Said Betty Buckley, who played Grizabella, the cat who sings "Memory," in the original Broadway production of "Cats," quoted in "How to Explain Trump’s Love for the Musical 'Cats'/To unlock this mystery, we went straight to the source: Betty Buckley, the actress who sang 'Memory' in the original New York production of 'Cats'" (The New Yorker).
October 5, 2021
"Saying they used [the song 'Memory'] to calm [Trump] down! In his rages. It helped me understand what’s baffled me about its appeal to him."
"The literal aspect of it is about this old cat who’s dead and dying, but beneath the beautiful music and beautiful poem is such a longing to connect! So, like, Trump was a handsome kid, but his dad was a bully, so he became a bully, just trying to impress Daddy. I can’t win with charm, he thought . . . and he’s always felt outside. In his heart of hearts, there’s this tremendous need, an insatiable need, to be loved, the love he never received from his father or mother. So that is in that song: that incredible longing to belong, to connect, to not be rejected, that’s what this whole thing is. All these years, I had no clue why that song touched him, but now, with this [Stephanie Grisham] book . . . I get it, I get it!"
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54 comments:
Good. Now explain the swooning love affair for Hamilton!.
Trump does indeed love to be loved. Who doesn’t? He’s commented on how his rally crowds love him. But he’s not afraid to be hated. That’s his secret power. Republican elite men are terrified of being even disliked. It’s made them into an ugly, pathetic form of Lindsay Grahams, weak, smiling too much, soft spoken cuckolds.
Give me Trump. I’ll love him.
More leftist mind reading. I wonder how they are doing to reading voters' minds ?
I thought that when he was raging they sat him down in front of The Gorilla Channel. At least that is what several unimpeachable (unimpeachable because they were anonymous) and one known (Chuck) sources said.
As for music from cats calming anyone other than a dedicated NPR listener down, I doubt it. The music is so annoying that it will raise the blood pressure of most normal people.
As the bard, Tuli Kupferberg, said "Music hath Alarums to wild the savage beast"
So I call bullshit on this. Not the singer. She is probably stupid enough to believe her own bullshit. I call bullshit about PDJT's handlers using Cats music to calm him down.
John Henry
Serious question. Are the people who operate media outlets like The New Yorker and the NYTimes mentally ill? It would seem that they are.
It is so great that we live in a country where we can rely on an actress to diagnose our president. I wonder what she would say about the imposter we have now....Frank Villelli
The Trump-hate is strong in this Gopnik.
Stormy Daniels, Russian Collusion, Impeachment, and now they're smearing him with Cats.
When does this stop???
....and oh!!......yeah!! I've never heard of this Grisham woman.
"so he became a bully, just trying to impress Daddy. I can’t win with charm, he thought"
He bullied Ivanka, Marla, and Melania? He bullied his way into NYC parties? He bullied people into voting for him?
It's amazing how a raging, raving maniac like President Trump is able to control the anger and the screaming, spitting tantrums when he is in public.
I've seen hour after hour of his public appearances under intense assault from the press and the closest I've ever seen him come to actually losing it, he stopped speaking, walked away for a few seconds, and returned to the podium in full control.
They lie.
Hoo boy--a New York musical actress psychoanalyzing a President in what else? The New Yorker magazine.
I'd be more impressed if I didn't think that the voices in the US productions of Andrew Loyd Webber's London creations are distinctly second rate. I've attended several of Webber's productions in London (including Mamma Mia two weeks after its initial opening). Webber seemd to always be able to find achingly beautiful voices for his London shows.
And so if this lady's voice might not be up to Webber's London standards, why should I listen to or read her pop psychoanalysis? A fellow has to have his standards after all.
These people are unbearable.
Who cares what she thinks about something she's obviously not privy to. But they will continue like this until there is the next Republican president or candidate on whom they can focus their life energy. Get a life, losers.
A cynic might hope they are successful at destroying civilization. It's only thanks to civilization, and the actual, real work that other people do to keep the lights on, that these losers can spend their time gazing at their navels and reporting back this critical information.
So "They" say. Always with the unattributed "They". Actors and actresses are so deeply aware of, and comprehending of, well, everything.
