SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                                   Back          Home
	The road more travelled (An appreciation of the American experience) Shaun Micallef. Arena Magazine, Dec 2001 p44(2) Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Arena Printing and Publications Pty. Ltd. Pinto Colvig It might seem strange to begin my story in 1942 but it really was when my life began. The previous twenty-three years had been merely a gestation period and my disgorgement from the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch) a relatively trouble-free birth. Pinto Colvig was the first person I bumped into on the Disney lot. Tall and charming, his gypsy good looks belied the oafish sounds he made as Uncle Walt's third favourite cartoon character. I had not been a fan of Goofy myself but I felt I shouldn't let on when I met him. At least not until I knew him better. And I would. He showed me around the temporary-looking buildings where the animators and in-betweeners brought their marvellous creations to life. I looked over the enormous multi-plane camera, which filmed down from the ceiling through five or six sheets of glass. To think that Goofy, Donald, and more importantly, Mickey, could not move, let alone conduct their Silly Symphonies, were it not for the enormous talents of Pinto and his ilk, made me realise how complicated the picture business was going to be. As I wandered over to where Randolph Ising conducted his auditions, I thought of my own Pinto Colvigs. My mother and my father. Southsea seemed a long time ago and indeed it was. Longer for them though. Mum had been a musical hall artiste long before Dad. She would dress in white tights and stand on the stage playing the flute while someone in the limes would project slides of famous works of art on her. As she improvised a haunting jazz riff she became, in turn, The Mona Lisa, Whistler's Mother, and Rembrandt's Anatomy lesson. It was mesmerising. Dad played piano in the pit. Not the orchestra pit though -- just a big pit the manager had dug out the back of the theatre, flung him in, and filled with dirt. You could still hear Dad though. He was nothing if not determined, except loud. And the fact that he could perform with a minimum of oxygen made him that rarest of entertainers; non-Mexican yet able to pianise at high altitudes without first spending time in a hyperbaric chamber. Of course he played more conventional venues too; he once shared the bill with Sir Harry Lauder at the Glasgow Empire, although granted it was for the dry cleaning. Mum had met Dad during the First World War. She was a munitions handler at a factory and when a handsome NCO walked up to her and asked where he and his band were doing Worker's Playtime she fell in love straight away. Dad took a little more convincing. She was a big woman, three hundred pounds in the old measurements (more in her diving suit). The only daughter of Russian immigrants who could not speak a word of English, they relied on her to put food on the table and keep Grandpa's mug full of Pernod. Mum's parents had escaped Russia during the revolution. Why? I don't know. They were peasants. It was a confusing time. Fires and much yelling. They left Minsk one morning and never returned. A kindly man with a boat took them through the Urals. They almost froze to death. They took little with them. Some food, Grandpa's reversible wainscoting and Nana's prized ulcer. When they sailed into New York Harbour in those desperate days before the Great War, how could they have known the fate that awaited them on Ellis Island? Corralled behind a rope and covered in lice they waited to have their family name changed from Willahorski to the anglicised and apparently more acceptable `Coconut'. And then onto a small hovel on West 133rd Street above a pawnshop and Chinese laundry. Ah -- those smells! For years Grandpa would regale us with tales of how he and Nana reeled with nausea around their garret for weeks on end until finally he would have to go downstairs and confront both Mr Saul and Mr Lim. `Must you boil those old trumpets?' he would ask the pawnbroker. `Aren't those trousers done yet?' he would screech at Mr Lim. It did no good. The police were summoned. Then the Fire Brigade, the Department of Works, and finally the guy with the sand who covers the sick in the streets. No one could get those two old men to stop preparing what must have been a thoroughly unpalatable meal of antique wind instruments and wedding suits. Eventually the Mayor himself, Fiorello LaGuardia appeared on my grandfather's door stoop. It was election time and New York's favourite son upheld the promise to himself made the day before to visit every home in New York and present a cigar to anyone who undertook to vote for him. My Nana, having agreed to vote twelve times for the Mayor, lay unconscious on the landing, her hair still smouldering, belching out palls of black smoke with each shallow and fading breath. Grandfather took the opportunity to bend the ear of the father of the city and sat with the great man himself in their cheaply furnished salon. Grandfather luxuriating on an orange crate, LaGuardia preferring to lean on the vaulting horse near the chalk drawing of the body. `Mr Coconut' spoke the voice that millions would recognise as having a New York accent: `This great city of ours has two things which our constitution says is immutable in terms of rights. First of all and most importantly, second