Can Halloween be any better? Not here in Las Vegas, the place is beyond what I think anyone could have imagined in those early off the hook days of Studio 54 in New York. What hits the street here on any given weekend is way up top, but on the Week of the Solstice you are swept away by the full combination of eroticism and fantasy. People, I tell you, this coming from me, I have scoured the far corners of this earth to find what is that unique and complex mix of music, people, and atmosphere to bring my mind , body, and soul to climactic exstasy in the crystalized moment of primal music and dance. We have that here, and this week all those dedicated followers of the spirit will don the most outrageous, and courageous of fantasy attire, and dance together through the frightening, torridly hot and sensual pagan ritual. As to comfort while contemplating another season of dark long nights and barren soil. That is winter. Dance . Dance . Dance. And Dress up, Paint your faces, role the entire memory bank of all the different "costumes" you have been since the first Trick or Treat bag was placed in your hand. Glide through them all, and arrive at the best place you have ever been, dressed like never before, in the Costume of you dreams. Heavy Happy Halloween.

Michael P. Whelan 2003.

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 11:42 PM

 
Strip searching
Hollywood depictions of Vegas have tourists chasing the real thing

By Jerry Rice, Staff Writer
LAS VEGAS - Britney Spears slept here.
So did Mark Wahlberg, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. It's also where Leonardo DiCaprio spent his last two birthdays.
"Here" is the lavish, 2,900-square-foot suite on the 28th floor of the Palms Casino Resort, which became one of the hottest places in town after it was featured in MTV's "Real World."
"I don't think any other room has gotten the kind of play and air time and publicity that room has received - and almost all of that is from the show," said Palms spokesman Brian Albertson.
It's just one example of Hollywood's increasing fascination with Las Vegas - on both the small screen and the big - and the phenomenon is causing fans to come trailing in the wake of their favorite stars.
It might not be surprising that celebrities have been plunking down $10,000 for a Friday or Saturday night in the Real World Suite (on Sunday through Thursday the room goes for $5,000 to $7,500). But that "as seen on TV" aspect to the three-bedroom suite has encouraged people of more limited means to reserve it for slumber parties of their own.
"A lot of times it's taken by groups of people who chip in and rent it out," Albertson said of a room that even locals seem to love. It was voted by the staff of the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the Best Use of Las Vegas in TV or Movies.
That recognition often means more revenue, said Anthony Curtis, publisher of the LasVegasAdvisor.com traveler tip site.
"There are close to 100 casinos in the entire Las Vegas valley," he said. "If you've got to choose one, where do you go? You go to the one you've heard about, that seems cool and you can identify with to some degree - and that happens when you see it week in and week out on television."
The Palms isn't the only casino that has found a home on TV.
-- Golden Nugget owners Tom Breitling and Tim Poster let television cameras follow them around for the summer reality series "The Casino." Produced by Mark Burnett ("Survivor," "The Apprentice"), the show attracted an average of 4.4 million viewers per episode - a fairly respectable showing. Breitling and Poster are now talking with other production companies about bringing more reality or scripted shows to the downtown hotel-casino.
-- The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino has a nearly 5,000-square-foot penthouse - complete with a single-lane bowling alley and a full bar _ that has hosted Howard Stern's radio show. The room also was featured in a first-season episode of "The O.C." on Fox, as was the palm-tree-lined pool area.
-- Green Valley Ranch in nearby Henderson is home to Discovery Channel's "American Casino," a reality series about the everyday problems of working in a casino, including pampering high-rollers and handling obnoxious customers. After completing a successful first run earlier this month, work is under way on an 18-episode second season.
All three places have enjoyed increased traffic since taking the publicity plunge. At Green Valley Ranch, for example, online reservations skyrocketed almost 300 percent after "American Casino's" June debut.
Elsewhere, the pyramid-shaped Luxor also experienced a spike in room reservations last year after it was featured in an episode of NBC's "Fear Factor."
Las Vegas on television and in the movies is not a new phenomenon. The city's neon lights have been captured dozens of times before.
-- The Rat Pack - led by Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean - conspired to rob five Las Vegas casinos simultaneously in the 1960 film "Ocean's Eleven." George Clooney returned to the scene of the crime for the 2001 remake, complete with a performance by the dancing-water fountains in front of the Bellagio specially choreographed for the movie.
-- Robert Urich played a handsome, wise-cracking private eye on ABC's "Vega$" in the late 1970s, setting up shop at the old Desert Inn. Today, "CSI" is the No. 1 crime drama in town. And while most of the CBS series is filmed in Los Angeles, set-up shots and lengthier scenes have been done at locations all around Las Vegas, including the Liberace Museum and New York New York, where senior forensics officer Gil Grissom (William Petersen) likes to work out his tensions by riding the roller coaster.
-- Chevy Chase brought his oddball Griswold family to several casinos in town for 1997's "Vegas Vacation." His unbalanced cousin (Randy Quaid) was caught swimming with the dolphins at the Mirage, his underage son was carded and kicked out of the Riviera Hotel and Casino, his daughter hung out with Beatles look-alikes at Lady Luck Casino Hotel, and his wife was wooed by Wayne Newton during one of his nightclub concerts.
-- Who can forget Nicolas Cage as a "flying Elvis," parachuting down to Bally's to rescue Sarah Jessica Parker from the clutches of James Caan in the 1992 movie "Honeymoon in Vegas"?
-- And long before there was a "Real World" suite - or even a Palms Casino Resort, for that matter - a suite at Caesars Palace gained instant recognition when Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman stayed there in 1988's Oscar-winning "Rain Man." Five years later, Robert Redford propositioned Demi Moore in "Indecent Proposal," staying in a lavish suite at the Las Vegas Hilton.
"People really are interested in visiting film locations," said Robin Holabird, deputy director of the Nevada Film Office.
She cites two examples to prove her point: the Ponderosa Ranch, a picturesque 570-acre property near Incline Village, Nev., which was used for "Bonanza," and the baseball diamond cut out of an Iowa cornfield for 1989's "Field of Dreams."
The Ponderosa Ranch continued to attract visitors until last month when its new owner closed it - 31 years after the long-running show was canceled by NBC. Future plans for the property are unclear.
The "Field of Dreams" diamond, which is located in Dyersville and operates under the name Left & Center Field of Dreams, attracts more than 1,000 tourists on weekends during the peak summer season.
Apparently in Sin City, there's even interest in some locations that don't exist.
During an episode last season of the NBC sudser "Las Vegas," Caan's casino boss met with somebody at a topless pancake house. The establishment's slogan held that the only thing flat in the place was the pancakes.
"We got an e-mail the next morning asking if we knew where it was," Holabird said. "They said, 'It looks like a friendly place.' Of course, we knew there was more to it than that."
Considering the desire to visit movie and TV locations, it's somewhat surprising that in Las Vegas, apparently, nobody is offering tours of the sites. Kenny Kramer, the inspiration for Jerry Seinfeld's frenetic neighbor in "Seinfeld," still offers a half-day bus tour of various New York City locations that appeared in that show. The Big Apple also has a three-hour "Sex and the City" tour, based on the former HBO comedy.
Of course, there's always the self-guided Las Vegas tour.
"You could almost walk down one side of the Strip, cross the street and walk up the other side and almost every place you hit would have had some association with either a movie or television show," said Holabird, who is working on a book about what draws producers to Nevada.
As with anything, Las Vegas location stories are not always happy ones. The image of the Golden Nugget, for example, took a hit from the producers of "The Casino." Locals considered the show overly sleazy and not in keeping with the property's image as a classic Las Vegas hangout on the rebound, according to a story in the Las Vegas Sun.
Several casino owners, including MGM Mirage, have turned down reality show offers, concluding that hosting them is not worth the hassles and potential risks.
"Some are still a little leery to lend their name to a show because they can't control the filming at all times, there's the inconvenience, and it's also fairly expensive," said Curtis of LasVegasAdvisor.com. "If somebody wants to come in and shoot, you've got to cut some sort of deal with them - like maybe you put them up or maybe they get food allowances.
"Even if you're not paying them directly, they're using a lot of the amenities and resources to house and facilitate the filming - not to mention the closing down of areas and putting customers out to some degree."
Other properties, while opening their doors to filming, have tried to shield themselves from downside risks by removing all references to the casino. CBS' new offering "dr. vegas," starring Rob Lowe as a playboy casino doctor, is filmed at Green Valley Ranch, but viewers won't know that from watching the show; Lowe's character works at a casino called the Metro.
But none of that seems to matter as long as the cameras keep rolling and the gamblers keep coming. Production revenues last year topped $104 million, with nearly $60 million of that coming from TV shows and specials.
"There's a value to Las Vegas in general when people see it over and over and over again on TV. It stimulates them and spurs them to get on a plane and come out here," Curtis said. "The most specific value of that sort of thing is for the individual places that actually do it. Somebody who's coming out anyway might say they've got to go to the Palms where they had 'Real World.'‚"
And that brings us back to Britney Spears. As far as her actually !ital!sleeping in the room, we're not entirely sure. But we know she was there. It was the night of her infamous 55-hour marriage in January to a childhood sweetheart.
"There's the notion that if you're a fan of 'Real World' you want to be in that room because you saw it on TV. But you can also say you slept in the same bed as Britney Spears or Mark Wahlberg or any number of celebrities," Albertson said. "I can't think of any other real hotel room that people just want to be in. It's a real attraction on its own."------Jerry Rice, (909) 483-9329, jerry.rice@sbsun.com------MAKING A SCENE IN VEGASMany hotels and casinos have played key roles in movies and television shows. The list includes:
Bally's: "Honeymoon in Vegas," starring James Caan, Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Bellagio: "Oceans Eleven" (2001) and "Ocean's Twelve" (coming in December), starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts; "What Planet Are You From?" (2000), starring Garry Shandling and Annette Bening.
California Hotel & Casino: "Con Air" (1997), starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack.
Caesars Palace: "Caesars" (upcoming reality series on A&E); "City Slickers: The Legend of Curly's Gold" (1994), starring Billy Crystal and Daniel Stern; "The Electric Horseman" (1979), starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda; "Fools Rush In" (1997), Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek; "Get Shorty" (1995), starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman; "Rain Man" (1988), starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.
Fitzgeralds Casino & Hotel: "Elimidate" (UPN reality series).
Fremont Hotel & Casino: "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" (1992), starring Rick Moranis; "I Love Trouble" (1994), starring Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte; "Miss Congeniality 2" (2005), starring Sandra Bullock; "Swingers" (1996), starring Jon Favreau.
Fremont Street Experience: "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" (2003), starring Brendan Fraser.
Hard Rock Hotel and Casino: "The O.C." (a first-season episode of the Fox series)
Lake Las Vegas Resort: "America's Sweethearts" (2001), starring Julia Roberts and Billy Crystal.
Las Vegas Hilton: "Indecent Proposal" (1993), starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore.
Luxor: "Mars Attacks!" (1996), starring Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close; "Showgirls" (1995), starring Elizabeth Berkley.
Main Street Station: "Casino" (1995), starring Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone; "My Giant" (1998), starring Billy Crystal.
Mandalay Bay: "Las Vegas" (current NBC series); "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts; "Play it to the Bone" (1999), starring Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas.
The Mirage: "Vegas Vacation" (1997), Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo.
Monte Carlo: "Dance with Me" (1998), starring Vanessa L. Williams.
New York New York: "CSI" (the roller coaster is a regular on the CBS series)
Riviera: "3000 Miles to Graceland" (2001), starring Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell.
Stardust: "Casino" (1995), starring Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone.
SEEING A PREVIEW„LAS VEGAS PREVIEW STUDIOS: Located in the Grand Canal Shops area of the Venetian Hotel-Casino, at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Spring Mountain Road. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. No admission charge. (702) 732-2733.
CBS TELEVISION CITY RESEARCH CENTER: Located in the Studio Walk area of the MGM Grand, at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. No admission charge. (702) 891-5752 or (702) 891-5776.
RETURN TO TOP


- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 5:54 PM

 
Wynn Resort
WYNN LAS VEGAS: LET THE HIRING BEGIN
Strip's next megaresort takes another step toward April openingBy ROD SMITH GAMING WIRE
Curtains up. It's showtime at Wynn Las Vegas.
With design work done, financing complete and shell construction wrapping up, the $2.5 billion project becomes operational Monday when it starts hiring an expected 9,000 line employees, developer Steve Wynn said.
"We've passed the tipping point," he said. "However good we were at design and financing, it's the people who bring it to life. The hiring part is the real game; Sunday afternoon at the Masters."
This time around, Wynn has his fans, and skeptics are hard to find.
Deutsche Bank analyst Andrew Zarnett said there isn't a chance of a flop this close to opening.
"When you look at his experience, the numbers of qualified people who want to work with him, the people who know him, it'd be almost hard not to hire the right people," he said.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas history department Chairman Hal Rothman said it's highly likely that Wynn will succeed in recruiting the best and the brightest, allowing him to unveil a premier property the way he wants and reigniting excitement in Las Vegas as a destination.
"I can't figure out what will be done that will increase the level of luxury, but I believe he will do it. He'll raise the bar in important ways," he said. "It's very clear Steve Wynn is a draw and an opportunity that can't be matched. He has a reputation that will draw the people he wants to work for him. The prospects for his succeeding are enormous.
"Wynn Las Vegas should yield a huge return to the bottom line over the next year for the city, the county and the state as customers and the just plain curious come to see it."
Zarnett said because no major destination resort has opened in Las Vegas in the past five years, the opening of Wynn Las Vegas will swell visitation as thousands of people come to see "what Steve has built."
"Every time you have an opening in Las Vegas, there's a group of naysayers and they've never been right," Zarnett said. "Las Vegas has continued to grow through four waves of new property openings."
Rothman said the opening of Wynn Las Vegas should also be an opportunity for Culinary Local 226 since Wynn's previous properties have all been unionized and have set new standards for benefits.
Wynn says there is no way to run a first-class operation without the best workers possible, and that means working with the Culinary.
Culinary Secretary-Treasurer D. Taylor said no deals have been worked out in advance. However, he expects workers to have the chance to vote on organizing. After the vote, the union will negotiate a contract.
Wynn said the development, which has gone through several stages, has reached the point of real excitement.
"I spent two years and five months with a felt-tip pen alone in a room. I'm in ecstacy during that period," he said.
Then he met the challenge of financing the project, which included a public stock offering in 2002 that Wynn called harrowing. Wynn's investment bankers were forced to drop the stock's price three times, from $20 to $18 to $15, before settling on its final $13 price.
Wynn Resorts shares closed at $58.15 Friday, up more than fourfold from their October 2002 opening price.
After that, the sales department came on line to schedule business meetings and conventions, and actual construction started, he said.
"Now, a whole other experience takes place. The organization is talking back to me. All of a sudden, I'm in the back seat of the car and it's delicious -- like watching your children grow up," Wynn said. "I start to meet managers I didn't know. That's so exciting because it's the judgment of my smart colleagues."
Keeping his sense of humor amid the accelerating rush to open, however, he said the entire project is not only on time, but on budget.
Wynn has been renowned for going over budget on his previous projects, and for sparing no expense to make sure the designs have been executed to his standards.
He accepted the notion that with 32 years of experience under his belt, he may be better than in the past at laying out designs so they are developed as he intended.
"But this is really an eye-popping kind of exercise, (partly because we've made such a premium, five-star hotel," Wynn said.
Wynn's goal, as it was with The Mirage (1989), Treasure Island (1993) and Bellagio (1998), is to open the entire 2,700-room resort complex all at once, April 28, except for the "Avenue Q" show and theater, which will open on Labor Day.
"It's no small thing to pull off. And it's particularly difficult when you're opening cold like we are," he said. "That's one of the big challenges."
Wynn said that when he opened his previous Las Vegas properties, he was operating other hotel-casinos from which he could draw employees.
This time, he has 57 operating systems, one of which is the Internet recruiting program, all of which have to work at once.
"We're going to throw a switch and they're all going to have to work perfectly on Day One," Wynn said.
Wynn's Chief Human Resources Officer Arte Nathan, who has helped open all of the developer's resorts since 1983, said going it alone with no sister operations makes this project unique and the hiring that starts Monday critical.
"We've always had sister properties. This time, we've had to work harder to implant the culture and get them to understand what we're trying to accomplish," he said.
Still, Wynn said the property will open as scheduled on the birthday of his wife, Elaine.
Nathan said: "Steve's known for this. He wants the place to feel like it's been open for six months on the opening day. Others try it, but he's just relentless on this."
And he said Wynn is right to say recruiting, training, motivating and retaining employees will make or break the project.
"The building (itself) is wonderful, but it has no spirit. The people bring it to life and give the place its spirit," Nathan said.



Find this article at: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-31-Sun-2004/business/25071946.html

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 5:25 PM

 
Mikey Pat, Olivia and DA. Our Current Crisis.
Happy Halloween to one and all! I am sitting here in the final hours before the major referendum on who will lead this foolhardy nation in the next four years. Can you believe that there are actually people alive in the land who would have the stupidity and guilelessness to cast a vote for Bush to continue on his road of ineptitude. The truth is stranger than the fiction with this guy, meanwhile the troops keep dying, and the only ones who know what is going on and how to handle the situation are the British troops, and they are not there in control are in sufficient numbers to make the outcome more positive. Please say a prayer for our country and for me! I am in rather desperate circumstances at this very moment, even as I concern myself with the macro picture, the world is seemingly falling down around me. I was refused a cash out on my pension because of being short 500 hours, out of over 14,0000 eligible hours. Meanwhile, the courts that enforce child custody payment have the Detectives looking for me, and my residence is in Court trying to evict me to the street for $800. Amazing, all the while I am petrified of loosing Mikey and Olivia forever, as that has been their Mom's avowed aim from the start. I worry a little about my emotional and psychological willpower through all this, but for right now I am OK. At night when I am alone I become a little frightened and overwhelmed by the seeming unfairness of Mikey and Olivia being kept from their Dad because he so much wanted them to be with him, and learn the things that he knew, and grow up with a clear eyed view point on the world. To be fair, and kind, and courteous, and polite. To be well read, and educated and concerned for their fellow man. Their Mom would laugh at these sentences, and cynically scream about money and child support, and go on about how it is that I do not have all the material possessions that give a human being value in her eyes. If I loose the place I don't know where we will stay, but it comes down to the problem being always the same, I have an avowed enemy(ies) in the name of my ex-wife and her new boyfriend, father of her new baby, violent ex-felon, who want Mikey and Olivia with them because it will increase my child support payments enough to afford them free living because that would be the amount of their rent each month. For the sake of Mikey and Olivia alone, they could care less where they go to school, or even if they go. They are both High School drop outs, and his other two children are on the same path. One boy seventeen is already an "early leaver", and the other girl 13, has only reached the fifth grade and will leave at sixteen. A complete and total nightmare environment for my little ones to internalize and adapt to in their most impressionable and formative years.If only I had someone here to help me with them while I went to work this situation would not be happening. I need a miracle this week, two miracles really. Kerry to be elected President and me to get out of the current jam. I have "slipped the noose" and cheated the hangman before, so with your sincere support and prayers I will not give up ever under any circumstances. Love and Thoughts, Michael.

