Brief encounter.

When you're a living legend and one of the great artistic talents of all time, everyone wants to have their picture taken with you. It's not always convenient, but I guess I'd do it for Gene Wilder.

Seriously, Mr. Wilder, now well into his career as a novelist and short-story writer, was the guest speaker at yesterday's hugely successful Unicorn Writers Conference. Thanks to Maureen Amaturo, who inspired the conference in the first place and got to interview the great man, for taking the picture.

Our latest centenarian. And I remember when she became a mere nonagerian.

Happy 100th birthday, Sylvia. Just remember that the first century is the hardest.

Dear Reader: I devoted all my blog entries this week to Sylvia Davis, or at least to the achievements and experiences I'd gleaned from knowing her for only 18% of her life. If this is the first entry about Sylvia you've come across, you might want to jump back to Monday, April 5 ("My other girlfriend . . .") and then read the week's posts in sequence.

Later that same day.

She remembered. A little prompting, maybe, which wouldn't have been required a year or so ago. I stayed with her a good part of the afternoon. There were stories about her childhood, about her mother's childhood, about early antisemitism, about knowing Burl Ives during the war, about filming with Woody Allen, who let her do two takes for Stardust Memories -- his version first, her version second -- and about needing a hospital checkup afterward to make sure the other actor in the scene hadn't broken her rib.

Her health isn't so good, although she hopes to get past a current problem that restricts her food intake. And she continues her hobby (her "therapy," as she calls it), the note cards made with dried flowers. I remind her that she made a batch for me, at my request, which Mary and I used for our wedding invitations, gosh, thirteen years ago. Two of her designs are framed and hang in our guest bathroom.

I found the picture I referred to in an earlier blog. It was taken at the Jersey Shore and published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in either 1929 or 1930 (giving Sylvia an age range of 18-20), and it won an award from the newspaper for the photographer, famous for adding the huge, puffy cloud to backgrounds. Sylvia has the yellowing cutting on the wall, but she also has some better black and white prints from the session -- this is my photograph of her framed picture. And it requires a correction:  Martha Graham was later; this was very much under the influence of Isadora Duncan.

The Daily Insult, Sylvia Davis version, part 2.

Today's the day. I'm going into Manhattan after lunch to see Sylvia, as close to the big day (tomorrow) as possible.

I called yesterday to let her know I was coming. She still lives in her own apartment, but now has nursing care during the day -- a mild irony, because when she played an invalid in those TV ads for the visiting nurse service those few short years ago, she had no need of their services in real life. And that was despite breaking a thigh, when a distracted young woman crossing a Manhattan street in a hurry knocked Sylvia off her feet. (She's 5 feet 2 inches and about 100 pounds -- she doesn't offer much resistance.)

Sylvia had trouble identifying me from my voice, apologetically saying more than once that she gets muddled. A day short of a hundred, she's entitled to. And I expected that. The last time I phoned, again to set up a visit, it also involved a long conversation where I tried to remind her who I was.

"It's Alan," I said, as clearly as I could.

"Who, dear?"

"Alan," I practically shouted. She wasn't getting my name. What would do it? I reminded her in some desperation that we used to work together at the library and often spent time together, especially back in the days before I deserted my beloved New York City for the leafy suburbs. Then I could drop in on her, with or without children in tow (or in Baby Bjorn slings, the world's greatest invention), at home, or in her younger brother's distinguished  art gallery, Davis and Langdale, on 60th Street, where she was still working as a receptionist, a relentless enthusiast for the artists who exhibited there -- she knew them well -- and for the collectors' taste shown by Roy and his wife, Cecily (the Langdale half of the partnership).

Polite, regretful, she couldn't fish me out of her memory. It would have been the first sign for me that her mind, troubled at times but always lucid, was showing the wear of the years, that the actress's remarkable memory was losing its professional sharpness.

And then something clicked. "Oh, Alan!" she cried. "How are you? How's Mary? How are the children?"

I needn't have worried. "Who did you think I was?" I asked.

"I thought you said your name was Ellen," she admitted merrily. "You sounded like a woman."

So there it was. Nothing wrong with her mind, it was just her hearing. Or perhaps my light tenor is getting lighter. Anyway, I'm not put off by the limitations of the telephone. When I get there this afternoon, she'll know me. We go way back.

The Daily Insult. By Sylvia Davis.

It was December 7, 2001, the sixtieth anniversary of the "day that will which in infamy," and Sylvia and I had a recording session. She was proud of having been a WAC during World War II, stationed in England, and had vivid memories of hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I'll never forget it," she sighed. She looked up at me. "Where were you when you heard the news?"

