and the artifacts that cause them?
Over half a century has elapsed since attending this concert at UCLA. Despite the passage of time, what remains as vivid today was of a memory lapse Miss Dilling experienced a little over halfway into the first movement of the Händel. This was the second time i had heard her perform. Roughly a year earlier she had given a recital at the Wilshire Ebell Theater, also in Los Angeles, but that was uneventful.
This lapse was all the more obvious when she stopped, thought for what seemed an eternity, then backed up a little and was able to regain her train of thought to finish the movement, the rest of the Concerto and remainder of the program without any other lapse. At the start of her brief demonstration of the collection of harps replete with history, she prefaced her remarks with an apology for the all-too-human memory slip. She then invited any and all interested to look at the collection and ask questions during the intermission.
For whatever reason, almost nobody came up so i brought a pen and program to make her feel appreciated by requesting an autograph. She couldn’t have been more gracious.
At the end of the concert she stopped the applause to announce how delighted she was to spot in the audience, halfway between my seat and the aisle, her good friend, Harpo Marx. The people on either side of him all wanted him to autograph their programs so i took out my pen again and that is how this program bears his signature as well. A little over two months later Marx died after a heart operation.
Eleven years later, after Diana and i moved into our first apartment in Los Angeles, she began organizing my haphazard collections of memorabilia and spotted this program saying i should save it. She tucked it into the copy on our bookshelf of the autobiography, Harpo Speaks.
The above brings to mind a story Diana recounted about Herbert Hoover. A young boy asked the former president if he could please have two autographs. While signing the second one, Hoover asked why he wanted two. The kid explained that he needed two to trade in for one of Babe Ruth.
May 2017