A good day for a good book

A picture of Roger Mudd is on the cover of his 2008 book, "The Place to Be" (detail).

Snow fell on Richmond for most of this day after Christmas. It was a good time for a fire in the fireplace, a glass of eggnog and a good book. My choice was TV journalist Roger Mudd's "The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News."

CBS News was really the place to be during the event-packed 1960s and 70s. I have long admired Mudd, whose career at CBS roughly coincided with mine at WTVR News. At WTVR, I met Mudd a few times when his assignments brought him to Richmond. Later, I ran into him occasionally at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I wound up having lunch with him one day when a crowded museum Café meant we had to share a table. (Mudd was a trustee of the Virginia Historical Society, the museum's neighbor. VMFA had a cafeteria; VHS did not.)

Mudd's book is a great read. He writes well, and the stories he tells of the heyday of network news are fascinating.

My favorite Mudd anecdote is one that will resonate with those who lived through the 1970s. It reveals so much about Richard Nixon, the president we young people loved to hate in those days. It happened at an annual meeting of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association. Mudd, who was the group's president at the time, was seated next to the president as singer Diana Ross performed after dinner.

Mudd wrote, "Believe it or not, the president turned to me during one of her songs and said, 'They really do have a sense of rhythm, don't they?'"

"The Place to Be" is an interesting look back at two turbulent decades in Washington politics and journalism. Only the need to stoke the fire and warm up a ham biscuit for lunch tore me away from it today.

Christmas 2010

Lucy was the youngest member of the family on hand for Christmas at my nephew's house today.

What would Christmas morning be without kids?

Leaving aside the messages of peace and good will that all of us adults should be thinking about first today, Christmas is for those young enough to still accept without question the magic of it all. "Look what Santa brought me!"

There were four children as the family gathered at my nephew's house today -- Lucy, who is 1, Rowan and Milagros, who are 3, and Carlos, who is 6. Carlos and Milagros are my great nephew and great niece. Lucy and Rowan are my great-great nieces. They opened so many presents that they didn't know what to play with first.

I'm grateful to be welcomed into my nephew's home each holiday season, and I'm especially grateful to my nephew's wife for working all morning in the kitchen. (She got up at 4 a.m. to put a roast in the oven!)

Tonight it's snowing lightly in Richmond, with more expected tomorrow, so we're having a white Christmas, even if the big day is almost over as the flakes begin to fall.

Today was like Christmas should be for all -- with family and friends, with good will towards all, and with children who truly believe in the holiday's enchantment.

PS to Becky: the roast was delicious!

Santaland secrets

My sister Dianne was photographed with Santa at Miller & Rhoads in 1950. She, like all of the kids, was surprised that Santa knew her name.

I ran into the Snow Queen yesterday.

I was at the Library of Virginia for a tour of an exhibition with my friend Barbara. When the tour ended we dropped by the gift shop. There, in her attractive white gown, was the Snow Queen, autographing copies of her book "Christmas at Miller & Rhoads: Memoirs of a Snow Queen."

Last year, Donna Deekens wrote about her years working with Santa from 1971 until the store closed in 1990.

Business was slow in the bookstore, so Barbara and I introduced ourselves. Donna reminded me that we had met before, in the early 1970s, when I was working on a Christmas story for WTVR TV News. I told her that my family's connection with Miller & Rhoads went way back. My sister and I visited Santa at Miller & Rhoads in the late 1940s and early 50s. My mom worked at Miller & Rhoads beginning in about 1955. I worked at the downtown store for a year when I was in college, and my niece Terry later worked at the Willow Lawn branch.

Donna is too young to have been the Snow Queen when I was a kid. She was still in college when she heard about the opening for a new Snow Queen at Miller & Rhoads. She told me one fascinating tidbit I had never known. The Miller & Rhoads Santa on whose knee my sister Dianne and I had sat, was William C. Strother, a former Hollywood stuntman who had retired to Petersburg and answered a Miller & Rhoads help-wanted ad in 1942, the year I was born.

Strother used his Hollywood background to make the Miller & Rhoads Santa Claus into a legend. Max Factor designed his makeup, which took about two hours to apply. Strother turned the store's seventh-floor Santaland into a holiday fantasy. He came up with an act in which he arrived in Santaland by appearing out of a chimney.

The Snow Queen was an integral part of the Santa magic. Santa listened through an earpiece as she greeted each child in line using a concealed microphone. When the children got to Santa's lap, he already knew their names. Strother became so famous as Santa that he was featured in an article in the Saturday Evening Post.

Donna, who was from Portsmouth, told me she had come to Richmond as a child to visit the Miller & Rhoads Santa in 1956 when she was 5. It was to be Strother's last season on Santa's throne at Miller & Rhoads.

Donna urged Barbara and me to read her book, and we told her we would. A few more people came into the gift shop, and Barbara and I said our goodbyes. We walked out into the blustery cold on a sunny December morning on Broad Street. It felt even more like Christmas.

Kick-starting Christmas

(Don Dale 2010 photo)

I started to really get the Christmas spirit Friday night.

I've already done most of the necessary shopping, and the plans for Christmas and New Year's Eve are in place. But I hadn't started to feel the memories of Christmases past that usually kick-start my enjoyment of the holidays.

My nephew and I had planned to grab dinner Friday night. He called me to tell me that he'd be a little late. He'd just learned that his 3-year-old granddaughter's -- my great-great-niece's -- pre-school holiday program was being streamed live on the Internet at 7 p.m. Rowan and her family live in Northern Virginia. The Internet video feed was originating in Arlington.