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 1:48 PM

 
Entertainment Vegas Style
When in Vegas . . .
TOMASZ ROSSA Celine Dion's Las Vegas show `A New Day' is a technological extravaganza. The show can be seen at Caesars Palace in the $95 million Colosseum.
Saturday, October 30, 2004City turns to big shows to draw tourists
By CHUCK DARROW Courier-Post Staff
As the television commercials constantly remind us, what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.
While this cheeky slogan ostensibly pertains to visitors' behavior, it also can be applied to a good deal of the city's casino-produced entertainment.
With the advent of legal gambling across the country, slot machines and gaming tables alone are no longer enough to lure people to the Nevada desert.
As a result, Vegas casinos have, with great success, turned to show business to bolster the tourist trade. The town teems with programs that simply cannot be seen elsewhere - or which play elsewhere on rare occasions. Clint Holmes, for example, has occasionally brought his show to Harrah's Atlantic City.
To be sure, Vegas has always had its share of long-running presentations. A production show called Bottoms Up just ended its run at the Flamingo and is, at least temporarily, without a home for the first time in 40 years.
But these "old Vegas"-style shows, while still popular, have been overshadowed by ever-more elaborate spectacles such as Celine Dion's A New Day at Caesars Palace, as well as resident headliners such as Harrah's star Holmes and impressionist Danny Gans at the Mirage.
It's relatively easy for solo acts such as Holmes and Gans to take their shows on the occassional weekend road trip. But it's not financially and logistically possible to do so with the multi-million dollar presentations that are Vegas' show business calling cards. That means you can't see them in Atlantic City - it's Vegas or nothing.
Here are four high-profile Vegas offerings: `A New Day'


This collaboration between French Canadian pop megastar Dion and veteran Cirque director Franco Dragone may be the most hyped Las Vegas revue of all time.
And why not? It's staged in Caesars' impressive, $95 million, 4,148-seat Colosseum built specifically for A New Day and it boasts an unusually large troupe of dancers and musicians.
But what makes this a must-see is Dragone's spellbinding staging.
There are plenty of Cirque signatures, such as the various objects (lamp posts and musical instruments) that float in midair and a couple of recurring characters (a bald man and a bellhop) whose purposes are never explained.
But what makes A New Day a landmark achievement is its amazing video presentations that create breathtaking, three-dimensional backgrounds for the various musical segments.
For instance, "I'm Alive" places Dion and her minions in the middle of a bustling Times Square, while "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" boasts a realistic-looking skyscape.
Technology aside, those who have found Dion's in-concert, sing-your-lungs-out-on-every-tune style tedious and annoying will be glad to know she has toned it down considerably.
Instead of doing every song as if it's her last, she nicely blends lower-key crooning with her trademark go-for-broke style.
There's a reason Caesars recently anted up another $50 million to keep Dion and A New Day there through 2007. See it and you'll understand why.
Where: Caesars Palace, 3570 Las Vegas Blvd.
When: Show dates vary. All performances at 8:30 p.m.
Admission: $225, $175, $127.50 and $87.50.
Phone: (877) 423-5463.
Online: www.caesars.com/Caesars/LasVegas/Entertainment/ANewDay/. `We Will Rock You'
"Catalog musicals," book shows created around the songs of an individual artist or group, are all the rage these days thanks, in large part to the outrageous success of the ABBA presentation, Mamma Mia!
At first glance, the songs of the quirky, bombastic English glam-rock band Queen seem an unlikely choice for the format. But somehow, this London import making its United States debut at Paris Las Vegas pretty much works.
We Will Rock You will never be confused with Les Miserables or West Side Story. And maybe it is, as the New York Times said, "dopey."
But author-director Ben Elton has fashioned a breezy, high-energy confection as entertaining as it is lightweight.
Set in the year 2304, the preposterous plot involves a group of youthful rebels who worship at the altar of 20th-century pop and rock, even though they're a little hazy on specifics. Each member of the clan has assumed the name of a real-life singer; one guy proudly goes by "Britney Spears."
The group eagerly awaits the arrival of an unknown savior who will find a long-hidden electric guitar and thus free "Planet Mall" (the orb formerly known as "Earth") from two scourges.
The first is Globalsoftcq , the planet's corporate overlord run by the cartoon-like villainess Killer Queen. The other is the bland, computerized pop music the corporation foists upon the sheep-like denizens it rules.
The hero shows up in the form of Galileo Figaro, a young man who dreams centuries-old song lyrics that are inexplicable to him. With the help of the female lead, Scaramouche, Galileo ultimately vanquishes the evil-doers and restores the kingdom of good old-fashioned rock 'n' roll.
Queen songs such as "Somebody to Love," "You're My Best Friend," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "Radio Gaga" (whose lyrics have been updated to reference the Internet) work surprisingly well in a theatrical context.
And Elton's jokey script, which takes plenty of funny potshots at such contemporary pop culture totems as Spears, Janet Jackson and Celine Dion, keeps the chuckles coming.
Throw in a young, exuberant cast and plenty of let-the-good-times-roll choreography performed to the sounds of a kicking rock band and you have all the ingredients for two hours of fun.
Where: Paris Las Vegas, 3655 Las Vegas Blvd.
When: 9 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 7 and 10:30 p.m. Saturdays and 5 and 9 p.m. Sundays.
Admission: $113.50, $97 and $80.50.
Phone: (702) 946-4567.
Online: www.playcaesars.com/paris/lasvegas/splash/WWRY/default.htm. `Zumanity'
Subtitled Another Side of Cirque du Soleil, this is the "new age circus' " attempt to keep up with Vegas' increasing dependence on sex as a tourist attraction.
Unfortunately, it succeeds neither as adult entertainment nor as a Cirque extravaganza.
The show, which runs at New York, New York, offers a series of variations on the theme of carnal activity, including tableaux featuring suggested homosexuality of both the male and female variety. There are some fleeting glimpses of nude breasts along the way, but nowhere near what you would see in traditional casino "topless" revues.
However, there is something oddly unerotic about the show, despite the presence of a slew of attractive, provocatively clad bodies simulating many of the ways human sexuality manifests itself.
Neither is it a traditional Cirque fantasia of psychedelic costumes and spacy music, either. Sure, there are the obligatory contortionists and acrobats and you can guess what they're up to. But they seem to be an afterthought amid all of the naughtiness that comes off as too contrived and self-conscious to be truly sexy.
That Zumanity is murkily lit doesn't help. Plus, the soundtrack is forgettable.
If Cirque and sex are your Vegas pleasures, you'd do better seeing O at Bellagio, Mystere at Treasure Island or KA (which opens Nov. 26) at MGM Grand, then hitting one of the city's many strip bars.
Where: New York, New York, 3790 Las Vegas Blvd.
When: 7 and 10 p.m. Fridays through Tuesdays.
Admission: $125, $85 and $65.
Phone: (866) 606-7111.
Online: www.zumanity.com. Clint Holmes
Atlantic City expatriate Clint Holmes has established himself as one of the strip's biggest names. And he has done it the old-fashioned way.
There is no state-of-the-art gadgetry during his 90-minute turn at the Harrah's theater that has been renamed in his honor. Nor are there blinding pyrotechnics or a small army of dancers in outrageous stagewear.
Instead, there is just the man and his music, played by a crackerjack 10-piece band led by Holmes' longtime conductor, Bill Fayne, and Holmes' warm, engaging and energetic stage presence.
Retro? To be sure. But not in a winking, campy way. Instead, Holmes is a classic entertainer who gives his all to please the audience. He does so with interesting interpretations of pop standards, a few original tunes and plenty of between-song banter, usually of the self-deprecating sort.
Of course, none of this would matter if Holmes didn't deliver the vocal goods. But his expressive, versatile baritone, which has improved with age, performs well in the service of songs such as Steve Winwood's "Higher Love," Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover" and The Shirellescq "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" which he reinvents as a silky, rhythm 'n' blues workout.
Amid so much dross in Las Vegas, Holmes is pure gold.
Where: Harrah's Las Vegas, 3475 Las Vegas Blvd.
When: 7:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.
Admission: $59.95.
Phone: (800) 392-9002, ext. 5222.
Online: www.harrahs.com/our_casinos/las/entertainment/clint_holmes. html.
Reach Chuck Darrow at (856) 486-2442 or cdarrow@camden.gannett.com.
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Shoes Are So Hot!
PROFILESHIGH-HEEL HEAVEN
A visit to the madcap world of Manolo Blahnik