I'm so old, I remember when actual psychiatrists (rather than actresses) tried to psychoanalyze Trump without meeting him!
Imagine having sung that song, night after night, and not understanding why someone might like it.
i Love how people can just Manufacture stories about Trump; and No One, EVER says:
Where'd you get THAT?
Unlike when President Trump said that they FBI had bugged the Trump Tower...
That was Universally derided as: WITHOUT FACTUAL SUPPORT;
Right up until the FBI casually mentioned, that it was True...
At which point Life Long Liberals said:
"Well, They FBI didn't 'bug' The Trump Tower, they just tapped its phones"
Whereas, say something about Trump, and Gorillas or Cats; and It's all taken as Gospel
It is so great that we live in a country where we can rely on an actress to diagnose our president. I wonder what she would say about the imposter we have now....Frank Villelli
It is so great that we live in a country where we can rely on an actress to diagnose our president. I wonder what she would say about the imposter we have now....Frank Villelli
Michael K @ 5:15: “…leftist mind reading…”. I think a better description is “projection.” Mind reading assumes that the reader is at least attempting to relate to another person and their experience: that they acknowledge the existence and autonomy of the other. But in fact I think the leftists are lost in a solipsistic fantasy where they unilaterally proclaim the features of the other; and the other need not exist at all, it is just a screen on which the leftist puts up what xe wants: which tends to be self-pleasing nonsense.
Just my theory.
I heard Ms. Buckley sing her famous solo in a space much smaller than the Winter Garden & covered with marble. She did not modulate her performance. It was loud.
Why am I not surprised that the New Yorker considers that to be going to the source?
"I wonder how they are doing to reading voters' minds ?"
When you fill out their ballots for them, it doesn't really matter what those voters think.
Is Cats the least macho musical ever? Listening to that song, I could literally feel the Testosterone draining out of my body.
I sincerly doubt Trump cared about the song.
Ohhhh.......I see that Grisham is the scorned woman. One of Trump's buddies did it to her.
Shouldn't the act of faking that you are an intellectual include at least the pretense of not being gullible?
Please tell me that I’m not the only person who finds the endless efforts by nominally intelligent individuals to apply pop psychology to “explain” the phenomenon of Donald Trump to be utterly tedious? It is enough to make one question that they really do possess at least a nominal level of intelligence.
I have heard her interviewed...she is capital D, box of hammers dumb.
So consider the source.
In another time Cats was a New York institution. Trump was a New York institution. Like the Empire State Building kind…
Betty Buckley played the step mom in Eight is Enough. That’s how grizzled she is…
She had a cool car though. Right hand drive, I think…
All this talk of how Trump is a bully - yet it's Biden and the left who want to kill or beat up Trump - behind the gym.
"this old cat who’s dead and dying"
You cannot be dead and dying.
The LEFT are lying liars who lie.
Betty Buckley is an expert on Trump's rages!?
Was she in the White House to see it all?
wow - how amazing. Was Betty Buckley in on the phone calls? I mean come on - surely she has Vindman level security clearance.
It's a much more troublesome path to diagnose the most likely explanation for Joementia's confused angry outbursts quelled by lids and naps.
Those folks at The New Yorker are really scared of him. Like most media, they just can't quit him.
By the way, Rabel is spot on. I've never seen Trump rage--and I bet Betty Buckley (Eight is Enough) and Adam Gopnik have never see him rage, either.
I saw an interview with Jamie Dimon today in which he diplomatically said that Joe Biden is always asking if he can do anything for you in public and private (very consistent) and that Donald Trump is very different in private than the man you see on stage. He didn't say it, but I think he likes Trump personally.
Mary Beth, my thoughts exactly. It's a great tune. Why should Trump, or anyone else come to that, care about the words particularly? It can't conceivably be the words, after all. This isn't a song from the classic musicals, where the words and the tune hewed closely together. It's not even a song that "Old Possum" sang to his kids at night, b/c there's no way TSE in his dreariest nightmares could have imagined writing the words of "Memory." If Trump doesn't know the plot of Cats, he's certainly not alone. I don't, strictly speaking, know the "plot" of Cats, and it does sorta fall within my professional purview.
