It’s sort of a natural to tell ghost stories about famous people who have died. After all, they’re dead. But they live in song and story.
Lunch is Served is about my mother’s favorite poet, Dorothy Parker.
My mother, Margaret Eddy was a child of the twenties. She went to speakeasies. She read all the authors from the disillusioned souls from WWI. She loved all the wild dances. She loved wit and cleverness, and she loved Dorothy Parker, perhaps the wittiest and wickedest woman of that time.
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The Algonquin Round Table was a loose group of brilliant writers, authors, actors and comics who generally joined each other for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. Hemingway, Benchley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Noel Coward, Wollcott and many others met in a group that referred to itself as The Vicious Circle, for their edgy conversation and their cruel wit. Dorothy Parker led the parade, as a critic, poet and short story writer who once said she got up every morning and sharpened her tongue.
It sounds cute. As a role model, Dorothy left a lot to be desired. She was a four-sheets-to-the-wind alcoholic with a brutal streak. But funny. Very, very funny.
So it was particularly fun to use her as a character in a story. It was an insight to my mother, and a new set of deliciously mean-spirited quotes. And my mother communicated almost strictly in literary quotes.
Since Dorothy and Robert Benchley were almost inseparable in life, I wrote them as ghosts together having taken a bet with each other. I used their own words and hope I got their spirits if not themselves.
I hope I was fair to them in this story. Because of my mother, they are both heroes of mine, in a kind of don’t-want- to- be-them-but-I-admire-them way. It’s impossible for me not to quote them. But as a historian once told me, what we write about people has probably been sanitized for your protection. It often needs to be. We don’t want anyone to know all our warts and flaws. I’m very glad my mother really wasn’t Dorothy.
Anyway, Lunch Is Served is a love story, told by an idiot, signifying not very much but a love of wisecracks. It’s up on the site for you to read now, You’ll also find it in the upcoming book, The Inverted Cup.
Sight Unseen 