BY MICHAEL SPECTER

The first thing I noticed when I entered the two-hundred-year-old town house in Bath that serves as Manolo Blahnik's weekend retreat was the alligator. About three and a half feet long, with olive-brown skin and black hatch marks flecking its body, it was sprawled imperiously across a Queen Anne table at the end of the foyer. The jaws were parted, and the teeth shimmered in the fading light.It was a dismal, rainy afternoon, and we had just come from lunch-though Blahnik had been in no mood to eat. He has a bad back, and it was giving him so much trouble that day that he wore a brace. We rushed through the meal and then walked along the cobblestoned streets toward his house, which sits in the middle of one of those Georgian crescents that provided Jane Austen with just the right setting for "Persuasion." He perked up the second we arrived. Opening the door, Blahnik swept into the hallway and cried out, "Honey, I'm home!"Then, with a manic swirl, he tossed his powder-blue cashmere sports jacket across a bust of the eighteenthcentury actor David Garrick, raced toward his alligator, and embraced it. With the stuffed animal nestled in his arms, Blahnik turned, and, in a voice that somehow blends the diction of Winston Churchill with the accent of the Gabor sisters, said, "There is simply no creature on earth that compares to a Louisiana alligator. Not iguana or python or ostrich or anything else you might want to make into a shoe. I suppose saying that makes me an enemy of the people. I'm sorry. I say kill them humanely, with a shot or something. But give us the skins. I mean, can you imagine where I would be today without wonderful babies like this? Cahnn you i-maah-gine?"Apart from its symbolic stature-assomething forbidden, luxurious, and astonishingly expensive alligator skin is no more essential to the shoes of Manolo Blahnik than lesser leathers, or, for that matter, the dozens of other materials he relies on: satins, silks, brocade, crystal, silver lame, sequins, rhinestones, buckles, bangles, beads, Velcro, pearls, neoprene, rubber, rawhide, chinchilla, lace, mesh, or (for the first time this year, but only for a few of his luckiest and wealthiest customers) diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. They are all just grace notes in the symphony of footwear Manolo Blahnik has composed over the past thirty years.In most seasons, the product of another designer-a perilously highheeled sandal by Jimmy Choo, for example, or a snakeskin sling-back by Christian Louboutin-will become the shoe of the moment. But Blahnik persists, and his creations have become an obsession for thousands of women (and not a few men). With their delicate straps and definitive spikes, Blahnik's shoes are objects of such fanatical devotion that one can easily imagine a fetish known as "the Manolo" retroactively airbrushed onto the pages of "Justine." "Manolo Blahnik's shoes are as good as sex," Madonna has said. "And they last longer." Joan Rivers, who has been an adherent to the cult of Blahnik for many years, and who claims to exercise each day in a pair of his flats, put it more directly. "His shoes are slut pumps," she told me on the phone one day while she was on her treadmill. "You just put on your Manolos and you automatically find yourself saying `Hi, sailor' to even' man that walks by."Shoes have always had meaning. The Chinese bound the feet of women, and the Victorians forced them into confining footwear; simple, comfortable shoes emerged during the French Revolution"Is that your cell phone or are you just glad to see me?"to go along with the idea of equality. Manolo Blahnik's shoes are about sexbold, even slightly menacing sex. They are erotic and feminine and extravagant without ever quite becoming vulgar. They represent a kind of haughty independence. Joan Crawford would have worn them. So would Dorothv Parker. In the fulsome language of Hollywood trade papers, fiiming starlets no longer walk out over the selection of the wrong leading man; they "put their Manolo down." When society women don't get what they want, they "wheel on their Blahniks" and flee, heels clicking. The aura of Blahnik hovers over the television series "Sex and the City," where, as Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker programs her answering machine to say simply, "It's Carrie. I'nm shoe shopping." Parker was a Blahnik fin bef'ol-C ',])Cknew who he was. "You have to learn how to wear his shoes-it doesn't happen overnight," she told me. "But by now I could run a marathon in a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels. I can race out and hail a cab. I can run up Sixth Avenue at full speed. I've destroyed my feet completely, but I don't care. What do you really need your feet for, anyway?"Blahnik's shoes often cost twice as much as those of his competitors, vet many models sell out overnight. They seem to weigh little more than a fistful of feathers and are always made by hand; dozens of people attend to each shoe before it is finished. Still, I wondered if Blahnik's workmanship was really so different from that of other designers. To the uninitiated eve it can he hard to tell. So I called Cynthia Marcus, who is in charge of ladies' shoes at Neiman Marcus, which sells about thirty thousand pairs of Manolo Blahniks each year (at prices that start at about five hundred dollars), to ask where, exactly, he fits in. There was silence on the line while she took a deep breath to roll the question around in her head. "Honev," she said finally-; "how important is Manolo Blahnik? I'll tell you. If he wanted me to change the name of the store to Neiman Blahnik, I'd do it in a heartbeat." The best shoes in the world are made in Italy, and Blahnik keeps four factories there working constantly. He sells nearly a hundred thousand pairs of shoes and boots in America every year and could easily double or triple that number, yet he has no desire to expand. You cannot buy Manolo Blahnik shoes in most European countries or in many American stores. Although he is a citizen of Spain, he makes only token efforts to sell shoes there. He has no stores in Italy, relies on a single outlet in France, and works out of the same cramped shop off the King's Road in London that he has used for twenty-seven years. Blahnik has turned away many offers to make him part of the new wave of conglomeration that has consumed the fashion industry. His sister, Evangelina, and his American partner, George D. Malkemus III, run the company. But as a designer Blahnik works alone. He has no deputies, assistants, entourage, or hangers-on. He draws every shoe himself, and in many cases he also stretches the leather, glues the soles in place, and whittles the last-the wooden form used to shape the shoe. When his shoes are ready to ship, he will sometimes stand on the factory loading platform with a lighter in his hand, singeing loose threads.Blahnik calls his house in Bath "the shoe mausoleum," and he spends as much time there as possible, because he says it's the only place he can truly escape or relax. But Blahnik never escapes, and he never relaxes. He travels constantly between London, where he lives, and Milan, with trips to America and Asia. ("Those little Japanese women are simply mad for me," he said one day, as I watched him sketch shoes for Japanese Vogue. "Can you imagine?") Blahnik, who is fifty-seven, works incessantly, turning dozens of ideas into richly detailed and provocative drawings for the three hundred styles of shoe he will make each year. "If you don't come see what I have in Bath," he said one day when he invited me to visit, "you cannot possibly understand how strange I really am."Blahnik has a daunting, almost imperial bearing; he was born to wear a cape. A friend once described him as Claus von Blahnik-as played, of course, by Jeremy Irons. He dresses crisply, in bespoke clothing. His silver hair is always gelled and his aquiline nose seems to hover in the air like a small bird. It is impossible not to notice him. The Four Seasons in Milan, which is the preferred billet for the nomadic fashion crowd, is often filled with the most jaded people on earth. Yet, once, as I was waiting in the lobby I saw a dozen heads turn away from Naomi Campbell to a more distant figure: Manolo had entered the room. And, as soon as he did, Campbell's head turned, too.Like many of his colleagues at the top of the fashion business, Blahnik is used to getting his way. He can be petulant and eccentric in several languages. In Milan, where he spends nearly three months a near, he must have Room 212 at the Four Seasons. At the St. Regis in New York, it's the tenth floor or nothing. Blahnik will travel to America only on what he calls "the quick plane"-the Concorde. At home, he eats little; on the road, when he can't dine in the hotel, he tries to eat at the same restaurant each night. Blahnik takes three baths a day. ("Are you kidding? When it's hot, I take six.") He calls his eightyfive-year- old mother, in the Canary Islands, almost as often as he bathes. He would never dream of travelling without his version of the nuclear football: a custom-made leather valise full of bonehandled hairbrushes, antique shaving utensils, fifty-year-old Italian linens, and an ample supply of silver mirrors, all of which would have been standard equipment for a gentleman's portmanteau two hundred years ago.Manolo Blahnik has the attention span of a kitten. He rarely finishes a sentence. One minute he will be talking with passion about Nubian folkmusic, which he reveres. And the next he is launched on a critique of young designers, who he feels are far too reliant upon MTV and other artifacts of an instant society. ("These little kiddies today, they don't even know what a shoe is. To them design is what they see in magazines. It's not based on human life. They will suddenly scream, 'Oh my God! My collection is going to be so very Anna May Wong,' because they stayed up late one night and saw a movie. Please.") He reads widely in English and French, and fluently enough in Spanish and Italian. ("My life is a torrential river of books," he told me, and then went on to describe, in torrents, the plot of the latest novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who is one of his favorite writers.)Blahnik appears to have seen everymovie, and he loves discussing casts, crews, and antecedents. Once, I asked whether he had seen the most recent film version of "Romeo and Juliet." He answered, but it is never possible to discuss one film with Blahnik unless you are willing to talk about ten: "Do you mean the Baz Luhrmann 'Romeo and Juliet,' with Claire Danes? I loved it.... I loved it. The best 'Romeo and Juliet' in my memory was Renato Castellani in the fifties, early, with what's the name of that girl, I don't even know the name of that girl now, the English girl ... and Laurence Harvey. Too old, both of them. But a beeeautifiil movie. And then I loved also the other version with Zeffirelli. It was cute. The teen-age one. Don't push me to go on, I'll go mad. But I love that new one that was set in California. It was MTV nonstop. But that's all right. I'm not mad about that child, though. Leonardo. The boy."For a man who inhabits a world ruled by ephemera, Blahnik despises change. He got so upset when the Spanish company that produced his favorite pomade went bankrupt that he considered trying to buy and revive it. (Not long ago, when we were together in Milan, he saw, in one of the city's most expensive pharmacies, a French hair gel, Tenax, his chosen substitute. After the clerk said that the store had sixtyone tubes in stock, he promptly bought them all.) So when Blahnik told me that I would have to travel to Bath and see his shoe archive to appreciate him in all his strangeness, I was pretty sure he was selling my imagination a bit short. I had no idea. M tnolo Blahnik only has eyes for feet. He says that he simply cannot stand the thought of a naked body. When he stops by the Prado, the Louvre, or the British Museum, as he does often, he can talk about the sculptures with great sophistication and in precise detail as long as you ignore the torso. He can distinguish the work of Praxiteles from the Aphrodite of