What, and Give Up Show Biz?
"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
— Saying attributed to Edmund Gwenn, star of "Miracle on 34th Street," and also attributed to "Noel Coward, David Garrick, William Holden, Edmund Kean, Marcel Marceau, Groucho Marx, and Oscar Wilde."
See also yesterday's entry on the Dark Lady. For more on Santa and the Dark Lady, see my archive for Aug.-Sept. 2002.
"Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound."
— Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara,
"another acidic writer to whom he
[John Gregory Dunne]
was often compared"
(Adam Bernstein, Washington Post)
For some context for the Hope of Heaven quotation, see Immortal Diamond: O'Hara, Hopkins, and Joyce, or click on the adding machine in yesterday's entry.
For more on miracles and the afterlife, see my archive for September 2002.