Greatest Shakespearean Actor of the Nineteenth Century: On this - TopicsExpress

Greatest Shakespearean Actor of the Nineteenth Century: On this date in 1831, according to Wikipedia anway, Gramercy Park was deeded to New York. From Assassination Vacation: Back home in New York, I’m always bumping into John Wilkes Booth’s big brother, Edwin Booth. I see Edwin’s statue almost every day. He’s so familiar and homey I would almost consider him my mascot but for the fact that he’s fenced off in Gramercy Park and I am one of the 7,999,900 New Yorkers who do not have a key. It’s the only private park in New York, and to get in, you either have to live in one of the lovely brick and brownstone buildings on the park’s perimeter or you have to play bass guitar in one of the bands that are always staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarchy. And at its very center, inside the gates keeping out the riffraff that is all New York, stands the statue of the sad and fancy Edwin Booth, dressed as Hamlet, his signature role. I like Edwin. I’m fond of Shakespeare too, but mostly because of the way I grew up watching his plays— sitting in the Montana dirt. In my home state , there was Shakespeare every summer put on by a heroic organization called Shakespeare in the Parks— parks, by the way, with no fences around them, parks a citizen can walk in and out of any damn time she wants. I live six blocks down Twenty-first Street from Gramercy Park and even though I walk by it every other day, I have been inside it precisely once, when my friend Nick, a Londoner, came to town and stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. How fitting that I cannot enter a park on my street without the escort of a subject of the British crown. Nick gets the hotel’s bellman to unlock the gate for us. Then the bellman asks how long we would like to stay. Why does he care? Because he has to know when to come back and unlock the gate. Unbelievable. Nick seems to like the park, but then he likes anyplace in America where he can smoke. We mosey toward Edwin’s behind. A life-size bronze in Elizabethan garb, his head’s bowed, as if he’s about to ask Hamlet’s that-is-the-question question. Like the Prince of Denmark, Edwin could have come up with at least three reasons not to be. For starters, little brother going down in history as the president’s killer was a cringing, galling shame. Before that, as a boy on the road with his drunken actor father, Junius Brutus Booth, when Edwin finally chose his own stage career over being Junius’s babysitter, the elder Booth only lasted a few days without him, drinking rancid river water and dying, sick, on the Mississippi . Though it’s hard to blame a kid for wanting more out of life than holding back his father’s hair every night as he vomited up his Shakespearean pay, Edwin felt responsible for Junius’s demise. Not that this guilt kept Edwin off the bottle. When Mary, his first and favorite wife, was lying on her deathbed in Boston, Edwin was in New York, too smashed to make the last train north. She was dead when he got there. He kicked himself for the rest of his life. “So who was he?” Nick asks , pointing at Edwin’s statue. “Only the greatest Shakespearean actor of the nineteenth century.” Says the English accent, “You mean, in America?” Whatever. I let that slide. I’ve been dying to get inside this park for years, but eventually, I’m going to need Nick and his bellman to get me out. (excerpt) — Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation Read Assassination Vacation: Library via WorldCat.org Local Bookstore via IndieBound: bit.ly/AVIndependent Goodreads: bit.ly/AV_Goodreads Barnes & Noble: bit.ly/BaN_AV Amazon: amzn.to/16xeOJg Photo: Statue of Edwin Booth through the fence of Gramercy Park https://begley365.wordpress/2010/04/