Doidalses with a glance at their chiselled toes. He will talk about the feet of fishermen for hours. (They are ideal, Blahnik says, because a life spent barefoot on the sand "rubs them to perfection.") He also has opinions about arches (the higher the better) and the proper alignment of a woman's toes (the second toe should be slightly longer than the big one). Slovenliness appalls him, and the words "clean" and "groomed," when applied to a human being, are the highest accolades he has to offer. ("Jennifer Aniston came into the store last year. She's a cute little girl, groomed to perfection, and, my God, is she clean.") Blahnik cannot abide bright shades of nail polish, or even the newer, more fashionable muddy dark shades; he finds them all vulgar. ("You should use crimson or a nude color," he says, sternly "Or clear varnish. And that is all.") He can stare at heels all day, and then go home and draw them all night. "I'm simply mad for extremities," he said. "I always have been. The rest of the body seems so dull to me."Thinking about shoes seems to giveBlahnik the energy of a switched-on teen-ager. At lunch, he had been sour and in pain. By the time we arrived at his house, which is shrouded in wisteria, his mood had changed completely. Blahnik likes to work there; the ground floor has an airy study with a large drafting table and a mesmerizing picture of James Dean. "I don't like beautiful boys in general," he said when he saw me staring at the photo. "But he was so much the most beautiful boy." In his bedroom, Blahnik has a Horst photograph that his sister and her daughter gave him; it's of a pair of disembodied legs and feet. He told me that Horst, whom he admired greatly, died in November because "he couldn't bear to confront the new century." When Blahnik talks about artists whose aesthetic vision he admires, his voice soars an octave. And it soars often. "Manolo lives for beauty," Andre Leon Talley, an editor at Vogue and one of Blahnik's oldest American friends, told me. "He is the Proust of shoes. Ugliness makes him bleed." There are books lying everywhere in the house, essays mostly, and biographies, but also great piles of art books, on subjects ranging from medieval churches to nineteenth-century stonemasonry. There are also dozens of videos-everything from "Alphaville" to "Pleasantville" to "Z."By the time we climbed the great stone staircase to the third floor-which is where the shoes begin-Blahnik was practically vibrating. He told me that the house, which offers sweeping views of the pale tiles and red rooftops of Bath, had once been occupied by the actress Helen Mirren. She should see it now. The drawing rooms were built for tea dances and whist. Now every room has cupboards that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, and each shelf is filled with shoes. Imelda Marcos wouldn't believe this place! Pumps! Sling- backs! Sandals! Mules! Shoes in the bathroom and the attic and the closets and the halls. Shoes stuffed into boxes and packed under beds. Shoes have taken over the guest rooms, the bedrooms, the studies. There is only one from each pair, but there are thousands, and they, represent almost everything Manolo Blahnik has ever made. "Look at this place," he said with real pride as we reached the landing. "Thereare shoes here to make you vomit."When Blahnik opened the first of the cupboard doors on the third floor, it was as if he had stumbled into a children's fable, something he had never seen before. He gasped. " Look. Look at these shoes. Look. This is what I love," he said, picking up a shoe that would seem, to most eyes, the antithesis of his style. It was flat, dark, heavily brocaded. A court shoe with almost no heel. "These arc the things that people don't want from me. The people want high heels. They want sex. They want danger. That's hdisease. I'm so incredibly bored with sex. I don't want to hear about it ever again."Blahnik was whipping through his collection now. He grabbed a satin mule, the shoe he is perhaps most famous for-the decadent backless bedroom slipper that he reinvented as a bawdy street shoe. It is a style that has been copied by every other designer. "Here it is. The mule. It's horrible! What was I thinking? If a shoe fetishist saw this, he would go nuts." Then he grimaced. "I have one, you know ... a shoe fetishist. He is in prison somewhere in America. He writes me letters. Sends them by express mail. He is a madman. He says"-and now he slipped into a perfect imitation of Hannibal Lecter-" `The only thing that will get me through the day is seeing a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels.' Do you have any idea how much that freaks me out?"This seemed a bit odd coming from the man who took stiletto heels from the world of prostitutes and introduced them into society. Didn't you create it all, I asked? What was the point of the Absolut Blahnik advertisement, for example, the one with the model drifting on a raft in the moat of the Vittskovle Castle, wearing only a bathing suit and a pair of Blahnik's shiny, spiked, black leather boots, which crept up above her knee-hoots that would have sent Leopold von Sacher-Masoch into an uncontrollable frenzy? It's not as if the sexual power of the high heel were unknown. High heels change a woman's posture and her gait. They accen- z tuate the length and contour of the ankle and leg while curving the foot, making it seem smaller. High heels are an erotic pedestal. They tilt the breastsforward, pull the stomach in, and push the rear out. And that's before you take a single teetering, contorted step. As William A. Rossi observed in his bizarre 1976 book, "The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe," "Women have always had an affinity for fragile foundations and willowy walking, and men have always responded erotically to the sight of it."Blahnik knows this well. "I understand that some people associate high heels with sex," he conceded. "To me, there is so much more. I happen to love artifice in a woman. Without that, there is no mystery. High heels create artifice. It's the way you walk. You create a motion, a space, it's sinuous. You become a living sculpture. Even if it's not successful sometimes. It's so exciting. It's the transformation that I live for. The sexual part means nothing."This kind of talk drives George Malkemus crazy. Malkemus, who has run the American end of the business for nearly twenty years, is a pleasant, compact fellow with a good head for numbers and an uncanny ability to endure Blahnik's tectonic shifts in mood. "I have heard it a thousand times," he told me. "All I can say is that when Manolo sees the shoe, just when he sees it, it's orgasmic. For him, that shoe isn't really about sex. The shoe is sex."Obsessives stalk Blahnik. On the train from Bath to London one day, a woman recognized him and started talking about shoes. After a few minutes, he stood up and said, "Madam, I am sorry to say, that I am visiting my niece, who lives in Swindon. I must now leave the train," and he fled. One terribly famous movie star used to wander frequently into his New York store and sit for hours, watching women try on shoes. Blahnik appears each year in America with his new collections for Neiman Marcus, and women swoon when he shows up. "When Manolo goes out to our Beverly Hills store, it's an absolute mania," Cynthia Marcus told me. "You cannot believe what happens. We will do two or three hundred thousand dollars' worth of business in a couple of days. In one store. The women fall all over him. They bring him bags full of shoes to sign. They are insane."Blahnik autographs all the shoes,high on the arch, so his signature won't wear away. It is a peculiar fact about Blahnik that women feel they can tell him anything. Customers will describe the most intimate details of their sex lives-and the effect his shoes have had on them. There are times when their comments leave him gasping for air. "Sometimes I just have to say, `Madam, please, 1 must ask you to refrain,' " he told me in Bath as we worked our way through his shoes. "Honestly, where were these people raised?" I n June, a book about Blahnik and his work will appear in England, and, with the help of his twenty-six-yearold niece, an architect who recently graduated from Cambridge, he has spent a good deal of time cataloguing and organizing his shoes. The book is written by a British journalist, and Blahnik has no connection with the project, although he was granted the right to approve the pictures. He views the book mostly as a way to put his designs into some coherent order. But Blahnik wants me to see that, while he loves his work, he doesn't take it all that seriously. He pulled out a classic hiking boot made in Corinthian leather and a construction boot with a threeinch heel. ("Isn't this faaab?") "This is called the Prairies," he said of another. "Look, it's an Indian moccasin in high heels. And this is quite funny, and what about the L. L. Bean look over here. And look, look! There are work-boot high heels. Isn't that camp? And these are high-heeled gardening shoes. Very practical."He means that, by the way. Blahnik says he loves it when women wear his shoes in the mud. He may be obsessed with cleanliness, but he likes his shoes to get a workout. "Best of all would be in stables," he told Inc. "I want them to be dirty." Blahnik remembers the genesis of every sandal or sling-back that lines the wall. "Look at this-isn't that sick?-it's for a wedding in Africa, where the girls have to walk in highheeled boots." He held out an elaborate and beautifully made ankle boot, fashioned from pony skin, with open toes and lots of eyelets.I asked what he meant about a wedding in Africa. "I don't know. I made it up. It's not normal. You wouldn't wear itin England. It has to be hot. In Africa you can wear this. Not here. In Africa." He raked through dozens of shoes at great speed. "This one is Kate Moss's favorite shoe. Absolutely: She has about a million pairs." Next, he grabbed a feathery mule that he said would have been perfect for Marilyn Monroe. He went on to cite her famous remark about not knowing who invented the high heel but that "all girls everywhere owe him a lot." He talked about her for a while, so I asked whether he had heard Elizabeth Hurley's recent comment that she would have to kill herself if she ever became as fat as Monroe. Blahnik froze. "Marilyn Monroe fat?" he shrieked. "How daaarrre the bitch? How dare she talk that way about Marilyn Monroe, the woman who marked the century?"Blahnik claims that he wants his shoes to be comfortable. He noted that while Roger Vivier-who is often credited with inventing the stiletto heelwas a brilliant designer, "it must also be said that he nearly crippled an entire generation of women." A surprising number of Blahnik's customers did tell me that his shoes are relatively easy to wear. I heard from quite a few others, however, including some of his fans, who said that they were among the most highly refined torture chambers ever invented. One friend bombarded me with E-mail calling him a misogynist and a psychopath. "There are lots of women who think high heels are an evil conspiracy to cripple women by men who didn't like their mothers," Valerie Steele told me. Steele is the chief curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the author of "Shoes: A Lexicon of Style." "It's all really, kind of silly." Still, walking aroundin three-inch heels can't be as pleasant assinking your feet into a pair of anatomically correct Birkenstocks (a word, bythe way, that Blahnik can't bring himselfto utter). I asked if he ever felt sorry forall those women teetering through theirlives on the spikiest of high-heeledshoes."Oh, my God, they love it," he said."How could I feel sorry for them? Sorry.Sorry for who?"By now, we had made it to the fourthfloor, and Blahnik's enthusiasm showedno sign of flagging. "Oh, this is Madonna's shoe from the'Evita' premiere. love Madonna, you have to admire her. She hides her lack of talent so well."On a wall nearby, there is a picture of Blahnik from 1971, when he lived in Notting Hill. A mop of hair is piled on top of his head. With bangs. He looks mod, swingerish, almost cool. He is much