from] the black space behind shards of cracked windows. Bliss was to watch ["The Addams Family" TV sitcom] before bedtime on Friday nights, to lay my Addams cartoon collection Homebodies on the bedside table, and to wake before anyone else in the house Saturday mornings to leaf through those drawings, admiring their skill, making up my own stories about them.
(from my blogpost Rediscovering Charles Addams' Family in a Musical)

Vermeer has the same effect on me. Light through open windows and closed panes, reflected on walls, sleeves, and goblets make his paintings live. Like Addams, he was often pulling us into a story - the young woman reacts to receiving a letter, for instance; a maid is day-dreaming. Like Addams, most of his interiors are rooms of just one house, his own. An art historian did painstaking calculations to prove this from the fixed relationships of windows, floor tiles, and doors. Only props and furniture are re-arranged like a stage set. (Hans Koningsberger. The World of Vermeer, 1632-1675 (New York: Time/Life Books, 1967).

Both artists tantalize us with glimpses through half-open doors and shutters into other spaces. There is an analogy between writing and these side-channels that bring such life to the works of these two artists. Even in the Bible, where the action is often starkly delineated, an odd detail fixes the story in our minds: the five sneezes of the boy that Elisha brings back from death, whatever Jesus scrawls in the dirt -- and the tense silence -- before he answers a mob bent on stoning the woman accused of adultery.

Once you've seen Addams or Vermeer, their settings become part of your mental furniture. In dreams since Mom died over a month ago, I've explored long hallways, a shadowy basement, high-ceilinged spaces in need of repair, cobwebbed alcoves. In the dreams, not unpleasant, this house somehow belongs to me, though I can't recall making any mortgage payments. The vast emptiness and the disrepair give me a strong feeling of heavy responsibility but also of creative possibilities in the life ahead. It may also be a metaphor for life now that Mom, Dad, uncles and aunts, the grandmothers, even the old teachers are gone: it's all up to me, now.

Wake Up, Dead Man: Whodunnit Comedy with Heart

Commenting on the grandiose architecture of a church, the young priest tells a visitor, "You can almost feel His presence."

"Whose?" asks the visitor. Uncomfortable pause. "Oh."

The young priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), has been accused of murdering his superior Monsignor Wick (James Brolin) during Mass. The visitor is Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), convinced at their first meeting that the young priest isn't a guilty man pretending innocence, but an innocent man who appears to be guilty. About religion, though, Blanc is dismissive: "God is a fiction."

Cracking Blanc's attitude to religion is a story that underlies the plot in this third whodunnit to feature the detective, after Knives Out and The Glass Onion.

The sacrament of confession punctuates the plot five times. The first confession is played for laughs as Father Jud hears TMI from Wick. In a replay of that situation, the young priest fights back, confessing that he has snooped around to learn all the ways that Wick is abusing his power over his followers. Once a boxer, Fr. Jud has sworn to fight for Jesus with his hands open in love, not with fists. His resolve is tested.

Confessions four and five are spoilers, but number three is the heart of this funny, macabre murder mystery. It has nothing to do with whodunnit, and there's nothing funny about it.

It happens in a phone conversation with Laurie, office-manager at the excavation company that unsealed a crypt. Who ordered that work? Blanc wants Fr. Jud to find out ASAP. But Laurie seems to be in a chatty mood, and Fr. Jud listens patiently while Blanc rolls his eyes.

Suddenly, Laurie stops. When we hear her again, she's sobbing, and Fr. Jud takes the phone and confession to another room. It's after dark by the time Laurie accepts forgiveness and finds the information they needed, but Blanc's attitude has changed. "You're really good at this!" he tells his young client.

What Blanc has learned carries over into a key decision he makes during the Big Reveal that usually caps tales of this genre.

As much as I laughed and thrilled to all the old mystery tropes - long shadows, a creepy crypt, a sudden storm, and an impossible "locked-room" murder - it's Fr. Jud's solemn and loving pronouncement of absolution to those who desperately need it that I've taken away from the movie. I'm tearing up now, a week later.

