One of the delights of Woody Allen’s recently released memoir,
Apropos of Nothing, is its celebration (all too-brief, alas) of Tennessee Williams. “I always wanted to be Tennessee Williams,” Allen writes. “I grew up idolizing [him]. The movie of
Streetcar is for me total artistic perfection… the most perfect confluence of script, performance, and direction I’ve ever seen.”
I wanted to be Tennessee Williams, too, when I discovered his works at age 18. And I’ve been a Woody Allen fan since seeing the Jazz-age romantic fantasy
A Purple Rose of Cairo when it was released a year later, in 1985. Yet only with
After Florence Foster Jenkins gave a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1944 (she rented the venue herself), Earl Wilson, the gossip columnist for the
New York Post, observed drily, She can sing anything but notes. Despite her notoriously screech-owl tones, Jenkins seemed to truly believe she was a brilliant coloratura soprano, and moved through the world in uninterrupted delusion. The crowds who flocked to her recitals watched with awed fascination, thinking, Am I allowed to laugh at this? Is she in on the joke? There are YouTube clips of her recordings. You may wonder, How bad could she be? Very, very bad as it turns out.