Partying with the 'Poonies--Part I

Right off George Plimpton Way, a night of spectacle and debauchery at the Castle, May, 2009. Pictured here, my hubbie and former Lampoon President (his name is engraved on a giant chair, and all future Lampoon members forced to memorize his name forever after!)


Two weeks ago Jonathan and I traveled to Cambridge for the 100th Anniversary of the Lampoon Castle.

As noted in an earlier blog, few men brought their wives. This was a chance to return to the good old days, alone, to reminisce, make misogynistic jokes, and remember a time when smart, white men in smoking jackets still ruled the world.

Oh, What a weekend it was!

I felt I needed to go to see one of the most powerful influences in my husband's life. After a weekend there, I think we both agreed it influenced him even more than he realized. We walked into the Castle the first afternoon and we both saw with a startled shock that our home in Whitley Heights is like a toned-down version of the 1909 landmark built by William Randolph Hearst. There were exposed beams, soaring ceilings, gorgeous old tiles (in our case, mediterranean, in the Castle's case, delph tiles from Isabella Steward Gardner) plate glass windows and a huge fireplace that looked like it had been stolen from an aristocrat's hunting lodge in Britain. Just like our house! It turned out we were not alone. Many Lampoon alumnae confessed that they, too, lived in Castle-like architecture scattered in pockets of 1920s architecture around the country.

On Friday night the Lampoon threw a party in the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum. Could there be anything more divine? They rented the whole place and filled it with a hundred years of men and a few women. Built like a Venetian Palazzo, with a huge open courtyard in the center, the museum is a dream. Wellesley art history classes sent us there semester after semester because Ms. Gardener had put together such an astounding collection of masterpieces. She is also a feminist fantasy--a woman who traveled the globe on her own, bringing back Buddhas, Chinese screens and pieces of Japanese temples--because she believed that through art, people really would find truth and beauty. She was an adventurer, an independent thinker and a philanthropist. And she dabbled in the occult. She had a secret Buddha room she would invite only her closest friends into, for a drink, or some opium, perhaps? We sought to gain entry. Alas, it has been dismantled...

That night, a trio played while we imbibed cocktails and strolled through the galleries. Docents hovered to give us private tours. The whole museum was ours. In the Dutch room, two huge gilt frames hung empty--a sobering reminder of the largest unsolved art heist in history--when two men disguised as police broke in and stole hundreds of millions in art, slashing Rembrandts and a Vermeer right out of their frames. (Of course I ended up buying the latest book on the art heist and reading it the rest of the weekend...) The art has have never been recovered.

Art! Beauty! Intrigue! Underworld connections! Heaven!!!!!

(That is what we thought about as we stood in line at the bar, placed strategically in front of the most gorgeous John Singer Sargent painting I have ever seen: a wall size canvas of a dancer in a flamenco cave in Spain, that looks so dramatic and alive that after a few drinks she looks like she will dance out of the piece into the room.)

Saturday morning the Lampoon held a memorial service with eulogies (is this right if they were already dead for awhile?) for George Plimpton (Walter Isaacson) and John Updike (Kurt Anderson). Hilarious anglophile Lampoon undergrads dressed in post-modern Victorian garb tried to sell shots of hard liquor on the steps of the chapel, but their IDs and liquor were confiscated by campus police before they raised much money.

For a writer, the service was nirvana. What perfect bookends the two men were.

Isaacson gave a fabulous, witty and admiring speech about Plimpton, but ended with a cautionary note for the next generation of phools: "Dont' be afraid to try hard. What would Plimpton have done if he had really applied himself? Sure, he threw the most fabulous parties, and directed his life like he was still the president of the Lampoon, and there was no one who was more fun, more outrageous, more decadent, larger than life, but, think, young phools, what could he have done??? As he would say about himself, I cudda been a contender. Could he have made it into the literary pantheon? Or was he just destined to be a fabulous meteoric flame, shooting through the sky and illuminating everything for one brilliant minute, like the fireworks he adored?"

VERSUS

Kurt Anderson saying of John Updike: He made it into the literary pantheon, and that is really cool and we respect that a lot here at Harvard and at the Lampoon. But he hated the Lampoon. Or maybe he hated Harvard. And his books sure are depressing. And maybe he should have tried to have a little more fun. Like George Plimpton.

Much to think about. And...much more to drink.

Tune in for Part II...