Talking Doorknobs and Dancing Bubble Gums

Phyllis Stoiberg died at the age of 99, in my hometown of Woodland Hills, CA. At the age of 20 she left Bozeman, Montana, with “aspirations of modeling and professionally dancing.” She taught dance at the Arthur Murray school, got married, and raised four kids. After the kids were grown she joined a little dance company and danced into her 90s.

That’s the way to do it. Dance your dance, which doesn’t have to be physical, though that’s great exercise, but anything creative, for creativity keeps our brains supple and our hearts dancing in the metaphorical sense. My own mom was that way, as I shall explain.

The other night my wife, daughter, and I watched the all-time greatest musical, Singin’ in the Rain. What a movie, and not just because of Gene Kelly’s phenomenal dancing, which would be enough on its own. But there’s also Donald O’Connor matching Gene step for step, and a young Debbie Reynolds who is irresistibly cute. She was only nineteen when she made the film and it proved her immense talent.

The movie is also laugh-out-loud funny, a sharp and joyful take on Hollywood’s transition from silent pictures to talkies. It works as a comedy, in no small part because of Jean Hagen as the annoying star Lena Lamont, whose voice is nails on a chalkboard, making talkies a challenge she cannot overcome. Hagen was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

But oh, that dancing! My favorite number is “Moses Supposes” featuring Kelly and O’Connor. And I was newly blown away by the incandescent Cyd Charisse.

Her number is part of the “Broadway Melody” sequence, where Gene Kelly plays a young hoofer trying to make it in New York. His agent takes him to a speakeasy, where he begins to dance for the crowd. In the audience sits a gangster, flipping a coin the way George Raft did in Scarface (1932).

George Raft in Scarface

With the gangster is a woman dressed in green. Sultry, magnetic. She looks at Kelly and raises her leg, balancing his hat on her foot. Her leg seems to go on forever until it’s pointing straight to the ceiling. It’s as if God had removed her hamstring and replaced it with an elastic band. She rises and begins to dance around the befuddled Kelly, moving like water, every part of her a ripple, then a torrent.

It reminded me of my mother, Rosemary Bell. Mom resembled Cyd Charisse in both face and figure. She was quite talented herself. In college she wrote radio plays and short stories, and later contributed to the small newspaper in our suburb of Woodland Hills. She served on the Chamber of Commerce, was honorary mayor of Woodland Hills for a time, and helped start the Women’s Club. She was also a dancer, trained in modern styles.

Rosemary Bell

As a mother raising three rambunctious boys, she found an outlet for her creativity by writing a children’s musical with her neighbor, Babe Hart. It was called “The Magic Talking Doorknob.” When they staged the play at a local theater, the part of the young boy who meets the talking doorknob was played by a rising young star named Jimmy Bell.

The story followed a boy with an active imagination who meets a doorknob that can talk. The doorknob invites him to open the door and enter a magical world, a la Alice in Wonderland. Inside, he encounters dancing and singing creatures.

The sequence I remember most featured the Dancing Bubble Gums. Imagine, if you will, five women dressed in pink costumes—no arms or legs visible—each resembling a giant wad of chewing gum. Their faces were pink, too, and as they danced around the boy in a free-form ballet, they chewed gum in time with the music. My mom was the lead bubble gum. I thought, Who has a cooler mom than this?

Moms and dads are, of course, kind of necessary for the little experiment I like to call “raising children,” which is a laboratory full of tubes and bubbling cauldrons that sometimes break or even explode, even for the most careful and loving parents, who stay in the lab, clean it up, and go back to work. Not a job for the faint of heart!

Which is why it takes guts to get married and have children. That cynic Oscar Wilde said marriage is “the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” (And a second marriage is “the triumph of hope over experience.”) Hamlet told poor Ophelia, “No more marriages! Get thee to a nunnery!” But Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, says, “Thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife!” Which means no one who hasn’t read Shakespeare can fully understand what the heck is going on at any given cultural moment.

Which reminds me of the late, great James Garner. I loved Garner. He was a charismatic TV leading man in the Western Maverick, who became a charismatic leading man in the movies, especially in The Great Escape where he refuses to leave the blind forger (Donald Pleasance) in the Nazi camp, then back to TV with The Rockford Files, and then more movies like Murphy’s Romance and Space Cowboys, and the reason I’ve wandered here after quoting Shakespeare is that once Garner was a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and reminisced about a time as a student at the U. of Oklahoma when he was cast in Romeo and Juliet and his down home accent didn’t quite make the Bard’s language sing, because it sounded like, “What light through yonder winder shines?”

James Garner as Brett Maverick

All of which is to say, Thanks, Mom, for taking care of me when I was sick, talking softly to me at night when I was afraid of the dark, and staying in the laboratory even after I broke stuff.

Anecdote

Elizabeth the Queen Mother was asked whether the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, would leave England after the Blitz. She replied, “The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances whatever.”