more distinguished-looking now."Some kind of bitter ones say the doctor orders them to stop wearing my shoes," he continued. "They say, 'I can't wear this and I can't wear that.' I say, '.Madam, buy flat shoes.' It is not mv understanding that anybody anywhere makes a person buy an expensive highheeled shoe. There arc women who like the shoes I make. For other women, there are other shoes."Then, as an afterthought, he added, "My mother cannot even walk in flats. She doesn't know how."We reached the final set of cabinets near the back of the house-his fantasy collection, full of pastels and flowers. "This is the Escher," Blahnik said, pulling out a psychotropic pump. "This was for Marianne Faithfull when she did drugs. Look at the lime-green sandal. It's the C. Z. Guest look. I did this one for Blanca. Look at the little foot. She has such tiny, tiny feet. Look. That was my- first shoe. My very first shoe1971. How embarrassing." It's a giant platform heel in turquoise and yellow. He hates platforms and never made another. "They are hideous. Simply hideous. Anything to do with the current rage makes me sick. Did you ever watch the fashion channel? If you look at it for ten minutes then you realize how horrible and stupid this business is. How shameful and pretentious."There was just an attic left, and it could be reached only by a dangerouslooking ladder. I passed. " Nothing there but shoes," he cackled. "Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. It is so sick. Isn't this just the sickest thing you have ever seen in your life? Come on, he honest."Before I could say a word, though, Blahnik let out a long, deep sigh. "Oh, God, I'm in Heaven." M anolo Blahnik was born in 1942, in the Canary Islands. He remembers it as a "paradise" of Renaissance buildings, colonial houses, and spare, empty churches. Blahnik's father, who died in 1986, was originally from Czechoslovakia, and his mother) kmFrom top: Manolo Blahnik at his factory in Milan; the designerscu/pting his new heelforspring/sianmer; 2000; thefinished product in his Manhattan boutique. Photograph, s by Michael Roberts.is Spanish. They ran a banana plantation there because, as Blahnik put it, "on the Canary Islands before the war there was nothing but bananas and me and my sister and my, parents." His mother, who still lives in Santa Cruz de la Palma, was a soignee sophisticate who travelled to Paris and Monte Carlo and Madrid to shop. At home, she used to whittle clogs because she wasn't impressed with the workmanship of the town cobbler. "As a boy, I got attracted to peasant shoes," Blahnik told me. "My mother would make Catalan espadrilles with a black ribbon in the middle. I thought that they were so exciting. I still do."It was often a lonely childhood, though Blahnik says he never minded. For fun, he would capture lizards and make shoes for them out of tinfoil that his mother saved from cartons of Camel cigarettes. Blahnik also made shoesof ribbon or lace-fir dogs, cats, birds, and anything else he could get his hands on. "I lived a complete fantasy as a child. There was nothing there but what came out of our brains." Even after the war ended, Blahnik said, the Canary Islands remained isolated. "We went years without publications from Europe or the Iberian Peninsula. We got everything by boat from Argentina. My mother had Vogue, of course, and Bazaar, and my father took Time and Life. We would wait every Friday for the boats to dock with all those packages of magazines. I can still see them wrapped up so neatly and tied in bundles. And that was my life. Can you imagine?"13v the time he was twelve, Blahnik and his sister, Evangelina, who is a year younger, were as inundated with culture as two children living on a remote Spanish island could be-piano lessons, ballet, instruction in several languages, even Swedish gymnastics. "We tried everything," he recalled. "We had this magical setting for our youth. I live there still in my memory." Blahnik remains close to his sister, who runs the European part of the business from their office in London. Evangelina has the same silver hair as Manolo and the same aristocratic bearing, yet she is as reserved as her brother is flamboyant.Blahnik's father had hoped he would become a diplomat. ("Can you imagine? Me? Patiently dealing with the fate of nations?") After studying politics and law at the University of Geneva, he quickly moved into literature and architecture. From there, he went to Paris before settling in London at the end of the sixties. For awhile, Blahnik thought he wanted to design stage sets. With a friend, the photographer Eric Boman, he travelled to New York in 1971, because "that was where you went to make it.""When you are young, you don't have a clue," he told me. "You just think you can do it if you try" Paloma Picasso, who is a lifelong friend, arranged for Blahnik to show his drawings to Diana Vreeland, then the editor of Vogue. "My God, how I was terrified. I am still terrified thinking about it. She looked at my drawings," he went on, "and then she started to scream." At this point, Blahnik broke into what I can onlyimagine is a pretty fair Vreeland imitation: " `How amuuusing. Amusing.' That is all she kept saying. Amusing.' She asked me how long I was in New York, and she said, `You can do accessories very well. Why don't you do that? Go make shoes. Your shoes in these drawings are so amusing.' I did what she told rne. It was like a commandment from God."Blahnik went home and got to work. He started small, needed little money, and succeeded at once. But he didn't really know what he was doing. "It took many years to realize how to do shoes, learn how to make them lovely and arty and technically perfect." In fact, his first collection was infamous. "I forgot to put in heels that would support the shoe," he told me. "When it got hot, the heels started to wobble. It was like walking on quicksand." Blahnik remains in London for convenience. "It's like an airport to me," he said. "Though I do Like certain things about the English. The madness, the eccentricity. London is like a multi-multi whatever. It's fusion. It's everything. But I sometimes wonder if I should have stayed in America. I worship the American women, after all. They are as tough as nails, and they have these incredible minds. They scare me. I love that." I caught up with Blahnik and George Malkemus around Christmas, in Milan. Spending time with there when they arc together is a bit like being thrust into the cast of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" ("This is my idea. George, and they are my shoes. Can I talk?" Blahnik blurted out at dinner one night, when Malkemus was describing a plan to make limited editions of shoes that will cost as much as fifteen thousand dollars a pair. "I swear, George, if you interrupt one more time I will stab you.")When Malkemus is in Milan, they spend most of their time at the factories, making sure that Blahnik's vision will translate into enough shots-and the right shoes-to satisfy their customers. ("I could care less whether a shoe I make sells," Blahnik told me more than once. "That's what I have George for.") Malkemus agrees, sort of. When I visited him at Blahnik's boutique in Manhattan, he showed me a pair of sling-backs called the Carolyne, named for the New York socialite Carolyne Roehm. It is Blahnik's most successful shoe. "This is beauty and sex and what every woman wants to have on her foot," Malkemus said. "Now, look at this shoe"-he pointed to a sandal with fringed leather running in various directions down the foot. Malkernus squirmed when he touched it, as if it had fleas. "Manolo adores this. Will we have this shoe in the shop? Of course. Will we sell more than ten pairs? Never.Blahnik's favorite factory is run by a family with whom he has worked for twenty-five years, but, on our way there, he asked me not to mention their names. "There are only a few things that can really get me going," he said. "Industrial espionage is one of them." Malkemus turned from the front of the Mercedes to tell Blahnik that, for0"She did only twenty-eight of the thirty-two fouettes in the BlackSwan'pas de deux... or are my eyes deceiving me?" the third time in as many weeks, a fairly well-known competitor had asked this factory to make his shoes."I can't take it anymore," Blahnik shouted as we pulled up to a tidy suburban building that looked more like a school than a factory. "It's not right. It's not ethical. I don't go to people's homes, to where they have been for twenty-five years, and steal from them. `I want your shoes. I want your factory.' How demeaning. How vile. How can he even face himself?"A handsome woman named Nadia walked us through the factory to the office. It is not unusual for other successful designers to fax their drawings to Italy and then to check in from time to time. Blahnik would make every pair of shoes himself if he could. I watched as he cut patterns-just as a dressmaker would and shaped the fabric to fit the last. He then laid strips of masking tape across the shoe so that he could glue on pearls, sequins, or beads."So opulent. So modern. Madame Vreeland would have gone mad for these." Blahnik was looking at a new baby-blue-and-lavender crocodile shoe with jewels set into the heel. "I can hear her now," and he put his high-dame voice back on-"'Give me opulence. Give me opulence. Nothing less will do'"--before slipping back into himself. "These could be for the Queen of Naples Ball. Maybe. Or for a tryst. Yes. A trysting shoe. But these shoes are so ridiculous. Who has the money to spend four thousand dollars on a crocodile shoe? What am I doing, George? Have I completely lost my mind?" I watched as he scraped an almost invisible drop of glue from the side of a thousand-dollar stiletto."What will happen to your brand when you stop?" I asked. The question surprised him. " Well, I'm not going to turn myself into McDonald's, if that's what you mean. They're just shoes. I'll make as many as I can, and when I die I suspect the world will survive."Lunch had been spread out along the worktables, but when a secretary announced that the man who makes their finest lasts had arrived Blahnik was out of his seat in five seconds. He dove across his desk, narrowly missing a plate of mozzarella. He grabbed a dozen drawings. "My God, George, get theothers. We must hide the drawings.""What's going on?" I asked, when the sheaf of papers had been temporarily deposited in the trash basket.Blahnik looked at me darkly. "That man is very talented," he told me. "There are not many like him left. But I don't trust him. He talks to Prada. I know it. He talks to Gucci, he talks to everyone." After returning from the factory, we decided to take advantage of the late shopping hours. The warm weather and Christmas season had conspired to fill the stores along the Via della Spiga with half the population of Milan. It was hard just to make our way down the old stone streets.We passed a billboard that displayed a vintage 1960 ad for Moet & Chandon, which featured a picture of Cary Grant and Kim Novak. "Oh, Kimmy, Kimmy, Kimmy!" Blahnik shouted, loud enough to turn heads. Then he ran up to the ad and kissed the Plexiglas that covered her face. "I adore you. Justadore you. I always have." We looked at the Christmas decorations in a few windows, but soon it was time to make our way back to the hotel. Before we did, though, I asked Blahnik if there was a "right woman" to wear his shoes, a muse. "Not at all," he said. " They don't have to be glamorous. I don't care who wears them. After I make them, the rest doesn't matter." Malkemus rolled his eyes and whispered, "Bullshit." Then he pointed to an elegant young Indian woman. She was dressed in a plain sari and a cashmere shawl. She moved as if there were a cushion of air between her and the ground. "Manolo," Malkemus said mischievously. "Look at that." Blahnik turned, but said nothing as she strode by. Then he let out a kind of yelp."Did you see that, George!" he shouted, completely beside himself. "She was wearing my clear heel. She was wearing it, George, and it looked perfect. It was made for her. My God, George, what a joy. Wasn't she beautiful? Wasn't she absolutely beautifiil?"

