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| Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' 6 September 2025 |
My first awareness of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet happened in Buenos Aires in 1952 when I was 10. My mother took me to see the 1936 version with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. My mother was fascinated and attracted to Leslie Howard. I have also been a fan of Howard since.
In 1961 I was going to a Roman Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School. I was keen on seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the University of Texas. For me it was an aural disaster as Juliet had a nasal Texan accent. Imagine, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
That terrible performance was somewhat ameliorated as soon after I saw the Dave Brubeck Quartet live for my first time.
In 1966, while doing my conscription in the Argentine Navy, I was madly in love with a lovely woman of Austrian descent, Susy Bornstein, who was sophisticated in her tastes and told me I was an uncultured man. I thought that taking her to see that 1936 Romeo and Juliet on movie theater row on Avenida Lavalle might just change her mind. It was not to be. She immediately told me that both Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard were much too old to be the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet. Not long after that film, in the middle of a cold and rainy Buenos Aires winter she called me. She said, “You are an uncultured man with no future. Don’t ever call me back. I have a new boyfriend. He plays violin in the Teatro Colón Symphony.” That was it and I spent months listening to Miles Davis in Kind of Blue. I thought that hitting a depressing rock bottom would improve things. It didn’t.
In 1987 I returned to Buenos Aires on a magazine assignment. I rang the bell at Susy’s apartment. She opened the door and said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
I wonder what Harold Bloom would say of my experience with William Shakespeare’s play?
It was while teaching English in Mexico City at Colgate Palmolive that I came up with an idea. I had one class that was made up of female secretaries. For three months I taught them to pronounce English with that Texan twang. I wonder what their bosses might have said later?