Like nearly everyone else alive in the early '80s, I loved "Memory." Not because I imagined myself as a feline Old Pro clawing at the door of Heaven, but because the tune was fantastic. If ALW had decided that, say, Skimbleshanks was to sing it, or Mr. Mistoffelees, or Rumpleteezer, or even Macavity, I don't know that it would have made the slightest difference. The tune is what it was, and it was everywhere.
(Let's go Brandon!)
They have to write these articles about Trump. Because if they wrote anything about Biden, their audience wouldn't read it. It would be too boring for them.
It's sorta like what Althouse does here, blogging NYT articles that will infuriate the regular commenters. Hardly anyone responds to the posts about sunrises.
It's a mistake to think that bullying and charm are opposites. People who learn that they can get their way through charm realize that if charm doesn't work there is always bullying, and they are probably self-confident enough to get away with that as well.
I don't fault Buckley for puzzling over something like this. People ponder all kinds of things when they have time on their hands, and if you're looking for motives in people, "wanting to please a parent" is always a likely possibility. I do wonder why anybody thought all this was newsworthy.
The Ocean by Led Zeppelin at volume eleven always calms me down.
I never realized until now that some people think that it's the person who stands up to the bullies that is the real bully.
We already knew Trump was fabulous but this is gayer than Elton John's fannypack.
"We've Only Just Begun" but with fur!
So Earnest Prole thinks it’s the Streisand version!
“The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.” -- Robert A. Heinlein
Trump broke a lot of people's brains five years ago......and they're still broken.
Steve Scalise has already posted photos refuting the liar Grisham’s false story about Melania. Just reviewed Steph’s employment history pre-Trump and man did she get fired a lot for lying and falsifying and plagiarizing, even more than the average democrat.
So Earnest Prole thinks it’s the Streisand version!
No, see, the whole point is that it’s a theater joke.
Darkisland said...
I thought that when he was raging they sat him down in front of The Gorilla Channel. At least that is what several unimpeachable (unimpeachable because they were anonymous) and one known (Chuck) sources said.
...
I never "said" that. I never wrote that. You can search this blog's comments pages, and you'll never find any such thing from me. In fact, that is what you should do. Do a search; try to find me having posted a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g about Trump and "The Gorilla Channel." Do a really diligent search; thorough enough that you'll end up agreeing with me about this non-fact.
You've posted a lie. A complete fabrication about me. I DARE you, you fucking worm, to link to a page where I ever wrote any damned thing about Trump and "The Gorilla Channel."
I didn't know I knew any of the music from "Cats." But I did recognize the song, when I clicked through based on Michelle's comment about the melody.
Meh. I'm just not the audience for Broadway.
As for the amateur psychologizing, that's half the fun of the intertubes. I got free psychoanalysis from wannabe Freuds almost from my first comments on usenet back in the day.
Lumpen-freudianism and lumpen-marxism are the basis of almost all lefty thought in America, and that shows no sign of changing soon.
Love the RAH quote--I've been using a paraphrase for years.
>>"there’s this tremendous need, an insatiable need, to be loved, the love he never received from his father or mother."<<
So, Betty Buckley and the New Yorker just decided that Trump never received love from his parents or have I just managed to miss that "fact" all these years? I've read plenty about his dad being a tough old dude whose approval Trump always strived for. And his mother, well I've read lots about DJT but have never seen much of anything about her or their relationship. I have read that Trump was close with his parents.
But, "he never received love from his father and mother." Yeah, I think I'm just going to go ahead and classify that as a factoid generated by these Trump-hating lefties.
I've noticed that many men of Trump's age have a "song." At the end of a long day at work, they close the door to their office, then play their song. It's usually a big song: hummable melody, constantly adding parts until it reaches a big finish, many times a key change at the end. Classical "songs" would be Ode to Joy or Bolero. I would include Let It Be as a "song" for Baby Boomers. Memory from Cats is Trump's "song."
pro-marxist LLR Chuck: "You've posted a lie. A complete fabrication about me. I DARE you, you fucking worm, to link to a page where I ever wrote any damned thing about Trump and "The Gorilla Channel."
Previous pro-marxist LLR Chuck explicit admissions:
1) His purpose at Althouse blog is to lie about and smear Trump and conservative republicans
2) Drive a wedge between Althouse and her readers
Discuss.
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