Paying Attention to Sondheim's SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

The child is so sweet
and the girls are so rapturous.
Isn't it lovely
how artists can capture us?
- from "Children and Art," Act II of Sunday in the Park with George

This lyric captured my attention early this month when I took my friend Susan to see Sunday in the Park with George, a musical by James Lapine with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The show imagines the creation of George Seurat's most famous painting in Act I. In Act II, a descendant of Seurat finds new meaning in that painting 100 years later. This was a staged symphony concert in Greenville, SC, beautifully sung and perfectly played.

The problem with these words about Seurat's masterpiece, sung 100 years after he completed it, is that it's all wrong. We know from Act I, in which Seurat sketches all the people that appear in his painting, that the girl wasn't "sweet" but an unmitigated brat, and the teenage girls were shrill gossips, not "rapturous." That artists can "capture us" is a nice thought and a neat rhyme, but Sondheim and Lapine seem to be undermining Seurat's achievement.

I saw the show on Broadway in 1985 and 2008, and many other productions. I've written many essays about aspects of the show. (Most comprehensive: "So Much Love in Their Words" (2021/09))

This time, I came away thinking how "attention" to what's there in the moment is itself a theme in the show that I haven't before -- er -- paid any attention.

Photo from the Facebook page of the Greenville Theatre.

One of the two central characters is George Seurat, a painter focused on his work -- to a fault, perhaps. At night, depicting a woman with a hat using tiny dabs of paint on his enormous canvas, he sings

...How you watch the rest of the world
from a window
while you finish the hat.

Mapping out a sky,
what you feel like, planning a sky,
what you feel when voices that come
through the window
go
until they distance and die,
until there's nothing but sky.
- "Finishing the Hat" Act I, Sunday...

For Seurat, his art is his "window" to the world "to see -- it's the only way to see!"

The woman is Seurat's mistress Dot. Modeling for him, Dot pays acute attention to all kinds of things: "a trickle of sweat"..."who was at the zoo?"..."I love your eyes." But Seurat, so attentive to his work, does not give Dot the attention she deserves. She leaves him for Louis the Baker because his "art is not hard to swallow" and he "makes a connection" to her. George is disappointed, but not surprised:

When the woman that you wanted goes,
you can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give,"
but the woman who won't wait for you knows
that, however you live,
there's a part of you always standing by,
mapping out the sky,
finishing a hat... where there never was a hat.

There never was a hat, and the verse from Act II that caught my attention is all wrong. Has Seurat failed to pay attention to what's really there?

That's what the boatman says. He disdains both Seurat and Jules, Seurat's colleague: "Condescending artists observing, perceiving -- well, screw them." He confronts Seurat: "Who the hell d'you think you're drawing? Me? You don't know me." The boatman, referring to the patch over his right eye, boasts,

One eye, no illusion.
That, you get from two:
one for what is true,
one for what suits you.
- "The Day Off"

Seurat's answer to the Boatman comes much later in a duet with Seurat's mother. Throughout the first act, he has entered into the lives of the people he paints, actually singing some of their lines with them. (In Greenville, he even rolled around in the grass to experience the life of the boatman's dog.)

But from the first minute of the play, when he erases a tree, we have seen him revise reality.

The duet "Beautiful" begins with his mother's complaints about the Eiffel Tower, under construction, where she remembers trees. While he sketches, he sings to his mother, "Pretty isn't beautiful... pretty is what changes... What the eye arranges... is what is beautiful." He breaks through to her. She raises her voice, almost in panic, and sings, "Changing -- as we sit here! Quick! Draw it all, Georgie!"

In the very next scene, chaos erupts as all these prickly characters confront each other until Seurat calls for "Order!"

Everyone silences and turns his way, awaiting instructions.

Order is what Seurat has been paying attention to. Sondheim said many times in many interviews that an artist's job is "to bring order out of chaos." That idea is embedded in the first line of the play, that an artist's challenge is to "bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Balance. Light. And harmony." At the end of Act I, as the cast sings the stately anthem "Sunday," Seurat moves the characters into the positions familiar to us from Seurat's painting, giving the show its truly iconic moment, recognizable even in the photo from the stripped-down Greenville production. (My one quibble with this production: Where is Dot's hat?)