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 11:28 PM

 
Halloween Classic Story
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOWby Washington Irving
A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,For ever flushing round a summer sky. Castle of Indolence.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail, and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market-town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days.
Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley, or rather lap of land, among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail, or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around, and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.
Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.
The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper, having been buried in the church-yard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church-yard before daybreak.
Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known, at all the country firesides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative- to dream dreams, and see apparitions.
I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom.
In this by-place of nature, there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, "tarried," in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut; a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
His school-house was a low building of one large room, rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of old copy-books. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the window shutters; so that, though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out; an idea most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eel-pot. The school-house stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by, and a formidable birch tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his pupils' voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard of a drowsy summer's day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command; or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, "Spare the rod and spoil the child."- Ichabod Crane's scholars certainly were not spoiled.
I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel potentates of the school, who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity; taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little, tough, wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called "doing his duty by their parents;" and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that "he would remember it, and thank him for it the longest day he had to live."
When school hours were over, he was even the companion and playmate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy some of the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers, whose children he instructed. With these he lived successively a week at a time; thus going the rounds of the neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied up in a cotton handkerchief.
That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic patrons, who are apt to consider the costs of schooling a grievous burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones, he had various ways of rendering himself both useful and agreeable. He assisted the farmers occasionally in the lighter labors of their farms; helped to make hay; mended the fences; took the horses to water; drove the cows from pasture; and cut wood for the winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the dominant dignity and absolute sway with which he lorded it in his little empire, the school, and became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating. He found favor in the eyes of the mothers, by petting the children, particularly the youngest; and like the lion bold, which whilom so magnanimously the lamb did hold, he would sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot for whole hours together.
In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him, on Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above all the rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill-pond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by divers little make-shifts in that ingenious way which is commonly denominated "by hook and by crook," the worthy pedagogue got on tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of the labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it.
The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver tea-pot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the church-yard, between services on Sundays! gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overrun the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.
From his half itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house; so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's history of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will* from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token.
His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought, or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes;- and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe, at hearing his nasal melody, "in linked sweetness long drawn out," floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.
Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was, to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!
But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show his face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! - With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window!- How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path!- How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! - and how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was- a woman.
Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.
Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is not to be wondered at, that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his eyes; more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those every thing was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived.- His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it; at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens; whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart- sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.
The pedagogue's mouth watered, as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind's eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.
As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.
When he entered the house the conquest of his heart was complete. It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high-ridged, but lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboring river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the place of usual residence. Here, rows of resplendent pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag of wool ready to be spun; in another a quantity of linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs, and dark mahogany tables, shone like mirrors; andirons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops; mock-oranges and conch-shells decorated the mantel-piece; strings of various colored birds' eggs were suspended above it: a great ostrich egg was hung from the centre of the room, and a corner cupboard, knowingly left open, displayed immense treasures of old silver and well-mended china. From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight, the peace of his mind was at an end, and his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel.
In this enterprise, however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight-errant of yore, who seldom had any thing but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily-conquered adversaries, to contend with; and had to make his way merely through gates of iron and brass, and walls of adamant, to the castle keep, where the lady of his heart was confined; all which he achieved as easily as a man would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were for ever presenting new difficulties and impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset every portal to her heart; keeping a watchful and angry eye upon each other, but ready to fly out in the common cause against any new competitor.
Among these the most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance.
From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb, he had received the nickname of BromM Bones, by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar. He was foremost at all races and cock-fights; and, with the ascendancy which bodily strength acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in all disputes, setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with an air and tone admitting of no gainsay or appeal. He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and, with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom. He had three or four boon companions, who regarded him as their model, and at the head of whom he scoured the country, attending every scene of feud or merriment for miles round. In cold weather he was distinguished by a fur cap, surmounted with a flaunting fox's tail; and when the folks at a country gathering descried this well-known crest at a distance, whisking about among a squad of hard riders, they always stood by for a squall. Sometimes his crew would be heard dashing along past the farmhouses at midnight, with whoop and halloo, like a troop of Don Cossacks; and the old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment till the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, "Ay, there goes Brom Bones and his gang!" The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good will; and when any madcap prank, or rustic brawl, occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.
This rantipole hero had for some time singled out the blooming Katrina for the object of his uncouth gallantries, and though his amorous toyings were something like the gentle caresses and endearments of a bear, yet it was whispered that she did not altogether discourage his hopes. Certain it is, his advances were signals for rival candidates to retire, who felt no inclination to cross a lion in his amours; insomuch, that when his horse was seen tied to Van Tassel's paling, on a Sunday night, a sure sign that his master was courting, or, as it is termed, "sparking," within, all other suitors passed by in despair, and carried the war into other quarters.
Such was the formidable rival with whom Ichabod Crane had to contend, and, considering all things, a stouter man than he would have shrunk from the competition, and a wiser man would have despaired. He had, however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form and spirit like a supple-jack- yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away- jerk! he was as erect, and carried his head as high as ever.
To have taken the field openly against his rival would have been madness; for he was not a man to be thwarted in his amours, any more than that stormy lover, Achilles. Ichabod, therefore, made his advances in a quiet and gently-insinuating manner. Under cover of his character of singing-master, he made frequent visits at the farmhouse; not that he had any thing to apprehend from the meddlesome interference of parents, which is so often a stumbling-block in the path of lovers. Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything. His notable little wife, too, had enough to do to attend to her housekeeping and manage her poultry; for, as she sagely observed, ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves. Thus while the busy dame bustled about the house, or plied her spinning-wheel at one end of the piazza, honest Balt would sit smoking his evening pipe at the other, watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior, who, armed with a sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of the barn. In the meantime, Ichabod would carry on his suit with the daughter by the side of the spring under the great elm, or sauntering along in the twilight, that hour so favorable to the lover's eloquence.
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for the man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette, is indeed a hero. Certain it is, this was not the case with the redoubtable Brom Bones; and from the moment Ichabod Crane made his advances, the interests of the former evidently declined; his horse was no longer seen tied at the palings on Sunday nights, and a deadly feud gradually arose between him and the preceptor of Sleepy Hollow.
Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature, would fain have carried matters to open warfare, and have settled their pretensions to the lady, according to the mode of those most concise and simple reasoners, the knights-errant of yore- by single combat; but Ichabod was too conscious of the superior might of his adversary to enter the lists against him: he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would "double the schoolmaster up, and lay him on a shelf of his own school-house;" and he was too wary to give him an opportunity.
There was something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival. Ichabod became the object of whimsical persecution to Bones, and his gang of rough riders. They harried his hitherto peaceful domains; smoked out his singing school, by stopping up the chimney; broke into the school-house at night, in spite of its formidable fastenings of withe and window stakes, and turned every thing topsy-turvy: so that the poor schoolmaster began to think all the witches in the country held their meetings there. But what was still more annoying, Brom took all opportunities of turning him into ridicule in presence of his mistress, and had a scoundrel dog whom he taught to whine in the most ludicrous manner, and introduced as a rival of Ichabod's to instruct her in psalmody.
In this way matters went on for some time, without producing any material effect on the relative situation of the contending powers. On a fine autumnal afternoon, Ichabod, in pensive mood, sat enthroned on the lofty stool whence he usually watched all the concerns of his little literary realm. In his hand he swayed a ferrule, that sceptre of despotic power; the birch of justice reposed on three nails, behind the throne, a constant terror to evil doers; while on the desk before him might be seen sundry contraband articles and prohibited weapons, detected upon the persons of idle urchins; such as half-munched apples, popguns, whirligigs, fly-cages, and whole legions of rampant little paper gamecocks. Apparently there had been some appalling act of justice recently inflicted, for his scholars were all busily intent upon their books, or slyly whispering behind them with one eye kept upon the master; and a kind of buzzing stillness reigned throughout the school-room. It was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a negro, in tow-cloth jacket and trowsers, a round-crowned fragment of a hat, like the cap of Mercury, and mounted on the back of a ragged, wild, half-broken colt, which he managed with a rope by way of halter. He came clattering up to the school door with an invitation to Ichabod to attend a merry-making or "quilting frolic," to be held that evening at Mynheer Van Tassel's; and having delivered his message with that air of importance, and effort at fine language, which a negro is apt to display on petty embassies of the kind, he dashed over the brook, and was seen scampering away up the hollow, full of the importance and hurry of his mission.
All was now bustle and hubbub in the late quiet school-room. The scholars were hurried through their lessons, without stopping at trifles; those who were nimble skipped over half with impunity, and those who were tardy, had a smart application now and then in the rear, to quicken their speed, or help them over a tall word. Books were flung aside without being put away on the shelves, inkstands were overturned, benches thrown down, and the whole school was turned loose an hour before the usual time, bursting forth like a legion of young imps, yelping and racketing about the green, in joy at their early emancipation.
The gallant Ichabod now spent at least an extra half hour at his toilet, brushing and furbishing up his best, and indeed only suit of rusty black, and arranging his looks by a bit of broken looking-glass, that hung up in the school-house. That he might make his appearance before his mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman, of the name of Hans Van Ripper, and, thus gallantly mounted, issued forth, like a knight-errant in quest of adventures. But it is meet I should, in the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed. The animal he bestrode was a broken-down plough-horse, that had outlived almost every thing but his viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring and spectral; but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it. Still he must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we may judge from the name he bore of Gunpowder. He had, in fact, been a favorite steed of his master's, the choleric Van Ripper, who was a furious rider, and had infused, very probably, some of his own spirit into the animal; for, old and broken-down as he looked, there was more of the lurking devil in him than in any young filly in the country.
