Darth Vader and A Statue of a Boy Pissing Pol Roger

I have been missing in action – lost in time and space, actually. With the time travel equipment of the future we can, according to the manual, journey backwards and loll about in the past for as long as we wish. Then with the flick of a few switches we will be able to arrive back the moment we left.

My time-machine is obsolete.

For the past few weeks I’ve been stuck in the Paris of Napoleon III, antebellum Boston, and, most enjoyably, at a modest Manhattan party held by James Hazen Hyde on the last day of January 1905. Some back-story? Of course. When his daddy dropped dead of overwork, Hyde inherited the reins of the Equitable Insurance Company at the ripe age of 23. Before too long he was director of 46 different companies, performing such wise business acts as selling bonds from one company he directed, to another company he owned, and then to the Equitable for a nice profit.

What better way to celebrate insider trading and conflict of interest than with a big party? So, Hyde called upon architect Whitney Warren to transform Sherry’s Hotel into the Court of Louis XV for a night and then commissioned playwright Dario Niccodemi to compose a one-act play. At around eleven o’clock the Metropolitan Opera’s forty piece orchestra along with their ballet corps filled the ballroom and performed until midnight. Then a foursome of working stiffs carried a sedan chair into the room bearing the actress Gabrielle Rejane, fresh from Paris, who performed the play, which was about as inspiring as taffy. Trumpets announced supper and we all retired to a room that had been transformed into the gardens of Versailles with grass, a canopy of roses, marble statues, and fountains bubbling with Pol Roger ‘89. Dancing followed, but of course two more suppers were served before the guests, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and myself, collapsed of exhaustion.

So . . . when I arrived back in Los Angeles in 2004, minus a few weeks of my life, only to find that Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had both come to life and emerged on a stage at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, you can understand the shock of recognition with which I was afflicted. It takes time to adjust to an all out battle between good and evil when you’ve been reveling in the spoils built by greed, waste, extravagance, imperial aims, corporate corruption, cheap imported labor, and no income tax for the rich.

But the historian’s mind, like the snob’s, is quite supple and soon I was carrying from 1905 to 2005 that emotion most appropriate for historians and snobs alike–indignation. Snobs and historians both have an aversion to the tasteless and the showy. Oh yeah, and the morally maladroit.

The ballot box is probably a better time-machine than mine. Vote appropriately and with hope we can revive the glory of parties past! Maybe, just maybe, they’ll even let us eat what falls from the tables.