I Was Dancing [Hardcover] Edwin O’Connor

Description

As commented on by the New York Daily ” Burgess Meredith gives an endearing, funny and skillful performance as a seventy-year-old star hoofer who has come to the end of the road and headed home Or to what he thinks is home, his son’s house. He has been here a year and the welcome has worn thin for he was never much of a parent, what with running out on his wife and infant son to hoof it alone around the globe. So his ungrateful boy, age thirty-eight at the moment, wants to pry him out of his comfortable top-floor bedroom and lodge him comfortably in Smiling Valley, a home for senior citizens. Meredith, a spry fellow given to subconscious dance steps and waltzing when he is alone, doesn’t want to go to Smiling Valley. He likes it where he is and besides, his sister, Pert Kelton, the gabbiest Irishwoman alive, is already a resident of Smiling Valley and he can’t stand her. Meredith has a scheme to halt the ouster by faking a heart attack and softening up his son. He confides it to his cronies, who are an odd lot. One, David Doyle, is an unlicensed doctor with a busy practice among strange cases, like a woman who got shorter and shorter until she died. Another is an affable priest who wanted to be a jockey. The third, Eli Mintz, is an utterly mournful man, and his account of how a friend died of a blood clot after playing golf is one of the funniest soliloquies in the play.”