My title paraphrases one of the best show titles of all time: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Did you know that this was in turn ripped off from an apocryphal Borscht Belt shaggy-dog joke? Well, so they say. I can’t actually find any source confirming that Morey Amsterdam or Henny Youngman once stood up on a stage at Grossinger’s, tapped the microphone, and launched the evening with: “Glad to see all you folks in the audience. You know, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the theater tonight. Seriously, this’ll kill ya!” Followed by a yarn about a flat tire, a carrot and a bottle of Irish whiskey…
Why do I even have this on my mind? Well, I’ve been delving into a multitude of boxes of my parents’ mementos and newspaper clippings and lightly assorted “cutesakes.” (An even more insidious category of keepsakes.) These boxes filled one of two rented storage units. I swore to myself I would empty one of these two dens of antiquity before 8/31. Unlike Mark Twain’s advice about eating the bigger frog first, I’ve concentrated on the one I actually thought I might be able to finish in four months of weekends.
Excavations to the Era of Papyrus
Some boxes, I sweated through on-site, determined not to drag useless paper back home. (Where I already have archived dozens of now-rare railroad timetables, menus purloined from Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and first-edition Star Wars comic books.) I set up a paper bag for recycling to my left, a small box for keepers to my right. Before me, a card table supporting piles upon piles of clippings, magazines, paper ephemera of all degrees of quality.
I found clippings on subjects both understandable — teachers’ salaries, travel to Copenhagen, Manhattan train station architecture — and unimaginable. The latter encompassed the history of Colonial American gravestones, how to refinish kitchen cabinets, and rail accidents in Tennessee.
The next box consisted of strata of newspaper recipes for everything from frogs’ legs to fried chicken. They were layered with color glossy recipes neatly excised from Bon Appetite and Cook’s Illustrated. (Gourmet magazines were never, ever dismembered.)
The next box, entire Arts & Leisure sections. Wrapped by inimitable Al Hirschfield line drawings were reviews of off-off-Broadway plays and orchestral performances at Carnegie Hall. Diligent comparisons of Maya Plisetskaya to Gelsey Kirkland, opening nights of American Ballet Theatre and Nureyev & Friends.
Now, imagine a box intermingling the last two. An interior box of Playbill magazines, wedged beneath dozens of 60 Minute Gourmet articles.
Funny and fishy, side-by-side
I opened the box labelled “theater” carefully. What treasures! A Playbill for Becket, featuring Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, and one for No No Nanette with Ruby Keeler. Next, both Playbill and program for Applause starring Lauren Bacall; ditto for Over Here, autographed by the Andrews Sisters. A program from the first Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof. Look: Bette Midler, not even Tseitel yet but a lesser daughter, with only a Borscht Belt musicale to her credits.
In the final layer, the Playbill that set off tonight’s ruminations: Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford mugging on the cover of Forum‘s Playbill.
My theatrical reminiscences satisfied, I turned to the heap of recipes. The 60 Minute Gourmet was a New York Times brainstorm, unheard of in the 1970s. Then, no one could imagine cooking a gourmet-caliber dinner — entree, side dish, something for ‘afters’ — in under an hour. But Craig Claiborne inveigled his pal Pierre Franey into giving it a try. Franey, one of the most gifted yet pragmatic chefs of his day, threw himself into the project.
Dad was a very good home cook, and willing to try almost anything Franey and Claiborne suggested. A few clippings I even recognized from Dad’s beat-up copies of the two cookbooks the Times published from the series. While frogs’ legs Provencal didn’t look much used, “fish en papillote” in its many guises looked well thumbed. I could almost smell the wine and cream wafting off the pages. Nonetheless, I was not about to try either.
At least not right now. But when I find myself ordering from my online UK grocery store, thinking what to cook for 10 days in quarantine, I might reconsider. Fish from the Devon coast, wrapped in parchment, dabbed with butter, seasoned with fresh dill.
Dad would be pleased.