“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
- Woody Allen
Here's something with a Tennessee/Missouri connection and a reminder that sometimes it pays to be very specific.
I was reading today about the great American playwright, Tennessee Williams. He wrote some of the most revered plays in the history of the English language, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to name three. I'm familiar with those (STELLA!!!), but I didn't know much about his life.
He was born in 1911 in Columbus, MS. His family roots were of neighboring Tennessee and of one of its most prestigious families-- one that boasted the state's first governor and senator. His immediate family, though, was slightly less distinguished. His father was distant, abusive and alcoholic, his mother was peculiar and one of his two sisters spent the majority of her life in mental institutions. Everything needed for storytelling, in other words.
He attended three different universities and worked briefly for his father as a shoe salesman (an experience he referred to as “a living death”). In 1938 he moved to New Orleans. There in the Big Easy's more liberal attitude, he changed his name from Thomas to Tennessee and fully embraced his previously latent homosexuality. Over the course of the next 20 years he wrote his most acclaimed works.
The 60s and 70s, however, began a period of downward spiral in his personal life. He suffered from depression, became dependent on drugs and fixated on concerns that he would go insane like his sister. He died in 1983 in a New York hotel room, after a night of heavy drinking, choking to death on a bottle cap. Cheers!
Here's the lesson. Tennessee's will stipulated that he was to be “buried in St. Louis.” This was a strange choice since he had no connection to the city whatsoever. There is, though, a cemetery in New Orleans named St. Louis Cemetery. It is the resting place of many of New Orleans' high society movers and shakers. The executors of the estate were unaware of this distinction and, thus, had him entombed in Calvary Cemetery, St Louis, MO.
Some things you don't want to be vague about.
A little Tennessee/Missouri music.