Yesterday's 'In Crowd'
DORFMAN, HERBERT
Yesterday's In Crowd* The Snow Ball By A. R. Gurney Jr. Arbor House. 240 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Herbert Dorfman Television writer, producer On the night of his 50th birthday party, Cooper...
...Before you are out of the first chapter, you can feel Cooper Jones' passion for reviving the Snow Ball developing into a matter of urgency...
...They turned a dance floor into a stage...
...And his friend Lucy, recently divorced, had given him a good night kiss that was a little too long and too "damp...
...Not surprisingly, Lucy's long, damp birthday night kiss also proves the prelude to an affair...
...Once they started dancing together they were sublime...
...Both events come to preoccupy Cooper over the next 12 months...
...Cooper wants a cause...
...Gurney's description of the classes, conducted by a martinet with a swagger stick, is both hilarious and unsettling...
...He wants to embrace something new without tearing up all his roots...
...They won't mix...
...The last derived from the fact that all the participants had gone to the same dancing school...
...It's likely that this Snow Ball will be the most important event of the second half of his life...
...Even the guests, all old friends, jest that he has "traveled 50 years toward the grave...
...where many of their parents and grandparents had their wedding parties...
...While hardly a secret, his wife never finds out about it...
...Outsiders envied them...
...New" money alone couldn't buy entree to the circle...
...But when they talked about dancing professionally their parents objected...
...It is also about a money-comfortable social class that has been displaced...
...He is not interested in the Winterfest...
...The two themes are woven together as Cooper tries to re-create the legendary annual dance and banquet, the Snow Ball, complete with Jack Daley and Kitty Price...
...Neither Kitty nor Jack, it turns out, has any interest in attending the Snow Ball...
...Their spouses are terrified, and fly to Buffalo to plead with Cooper Jones to call off the evening...
...If the hotel is reopening, he wants the Snow Ball...
...Whatever it was other kids were doing on a Saturday night in Buffalo, Cooper Jones and friends, from age 10 to about 15, were at the dancing school...
...Reviewed by Herbert Dorfman Television writer, producer On the night of his 50th birthday party, Cooper Jones is forced to admit the excitement has drained from his life...
...Although his wife thinks the idea is silly, he and Lucy set out to make it happen...
...They learned to dance together, to be together, and the weekly sessions became the end-of-year Cotillion and eventually the Snow Ball...
...Gurney's style is perfectly suited to the ever-accelerating tempo of the story...
...they were separated and the romance withered...
...He realizes that if his children had their druthers, they'd be downstairs...
...The author of more than a dozen plays, he writes dialogue well...
...Every week, in blue suits and white shirts for boys, and silk and taffeta dresses for girls...
...Its main accomplishment is that it happens...
...To Cooper and his friends an ethnically vigorous Buffalo is no substitute for a city that has lost its economic and social status and watched its genteel way of life recede into the background, forcing them to learn to live with diverse ethnic power groups...
...Most of the evening's fun consists of remembering the old days there in Buffalo, when it seemed the great times would never end...
...He has no trouble finding Jack, who has married and is now Lieutenant Governor of Indiana, on his way to Governor...
...Kitty is living with husband number three in Florida when Cooper Jones finally locates her...
...The Snow Ball is his cause...
...He can summarize the tension of a scene in a single sentence, or evoke a mood with a few brief phrases...
...If he could show the newcomers the magic created by Jack and Kitty, then they would know what he was like...
...where they all went to dancing school...
...The same hotel where the Snow Ball was held...
...When the dance is over, we know no one will ever try to revive it again...
...It's too late...
...That was where it began...
...Yet A. R. Gurney' s novel is less about nostalgia than growing older without a cause...
...The point of the dance was that it wasn't for everybody...
...Cooper Jones is back where he started...
...His narration is tight and at times surprisingly poignant...
...Cooper is moved to action by an announcement that the old George Washington Hotel downtown is being refurbished...
...Their particular magic touched all their friends gathered around...
...Even his affair with Lucy is not particularly exciting...
...The past and any new surprises appear out of reach now...
...It belonged to them...
...Everyone" went, but "40 years later, Cooper still shuddered as those days came rolling back into his memory...
...Cooper Jones is a modern hero— that is to say, in many ways no hero at all...
...There was little outright snobbism...
...The Snow Ball and the Winterfest are to be held the same night at the George Washington Hotel, the former upstairs, the latter downstairs...
...Something in Cooper's soul won't let him roll over, though, and he grasps at two small incidents that occurred during his party: There had been a brief conversation recalling the annual dance that was the center of his set's social world 30 years ago...
...They had not only been the best dancers in Buffalo, but just about the best anybody had ever seen...
...Nonetheless, the black tie, long evening dresses, expensive tickets, and having to be part of the "in crowd" combined to keep out the unwelcome...
...Incredibly, after more than half a lifetime that prospect packs enough emotional power to bring Kitty north from a sick bed and make Jack interrupt a political campaign...
...It was assumed they would marry...
...Jack and Kitty met at the school...
...But the revival produces no magic...
...They are greatly interested, though, in dancing with each other...
...Nothing really unexpected happens to him...
...As Lucy points out to him, however, a civic committee plans to sponsor Winterfest there, a kind of indoor country fair celebrating the contributions of Buffalo's ethnic groups...
Vol. 67 • December 1984 • No. 23
