Authors Electric

 Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, "Play it, Sam." 1942 I turn 87 on the 16th of this month. That means I was five years old when Ilsa Lund asked Sam to play As Time Goes By . No wonder I've been a lifelong romantic (who writes about time travel a lot.) I vaguely remember first seeing Casablanca at a theatre with my mother. She elbowed me from a Hershey-bar stupor to see one of her Hollywood bit-actor friends, Frank Puglia, as a Moroccan vendor selling Ingrid Bergman a scarf. I posted about Puglia here in 2020. (See " The Phantom of Dream Streets .") It was 1943. I was a precocious kid who could read the funnies and the headlines of newspapers delivered to our front steps every day. I hid under a marble-topped coffee table during air raid drills, laughing at the game of sirens, closed drapes and wardens waving hooded flashlights.  My mother, wth my Nonna Rosa, c. 1960 My Rome-born Nonna Rosa, still kept milk in an "ice-a-box." She didn't own an elec...

Smocked Puglia in "20 Million Miles to Earth," 1957 The first time I saw Arturo Toscanini was on a then state-of-the-art, 16-inch, Philco TV set at Frank Puglia's house in Beverly Hills, where my mother and I were regular Sunday guests. It was in the early 1950s. Toscanini was featured on a then-special, coast-to-coast broadcast with a stellar cast, conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra (specially created for him by the network, now the New York Philharmonic.) performing Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, live from New York. The white-haired, mustachioed, octagenarian maestro electrified viewers even on that a fuzzy black-and-white screen that seemed otherworldly. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, but knew I was watching history. Besides having been a musical genius who changed the fundamental of the way orchestras had been conducted, Toscanini was a genuine, anti-fascist, World War 2 era hero, a larger-than-life link to great composers of the 19th and early 20th cen...