only to the next thing I'm going to say -- people in my town, be they black, Hispanic, green, wetbacks, red Indian, Italian, fags, Jews or whatever are free to offend whoever they want, whenever they want, and whoever they want.' My grandfather puffed on his wet cheroot, blowing gray circles into the Priest's Hole in the wall. The great man took a swig of the ancient coffee that filled to brimming meniscus the gumboot he had been offered when dragged in from the street. `Further more', he continued, `I don't care what law they break -- the smells of this city are the smells of a mass o' humanity; a crush, if you will. A huge pineapple goddamn crush!!!!' He was right. This was New York godammit. New York, New York. So deaf they said it twice. America. Leif Eriksson may have ignored it, but Columbus knew when he was onto a good thing. Not bad for a secret Rosicrucian sponsored by the Queen of Spain. And it's been a land of opportunity for the world's huddled masses ever since. `I Want To Be In America' sang Charo in her 1978 TV Special (emphasis mine). She sang it without irony, which is her style but what is it she loved so about this ad hoc collection of States that prompted her to pack up her meagre belongings in a bandana and leave Ecuador? It's a question that has faced many immigrants. America as been described by people like Irving Berlin as `the land of the free and the home of the brave'. Anyone who has seen Mathew Brady's superb photographs of the millions of civil war dead will know just how awful life can be there. This observation does rather make Berlin look a fool but he wasn't to know. His life was New York and Broadway in the 1920s. Writing catchy songs for perky kids. No historian was he. A short bald homosexual Jew. But boy! Could he play the piano? Yes. Like my father after him. Since the Boston Tea Party when poorly costumed pirates threw boxes of cargo into the sea vowing to not pay tax to Britain, life in the States has been one long growth upwards and outwards. Buildings, morality, art, food, weaponry, fashion, television, literature, furniture design, the motor industry, phones, animals -- the list is endless. And the end is listless. The Constitution tells us that it is every man's inalienable right to bare arms and various other bits of their person. It speaks of Freedom Of Speech and the Right To Remain Silent. Such contradictory philosophies sit comfortably together in Americans huge melting pot. Weeping, my normally stoic grandfather rose and shook hands with the Mayor and made him a gift of his remaining tooth. My grandmother swears she saw a tear in the great man's eye, although she concedes it did have a string hanging from it so it might have been a monocle. In any event, within moments several of New York's finest arrived, kicked in the door, and ushered the Mayor from the building and into the rear of a quaint horse-drawn police wagon. Within weeks he was re-elected for a fourth term. One of the few ways available for my grandparents to escape the suffocating stench of the neighbours was to take a leisurely stroll a few miles up Broadway to catch a show. Jolson was my Grandfather's favourite. He loved him in `Bomba', and `Sinbad'. He thought `Quick! My Legs Are Paralyzed' was appalling but was prepared to forgive, such was his regard for the singer many called `The World's Greatest Entertainer'. Quite what the Jewish minstrel singer had that appealed to a 75-year-old Russian immigrant I did not understand. `Jolie', as my Grandfather referred him, had a voice so rich and resonant that when he sang at the Wintergarden you could feel the vibrations through the wall at the back of the theatre. These were the days before microphones. Rudy Vallee sang through a loudhailer but Jolie sang au naturale. Grandpa would rise from his seat two bars into `April Showers' and run to the rear of the theatre and put his hands up on the red velveteen wallpaper. The profoundly deaf could also enjoy Jolson in this manner. Swaying away with their arms out-stretched and their backs to the stage they hummed tunelessly to Jolson's greatest hits. It was all the craze during `Broadway Melanin of 1922'. Aisle upon aisle of seats going begging but the back wall completely booked out for months. You couldn't get a handspace for love or money. `I clapped my hands until the skin chafed off and my bloodied skeleton was revealed!' enthused the not-usually-given-to-macabre-hyperbole Clive Barnes in his Variety review of opening night. Mind you, he also enjoyed Barnum. But Grandpa agreed, despite Barnes notorious lack of discrimination. `Jolie sings like a beautiful girl', my Grandpa would often say. And Jolie did. Shrill and demented, like a descending missile Al Jolson captivated millions. In later years, after he lost his lung in the war, his voice went down a few octaves. Larry Parks was heard to comment `Jeez that's low -- how the hell am I suppose to mime that?' Sound engineers at Warner worked for weeks to raise the pitch of the voice so that it matched Parks' lip-syncing. It's what made `The Jolson Story' and its sequel `Mighty Joe Young' the staggering successes they were. A lot of people forget about the technical wizardry of those early days. Spielberg and his dinosaurs had nothing on the old masters. But more of them later. I knocked on the tin door of Rudolph Ising's caravan. He wasn't in, so I left a message with the receptionist.. He never rang back. Shaun Micallef is an Adelaide-based solicitor