Here my take on the festivity...
The essence of a Fischetti cartoon was more than a visual experience.
It was a cram cource in the human condition.
Hamid Bahrami is one of the wittiest cartoonists I have encountered.
You will never become tired of looking at his drawings.
And my romantic/melancholy contribution from Edna St.Vincent Millay whose candle burnt brighter than most and which I read often.
(Though now, like most American poets of the early twentieth century, something of a forgotten figure, Edna St. Vincent Millay was a greatly acclaimed writer in her time, also, rather unusually for a poet, an engaging personality. A bohemian in an era when there were serious risks in stepping out of line, especially in strait-laced East coast America, she did what she wanted with her own life and without making a song and dance about it.)
Paris April 1, 1922
A mile of clean sand I will write my name here, and the trouble that is in my heart.
I will write the date and place of my birth,
What I was to be, And who I am.
I will write my forty sins, my thousand follies,
My four unspeakable acts ...
I will write the names of the cities I have fled from,
The names of the men and women I have wronged.
I will write the holy name of her I serve,
And how I serve her ill. And I will sit on the beach and let the tide come in.
I will watch with peace the great calm tongue of the tide
Licking from the sand the unclean story of my heart.
