"A BOOK AT BEDTIME" - TENNESSEE WLLIAMS NOTEBOOKS

Well...! It has been a quiet - a looooong quiet - patch since my last post, and no recent screenings of U & ME & TENNESSEE - sorry to report ...

*But* -

A lovely thing happened a little over a month ago. I got a call from Sarah Langan, a Radio producer at the BBC, asking if I'd like to read some extracts from TENNEESSEE WILLIAMS's Journals for BBC Radio 4's "A Book At Bedtime" show...

( " *WOULD* I ?!!" ) -

I was even at that moment standing in a wonderful bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London, just about to buy a copy of........TENNESSEE WILLIAMS's NOTEBOOKS !

Cosmic, or what ? ! !

And as Fate would have it, standing nearby eavesdropping on my phone conversation with Sarah Langan was my old friend MIKE CARLSON ( his blog is: IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS and it's - irresistible! ) As I hung up Mike sauntered over to me, drawling out:

"I have always depended upon the kindness of researchers!"

The selections from Tenn's Journals are a lot of fun, especially his astute summation of André Gide, gleaned from that writer's own notebooks which Tennessee was reading during the try-outs for A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE in New Haven, Connecticut:

"Miss Gide seems to have been an old auntie all her life !

...I don't have the impression, from her journal, that

she liked anyone really very deeply except Miss Gide,

whom she pretends to deprecate but whom I think she

regards as a girl of destiny pretty nearly all the way through...

(She declares, at one point, that she spends 5 hours a day

practicing Bach and Chopin - That girl's ass and fingers must

have been something prodigious! To sleep she drinks a

"libation of orange water". Girl ! " )

Ah Tenn ! How wonderfully wicked - and perceptive - you were !

You can hear these selections on the BBC website at the "A BOOK AT BEDTIME" home page - for seven days from today, the 12th of February, 2010 - I hope you enjoy them !