172 stories by "John Simon"
What a bizarre, paradoxical, self-contradictory and ephemeral thing is fashion! On the one hand, it challenges haute couture to come up with ever more unique, far out, incomparable women's c…
My fans sometimes ask me whether I have learned from other writers, and if so, what and from whom. This does not elicit easy answers for more reasons than one. The first probable influence i…
"Sweet Charity" is as good a musical as can lap at the heels of top tier, and can even, in the right production, make it there. It does, after all, have a book by Neil Simon, music by Cy Col…
So now we have "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1912," transferred after a hiatus to Broadway and ensconced at the Imperial Theater, in a grandiose setting it does not really deserv…
"Dear Evan Hansen" was, in my view, an undeserved hit Off Broadway, and is so again on Broadway, once more harvesting critical raves as numerous and useless as fallen autumn leaves. In one…
All writers in general and playwrights in particular are uneven. Perfection is not a widely recognized human attribute. As the poet Horace cannily observed, "Sometimes even good old Homer no…
The Westchester Guardian is gone, and once again I have had the horse shot out from under me. True, it may not have been much of a mount"more like Don Quixote's spavined nag Rosinante"it was…
Some few mistakes are actually charming. A bunch of us Harvard undergraduates were fans of the delightful French soprano Lily Pons. So we sent her an ardent fan letter, naively hoping for a …
Ever since the year one, and probably even before, people have speculated about death and what could be done to defeat it, as in John Donne's famous sonnet. But live forever not in Donne's C…
Probably the most famous reference to the nose is the phrase "Cleopatra's nose," derived from Pascal's celebrated pensee, "If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of …
Clearly, justice must be the same for all, but is this not true also of morality? Yet for some people, under certain circumstances, this is hardly the case. There exist certain persons by wh…
Like first impressions in life, and rather more so, first impressions, i.e., beginnings in fiction matter. They may not be quite all important, but they do invite and influence readership.Ta…
Fetishes are called kinks or perversions and refer to any deviance from the accepted "normal" sexual practice. But is there not a certain flexibility allowed for them? Homosexuality, for exa…
Politics is a mug's game, and by mug I don't mean Donald Trump's countenance that television would have me contemplate with scant respite. Mrs. Clinton looks more presentable, by which I do …
This was a brief introductory comment to a prize-giving dinner for student essayists at Hunter College.I would imagine that all of you have heard of the Pen Club, the premier international o…
I have always been a Francophile, hugely fond of France. There has been only one thing that I didn't like about it: the French. To be exact, not all the French, only the petit bourgeois vari…
What does the expression "without rhyme or reason" tell us about rhyme? It seems to me to mean that, along with reason, it is one of two valid alternative modes of expression, at least in po…
Let me start with a postscript to a previous blog entry about obesity. There is a plea on ABC television for locating missing children, which provides a picture and description of them, and,…
Any discussion of obesity comes down to the not particularly friendly contest between thick and thin, with the body as the chief battleground. Mostly the female nude, because that has been t…
Memory is one of our most interesting possessions; its failure, our possibly most grievous loss. What enhances its importance is its mystery, its surprises, its ultimate inscrutability.Its c…
Naomi Wallace's "Night Is a Room" was recently playing at the Signature Center, the third part of a trilogy from their playwright in residence. Wallace has received every conceivable award a…
A letter in the November 23rd New York Times from Bonnie Berry, the author of "Discrimination and Social Power," expresses her approval of Julia Baird's November 9th Op-Ed essay "Being Disho…
This one really works only in German, but I'll render it into English. "What's the dog's name?" the new maid asks. "Herkules," says the mistress. "Herr Kules?" responds the maid. "I'll just …
A time when puny Roberta Vinci"bless her!"derails the elephantine Serena on her route to the Grand Slam, the moment is rife for a discussion of the Absurd, which I deliberately capitalize. W…
Her name was Ljiljana, Serbian for Lilian, and she was my first love. To be sure, in kindergarten I was smitten with Milica, who did not reciprocate, but that doesn't count anyway. One had t…
