Mary Poppins

When I was a kid in the pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-Tevo days, movies were rare events and not the stuff of daily life as they are now. I still remember the first movie I saw; it was “Mary Poppins” and the year must have been 1964, which means I was 7. We went to the movie and loved it and bought the soundtrack, on a 33 record album of course, which we played over and over again. I knew all the words to all the songs and could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (sp?) backwards. Walt Disney was also a family hero. We watched “The Wonderful World of Color” (in black and white) every Sunday night at 7:30. I remember when Walter Cronkite announced Walt Disney’s death on the news; I think it was a Thursday (I just looked it up on Google, and I was right – he died of lung cancer on Thursday, December 15, 1966). Besides JFk, his was the first death that I remember, and the first that I felt as personally affecting me, more than that of the President since I was only in first grade at the time. (The fact that my teacher was crying was the most shocking thing to me about JFK’s assassination.) Anyway, I am trying to get to the point of this entry, which is to discuss the article in the Dec. 19 New Yorker about the author of the original Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers. But now, I’ve run out of steam and will have to continue this thought tomorrow….