From Sybil Bruncheon’s "My Merry Memoirs"... a not-so-merry memory of Springtime and my childhood garden:

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I used to have a stand of miniature white irises in my garden that I planted with my grandmother. They were absolutely beautiful; almost too perfect to be real… and they made me feel so wonderful at the very start of Spring when the first green shoots would begin to push up through the cold dirt. Iris shoots have that satiny silvery-green sheen to them, and they’re laid out in flat fan-shaped forms like little sword blades that are so distinctive and sculptural in their own right even before the buds begin to climb out of them and develop into the blooms. Every year, they struck me as incredibly brave, and they warmed my heart more than I can say...

I found out later after I moved away from home, that my brother, (clumsy and not very curious about any of the world around him, let alone all the gardening I had done over the years), went to that particular bed in the very early Spring, and, seeing all the green shoots coming up, thought they were some kind of weed. Can you imagine? What an idiot. A large grouping of identical shoots, very dramatically shaped and obviously the same plant, and he thought it was just a bunch of weeds. He spent hours digging, gouging, and pulling and finally resorted to an axe and a crowbar to pry and chop "all those tangled roots" out of the earth. He just couldn't understand why they were so stubborn.

I returned one Summer for a visit, and I noticed there were no irises left in that part of the garden. I mentioned it to my mother, and she chuckled merrily as she told me.

I remember when I heard what had happened, I went to my room and cried. I imagined all those iris rhizomes wound through each other in that rich black dirt that I had tended year after year after year, so carefully with my grandmother standing by and chatting, guiding me, her eyes twinkling at the promise of beauty. And I grieved at the thought of how those brave little irises had finally been torn to pieces, pried and dragged out of the ground, by a lout, and thrown away in the garbage. I wondered if they wondered where I had gone… the person who had selected them at the nursery, and had planted and then cared for them year after year. Why wasn’t I there to love and protect them?

To this day, it still breaks my heart... breaks my heart…

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Sybil’s “My Merry Memoirs”… Down And Dirty With The Girls!...

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... shortly after the HUAC hearings began and Hollywood was rocked by the hysteria and scandal of possible Communists in every cartoon and cooking show on tv and radio, my Ladies Gardening Club was rounded up for questioning. It's true that our color scheme for the Spring had been titled "THINK PINK!", and that Gale Sondergaard had been a guest speaker at our "Perennially a Star!" luncheon, but the FBI never found any typewriters, or even a pencil in our flower beds.... and the closest our flowers came to being left-leaning was when we planted them on the shadier side of the house!!... here are the girls just minutes before the cops kicked in the French doors to our "Gal Gazebo" and led us all away with our Singapore Slings still in our hands!!! They let us keep the drinks… but they took away our little paper umbrellas. They claimed we might try to “injure” ourselves in our cell!!

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For Mother's Day... From My Merry Memoirs:

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That's me with my own family. From the left, my eldest daughter, Clinique (in her school uniform from the La Petite Académie Pour Les Ingénieuses... (My other two daughters, L'Oreal and Jean Naté, hadn't been born yet.), myself with the binoculars (watching the men in our family playing a hearty round of Cross-Country-Obstacle-Course-Polo-Croquet!), my identical twin sister Dagmar (concealing a sharp object, or perhaps a firearm in her pocket, as usual!), and lastly my own mother (in one of her sane and fairly manageable moments!) also holding a gun, a stick of dynamite, or possibly a flask filled with gasoline ....interestingly, I must admit that a good 94% of my existence is (and always HAS been!) among the more ...um..eccentric, or as you might say ODD characters in life... starting with my own family... I have posted photos and anecdotes about them, and their misadventures can be found in medical encyclopedias, on post office "Most Wanted" boards, and in Madame Tussaud's "Hall of the Hellacious".

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SYBIL'S News Items From Around The Globe!!... London:

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...and so, even with turmoil and strife and terrible tragedies in the news every day, it was important to remember that people had struggled before, and survived appalling circumstances before too. Entire cities had disappeared in flames and death in the 1940s, and it seemed to many that the world might end. Millions of people with homes and children and lives wagered everything and took up new and terrible weapons and wiped everything out in front of them gambling that somehow THEY might be the ones to inherit what little would be left of the Earth... and then, the stars, the seasons, and men's minds shifted, and people who had been ferocious and murderous enemies became allies, friends...and even families. And four elderly ladies who had been cowering, shivering infants in a bomb shelter, clutched fearfully by mothers who prayed that somehow their children would live to laugh again...four lovely, elderly ladies sat by the great and ancient Thames that had seen so much that was sad and joyous. They sat on a misting Spring day and opened their lunches, and watched the boats sail by...and the new bridge being built, and they marveled and chuckled at all of it... the river, the world, and the great mystery and wonder of life... (photo from Meredith Jane Grant)

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Tour-ette in the driving rain!... Cozy and grateful! 4/30/2020

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... the night in 2020 when we found out we'd be leaving NYC and moving to the Philadelphia area.

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SYBIL’S HYSTERICAL HISTORIES!... Dateline: Heckscher State Park – 1923...

