Monday, September the 10th, 2007
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Today I learned, O Waly, Waly, that Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was the child of a dentist. Britten celebrated his fiftieth birthday on the same day that both Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis died, which—as all students of such matters are vibrantly aware—was the date of the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Incidentally, not long before his death, the spookily tall and almost blind Huxley answered the doorbell of his California home to a young vacuum cleaner salesman named Don Van Vliet, soon to be better known as Captain Beefheart. It would be fitting if I could end this squib with the observation that Van Vliet, too, was the child of a dentist, but his Pa was a van driver for a bakery, toting pastry-related items hither and yon, and I have no idea of his Ma's occupation, alas.