Adelaide Road Vigil

I wasn’t into wandering around needlessly in the heat. I did walk a plucky old lady down to Wilton Terrace by the shady canal to get the Navan bus. She was after an injection in her eye. She told me why she hadn’t brought her husband (“He’d only get lost”). When two more old dears were waiting to hail a taxi outside the hospital they got distracted, nattering to each other, so I discreetly flagged a cab down from behind a tree and then pointed to them as he pulled in. Good deeds help pass the time.

The fourth time I went around up the corner to put money in the meter, it was half past five. I crossed from the appealing evening sunshine to the shady, greener side of Harcourt Terrace. A beautiful blonde, I’d say thirty, was standing near the meter. She looked like she was on hold, on her phone. A loose pastel blouse, light blue jeans or trousers, sandy sandals or shoes… I didn’t look her up and down when I got close. She looked up. Her face looked a bit tense or troubled, either from the phone or from my crossing the street, or both. By then I had a two-euro coin evident between my fingers. I said “Hi” with a smile. She echoed the hi, I suppose a little relieved. I had a nice shirt. I got the final ticket with my back to her and went up further, to the car. When I turned back towards Adelaide Road and its tall trees, she was gone.

My mother got out at ten past six. We were away from home fifteen minutes short of nine hours. For what? No one had actually put her name down for the machine test. The consultant macgyvered a couple of things (a protective lens, a lash pluck) and told her to come back in three weeks. A charmer of an unfamiliar nurse (“too much hair and peroxide”) had even made an issue of her throwaway mask being on upside down.

The Art of Edwin Edwards

A government of cynics is often tolerant and humane…

– H. L. Mencken

Laissez les bons temps rouler.

– Edwin Edwards

A French speaker, a four-time Governor, an eight-year Federal guest, a civil-rights champion – he never forgot his school bus sloshing past black children in bad weather – the all-round Louisiana legend Edwin Edwards (93) died last Monday. An artist of politics, he was the author of the (being caught with) “a dead girl or a live boy” quip that outlined the pair of unlikely scenarios in which he could be embarrassed into losing the 1983 election.

Other notable Edwards quotes of that race included a response to the GOP candidate, Gov. David Treen, who accused him of talking out of both sides of his mouth (“It’s so people like you with only half a brain can understand me”). To reinforce the point, he claimed his opponent took an hour and a half to watch the CBS show 60 Minutes.

In dire need of money to clear the debt accrued by that victorious campaign, Edwards filled two jumbo jets with donors, who paid ten grand each for a seat, and took them off to France. The climax of the trip was a banquet at Versailles, at which he crowned himself with a waiter’s powdered wig.

In the early Nineties he came up against the Grand Wizard David Duke. The ladies’ man claimed the only thing he and Duke had in common was that they were both wizards under the sheets. He also feigned concern for the health of the man from the Klan – over smoke inhalation from “so many burning crosses” – but his supporters’ bumper stickers were still more memorable, such as

Vote for the crook. It’s important.

Vote for the lizard, not the wizard.

They did. Edwards won the run-off by 400,000 votes. I had thought that Edwin’s most exciting electoral joust was versus Duke (1991) but I was wrong. During the 1983 campaign, one of his brothers was murdered by someone to whom he (Nolan Edwards) had stopped lending money. 

To say Louisiana life is merely colourful would be too black and white. Edwards’ career was marked by “events, dear boy, events” (Harold Macmillan), in which, typically, some clown or other, usually in a position of responsibility, left a financial and/or violent mess for Edwards to try to sort out, in an oil State with an unstable tax base.

On the unresolved matter of dodgy deals and donations, the Feds finally got a conviction in 2001. Back in the Eighties, when they couldn’t lay a glove on him, legally if not politically, the Governor had loftily proclaimed

It was illegal for them to give but not for me to receive.

After he was acquitted in a 1986 corruption trial, the jury’s hotel complained to the press that half the jurors had made off with their hotel towels. The Governor’s reaction?

A man is entitled to be judged by a jury of his peers.

The Joker of Vienna

The most popular piece in the five years of this site (founded April 2016)

Dr. John Flynn

In one sense immortal after the dramatic monologue Der Herr Karl (1961), Helmut Qualtinger died in 1986 soon after giving a memorable film performance as the heretical monk Remigio da Varagine in The Name of the Rose. Apart from his career as writer, actor and cabaret singer, though, he was also a genius mimic and hoaxer, sometimes at a serious personal cost, at least before he developed his art of mischief.

One thing he craved professionally as an adult was to be taken seriously as a writer. His case echoes in part the jailing of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton in 1962 for their campaign of altering London library books with funny collages and false blurbs. Reports on their trial included a banner headline in the Daily Mirror (“Gorilla in the Roses” referred to a monkey’s head pasted to the cover of the Collins Guide to Roses) and…

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