Abraham Lincoln, Seeker Of Knowledge

As a lifelong reader and book lover, I can totally relate to young Abraham Lincoln's reading habits as cited in the following passage from Brian Kilmeade's The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, 2021):

"Whenever and wherever he [Lincoln] could, he read. He read in bed. He read sitting astride a log by a stream. One friend spotted him reading in the woods, lying on the ground with his legs extended upward along a tree trunk. He read while walking, so absorbed in his text that he would sometimes stop, oblivious to anything but the words on the page, before continuing on, never having lifted his gaze."

Composer Billy Strayhorn Was Never In The Closet

A biopic about composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's friend and musical collaborator, is long overdue.

In the 1990s, director Irwin Winkler was set to turn David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), into a movie. It never happened. I remember Winkler being quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that Strayhorn was not open about his homosexuality. Clearly Winkler hadn't read the book. I, who read a significant portion of the book, learned early on that Strayhorn was very much open about his sexuality.

"...Strayhorn," writes Hajdu (pronounced Hay-doo) on page 79, "made himself a triple minority: he was black, he was gay, and he was a minority among gay people in that he was open about his homosexuality in an era when social bias forced many men and women to keep their sexual identities secret."

Maybe it was a good thing that the movie was never made. Who knows what other inaccuracies would have crept into the script.

In the right hands a Strayhorn biopic could become a powerful and memorable cinematic experience. Someone like director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) might be that someone who could accurately bring Strayhorn's life and musical achievements to the big screen.

The big question then becomes this--who would be a good candidate to play Billy Strayhorn?

A Harlem Renaissance Novel Becomes A Musical

One of the many books from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that I need to read is George Schuyler's Black No More. It is described as a satirical novel in which, writes historian David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage Books, 1982), "Dr. Junius Crookman, an Afro-American scientist, invents a process--'by electrical nutrition and glandular control'--which turns dark skin white and crinkly hair straight."

The book was recently adapted into an off-Broadway musical, complete with choreography by the renowned Bill T. Jones.

Schuyler, a black conservative, and his white wife, were the parents of a biracial child, Philippa, who became a piano prodigy. Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker magazine wrote two lengthy profiles of Philippa in the 1940s when she was still a child. In 1967, covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist, she was killed in a helicopter crash.

For a time there was talk of turning her life story into a feature-length movie, with singer Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, portraying Philippa.