Tag: P.G. Wodehouse

Have a Heart, a musical by a trio new to the Broadway scene opened for the first of 76 performances during the 1916-1917 season.  Although it was a pretty short run for Broadway, the team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would go on to create legendary musicals and forever change the landscape of American musical theater.  The exotic locales and characters of operetta and the over-the-top spectaculars of the Ziegfeld Follies gave way to the lives and loves of ordinary folk and the theatrical style of such giants as Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and George Gershwin.  The trio only produced five musicals.  Kern would go on to produce such monumental musicals as Showboat.  Bolton would work as librettist with most of the top composers of the day.  And Wodehouse, now better known by the initials P.G. or the nickname Plum would make his mark in the literary world, giving us Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and dozens of characters whose comic entanglements filled 90 books, 40 plays and a couple hundred short stories.  A sampling of his amazing wit:

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?”

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when.’

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

Wodehouse was knighted in 1975 at the age of ninety-three and died later that year.

Perhaps You Could Smoke It

We may never know why he did it — perhaps as a joke or prank — but on January 11, 1770, Benjamin Franklin shipped the first ever rhubarb to the United States. Americans were unimpressed until years later when Thomas Jefferson began to cultivate it and it finally caught on.

Rhubarb had been around in other parts of the world for a good 5,000 years. Fried rhubarb was used as a laxative in Imperial China. Greeks and Romans used it as well and gave it its name Rha (Greek for the Volga River) and barbarum (Latin for barbarian , anyone who was not a Roman). Marco Polo waxed poetic about Chinese rhubarb. It was a prized commodity on the Silk Road to Europe. And in Europe heavy demand made it more expensive than cinnamon and twice the price of opium (which explains why there weren’t very many rhubarb dens).

Rhubarb is a vegetable but is treated and cooked as a fruit. It tastes like a very sour apple which is why all rhubarb recipes use copious amounts of sugar. Why bother? Because it’s healthy as all get out, jam packed with such goodies as dietary fiber, vitamins C and K, B complex vitamins, calcium, potassium, magnesium, beta carotene just to mention a few.

Stalk of rhubarb, anyone?