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Drama: An Actor's EducationMost memorably, he read to us from a fat book called Tellers of Tales. This was a fifteen-hundred-page tome, edited by W. Somerset Maugham, that contained a hundred classic short stories. The book had been printed in 1939. By the fifties our copy was already faded and worn, its pages yellowing. Its spine was sprung, too, but my father had craftily repaired it with crimson-colored duct tape. He had even taken pains to neatly write its title in white ink on the taped spine. Characteristically, he had written it upside down by mistake. When we were growing up, that homely old book was a kind of family Bible in the Lithgow household (wherever that household happened to be at the time), and story hour had all the gravity of a sacred rite. We would pick a story and my father would read it БЂ” savoring the wit, ramping up the suspense, and performing all the characters full-out. He worked a kind of hypnotic magic on us. We would hold our breath at the hair-raising suspense of БЂњThe MonkeyБЂ™s Paw.БЂ«We would sniffle and sob when Krambambuli, the loyal Alsatian mountain dog, died of a broken heart ...» |
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