Now Vintage

LizzieMaine said:

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I started reading the daily paper around the age of six, and got in trouble for saying out loud "hey, Tricky Dicky!" when my first grade teacher handed around the issue of "My Weekly Reader" with the newly inaugurated president on the cover. And even he had that overripe-tomato look about him.

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My doing a book report on “In Cold Blood” at age 10 sparked a minor controversy. The teacher, who obviously hadn’t read the book, apparently thought it inappropriate for a person my age.

My mother had given me the book after reading it herself. She didn’t think it inappropriate, of course.

Whatever one thinks of Truman Capote’s methods and character (he played fast and loose, for sure, with his subjects and with the facts), he was a master of the straightforward literary style. Nothing hifalutin about it. Any 10-year-old reading at grade level can get through his prose without much of a strain. And “In Cold Blood” changed how true crime stories are told.

I’ve since read it (and most of Capote’s other work) in whole or in part several times, to recharge my batteries, to remind myself to get out of my own way and just tell the ********* story.

I recall a teacher telling us at age ten that she didn't think my idea for a class play on the assassination of JFK (which had occurred a few months earlier) was "appropriate." I remember that the script we decided upon took fewer liberties with the known facts than Oliver Stone's movie did 27 years later.

The classmate who was going to play Oswald wanted to use my Johnny Eagle Magumba toy rifle (pictured) as the stand in for the infamous Mannlicher–Carcano: can you imagine a ten year old bringing that to school today? Said classmate ended up being a career Army officer, and the little girl who wanted to play Jackie ended up teaching at said school for over three decades.... lasting a lot longer than the killjoy who nixxed our play. Ah, childhood!