Tilting at Windmills - Column

Washington Monthly, July, 2000 by Charles Peters

RECENTLY A LETTER ARRIVED at my house at 5025 V. St. Washington, D.C. It was addressed to 5025 Campstool Rd. in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The zip code was 32007. Mine is 20007. The addressee was the Sierra Trading Post. The only addressees here are Charles and Elizabeth Peters. The only thing these addresses have in common is the last three digits of the zip-code and the street number 5025. Can anyone out there explain how this could have happened?

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION on Terrorism has proposed that we monitor the activities of all foreign students in the United States. Exactly what would we be looking for? Well, the commission says, the student may change his major from, say, "English literature to nuclear physics." I must say that seems to me to be more likely to produce bad grades than terrorist bombs.

IN ITS OBITUARY OF SIR JOHN Gielgud, The New York Times says that after World War II, "He returned to the United States in 1947 with `The Lady's Not for Burning.'" This omits one of the great wonders of the New York theater--Gielgud's production earlier in 1947 of "The Importance of Being Earnest." Its success with Pamela Brown as Gwendolyn, led to Gielgud's return later that year with Brown as the star of "Burning." Gielgud's New York "Earnest" was different because it cast Margaret Rutherford as Lady Bracknell instead of Miss Prism, the role she usually played in London as she did in the Michael Redgrave film. In the movie, Lady Bracknell was played by Dame Edith Evans, who had often performed the role on the London stage. Rutherford's performance was a triumph. Never have I heard such delighted laughter in a theater. Her reading of Wilde's great lines--"To be born--or at any rate bred--in a handbag seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to"--was much more spirited than Evans'. Similarly, Brown brought more vigor to Gwendolyn than Joan Greenwood did in the film where, like Evans, Greenwood tended toward languor. The result was the brisk pace comedy needs to work best.

This was an incredible era in the theater. Just the three years from 1946 to 1949 while I was in college at Columbia, saw the original productions of "The Iceman Cometh," "Born Yesterday," "Annie Get Your Gun," "Brigadoon," "A Street Car Named Desire," "South Pacific," "Death of a Salesman," and "Kiss Me Kate" Of all of these, none seemed as perfect to me as Gielgud's "Earnest."

REMEMBER RICHARD PRESTON'S The Hot Zone, that nightmarish book a few years back that posed the possibility of some horrible disease escaping from the Army's biological weapons defense center at Fort Detrick, Md.? Well, buried on an inside page of a recent Washington Post was this tidbit: "A review of lab safety procedures is underway at ... Fort Derrick, Md., after a scientist contracted a rare and potentially deadly disease, officials said yesterday."

THIS COLUMN USED TO regularly feature items about the tendency of public officials to find reasons to travel to nice places at taxpayer expense. But after several readers complained that I had beaten this horse nearly to death, I desisted. But I find I can't resist a recent story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the travel records of the city's pension board. Why, one might ask, would the members of a pension board have to go anywhere? Yet, according to the Journal Sentinel, "Six of the eight members have traveled to conferences in locales such as Phoenix, Palm Springs, Orlando, Las Vegas, and New Orleans--with several making more than one trip." The Monthly's answer to official travel abuse is to require that all conferences be held in Buffalo or Toledo.