Here’s the note from a blog a couple of days ago, re Satyricon:
“Satyricon (STRATFORD FESTIVAL, 1969), a large-scale adaptation of the Petronius satire by Stanley Silverman with a rock score. “ This note fails to mention Tom Hendry, the script-writer.
Now, where am I? Coming back soon.
Later, the same day (June 17, really) I keep napping/sleeping as if I’ve been drugged. I am drugged. I normally don’t take any pills so i am reacting sharply to the Tylenol-2 that has been prescribed for the pain. I can’t go on like this. Maybe some yoga? I believe in exercise.
Our pool in Stratford was our saving grace; we swam 50 lengths every morning, not that it was that big, but the regularity helped us. And I quit smoking, shortly followed by Bill.
We went to England, asI told you, that first fall, to immerse ourselves in theatre. We were so addicted to cigarettes and to our own brand that we counted how many cigarettes a day we were likely to smoke and took them with us. We had scarcely arrived home when I read the first Surgeon-General’s Report on smoking with its conclusive decision that cigarettes were closely linked to cancer. Right. I thought about it for three months and I quit smoking, cold turkey, on January the First, 1968. This was no light decision. I mean, I was a writer and I was dependent , I thought, on cigarettes, to think. And we were in the theatre business, and we went to a lot of late night parties that increased our smoking from an average two packs a day to three. And there was no Nicorette in those days.
It was hard. I wouldn’t want to start again because I’d have to go through the terrible withdrawal process of quitting. But I did it. Bill was so impressed with my improvement (no coughing, no throat-clearing, no mint candies, NO CIGARETTE HANGOVERS, that three months later, after a hard weekend in Ottawa as the Stratford Festival Board and the National Theatre Board tried to work out an agreement whereby they would become Canada’s National Theatre, an instant icon with touring mandates, he also quit cold. He said it was the easiest thing he ever did. Well, I set it up for him. And he didn’t have to kiss someone with a cigarette mouth.
He said he realiized that smoking was entirely related to gestures and that if you modified or eliminated the gesture, the related gesture, i.e., lighting up a cigarette, would not follow. The easiest cigarettes I gave up where those following the births of my children. How delightful it had been to smoke a cigarette following childbirth! I gave up having any more children and just like that, there were four cigarettes I could do without. Others were not so easy.
Anyway, we quit, and my mother was shamed by our good example into quitting as well. And I think we quit at the right age for our children because they never started (to my knowledge). So you see, that was another far-reaching consequence of our move to Stratford.
More anon.