Christopher and I
Nov. 6th, 2011 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceThere is this abiding myth/joke/mock abroad among my friends, which is that Chaz Knows Everybody. The more refined version is that Chaz Met Everybody. Obviously nobody actually takes this seriously, because obviously neither version is at all true; but I have been around in the literary world longer than many, and I have met a lot of people, and I don't so much drop names as lay them like trumps on the table, just to perpetuate the myth. (Karen likes to point me out as someone who has met both Tolkien and Gandalf; that is true.)
The point of this, though, is that I never did meet Christopher Isherwood. It just feels as though I should have done - partly because so much of his writing was so intimately autobiographical, partly because I think I've read it all, partly because I was a total Isherwannabe when I was a teen. Isherwood, Auden, Spender - that whole British gay '30s thing, I was deeply into that. Oh, and Berlin. It wasn't actually Christopher's books that had me learning German, but it might as well have been.
So, yeah. First there were the books. And then there was Cabaret the movie, which I first saw when I was eighteen or so, which led me to the whole Judy/Liza gay fanboy cult thing; and since then I've been seeing every live production that I could.
Last night, I took Karen to see her first stage production, with the San Jose Stage Company. This was essentially the Sam Mendes revision (I kind of want to put a hyphen into that, re-vision) from the Donmar production in the early '90s, which is darker and edgier, bisexually erotic, and ends with a starker vision of what's to come. I loved it, though I may be an easy sell. (I love being sung to anyway, and there was some fine singing; and when the show is Cabaret, hell, I'm pretty much sold already.)
Also, I may never have met Isherwood, but I did know Sally Bowles' daughter rather well.
The point of this, though, is that I never did meet Christopher Isherwood. It just feels as though I should have done - partly because so much of his writing was so intimately autobiographical, partly because I think I've read it all, partly because I was a total Isherwannabe when I was a teen. Isherwood, Auden, Spender - that whole British gay '30s thing, I was deeply into that. Oh, and Berlin. It wasn't actually Christopher's books that had me learning German, but it might as well have been.
So, yeah. First there were the books. And then there was Cabaret the movie, which I first saw when I was eighteen or so, which led me to the whole Judy/Liza gay fanboy cult thing; and since then I've been seeing every live production that I could.
Last night, I took Karen to see her first stage production, with the San Jose Stage Company. This was essentially the Sam Mendes revision (I kind of want to put a hyphen into that, re-vision) from the Donmar production in the early '90s, which is darker and edgier, bisexually erotic, and ends with a starker vision of what's to come. I loved it, though I may be an easy sell. (I love being sung to anyway, and there was some fine singing; and when the show is Cabaret, hell, I'm pretty much sold already.)
Also, I may never have met Isherwood, but I did know Sally Bowles' daughter rather well.