(In case you're not following, I was not exactly focused on world events in 1941, since it was fifteen years before I was born.)

A perfomer's life.

I have only a partial knowledge of Sylvia's career -- indeed, of her life -- but I know the moments she was most proud of. She started as a dancer -- the name Martha Graham has come up in conversation -- and there's certainly a framed picture in her apartment of a very young and somewhat scantily clad Sylvia, caught at the apogee of a very impressive and well-formed leap.

Her most prominent role as an actress was playing Arlo Guthrie's mother -- Woody Guthrie's wife, who becomes Woody's widow during the story -- in Arthur Penn's film of Alice's Restaurant. She also had parts in a Patrick Swayze movie and, memorably, in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, playing a "hostility victim" during a brief fantasy scene. She did soaps and some other TV stuff, and even during the time I knew her, she took part in shorts by NYU film students and made a sitcom pilot that wasn't picked up.

[Added later] Here's a moment from Alice's Restaurant, with the added benefit of a great song at the beginning from Pete Seeger:




It was her stage work that she was most proud of -- mentioning with pride that she created the role in The Whales of August that was played by Lillian Gish in the eventual movie version -- and among her anecdotes were stories of acting with the Lunts and Edward G. Robinson. Plays by Shakespeare (she loved the role of the Duchess of York in "Richard II"), Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams feature in her resume. Her last appearance (which I missed, to my eternal regret) was as Henry Higgins's mother in an Off-Broadway Pygmalion in 1993.

Together, we recorded biography, creepy science fiction, young adult, literary fiction, works by Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein, and poetry -- Ted Hughes's translations of Ovid (to my private peevishness, because I had voiced all the Hughes recordings up to that point). She was always up to it, and couldn't contain her glee when she nailed a particularly challenging passage or sentiment.

We also did live readings at the library, and I was paired with Sylvia once in reading 20th century English poetry. I did get Hughes this time, plus Larkin, while she had Auden. (And Eliot? Can't remember.) As a finale, I had taken Auden's "Night Mail," originally written as film narration over Britten's music, and split it between two voices, a complex duologue of interlocking rhythm and fluctuating pace. I set aside time to practice with her, since she was unfamiliar with the poem. I needn't have bothered. She was already better than me in the first cold reading.

At another of the readings, Susan*, the studio director, had given Sylvia "Rockaby," a testing piece by Beckett, tough for any actor, let alone one in her nineties. Sylvia was so good that she could have walked out of that meeting room on 20th Street and delivered the same performance at any off-Broadway location.

And then, her most famous role, seen and loved by millions. At 93, Sylvia got a commercial, for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. (Alas, no amount of searching through YouTube and other websites has located it.) As I recall, it began with a tight close-up of her face, lit for glorious black-and-white, delivering a line that went something like: "I survived the depression, two husbands . . . and miniskirts." [Found it much later. See: Another curtain call.] A moment of fame that got her recognized on the streets of New York.


*Susan Mosakowski worked continually to expand the role of the Audiobook studio. New York theater offered an extraordinary pool of voice-over and performing talent willing to volunteer their time for the blind and visually handicapped, and Susan created many opportunities for the library's patrons to enjoy live performances and readings at the 20th Street branch. She was well qualified to do so -- in addition to her role as director, Susan was and is a successful playwright, whose works have been performed off-Broadway and around the country, and with her husband, the inordinately talented Matthew Maguire, founded the Creation Production Company.

Who is Sylvia?

I had only met Sylvia on a couple of brief occasions before we started to work together on the Josephine Baker biography. I was still relatively new to the process of monitoring, and I had yet to record anything myself -- my first narration was much later, Julian Barnes's wonderful Flaubert's Parrot -- while Sylvia had a long track record . . .  and a reputation for doing things her way. I had yet to discover that her personal warmth was as abundant as her unruly gray curls, and that the steely professionalism that I rightly detected beneath a too-obvious veneer of self-deprecation was itself another veneer covering deeper insecurities about her career (but never her undeniable talent).

During our first session, I heard her stop reading mid-sentence, and so I halted the tape and informed her over the intercom that we would be restarting. I assumed she had lost her place in the book momentarily. (Whenever Sylvia made a mistake, I always apologized to her.)

