Pollyanna on the Town, or Playing the Glad Game in the Big Crab Apple

Pollyanna is the title character in a novel written by Eleanor H Porter and published in 1913. Recently orphaned, 11 year old Pollyanna is sent to live with her stern aunt in a small New England town.  In this new home, Pollyanna finds herself surrounded by curmudgeons and contrarians, pessimists and pooh-bahs. Her survival strategy consists of playing the Glad Game which came into existence when, one Christmas when her dad was alive, Pollyanna hoped to find a doll in the missionary barrel but instead found a pair of crutches. To ease her disappointment, her dad invented the game on the spot, telling her to be glad about the crutches because "we don't need 'em!"

In the glad game you must find something good about everything, no matter what the circumstances. I live in Toronto, which may be one of the biggest crab apples around these days (our Mayor has made international headlines with his alleged cracktivities) but I find plenty to be glad about in this city.

Hollywood made Pollyanna into a movie in 1960 (a flick I adored as a child) and so I thought we’d start our glad adventures with Toronto born peeps who became Hollywood actors who then starred in famous literary adaptations!

Walter Huston was born in 1883 at 11 Major Street not far from today’s Kensington Market. He attended school at Winchester PS, a beautiful old four storey brick building in Cabbagetown. As a young man Walter found work in vaudeville and eventually made his way to Hollywood. In 1948 his son John directed him in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, based on the novel by B. Traven. 

Both Hustons won Oscars for their work on that film. Other cinematic/literary accomplishments: Walter portrayed a suppressed Reverend full of fire and brimstone and lust in an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story Rain. A stunning performance, mixing fear and desire, quite the opposite of the title character he portrayed in Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth. Huston’s work always makes my gladbones tingle.

A stones throw away from Huston’s boyhood tromping grounds is a grand old mansion that once belonged to Raymond Massey’s grandfather. As a child Raymond lived in the mansion next door but frequently frolicked in his grandparents’ domicile. His first movie from a literary source was The Speckled Band in 1927. Other literary adaptations Ray appeared in: The Scarlet Pimpernel, novel by Baroness Orczy and HG Wells’ Things to Come. And his memorable turn as James Dean’s stern god-fearing father in East of Eden, adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck, is one of my all time favourites. That whole movie makes me glad!

Just south of the Massey mansion is the Grand Hotel. And in that hotel is a restaurant called Citrus. Nothing is more gladifying than to sit on the terrace at Citrus and have a Dean Martin cocktail. Okay, Dean Martin was not born in Toronto. Why he has a cocktail named after him here is a mystery. Even more mysterious is that this cocktail has no alcohol in it. In fact, it isn’t even a drink! No, the Deano, as I call it, consists of 2 big scallops resting on a scoop of mashed potatoes covered in some kind of delicious gravy. It tastes very good even if it sounds weird. The only reason our waitress could think of as to why this dish is named after the famous ratpacker is that it’s served in a martini glass. As for Deano’s literary adaptations, he costarred in Some Came Running with Frank Sinatra in 1958 and that flick was an adaptation of the novel by James Jones. Variety said this of Deano’s performance: “It is not easy, either, to play a man dying of a chronic illness and do it with grace and humor, and this Martin does without faltering." I’m sure that review made him feel glad right down to the olive pits.

Marie Wilson © 2013

Magic and Wonder

Hello. I am Marie Wilson and I wrote a novel called The Gorgeous Girls. This book has been described by my publisher as “the thinking woman’s erotica.” I had a lot of fun writing it but the summer I was twenty years old I was writing an entirely different sort of novel, one that never got finished.

I was renting a room in an old house in Vancouver that summer. My landlady’s name was Lois Light and her house was known to the locals as The Lighthouse. My room was in the basement and although it was the size of a large closet, there was a lot of light admitted by a window that took up half of one wall. The rent was extremely low.

One day at breakfast another basement-room renter said to me: "You are an enigma." I knew what she meant. I wasn’t saying much that summer. I was working on that novel and when I did speak it was likely about the mysteries of the universe (which was what the novel was about which was why I never finished it).

But I felt that if people were to just quiet their minds and listen then they could decode not only me but the entire shebang. That morning, I downed my orange juice, looked my roomie in the eye and said, “I'm actually an open book." She arched a quizzical brow. I explained: "You just have to know how to read."

In the intervening years I have often wondered what sort of a book, open or otherwise, I might have been then. Or now. An epic romance? A toddler’s board book? A philosophical tome? A dime store potboiler?

Perhaps all of the above, perhaps none. But if I could choose just one book to be it would be the first book I ever fell in love with. I was nine years old and the book was called The Golden Pinecone. I can’t recall its plot or characters anymore; I only know that it was full of magic and wonder. There were fairies in it and of course the eponymous pinecone, which as I recall was an earring... for a giant. It's a book full of enchantment and mystery. As far as deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos, that remains a matter of quieting your mind and knowing how to read.