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Hello, History Habitués! Did you know that at one time, people actually didn’t like their children? Oh, I don’t mean the thirteen noisy pyromaniacs ranging in age from 2 to 17 living next to you who burned your wisteria arbor down. I mean people who didn’t like their own children! Can you imagine?? (Well I can, but that’s another story for another time!)

       Back right after World War I, when the influenza epidemic had killed off millions of people including their children, youngsters were viewed more often as unpaid help, additional employees, and even appliances, farm tools, or kitchen utensils. If one broke (or died) you could always make or purchase another. Half of Shirley Temple’s and Jackie Coogan’s early films were about just such adventures (but with much happier endings… and usually a tap-dance number or two with a grumpy British man or a kindly “negro”.) A child at that time was considered a blessing, not at birth of course, but only as an investment in the future, and other families would shake your hand in the delivery room, on the kitchen floor, or behind the barn… (wherever!) and say things like “Well, Clem, he should grow up to pull a fine plow in 8 years….even without that foot!”… or “She’s okay looking if you ignore that dent in her forehead, but what does a pretty face have to with filling artillery shells?... especially with those perfect little fingers!”… You get the idea. 

       Of course, there was the alternative too. Later on, parents might not be particularly fond of their children after a few years. Perhaps the jobs their toddlers had learned were replaced by machines or by children in other countries. Or perhaps that missing leg or the loss of a couple of those dainty fingers proved to be a setback on the farm… or in the war department, and so, there came that sad day when it was time for a call to the Heckscher Haven For Waifs, Wastrels, Wantons, and Waiting-To-Be-Adopteds! Yes! That’s it in the photograph in the background there… a sturdy and pious building (except for those frivolous awnings!... well, the Warden’s wife DID want to try her hand at decorating). The building and its grounds were formerly known as the South Shore Asylum for the Inconveniently Useless, but liberals and so-called intellectuals from Eastern universities felt that bronze plaques like that only encouraged drooling, temper tantrums, yowling at the moon, and chewing with one’s mouth open. And THAT was not going to be tolerated! Eventually, all the adult inmates either were taken away to “friendly farms” or “aged out of the system”, and the juvenile wing became the model for the rest of the facility. The crayons, finger paints, construction paper, and round-tipped scissors were tossed in favor of drill presses, pedal-driven sewing machines, tiny convection ovens, pressure cookers, and giant turbines with surging pistons, toothed gears, whirling blades, and signs printed in block letters saying things like “BE CAREFUL!... OR DON’T CRY!” and “DON’T THINK THAT POKED OUT EYE GETS YOU MORE OATMEAL!”. Children seemed to understand and follow the directions (well, most of the time!). And getting a child to sleep was never a problem at Heckscher… not after a sixteen-hour day! The staff prided itself on the smooth running of the place, and even their pick-up service was a model for the industry.

      On that special day when a child was to be “relocated”, the staff arranged for the ever-cheerful Kare-Free Kiddie Kar to come for them, driven by “Reverend” Jim-Bob Wrightsmann, accompanied by two specially selected “residents”, usually Edith Flank, one of the senior girls who served as mentors and advisers to the newcomers, and little Jeanine Comerhum who acted as a playmate for the newly acquired child but was actually a 44 year old midget from the Esterhozy Circus when it went bankrupt. There they are in the photo with friendly Mr. Jim-Bob. Not pictured in the photo due to a weekend-long headache is Koo-Koo the Kar Klown who was hired to distract possibly screaming and begging children if Edith and Jeanine weren’t able to restrain them. His poodle-balloons were always very effective, especially when filled with nitrous-oxide. And sometimes if they popped en route to the Heckscher Haven everyone on board would have a very merry time… provided there wasn’t a fiery bus crash along the Timber Point Road… but that’s a story for another time!

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Tour-ette on a grey Monday in Straus Park... a quiet NYC in quarantine. 4/20/2020

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… NYC just beginning to really come to terms with shutting down… ironically, at the beginning of Spring.

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From Sybil's "MY MERRY MEMOIRS - Hollywood's Hysterical Histories"...

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About six years after Otto Preminger made LAURA (1944) with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price, he approached me with a sequel! I was so excited. And I was being offered the lead! But I asked him, "What about Tierney?"... he said that she would have to pass. She was busy with WHIRLPOOL... and Dana Andrews was doing MY FOOLISH HEART... and the others weren't "available" either. But I was still excited. It was a job, a real job, and right when the Hollywood blacklisting was picking up speed.

There were two great things about the project! One was the song, "Laura" by Raskin and Mercer. They were rewriting the lyrics to make it fit with the sequel. And the other great thing was that Vincent Price had agreed to be in it. And then I got the script over the weekend... it was set on the planet Neptune, Price was playing a mad-scientist who experimented in his garden, and I was to play his newest creation... LARVA!… and the new lyrics? JEEESH! (by the way, Vincent insisted that it could NOT be set on Uranus!!)

Larva is the face in the misty light, she flits here and there in the hall. You see her alone on a summer night as she crawls along the wall. Eight eyes and oh, how they twinkle so, eight arms to give you a hug. She gave your very first kiss to you, that was Larva, but she's only a bug.

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