Memoirous

I just watched Maestro on Netflix—maybe I’m getting old, but I kept checking to see how many minutes were left half-way through. It’s a little over 2 hours. I remembered that Leonard Bernstein was a contemporary of the poet Frank O’Hara and that their orbits had at times crossed. The Brad Gooch biography of O’Hara had two index listings for Bernstein. There’s a lot of reasons for the connection—both were in New York City and social gadflys in their own right. One of the mentions in City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara has Bernstein as team captain in a game of charades that O’Hara sat out. It is likely in the New York social scene for gay men that they shared many of the same friends. When Frank O’Hara entered Harvard after World War II his intention was to study music and composition. He was a trained classic pianist. While reading the Gooch biography I couldn’t help but think, like a lot of young people with artistic passions, that studying the arts after a while fee...