Order from chaos is revealed to be a core value of Sondheim, almost a religious creed, in a new book about Sondheim's "puzzle mind," Matching Minds with Sondheim, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2025). Author Barry Joseph found notes in the papers of Sondheim's biographer Meryl Secrest concerning a conversation that she skims in her book. She told Sondheim that she was "baffled" by his lifetime interest in games and puzzles.

During the conversation, Sondheim suddenly realizes something about himself that had not emerged in decades of therapy: that his interest in puzzles and games, and also in music, began when his father's infidelity and the jealousy of his "genuinely monstrous" (230) mother threw ten-year-old Sondheim's orderly world into chaos. Puzzles, games, and music composition all have at least one thing in common: "It's all about rules...It's about: 'The universe is not chaotic'" (Barry Joseph, Matching Minds with Sondheim, New York: Bloomsbury, 2025, p.231)

That comes close to sounding like a religious statement. Secrest followed up: Did Sondheim believe in God? No, but he allowed that the idea of religion is "such a wild poetic concept" (232). She tells him that she believes in God and an afterlife. His response is surprising, that such belief "may be true for some people and not others."

Is that child sweet, or the girls rapturous? Does Seurat see just what suits him?

He is paying attention to life in all its chaos, but also to the rules of design, composition, balance, light, and harmony. What he searches for, finds, and recreates on canvas is an ideal version of experience. He tells his mother, "You watch while I revise the world."

Seurat, a stand-in for any artist, is making a religious statement: "The universe is not chaotic."

Though Sondheim and Lapine don't include "love" in Seurat's vocabulary, Lapine concludes the play with George of the second act (a descendant of Seurat) reading Dot's handwritten notes about Seurat: "So much love in his words... forever with his colors... how George looks... he can look forever...."

I've written before that Sunday is as close as Sondheim ever came to making a religious statement. Now I'm more certain of that then ever.

Thanks to St. James from the Communications Coordinator

(Published Jan. 22 in our parish newsletter The Bells)

St. James was in a book we're reading with Education for Ministry (EfM). Not by name, exactly, but, in spirit. Theologian Luke Bretherton was explaining how Christian economics should value work that doesn't earn wages. Our churches, he writes, should "hold open times and spaces for wonder, prayer, rest, festivity, and play [to] regenerate the human spirit." That seems to me like a straightforward description of what we do here any given week, especially on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. (For more about EfM, see our St. James EfM blog)

Speaking of unpaid work, I had only a vague notion of the efforts that go into a funeral before last Saturday's memorial service for my mom. Some of these were efforts by members of my own family - sister Kim displayed photos of Mom's life, brother Todd shared Mom's legacy through favorite memories, and his wife Alice and son Raymond made their scripture readings clear and meaningful.

And there was so much preparation made by members of the parish.

(Screenshot from the livestreamed service)

Dr. Black was here Friday rehearsing pieces for the service. He arranged his own reverent organ prelude from an old popular song that Mom sang for a lullaby, "You are my Sunshine." The Choir was there in robes to sing for the service.

Nuno Nuñez was here an hour early to set out the signs to help guests find our parking lot, and he ushered strangers to good seats. Jane Sanders set up the cremains and the altar. Andrea Keener was here to help both of them.

Mother Mariclair never had a chance to meet my mother, but she nonetheless drew together threads from the scripture readings that made a meaningful celebration of an educator, runner, and mom.

Just before the service started, Cathy Brown offered to ring the bell during communion. I hadn't thought to ask for that to be done, but then, during communion, I realized how much would have been missing without that rich, golden tone sounding during the Eucharistic Prayer.

Being an old drama teacher, I was looking for reviews. "It was so uplifting!" said Katey Evans after the service. The Livestream produced by Kevin Kamperman reached Mom's older cousin in hospice, whose daughter texted that it was beautiful. The service brought tears to the eyes of my niece Mary Alice in Japan. She texted that she also heard her uncle's voice during the hymns.

Sue Hannan was here the night before to set up tables for the reception. Then Jean Sommerville and Suz Traendly set tables with sandwiches from Hoboken Cafe, with drinks and flowers. When the reception was over, Suz took trays of sandwiches to The Men's Extension.