The Joy of Singers & SINNERS

When the lights came up after the credits for Sinners, the elderly black man beside me, who had seen me gasp, laugh, and cry throughout the movie, said, "So, I suppose you're a blues man?"

"I am now," I replied.

It's true: to my collection of hundreds of recordings, I've recently added the first two blues albums, both by Buddy Guy, the revered singer-guitarist who appears late in the movie. I've been listening to them over and over, beginning to appreciate what I've been missing.

Sure, Sinners tells a story of vampires who crash a party at a Mississippi juke joint during the Jim Crow era. They do make a bloody mess, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "sundown town." But the tentpoles of this film are music and dance, and, like Blues songs about tough life, the overall effect is joy.

The first words of the movie are voiced by a woman who tells us about music's power to open a door between our world and the spirit world, between past and present, between good and evil. Take that as the thesis sentence for the movie. We will hear the blues, and we will also hear Irish folk music from another race of down-trodden people.

Then there's the character Sammie. The charismatic actor Michael B. Jordan was the draw to this movie, playing both "Smoke" and "Stack," Sammie's uncles. But it's Miles Caton as Sammie who stole the show. Sammie's a teenager, son of a preacher who forbids him to play guitar or sing the blues. Sammie's uncles think he might be a good singer for the opening bash at their new juke joint. So it's sort of an audition when, riding shotgun beside his uncles, he strums guitar and sings. The fullness and maturity of the sound from this deferential, unimposing young man is so unexpected that his uncle gasps, turns to gape at his passenger, then smiles broadly. That was my reaction, and others' too. Caton is now hailed as the "breakout" star of the movie.

Caton admits in an interview that he got the part before he understood SINNERS is a vampire movie.

His is the voice that cracks open the spirit world. Like songs in the best musical theatre tradition, the words of his blues number are very specific to his story:

You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi road
See, I love you Papa, you did all you can do
They say the truth hurts, so I lied to you
Yes I lied to you
I love the blues

It starts as voice and guitar, but ramps up to a surreal dance number. As the camera roams the dance floor, the dancers seem unfazed when they're infiltrated by musicians and dancers from Africa, China, past and future (there's a rap DJ with turntable).

Then a trio of white people ask to be invited in. They're musicians, too, says their spokesman Remmick (Jack O'Connell). He says they're not Klansmen: "We believe in equality." What that really means is, every new vampire joins a "community" of vampires who share Remmick's mind -- including his accent and movements. The trio sings a little ditty about eating a man. Smoke and Stack turn them away, but they lurk in the woods and pick off guests who leave the party, one by one.

Soon, Remmick has enough vampires to make up the cast of Riverdance, and that's what they do. He leads an Irish dance tune, "The Road to Dublin," and the chorus encircles the club doing their Irish jig.

At this point, I was laughing and crying -- one, because it was so incongruous to see blood-smeared black people jigging, and, two, because it was both outrageous and fitting -- perfection!

The film score by Ludwig Göransson is nearly continuous -- bluegrass or blues guitar playing behind images when not accompanying voices. Songs performed by women in the cast express their tangled relations with Smoke, Stack, and Sammie.

Director Ryan Coogler has made a great movie that busts out of one genre to another: music is at the heart of this horror movie. You can watch SINNERS for the thrill of a bloody horror suspense film, and find yourself exhilarated by the season's best musical.

Tom Stoppard and Me

The one thing left on my bucket list is to write a Stoppardian play. That would mean a comedy with characters whose dialogue would mix their personal stories with some intellectual controversy in a collage of images, literary allusions, and scholarly research. A prominent critic said that Stoppard disguises simplicity of thought with complexity of form.

I tried to write my Stoppardian play, but never got beyond the brainstorming stage. It's probably a mistake to start with the form and not with a subject of interest. Anyway, he died today, so he'll never see my homage, should I ever write it.

Regardless, I loved what I read and I liked what I saw.

Bruce Davison, actor on stage and screen, starred in the Duke Players' production of Stoppard's Travesties for which I, a drama major 20 years old, was props manager. Davison was Duke's artist-in-residence that year, around 1980. I felt honored when the actor inserted "Scott Smoot" into a list of names during a performance.

