A Memory of Cary Grant

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A memoir about the night I saw Cary Grant in person:

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Starting in the mid-1980s, Cary Grant toured in a one-man question-and-answer show, A Conversation with Cary Grant, in which he spent ninety minutes or so answering questions from audience members. Several other movie stars and celebrities have since taken on similar productions in which they and their fans bask in an accepted and reflected adoration— Gregory Peck, for one—but Grant was the first. The show was an extended, and deserved, curtain call from beginning to end.

One cool feature to Grant’s tour was that it brought him to theaters in which he had performed during his vaudeville years in the 1920s. Thus it was that in April 1985 I found myself sitting in the balcony of the small (1500 seat) Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, New York, a stage on which he had performed decades earlier. I was 16 and a movie nerd and Cary Grant was my idol.
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George Harrison’s ‘Any Road’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

George Harrison died fifteen years ago today.

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For nearly a decade before his death, George Harrison had been working slowly on a new solo album while dealing with a cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatments, a remission, and then, a new cancer and its eventual metastasization. He was also stabbed 40 times in a house invasion about two years before his death.

So George Harrison’s late 1990s was a period in which the “material world,” as he once called the here and now, appeared to be a genuinely unpleasant place, one that no longer wanted him around, but he retained a sharp wit about it anyway. Asked about his attacker, Harrison said that he “clearly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” (The attacker suffered from untreated schizophrenia and was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.)

Working on his music through all of this, Harrison finished enough tracks to have a rough cut of a full album, but he finally ran into the ultimate deadline when cancer was found in his brain and he was given weeks to live. He wrote out instructions for his son, Dhani, and musical collaborator, Jeff Lynne, and they produced his final work, the farewell album Brainwashed, which they released a year after his death, in 2002.
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Today in History: Nov. 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Erwin Schrödinger published a paper titled “The present situation in quantum mechanics” on this date in 1935 in which he presented a thought experiment in a joking way that involved a box that contained a vial of poison, some radioactive uranium, a Geiger counter … and a cat. Happy birthday to Schrödinger’s cat, always simultaneously dead and alive.

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The New York Yankees signed free agent outfielder Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $2.96 million contract 40 years ago today.
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