by Carol Verburg
As I write this, I’m poised on the diving board, far from ready to plunge in.
When you read this, I’ll have sunk or swum. I’ll have crossed the country and met dozens of readers, theater fans, and Halloween partygoers who showed up at festive events in Minneapolis or Sandwich or Harwich or Provincetown, MA, or right here in the Bay Area, to find out more about The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey.
Of the dozen or so books I’ve written, this is the most elegant. Lavish collections of art and stories are a specialty of my San Francisco publisher, Chronicle Books. The Theatrical Adventures has a red velvet stage curtain (really!) wrapped around the cover. Inside are drawings that almost no one has ever seen before—unburied at last from the archives of a brilliant, eccentric artist. Edward Gorey designed the Tony Award-winning 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, starring Frank Langella. And the opening credits of PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery. And several alphabets in which one hapless child after another meets an off-screen demise:
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
Edward and I staged “entertainments” together on Cape Cod over a decade before he died in 2000. His New York friends assumed he’d retired years before, when he left Manhattan for the seaside village of Yarmouth Port. In fact, he’d just chosen a different fork in the road. He retired at age 75 only because he postponed getting a pacemaker until after The Tiger Lillies came to talk about a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. If not for his wayward heart, Edward Gorey might have continued his theatrical adventures for another decade.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea.
N is for Neville who died of ennui.
And here I am, 25 years later, embarking on my first major book tour. Retirement (glimpsed in my side mirror) is farther away than it appears. While some of my friends are attending their grandchildren’s weddings, others are hanging their next photo show, redesigning their garden, experimenting with painting/ceramics/quilting, or finishing a film.
The great revelation of aging—like the arts—is: We’re all in this together.