The earth moved for me the first time I saw a play of Stoppard's that I could understand. It was a one-act take-off on Agatha Christie's plays that he called The Real Inspector Hound. Mid-way, the phone rings and just keeps ringing. A theatre critic who has chatted loudly with a colleague during the first half of the play gets annoyed and climbs up onto the stage to silence the phone. From that point on, every line and stage movement is practically a repeat of the first half of the play, only it all means something new with this different character.

Stoppard performed a similar feat in his screenplay for Russia House, which opens with a story told by Sean Connery, heard three times, verbatim. Each encore accompanies images of the events from a different angle that upends our understanding of what Connery describes.

Watching both of these works, I was awestruck and delighted. I felt the ground drop away, in free-fall. I'm always grateful for that experience.

I got that same feeling from Arcadia, a much more substantial, joyful, and meaningful play. I admit that other live performances of Stoppard's plays were rarely as strong as the ones I imagined while reading them, when I could make marginal notes of cross-references, puns, and epigrams. A Broadway production of Jumpers, a play I had read with acute pleasure, was especially disappointing. When the action was happening on stage, I missed so much that I had caught on the page.

That's more or less my experience with other Stoppard plays. Below are links to my blogposts about Stoppard's works:

• Stoppard's The Hard Problem: Dramatizing Thought
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Still Kicking How do we gain when Stoppard crosses Hamlet with Waiting for Godot? Let me count the ways!
• The Invention of Stoppard reviews The Invention of Love, Stoppard's favorite of his own works. I saw it on Broadway and later read it closely. Stoppard eluded me, but I do think my essay about the show hits on something great: the playwright known for verbal virtuosity achieves his greatest emotional effect with just "Oh."
• I read today (Stoppard's death) that he thought Arcadia was his best play. Me, too. I wrote about it in Math and Tenderness.
• I tried to appreciate Stoppard's suite of plays called The Coast of Utopia about the intellectual developments of the 19th century that led Russia to totalitarianism. I didn't succeed. Or maybe, Stoppard didn't. You Had to be There.

I may some day post notes I wrote longhand on Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Real Thing, Professional Foul (a teleplay), Travesties, and Night and Day.

When I studied at Oxford in the summer of 1980, the lords of British theatre were Stoppard, his buddy Pinter, and their less-revered-but-more-popular colleague Peter Shaffer. I wrote about the other two when they died:

Playwright Sees God: Remembering Peter Shaffer https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/06/remembering-playwright-peter-shaffer.html

A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinterhttps://smootpage.blogspot.com/2008/12/moment-of-silence-for-harold-pinter.html

Premieres by young composer Nathaniel Davila

Young composer Nathaniel Davila presented a recital of original works Sunday night November 9. Although he is a baritone, he has sung Tenor with St. James parish choir for two years. I and many other members of the choir were there.

In Scott Hall of KSU's Bailey Arts Center, we heard live performances of several chamber works by Nathaniel. The theme of the recital was a question, "How do you express character in music?" In a three-movement work for piano, cello, and bassoon, Nathaniel played with the notion that time changes character while character also changes our perception of time.

We also viewed a short film Distance for which Nathaniel composed the score. The story is about a relationship when the partners are separated for a summer. The director used split screens to show the action, so Nathaniel created parallel themes. Like parallel lanes of a north-south highway, the characters' themes moved in opposite directions: not a good sign for their relationship!

Another piece featured a choir singing vocalese in close harmony over, and sometimes against, a tonal background created by instruments.

At the conclusion, Nathaniel thanked Dr. Black. "I have learned so much from St. James," he said. In the photo, he's pictured at the piano, surrounded by members of the choir.

Remembering Mom

Frances M. Smoot
Educator, Dancer, Runner
November 5, 1934 – November 6, 2025

Frances Smoot died in her sleep one day after her 91st birthday. She was born Frances Lee Maier in 1934. Throughout her childhood in Cincinnati, she danced ballet and tap, continuing to dance in the annual revues at Walnut Hills High School. There she met Tom Smoot, a “bad boy” who reformed under her influence. She finished her undergraduate degree in Education at the University of Cincinnati, and married Tom in 1955. Over the next seven years, their family grew by three children, daughter Kim and sons Scott and Todd. They lived in Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Chicago before settling in the Atlanta area in 1969.