I was gratified to see such a turn out for Mom, who outlived many loved ones and friends. Her niece Lisa came down from Cincinnati. Also present were our longtime neighbor Doll, my friend Susan, my friends Suzanne & Dimitri, Mom's friends from Holy Innocents School -- Nikki and David, and many who taught with her and told me how much they had learned from her -- plus my friends from Walker School Mike, Deb, Philippa, Kemper, and Terri. Mom's longtime Visiting Angel and friend Laura Robinson was there, and so was Avis, a caregiver from Arbor Terrace who visited Mom several times after the move to a nursing home, including the last time I heard Mom speak.

To list all of these names is not to overlook the numerous parishioners who never knew my mom but joined with family and friends to celebrate her life.

I'm grateful every day for this parish, and particularly grateful for the support I had on that day.

L-R: Laura, me, Avis at the reception.

My Brother’s tribute to Mom

My brother Todd Smoot delivered this eulogy at Mom's memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA, January 17.

Frances Lee Maier Smoot.

To sum up 91 years of life is to speak of the lasting impact and memories of the lives she influenced - her legacy.

In her 33 years as a 3rd grade teacher at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School – no less than 750 lives were directly affected by her attention to details, encouraging lessons for life and instilling self discipline to all who spent time in her classroom. Cultivating a desire for reading is unquestionably the main focus of her efforts.

Kim shares that Mother believed each of her children would succeed and Kim knows to her core that Mother was proud of her three children.

(Mom's Visiting Angel Laura Robinson took this photo when Alice, Todd, Scott, and Kim visited.)

Scott recalls advice offered by Mother early in his teaching career – “she told me that every child has to find something they are good at doing. Whatever it is, she said, you find out what it is and build their confidence on that. This advice guided me through 40 years of teaching.”

Alice shares lasting memories of her Mother-in-Law:

• dress shopping for our rehearsal dinner and how the perfect dress was made to fit Alice’s little runner’s body to perfection by my Mother’s seamstress.
• [encouraging] Alice to complete her undergraduate degree which Alice earned in December 2019.
• and [demonstrating] her love to Raymond and Mary Alice when visiting their grandparents.

(Raymond visited his grandmother in memory care, along with his parents)

Raymond’s lasting memory of his grandmother is bedtime stories during overnight visits:

“Grandmother would take one of her well loved books that was taped up and almost falling apart at the seams and read to us. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was a story about a woman who taught children to behave with crazy methods. I still remember a few of the stories – the boy who wouldn’t clean up his room, the one who ate slowly, the girl whose parrot repeated to the girl every rude comment the girl said to others. Grandmother had the best voices and kept our attention effortlessly. SHE is the reason for my own avid interest in reading.”

(When Mary Alice was about to move to Japan for a few years, she knew that her good-bye to her Grandmother might be the last. Mom was polite, unsure who Mary Alice was. Mother's brain fog cleared when she saw Mary Alice's tears. Read more)

Grandmother’s impact on Mary Alice:

I remember a woman who lived her life with a beautiful mix of love, strength, and grace:

• She was a teacher through and through, not only to her students but to me and my brother whenever we visited.
• Whenever things didn’t go our way or I complained, she’d simply say, “tough apples.” And it was her way of reminding us to be strong, to move forward, and to handle life with grit and grace. She carried herself with pride, valued a beautiful home, nice clothes, and proper presentation and she lived that every day.
• My grandmother showed me how to live with grace, curiosity, resilience, and love. I will always carry her with me, and I am forever grateful for the strength she instilled, the love she gave, and the beautiful legacy she leaves behind.

Mother’s impact on her youngest child, me? As Scott shared, she found sports were the only action I was good at and she worked to build my confidence through that activity. A lasting memory is every time I passed by her during a race, I would hear Run faster Todd, run faster.

I am hopeful that each person influenced by Frances Smoot will continue to share what you experienced through her with others. Her passing leaves a vast hole and each of us has a responsibility to fill in where she left off. If what she did was easy to accomplish, then there would not be a void. As Mary Alice expressed, what set Mother/Grandmother/Frances Smoot different from others is she did it all with grace. Unsure about you, everyone who has experience with me will unequivocally state that I do not possess that characteristic specifically. I can deliver the same words, but it was never with the effortless grace as my Mother did.

I conclude with a request to act: Do what you can with whomever you can – contribute to continuing to pass along the legacy of Frances M. Smoot.

