"A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser."
If you have loitered around these parts, you have read that quotation. It is from Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out -- a fascinating tale about murder and deception. Mainly deception. Of the self-induced variety.
Every writer is guilty of Kirn's sin. In the re-telling of tales, we have a tendency to re-write our experiences. Often, because the re-write is far more interesting. Someone once asked Anne Lamott if her stories really happened. She replied something like this: "They may not be factual, but they are true."
I am currently in Los Angeles waiting for my flight to Manzanillo. But there is an incident that happened on the cruise that has been eating away at my soul since it happened. I could re-write the facts because I do not come out well in the end. But I won't.
Here is what happened.
Every cruise ship has a resident company of dancers and singers. All of them are young. Some are just breaking into show business. They usually perform music that their audiences will recognize. Seldom are any of the performances edgy.
On this cruise, one of their production shows was based around the conceit that the old hotels in Las Vegas still held the ghosts of performances past. It is not the worst concept I have heard to string together a lot of otherwise disparate songs and personalities. Elvis. Elton John. And, of course, the Rat Pack of Frank, Dean, and Sammy.
It was during the Rat Pack sequence that disaster struck. And it was not that the callow twenty-something performers had no idea how to convey a homage, let alone an impression.
All three Rat Packers were vaudeville stereotypes. Frank cool and aloof. Dean a drunk.
It was the Sammy Davis, Jr. character who really jangled. He was played by a young black man who gamely sang one of Davis's signature songs -- "The Candy Man." Accompanied by the girl dancers who were dressed as various candy boxes.
So far, so good. But, everything went off track when he came to the bridge. You recall it: "Now you talk about your childhood wishes/ You can even eat the dishes." At that point, he would turn to Miss Sweet Tart with a Bennie Hill leer and attempt to grab her as if he were Harvey Weinstein. All to the coy giggle of the dancer.
The image was beyond disconcerting. It combined the worst aspects of racial stereotypes and minstrel shows. Even though the scene was obviously designed to portray mores of a different era, putting it on a contemporary stage was simply offensive. If the entertainment industry wants to pretend that it has changed its ways on sexual harassment, this was hardly the mechanism to do it.
And the offensiveness of the racial stereotype was enhanced when in the next breath, the show credited Sammy Davis Jr.'s bravery in prevailing against Las Vegas racism by being the first African-American entertainer to walk through the front door of a casino. Everyone applauded. Mainly, they applauded themselves for their own moral superiority.
But no one, including me, raised one objection to the vileness in the performance they had just witnessed. They applauded the Candy Man number. No one walked out. No one shouted: "Stop it! Just stop it!."
And I have no idea why I didn't. I saw the problem while I was watching the performance. But I did nothing.
I am perfectly capable of exercising my moral dudgeon in public. In the summer of 1976 I attended a performance of the Folies Bergère in Paris. I knew exactly what it was. Las Vegas showgirls tarted up as classy -- as only European hypocrisy can do.
About two-thirds of the way into the show, the showgirls appeared on stage dressed as topless brides -- gliding along to the strains of Schubert's "Ave Maria." Something broke inside me.
I am not Catholic; "Ave Maria" holds no spiritual significance for me. But it does for others. The song was not in the number to somehow honor the religiosity of some French citizens. I doubt the drunk Japanese businessmen in the front row saw anything but bare breasts. The combination was pure sacrilege.
Now, I am not in favor of censoring art because it offends my principles. Sometimes, that is the very purpose of art. But I do not need to approve of it, either.
My friend Bud Johnson and I looked at one another, rose as one, and booed repeatedly as we exited the theater. Only to find a man beating a young boy with a studded belt about a block from the theater. We intervened and called the police. It was a full night of moral adventure.
I fondly remember that night in Paris. Probably because I exercised my rights as a moral agent. And I will equally remember that night in the ship theater where I showed moral cowardice.
"Racism" has become one of those terms that is overused in conversation. But there really is racism around us. And the show was a clear example. Mixed with the "humor" of sexual harassment, it was something I should not have ignored when it happened.
So, here is my pledge to myself. When I encounter similar events in the future, I will not let them go unremarked. I will have my say.
And I hope we will all do the same. Racial relationships have made great strides since the 1960s (as I noted when I discovered the Fort Lauderdale wade-ins on this trip: are you waterloo or peterloo?). But there is still a long journey in front of us.
And, sometimes, the candy man just can't.
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