John Updike reminds us that “redux” is pronounced ray-dukes, not ree ducks, so here’s another look at the Brits.
My father, despite numerous ancestors having come from the UK, had but one prejudice. I’ll spare you what he called them. Something to do with a citrus that hates scurvy.
I never heard him use the other such words, though my uncles, one by marriage, one not, used various slurs, all of which I’ll also spare you.
What was it that so bugged my old man about the Brits? Something about their putting on airs, I think. Pushing me to be the Anglophile I am.
Back to the Queen. Have we not had enough?
A delightful selfie of a man who brought his stepladder to the line of mourners, better to see over the heads of those in front of him.
He brought his stepladder?
Another man, asked why he had come, said that Elizabeth had given 70 years of her life, the least he could do was wait in line nine hours for her.
A woman, her grown daughter and the daughter’s dachshund (the Windsors were initially German, ja wohl), said she really wasn’t much of a royalist, but wanted to see what was going on. What was going on was an endless line and nothing more.
But really, what was going on?
The paparazzi chasing the drunk driver carrying Princess Diana and her lover through the streets of Paris, now that was something going on.
But none of the lined up mourners ever mentioned that they had never met the Queen, that precious few in the thousands-long line had ever met her. How could they have, having spent much of her time in Scotland with her beloved corgis Heseltine and Mergotroyd.
In a previous column I noted that a woman in Charles’ receiving line had kissed his hand when he shook hers and no punishment was exacted by the Brits’ Secret Service. No 007 on the case.
In another of these lines another woman kissed his cheek. The ghost of Sean Connery? Nope?
We can only guess what yet another woman in a third line would have done to or for the new King. Camilla, beware. Calling Daniel Craig when we need him.
(Craig doing the Scottish play opposite the divine Ruth Negga on Broadway, almost enough to lure me back to the theater, masked and all and I hear they are great.)
An atheist friend of some 55 years says he wouldn’t stand in line for five minutes to view the Second Coming. Or the First. My friend is Irish. And doesn’t drink.
The Third Earl of Guinness, who had not uttered a word from the floor of the House of Lords, had had enough. Another Lord was decrying the fact of so many billboards littering the countryside advertising the luscious stout with Guinness is Good for You. The Third Earl rose to declaim the only five words he was ever to say in that august body — Guinness IS good for you.
My stepladder is in the kitchen. And there is a Guinness waiting in line. Just for me. And the Queen.
Lonnie Carter is a playwright, Obie winner and his signature play is “The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy.”
The Brits redux — What’s the obsession?