* * *

Related articles in this blog

• All the stories I've posted to this blog about Mom since her 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.
• Todd's letter to our Aunt Blanche was read as the eulogy at our uncle's burial back in 2005. See Remembering Jack C. Maier.

Bible as Literature

(An enlargement of my "Pulse of the Parish" column for this week's newsletter The Bells of St. James.)

Tuesday I had the pleasure of joining St. Anne's Chapter to present some thoughts on the topic "The Bible as Literature." Glenda Hogg had invited me months ago. From then to this week, I was sifting through piles of ideas every spare moment.

For a warm-up, I brought out internet images of various print publications. Since St. Anne's chapter is part Bible study, I asked if anyone could think of any scriptures that corresponded to each image. So, instructions for a DIY building project reminded the group of chapters that describe the building of the tabernacle and the temple. Photos of Martin Luther King's original Letter from a Birmingham Jail reminded them of Paul's letters from jail. King's letter anticipated where the Civil Rights movement was headed, so I compared it to prophetic writings. A romance novel featuring on its cover a barebacked cowboy embracing a pretty young woman reminded them of forbidden romances in Song of Songs and Jacob's ordeals trying to win Rachel in marriage.

A Batman comic from the 1940s displayed Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo exploded by a giant stick of dynamite. They were stumped. So I asked how that cover would have made a reader feel in its time? "Hopeful. Satisfied. Encouraged." Then we saw the same effect from revenge fantasies in Revelation, Daniel and some Psalms, written to give encouragement to believers under persecution.

Then we studied an acrostic poem about B-A-S-E-B-A-L-L. Some were surprised to learn that many Psalms, all of Psalm 119, and portions of Lamentations are acrostics. That segued to our first activity.

Everyone wrote an acrostic poem about blessings in their lives, beginning each new sentence with one of the letters B - L - E - S - S, in that order. There was some dismay at first, but then people got into it. The results were clever and moving. A participant who said, "I'm no good at this," got applause when she read her poem. Hers was the only one that concluded with a rhymed couplet! Then I asked what they experienced as they wrote. Challenged at first, they became pretty excited, and they got ideas as they went. I said that writers, "inspired by God," were still people like them, facing the same challenge to fit their ideas to a conventional form.

We also did some acting, getting into the minds of minor characters in a famous piece of literature, King Lear. It got pretty emotional, even for "Servant 2" who had no lines. As he stands behind a chair where he and Servant 1 have bound an old man whom the King proceeds to blind with a knife, what is he thinking? What is he feeling? When Servant 1 steps forward to defend the old man from torture, does Servant 2 feel scared for his friend? ashamed of himself for not helping? When Regan the Queen demands his sword, he gives it to her without a word. What is he feeling then? It's important for the actor to know, because his reactions are just as much a part of making the scene "present" as those of the old man or the Queen. In our meeting room, everyone was deeply involved in the emotions unspoken during this unspeakable act.

We wondered: Shakespeare's play is a fantasy about a legendary king, but is this scene "true?" After a pause, the room erupted with answers, reaching a consensus that "it's always true," because criminals and unchecked authoritarians who resort to torture are placing their officers and citizens in the same situation somewhere in the world every day.

We related this imaginative experience putting ourselves in a piece of literature to the way Mother Mariclair had put herself in the roles of Mary, Joseph, and 12-year-old Jesus for her sermon Sunday.

Bottom line: We sell Scripture short if we read it only for lessons and instructions from the past. When we read the Bible the way we read literature, the story, and God, are present with us.

The group had so much to say that I only got through half of my material!

Top Ten Memories of Teaching Middle School

During the year of COVID I appreciated my 40th and last homeroom, socially distanced and masked up. They're playing their original game "Tilleyball," named for the Dean who said to put down their screens and play something active. They made me laugh every day, even online. Evan, third from left, signed into Zoom as "moomoo Mr Cow." He coaxed the shy kid to join in the game.

40 years in Middle School are a blur, now that I've had five in retirement. At the new year, I feel this might be a good time to record my top ten favorite memories of teaching. After the first one, they're in no particular order.

Big One: About 10 years into my teaching career, kids shunned me after I gave Laura a "C" on her term paper. Her mother, on the phone that day, told me how her daughter had stayed home weekends working on her research "just to please you." I protested that I had to uphold standards -- and she scoffed, "'Standards.' You teachers should take the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.'" The next day, I asked students' forgiveness, and asked how I could better ensure students' success in writing class. Their ideas started me in the way I taught for the rest of my career. Their forgiveness -- including Laura's, and even her mother's -- made this painful episode a best moment.