A few minutes later, I called my nephew back and asked him to send me the Internet address so that I could watch too.

At 7 p.m., I settled in to see the first children's holiday presentation I've seen in ... oh, maybe, 50 years.

The picture was a little fuzzy, and the sound was hit and miss, but "adorable" is the best word to summon up the performance. Watching Rowan and her friends caught up in the excitement that only children can really feel at Christmas started to put me in the holiday mood.

This morning, I woke up to snow falling and a light dusting already on the ground. The snow really cinched the deal. By 10 o'clock, it had stopped. It was just the kind of snow I like -- not enough to disrupt life much but enough to suggest a winter wonderland.

Christmas madrigals are playing on the radio now, and I picked up a quart of eggnog on the way home from fitness class. Tonight I'll probably drag out the DVD of "Christmas in Connecticut," which is one of my favorite holiday movies. Maybe I'll even wrap a few Christmas presents.

Sometimes the Christmas feeling hits me early, and at other times I don't really get in touch with the holidays until Christmas Day itself. This year, it came early.

Kids and snow. It's an unbeatable combination for ramping up the Christmas spirit.

Some thoughts on theater

Poster art for the Richmond Triangle Players production of "Comfort and Joy"

One of the things I enjoyed most about my job at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was working with the Virginia Museum Theater.

When I was a kid, I used to enjoy theater from an acting perspective. Looking for a means of breaking free and expressing myself, I wanted to perform. In junior high, I declaimed Patrick Henry's famous speech at the Mosque as part of the city school system's celebration of something or the other, and in high school I played the sycophantic Mr. Collins in "Pride and Prejudice," our senior play. I played a few roles in Dogwood Dell productions and was cast in minor parts in three VMT productions when the theater was still all-volunteer.

By the time I went to work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts many years later, I was much more interested in the process of the theater -- how it worked, what worked and why it worked. I was assigned to handle public relations, and the managing director of the theater company was kind enough to keep me involved in every production from the planning stages through opening night.

Thus, I learned what the audience doesn't see and isn't meant to see: the nuts and bolts of mounting a theatrical production -- everything from acquiring the rights to a script, casting, rehearsals, and artistic temperaments to opening nights and the next day's newspaper reviews. The costume designers, the prop masters, the carpenters and the box-office people were all my friends. They recognized a genuine interest, and they took valuable time to explain how they did what they did and how to make illusion look real.

Today I have no connection to a theater, either on- or off-stage, but I still believe there's something unique about live theater that no other form of entertainment can supply. I saw a production with my niece Terry this week of "Comfort and Joy" by the Richmond Triangle Players. It was funny and touching and thoroughly entertaining. I've seen a half-dozen shows at as many theaters this year, and each one entertained me, made me think, and provided some insight into my life or the lives of others.

A good movie or a good television show can provide much the same thing, but with one important difference. There's always, inevitably, an element of risk in live theater -- simply because it's live. If you're willing to suspend disbelief, you can get swept up in the thrill of seeing real people tell a riveting story right in front of you. The show you're seeing might have been performed by the same cast 25 times already, but it's still live, and the actors -- and in some ways, the audience -- are taking a risk. Will it work this time? Hopes are always high on both sides of the footlights.

And risks often bring rewards.

The word drama is from the Greek for action, which is, in turn, derived from the Greek verb to do. When cast and audience are totally in sync, the risks that are taken on stage leave the audience with a greater understanding of other perspectives, other ways of seeing themselves, and other methods, to refer back to the Greek, of making and doing.

By any light, especially a spotlight, that's altogether a good thing.

Live from the Eifel

http://www.webcam.bitburg.net/

On this December 1, there's already snow on the ground in Bitburg, Germany. That's the little town in the Eifel Mountains, near the Luxembourg border, where I was stationed from 1966 to 1969 in the U.S. Air Force.

Chuck Minx, who served at AFTV with me, sent me this link the other day in an e-mail. I already had it, but it had been about a year since I last took a look. Check out the site and you'll see live webcam images from downtown Bitburg. (Remember that Germany is 6 hours ahead of East Coast U.S. time, so when it's the middle of the day here in Richmond it's already dark in Bitburg.)

Bitburg, population 14,000, is already decorated for Christmas, with white stars strung from one side of the street to the other. The Web camera is looking down one of the main streets toward the town's center.

There are a few thousand more people in Bitburg now than there were when I was there. That's actually more impressive than it sounds. Before the Cold War ended, thousands of American military personnel and their dependents lived, ate, or shopped off base -- "on the economy," as we called it -- and pumped money into the region's coffers. The town has survived the loss of those GIs and their American dollars, at the same time adapting to change and growing. Bitburg survived the drawdown of U.S. troops well.

Part of Bitburg's success is due to the Simonbrau brewery, which was merely a regional operation when I was there but is now internationally known for its excellent Bitburger Pilsner beer.

Bitburg is nestled in the Eifel's green, rolling hills and gentle mountains. This is farm country, home to plain folks with few ostentatious tastes. You can find most of what you need in Bitburg, including good beer, superb Mosel wine and marvelous food. When I lived there, the town had six Italian restaurants, all of which provided free pizza delivery to the air base.

Bitburg's street food is also delectable. I like a mettwurst sausage on a bun, or shashlik on a skewer with pommes frites and lots of rich gravy. If you're looking for a department store or what we'd call a big-box store, you won't find one in Bitburg: You'll have to travel 25 kilometers to Trier, Germany's oldest city (population 104,000).

Bitburg's small-town look hasn't changed much in 40 years, and watching the live webcam can still fill me with nostalgia.