While I am waxing nostalgic, it's a
good time to catch up with our old friend SJ Perelman and see what he
remembers about his sunshine years:
Whenever I stretch out before my incinerator, churchwarden in hand and, staring reflectively into the dying embers, take inventory of my mottled past, I inevitably hark back to a period, in the spring of 1926, that in many ways was the most romantic in my life. I was, in that turbulent and frisky epoch, an artist of sorts, specializing in neoprimitive woodcuts of a heavily waggish nature that appeared with chilling infrequency in a moribund comic magazine. It was a hard dollar, but it allowed me to stay in bed until noon, and I was able to get by with half as many haircuts as my conventional friends above Fourteenth Street.
So from the The Most of S.J. Perelman 290 (Steve Martin, ed.) It's the opening of an essay called "Cloudland Revisited: Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow." It's a kindofa, sortofa review of a book called Replenishing Jessica, which sounds like it might be the most boring saucy novel ever to escape the writer's garret. And yes, I keep a copy of Perelman in the can, doesn't everybody?
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