Early one school year, our textbook introduced poetry through "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. After a first read-through, a boy said, "I don't get any of this!" In discussion of poetry, I always let the kids tell me what they noticed -- about what's going on in the world of the poem, and what's going on in the writing of the poem, and what's going on in us as we encounter the poem's twists and turns. They unpacked the poem thoroughly. That same boy said, "I never took a poem seriously before. I really liked it." (On the other hand: Another class was reading "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the first time when a girl jumped to the conclusion that the speaker was Santa Claus -- harness bells! snow! miles to go! "He has to go around the world, duh!" My first principal Dot Kitchings gave good advice: Sometimes, you just throw your hands up, laugh, and say, "Kids!")

While I gave notes to the 8th Grade Drama class following our after-hours dress rehearsal, an eighth grade boy stood up and headed for the exit. This was so out of character for the polite young man that I paused to ask, "Are you O.K.?" He said, "I'm Muslim. It's time for me to pray." Seeing his classmates gape, he said, "Whoa, this is awkward." The alpha male in class, child of wealthy and powerful parents, master of sarcasm, said, "No. I think it's beautiful."

Our weekly Advisory meeting one week involved a "fishbowl" activity. The boys were "in the fishbowl" answering questions written by the girls. The question was, "What do you look for in a girl?" Tension grew as the boys looked for a response from the tallest, strongest boy with the deepest voice. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, "Kind." The other boys nodded, saying nothing more.

I directed a middle school drama class in the classic American comedy Heaven Can Wait, in which a boxer, taken to heaven before his appointed time, comes back to earth in the body of a millionaire. When he realizes that he has fallen in love with a staffer, he lightly touches her cheek. In the audience, his father, who had seen him only as the goofball in his family, gasped.  Any time when student actors stretched beyond themselves was a favorite moment.

At the center of this collage from 1995, 8th grade actor Brian as Macbeth lays his hand on the shoulder of his wife, played by Caldwell. It's after the guests have fled her banquet, and she has asked what he's going to do. She has been crying; you see his concern for her anxieties and guilt. The line, delivered gently, was, "Be thou innocent of the knowledge."

I learned the day before school started in 2001 that I would have to teach drama AND music to all the sixth graders who hadn't signed up for chorus that semester. Literally mobbing me as I entered the auditorium where we met, the kids clamored to know, how are we going to do music AND drama? On the spur of the moment, I said, "We'll create an opera!" Over the weeks that followed, they reimagined "The Frog Prince" to include a posse of mean girls for the Princess and a gang of frogs who befriend the Prince-turned-into-a-frog. In small groups, they wrote words and tunes for themselves. All was going well, but the day came when I had to say, "It's time we stop writing and start rehearsing. How can we finish the opera?" Andreas volunteered to write the last scene that night. The next day, he apologized, "I didn't have any new ideas, so I just repeated tunes from the rest of the opera with new words. I hope that's all right." I told him it's what geniuses have done since Mozart. Andreas adapted the Frog's song to the Princess, "I know I'm small, I know I'm warty -- do you think you could love me?" In the finale that Andreas wrote, the entire cast turned in a line to face the audience and sing, "We know we're small, sometimes we're crazy -- do you think you could love us?" Many parents and teachers, including School Secretary Terri Woods and Principal Nancy Calhoun, wept.

One of the most difficult students I ever dealt with was Marc. Sharp-witted, charismatic, determined to play around with his pals during class, he was also able to treat any disciplinary action as unfair. Once I wrote a demerit for of his subversive activities and he turned the tables, doing a great imitation of me that day as I'd been on alert to catch him in misbehavior -- and I laughed out loud and ripped up the demerit. A few years later, he visited from public high school, a very big guy. When he saw me, he said nothing: He just came forward, arms wide, and drew me into a hug. Later, as editor of UGA's newspaper, he wrote a kind letter about what his writing owed to my teaching. PS - When he was still in 7th grade, I had a bad accident. Only he, of all my students, visited me at home. My lovely dog Cleo jumped up on the sofa next to him, something she had never done before. What a blessing!

