JOAN E. BAUER

Measure for Measure

No film or video of Joseph Papp's 1976 New York production:
John Cazale & Meryl Streep, a fateful collision 

in Shakespeare's thorny problem play. Only a photo remains:
Cazale as imperious Antonio in high-necked coat & black boots.

Streep in a pale novice's habit kneeling before him.
You know the story. When the Duke departs Vienna,

his deputy Antonio cracks down, condemns hapless Claudio
for impregnating his bride-to-be. When pious Isabella begs mercy

for her brother, Antonio demands her virtue for her brother's life.
She refuses: "More than our brother is our chastity."

As justice & mercy are tested, Cazale & Streep fall in love.

Cazale was a chain smoker, brilliant & intense.
Lean & rangy with deep-set eyes, an oddly high forehead,

he played weakling, down-and-out, doofus in five classics:
Dear Hunter, The Conversation, Godfather I & II, Dog Day Afternoon.

When Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer, Streep, 
not one to despair, asked: "So where do we go for dinner?"

Streep stayed with him every day, sometimes reading him
the sports page in a comic-brassy voice.

When he died at 42, Streep beat on his chest, sobbing.
For a moment, he opened his eyes, "It's all right, Meryl."

Those Who Know, Will Know

-Yiddish proverb

Anna Maria Louisa Italiano & Melvin Kaminsky
met on the set of a Perry Como special.
She'd already starred on Broadway with Henry Fonda
& he'd written for Sid Caesar's Show of Shows.

For him, love at first sight & so he pursued her
doggedly. I couldn't get rid of him. 
She'd soon be playing Mother Courage
& hadn't had a date for two years.

Growing up in the early sixties,
if you wanted to be – maybe– an actress
& you were Italian, Bancroft was your lodestar.
A dancer's grace. Luminous & eloquent eyes. 

Her breakout role: Annie Sullivan.
Later she played more mothers.
To Winston Churchill, Harvey Fierstein.
Then a Mother Superior, a pumpkin eater,
& the mother of a nation, Golda Meir.

On their long & happy marriage:
He looked like my father,
but acted like my mother.
So much in common.
Quicksilver wit, ambition, laughter.
Immigrant families, Brooklyn & Bronx
through & through.

In her portrait of Mrs. Robinson,
you're left wondering:
Desperation? Boredom?
Bancroft makes her almost unknowable
with that nyloned leg, the husky voice
& the gesture of taking off an earring
every time she answers the phone. 

Twenty Missions

Ciardi flew twenty missions over Japan.
B-29 Superfortress. Crew of ten.

The plane had its problems.
Four engines, but not reliable.
Trouble sometimes gaining speed & altitude.
A propensity for catching fire. 

John Ciardi had trained to be a navigator,
then got busted for his support
of Spanish anti-fascists.
Also for his "superiority complex."
That likely saved his life.

Soon he was teaching at Harvard, then Rutgers.
A workhorse, a wunderkind.
He had that encyclopedic memory.

Brilliant lecturer & ruthless on verbosity.
He often discouraged younger writers & gunned
for women poets. Ask May Sarton.
Ask Mrs. Lindbergh.

Blunt-spoken, unflinching. Little patience
for "swooners of either sex."

Five packs a day of Luckies.
Most days: a bottle of 100 proof Kentucky sour mash.
There's nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

By the sixties, he was "Establishment."
He collided with younger poets who found him obsolete.
I can still hear that gutsy no-nonsense voice.

A Young Jewish Scientist in Fascist Italy

for Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012)

 

Before she was a bella figura in a lab coat & heels,
before she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine,

a shy, sensitive girl born in Turin to an engineer father
who believed college would ruin her for marriage.

When she was twenty, her father relented. She graduated
from medical college, but her work cut short—

Mussolini banned Jews from academia & the professions. 
So she created a lab in her bedroom, made scalpels

from sewing needles, laughed at Il Duce
for thinking she was "inferior" because she was a Jew.

Thus began her study of chick embryos, research easy
to disguise, as eggs could be turned into omelets.

As the Allies bombed Turin, she moved to a country
cottage—more lab space, more chickens—then fled

with her family, living underground in Florence
where she served as nurse & doctor for typhus-plagued

refugees after the war. She meant to travel briefly
to Wash U of St. Louis. Stayed thirty years.

Colleagues sniffed at her study of nerve growth factor,
but it led to breakthroughs in cancer, immunology,

neuroscience. Never married & hated it when anyone
turned her writing into "boiled spinach."

At 100, a tiny gray-coiffed Senator in the Italian
parliament, arguing for liberty, ethics & justice.

She'd say: The body does what it wants.
I am not my body, I am my mind.

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