It was reel-to-reel tape in those days; the studio has since gone digital. Because the erase head and the recording head on the old machines were about half a second apart, picking up after a break was a rather complex ritual that was 50% button-pushing and 50% sheer faith that you weren't going to cut off the end of a successfully recorded sentence, especially a long one. So while I was going through the motions for the restart -- it hadn't yet become second nature as it would be later -- Sylvia buzzed. I took off the headphones to use the intercom.

"Why did you stop me?" she asked.

I realized I hadn't explained properly. "Oh, you left rather a long pause there, so I guessed you wanted to do it again," I told her.

There was another pause, and then her voice, frosty, on the intercom.

"My dear," she said, "that was acting!"

My other girlfriend . . .

 . . . was the way my wife used to refer to my dear friend, Sylvia Davis, in the days before we were married.

I met Sylvia in 1992, when I was volunteering in the Audiobook Studio in the New York Library for the Blind. I'd worked on just a few books before I was teamed with Sylvia as her "monitor" (i.e., sound recordist and occasional, trepidatious editor) for Naked at the Feast, a biography of Jazz chanteuse Josephine Baker. We went on to do eleven books together, after she refused to work with anyone else.

(Under Library of Congress guidelines, the books are recorded unabridged, and with weekly two-hour sessions -- any longer and the vocal tiredness of the volunteer readers can be heard by discerning listeners -- a longish book can take months to complete.)

If ever I missed a recording session over the years, only the studio director, the indefatigable Susan Mosakowski, would be grudgingly accepted as a substitute. Anyone else would result in a sulk.

This exclusiveness was no hardship for me, since Sylvia was the best reader I worked with, and I loved her company, in the studio and often on social occasions. She was also the best prepared -- her reading copy of the book was peppered with penciled notes about emphasis and mood, as befits the professional actress she was and remained through all the time I worked at the library. (My move from Manhattan to Rye seven years ago ended my ten-year stint as a regular volunteer.)

But like so many of her colleagues in the business, she lamented the lack of work, the absence of auditions. Her agent just wasn't calling. And any suggestion that, since she was now in her nineties, she was entitled to a graceful retirement was generally met with a withering, scornful look. (Despite her tiny, elfin physique, she could have the presence of a Titaness.) Sylvia had to keep busy.

Well, she has kept busy, to the point where on Saturday, Sylvia Davis will celebrate her one-hundredth birthday. In her honor -- and with a massive measure of guilt that I can't be with her on the day because I'll be presenting at the Unicorn Writers Conference in Connecticut, I'm going to devote this week's blog entries to a true star of dance, stage, screen, and my life.

Impressions from Virginia.

The retirement community where my in-laws live is described at its main gate as an "adult lifestyle" community, which sound like a different kind of euphemism.

-------

Formal meals are served in the main dining room in the central building, known as the "Big House." Returning to the family cottage after lunch a little later than the others -- held up by an impromptu game of checkers with Primus and Secundus -- we pause open-mouthed as a solo bald eagle flaps lazily past us, below the tree-line.

-------

The boys have enormous trouble letting go of things, which is obvious from a glance at their over-stuffed bedrooms. They speculate on how much of our beloved minivan can be repurposed when her days on the road are done, unable to handle the concept of selling her in her entirety. In a rare note of fraternal pride, Tertius tells me that I should just give her to Secundus, the would-be Edison. "He'll turn it into a flying car," he declares with cheerful confidence.

(Well, it's about time somebody came up with one. We were promised them, as any consumer of science fiction will tell you.)

-------

We emerge from the in-laws' cottage to drive back to the hotel (which allows Leila to stay in the room with us). The full moon shines through crisply etched clouds like a Dore illustration or an establishing shot from a werewolf movie.

"That moon looks ominous," pronounces eight-year-old Secundus. The writer in me inflates.

"It does," I agree. "And that's a great word."

"Yeah," he says thoughtfully. Then adds, "Dad, what does 'ominous' mean?"

Oh well.

I didn't take enough pictures of Leila when she was a puppy. Here's one of me and the beast in a rare moment of repose. (For her; I'm generally in repose). It was taken by my mother-in-law during our Thanksgiving visit to Virginia in 2007, when Leila was three months old, but I only collected a copy on this visit.

The Daily Insult.

Visiting the in-laws in Virginia (yes, that's one of the reasons why there's been a bit of a hiatus -- and before I left I had to deal with this approaching tax return deadline, always scarier for the self-employed).

I'm walking the dog around the grounds of the retirement community where my parents-in-law live, when an aged resident greets me and notes with devastating accuracy that's she's never seen me or Leila before. I explain that I'm visiting.

"Oh," she replies, "I thought you just lived in a different part of the community."