Sometimes, I took the casts of plays to locations that would help them imagine the real contexts of their scripts. The cast of Cheaper by the Dozen inhabited the rooms of a local B+B from 1912 and gave each other Christmas gifts in character; Mr. and Mrs. MacBeth shared dinner; the cast of The Foreigner prepared and ate a meal in character at a private lodge in the mountains of north Georgia, the setting of the play. I took the entire cast of The Miracle Worker to experience a simulation of blindness. These memorable occasions grounded the casts in the reality of their stage settings.

A 7th grade Literature skeptic became my poster boy for what literature can do, as he worked through a term project with several stages. First, the students researched an historical subject. Second, they wrote an essay focused on a turning point in the event. Third, they wrote a story focused on a fictional character connected to their research. Then, they were to pull all of their work together in a poem with a strict length limit. Stephen protested that no short poem could contain all the important things in his long story: a soldier on D-Day, his family and friends, the importance of the battle to the war effort, the sensations of the battle, and the effect on his life. But, as he explained in a short reflection that capped the project, he had an "ah-ha" moment thinking about the iron doors of the troop transport. They swung open for companies to pile out onto the beach under enemy fire. These gates became his metaphor for other "gates" in his character's life. He got poetry, and his work helped others to get it, too.

I'm tempted to say that my entire last year is a best memory because COVID restrictions forced me and my colleagues to become first-year teachers again. Classes met only twice a week, twice as long as before, while half of the class was home online, a different half each meeting. How could I keep them all engaged with literature, writing, vocabulary, grammar? How could we do drama on Zoom? I remember climbing that learning curve as a thrilling experience, once I got the hang of it. But I'll focus on a favorite moment during a Zoom conference mid-year with the dad of David, a kid new to our school that year. The math teacher and I described how the boy was curious, conscientious, polite, focused, funny, and kind to his classmates. The dad wept. PS - In a COVID drama class, this David teamed with Evan (see first picture) and another buddy to write a screenplay for soldier ants who overcome sneakers and other obstacles in a teenage boy's bedroom to capture a potato chip. Cellphones in hand, they broadcast themselves climbing all over the auditorium towards their objective, an outsized panel of cardboard. It worked! [See my poem about the COVID year, Dear 7th Grade]

If I may squeeze in an 11th, there was Michael, a sixth grader with a reputation among both adults and classmates for not being a serious student and for being something of a cut up in class. In Speech class, the kids were working in small groups to present stories of elders in their families, but retreated alone to a corner of the auditorium alone, and he didn't finish until everyone else had presented their work. Then he delivered a monologue of a visit to his grandfather in the hospital. Michael sketched in what they loved to do together and what they'd talk about. He concluded, "He says 'Love you' the way he always does, and I say 'Love you, too' and I turn the knob and walk through the door. It was the last time I saw him." Classmates were stunned: such detail, so well-formed, so serious. Michael's reputation changed from that day, and he became a star performer in the upper school drama program.

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 Homebodies, the book I "read" literally to pieces in the days before I could even sound out the words.

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. I was in there with them all. Addams cartoons often have that effect on me, and I'm not the only one.

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:

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. The gradations of light from windows reflected on walls, sleeves, goblets, and a certain famous earring 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 young woman seems to be startled by someone behind her; a maid is day-dreaming. Like Addams, most of his interiors are rooms of just one house, probably 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 of other spaces through doors and shutters half-open. I see 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 simply, even starkly, delineated, an odd detail fixes the story in our minds: the seven sneezes of the boy that Elisha brings back from death, or whatever it was that 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. Somehow, I'm supposed to move Mom and Dad into this space. The levels, the many rooms, dillapidated, so much like Addams's house, give me a feeling of responsibility -- so much to repair, so many spaces to furnish -- and an excitement that comes with creative possibilities. 60 years after I fell in love with that Addams house, it's 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.

More on Vermeer I wrote in 2006 about an exhibit that juxtaposed Vermeer works with those of his contemporaries. At first, I was disappointed. Then:

In peripheral vision, I glimpsed the first Vermeer in the exhibit, and chills started at the back of my neck. I approached. What was the difference? Style, subject matter, and true-to-life drawing -- these were all the same. But Vermeer's paintings seemed to glow from the inside. I felt there that I was seeing not just a slice of life, but that it was reaching out to me.

See Vermeer, Updike, and Poetry Editorial]

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.