Once the youngest child Todd reached middle grades, Frances started her career as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School in Sandy Springs in 1972. Soon, she was leader of the third-grade team. After she earned a graduate degree in Educational Administration, she instituted the school’s summer program, directing it for twelve years. At the celebration of her retirement from Holy Innocents in 2005, she surprised the faculty by handspringing up onto the stage to accept her plaque.

Frances also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.”

Tom and Frances traveled the world. From Alaska to Peru, Iceland to Italy, Egypt to South Africa, Australia to New Zealand, and India to China, Tom and Frances covered every continent but Antarctica. Her brother Jack Maier and sister-in-law Blanche often accompanied them on their travels. Closer to home, Tom and Frances flew in a hot air balloon and parachuted from a plane. Tom made photo collages of their many adventures, keepsakes that Frances treasured.

Frances and Tom went to great lengths to support their children. When son Todd joined his high school’s track team, Tom and Frances both began to train as well. During the 1980s and 90s, Frances competed in Atlanta Track Club events, often winning her age division, being the only contestant.

While Frances was a consummate cook and entertainer for social occasions, the grandest party of all was a surprise to her. Years in advance, Tom invited guests to her 60th birthday, and they came from as far away as Italy. He rented the top floor of an Atlanta skyscraper, and led her to believe they were going to a friend’s retirement party.

Shortly after Frances retired, she and Tom followed Todd to Valdosta to be close to their grandchildren Raymond Craig and Mary Alice. They continued to race, supporting Todd’s business promoting track events, and they were active in Valdosta’s First Presbyterian Church. They also rescued Sassy, a miniature Doberman Pinscher who had been slated for euthanasia. When Tom died in 2010, Frances wrapped up affairs in Valdosta and returned to the Atlanta area in 2012. At Winnwood Retirement Community, she made friends and kept active walking with Sassy to the end of the dog’s life. During this time, Laura Robinson of Visiting Angels became her daily companion and friend.

In 2018, she moved to memory care at Arbor Terrace, where she was a bright and lively presence. A director there observed that her schoolteacher instincts kicked in, as she encouraged others in warm but firm tones to participate in conversation. With Laura at her side, she never felt alone during months of COVID-19 lockdown.

As dementia progressed, Frances forgot how to walk and talk, but she maintained a regal bearing and sense of humor. Some of the staff at Arbor Terrace referred to her as “The Queen.” During a visit when she hadn’t opened her eyes or said a word, Scott chatted with the nurse who was feeding her. When he rose to go, he said, “Ok, Mom, nice talking with you.” She stopped chewing and said, distinctly, “Yeah. Right.”

More about Mom

• All the articles I wrote to work through my range of feelings since Mom's diagnosis are linked on one-page overview at Dementia Diary. It may be of help to others shepherding a loved one through the same valleys.
• Articles about Mom in the context of generations of my family are linked to a page I call Family Corner.

Dementia Diary: Sarcasm

Mom is now in a full-fledged nursing home because they accept Medicaid. When I have visited, she has smiled, she has nodded, and she has opened her mouth when I've held a fork full of Sloppy Joe or beans or rice to her lips. But she hasn't spoken. She has kept her eyes closed.

I spent some time with her Friday, chatting with the young woman who often feeds her mid-day. After awhile, I said, "Okay, Mom, I'm going home, now. Nice talking to you."

She said, distinctly, "Yeah. Right."

[I've posted stories and pictures since Mom's diagnosis in 2012. I've curated links to those stories at my page Dementia Diary. If you're dealing with a loved one's dementia, you may find useful tips and comfort there. ]

[A favorite photo from late 2019, just before the pandemic -- when Mom was still walking and conversing. A sharp drop-off followed in the months after, when only her Visiting Angel Laura Robinson could cross the quarantine boundaries around her.]