Ichabod was a suitable figure for such a steed. He rode with short stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle; his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers'; he carried his whip perpendicularly in his hand, like a sceptre, and, as his horse jogged on, the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings. A small wool hat rested on the top of his nose, for so his scanty strip of forehead might be called; and the skirts of his black coat fluttered out almost to the horse's tail. Such was the appearance of Ichabod and his steed, as they shambled out of the gate of Hans Van Ripper, and it was altogether such an apparition as is seldom to be met with in broad daylight.
It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day, the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble-field.
The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking, from bush to bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them. There was the honest cock-robin, the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering blackbirds flying in sable clouds; and the golden-winged woodpecker, with his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedar bird, with its red-tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail, and its little monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb, in his gay light-blue coat and white underclothes; screaming and chattering, nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with every songster of the grove.
As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odor of the bee-hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.
Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and "sugared suppositions," he journeyed along the sides of a range of hills which look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson. The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down into the west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark-gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.
It was toward evening that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Herr Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the adjacent country. Old farmers, a spare leathern-faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles. Their brisk withered little dames, in close crimped caps, long-waisted shortgowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and pincushions, and gay calico pockets hanging on the outside. Buxom lasses, almost as antiquated as their mothers, excepting where a straw hat, a fine ribbon, or perhaps a white frock, gave symptoms of city innovation. The sons, in short square-skirted coats with rows of stupendous brass buttons, and their hair generally queued in the fashion of the times, especially if they could procure an eel-skin for the purpose, it being esteemed, throughout the country, as a potent nourisher and strengthener of the hair.
Brom Bones, however, was the hero of the scene, having come to the gathering on his favorite steed Daredevil, a creature, like himself, full of mettle and mischief, and which no one but himself could manage. He was, in fact, noted for preferring vicious animals, given to all kinds of tricks, which kept the rider in constant risk of his neck, for he held a tractable well-broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit.
Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlor of Van Tassel's mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses, with their luxurious display of red and white; but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly tea-pot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst- Heaven bless the mark! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty.
He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer; and whose spirits rose with eating as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor. Then, he thought, how soon he'd turn his back upon the old school-house; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call him comrade!
Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests with a face dilated with content and good humor, round and jolly as the harvest moon. His hospitable attentions were brief, but expressive, being confined to a shake of the hand, a slap on the shoulder, a loud laugh, and a pressing invitation to "fall to, and help themselves."
And now the sound of the music from the common room, or hall, summoned to the dance. The musician was an old gray-headed negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a century. His instrument was as old and battered as himself. The greater part of the time he scraped on two or three strings, accompanying every movement of the bow with a motion of the head; bowing almost to the ground, and stamping with his foot whenever a fresh couple were to start.
Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle; and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you would have thought Saint Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring before you in person. He was the admiration of all the negroes; who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their white eye-balls, and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear. How could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous? the lady of his heart was his partner in the dance, and smiling graciously in reply to all his amorous oglings; while Brom Bones, sorely smitten with love and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner.
When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to a knot of the sager folks, who, with old Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the piazza, gossiping over former times, and drawing out long stories about the war.
This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, was one of those highly-favored places which abound with chronicle and great men. The British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding, and infested with refugees, cow-boys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each story-teller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit.
There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-bearded Dutchman, who had nearly taken a British frigate with an old iron nine-pounder from a mud breastwork, only that his gun burst at the sixth discharge. And there was an old gentleman who shall be nameless, being too rich a mynheer to be lightly mentioned, who, in the battle of Whiteplains, being an excellent master of defence, parried a musket ball with a small sword, insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade, and glance off at the hilt: in proof of which, he was ready at any time to show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There were several more that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand in bringing the war to a happy termination.
But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities.
The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Van Tassel's, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the church-yard.
The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on a knoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime; but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. This was one of the favorite haunts of the headless horseman; and the place where he was most frequently encountered. The tale was told of old Brouwer, a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts, how he met the horseman returning from his foray into Sleepy Hollow, and was obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge; when the horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old Brouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-tops with a clap of thunder.
This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous adventure of Brom Bones, who made light of the galloping Hessian as an arrant jockey. He affirmed that, on returning one night from the neighboring village of Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but, just as they came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash of fire.
All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with which men talk in the dark, the countenances of the listeners only now and then receiving a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe, sank deep in the mind of Ichabod. He repaid them in kind with large extracts from his invaluable author, Cotton Mather, and added many marvellous events that had taken place in his native State of Connecticut, and fearful sights which he had seen in his nightly walks about Sleepy Hollow.
The revel now gradually broke up. The old farmers gathered together their families in their wagons, and were heard for some time rattling along the hollow roads, and over the distant hills. Some of the damsels mounted on pillions behind their favorite swains, and their light-hearted laughter, mingling with the clatter of hoofs, echoed along the silent woodlands, sounding fainter and fainter until they gradually died away- and the late scene of noise and frolic was all silent and deserted. Ichabod only lingered behind, according to the custom of country lovers, to have a tete-a-tete with the heiress, fully convinced that he was now on the high road to success. What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen.
Oh these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I!- Let it suffice to say, Ichabod stole forth with the air of one who had been sacking a henroost, rather than a fair lady's heart.
Without looking to the right or left to notice the scene of rural wealth, on which he had so often gloated, he went straight to the stable, and with several hearty cuffs and kicks, roused his steed most uncourteously from the comfortable quarters in which he was soundly sleeping, dreaming of mountains of corn and oats, and whole valleys of timothy and clover.
It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavy-hearted and crest-fallen, pursued his travel homewards, along the sides of the lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and which he had traversed so cheerily in the afternoon. The hour was as dismal as himself. Far below him, the Tappan Zee spread its dusky and indistinct waste of waters, with here and there the tall mast of a sloop, riding quietly at anchor under the land. In the dead hush of midnight, he could even hear the barking of the watch dog from the opposite shore of the Hudson; but it was so vague and faint as only to give an idea of his distance from this faithful companion of man.
Now and then, too, the long-drawn crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farm-house away among the hills- but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog, from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably, and turning suddenly in his bed.
All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon, now came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. He had never felt so lonely and dismayed. He was, moreover, approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost stories had been laid. In the centre of the road stood an enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above all the other trees of the neighborhood, and formed a kind of landmark. Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air. It was connected with the tragical story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by; and was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree. The common people regarded it with a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange sights and doleful lamentations told concerning it.
As Ichabod approached this fearful tree, he began to whistle: he thought his whistle was answered- it was but a blast sweeping sharply through the dry branches. As he approached a little nearer, he thought he saw something white, hanging in the midst of the tree - he paused and ceased whistling; but on looking more narrowly, perceived that it was a place where the tree had been scathed by lightning, and the white wood laid bare. Suddenly he heard a groan- his teeth chattered and his knees smote against the saddle: it was but the rubbing of one huge bough upon another, as they were swayed about by the breeze. He passed the tree in safety, but new perils lay before him.
About two hundred yards from the tree a small brook crossed the road, and ran into a marshy and thickly-wooded glen, known by the name of Wiley's swamp. A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This has ever since been considered a haunted stream, and fearful are the feelings of the schoolboy who has to pass it alone after dark.
As he approached the stream his heart began to thump; he summoned up, however, all his resolution, gave his horse half a score of kicks in the ribs, and attempted to dash briskly across the bridge; but instead of starting forward, the perverse old animal made a lateral movement, and ran broadside against the fence. Ichabod, whose fears increased with the delay, jerked the reins on the other side, and kicked lustily with the contrary foot: it was all in vain; his steed started, it is true, but it was only to plunge to the opposite side of the road into a thicket of brambles and alder bushes.
The schoolmaster now bestowed both whip and heel upon the starveling ribs of old Gunpowder, who dashed forward, snuffling and snorting, but came to a stand just by the bridge, with a suddenness that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a splashy tramp by the side of the bridge caught the sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller.
The hair of the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head with terror. What was to be done? To turn and fly was now too late; and besides, what chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin, if such it was, which could ride upon the wings of the wind? Summoning up, therefore, a show of courage, he demanded in stammering accents - "Who are you?" He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides of the inflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth with involuntary fervor into a psalm tune. Just then the shadowy object of alarm put itself in motion, and, with a scramble and a bound, stood at once in the middle of the road. Though the night was dark and dismal, yet the form of the unknown might now in some degree be ascertained. He appeared to be a horseman of large dimensions, and mounted on a black horse of powerful frame. He made no offer of molestation or sociability, but kept aloof on one side of the road, jogging along on the blind side of old Gunpowder, who had now got over his fright and waywardness.
Ichabod, who had no relish for this strange midnight companion, and bethought himself of the adventure of Brom Bones with the Galloping Hessian, now quickened his steed, in hopes of leaving him behind. The stranger, however, quickened his horse to an equal pace. Ichabod pulled up, and fell into a walk, thinking to lag behind- the other did the same. His heart began to sink within him; he endeavored to resume his psalm tune, but his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a stave. There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion, that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck, on perceiving that he was headless!- but his horror was still more increased, on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle: his terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks and blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement, to give his companion the slip- but the spectre started full jump with him. Away then they dashed, through thick and thin; stones flying, and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod's flimsy garments fluttered in the air, as he stretched his long lank body away over his horse's head, in the eagerness of his flight.
They had now reached the road which turns off to Sleepy Hollow; but Gunpowder, who seemed possessed with a demon, instead of keeping up it, made an opposite turn, and plunged headlong down hill to the left. This road leads through a sandy hollow, shaded by trees for about a quarter of a mile, where it crosses the bridge famous in goblin story, and just beyond swells the green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.
As yet the panic of the steed had given his unskillful rider an apparent advantage in the chase; but just as he had got half way through the hollow, the girths of the saddle gave way, and he felt it slipping from under him. He seized it by the pommel, and endeavored to hold it firm, but in vain; and had just time to save himself by clasping old Gunpowder round the neck, when the saddle fell to the earth, and he heard it trampled under foot by his pursuer. For a moment the terror of Hans Van Ripper's wrath passed across his mind - for it was his Sunday saddle; but this was no time for petty fears; the goblin was hard on his haunches; and (unskillful rider that he was!) he had much ado to maintain his seat; sometimes slipping on one side, sometimes on another, and sometimes jolted on the high ridge of his horse's backbone, with a violence that he verily feared would cleave him asunder.
An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopes that the church bridge was at hand. The wavering reflection of a silver star in the bosom of the brook told him that he was not mistaken. He saw the walls of the church dimly glaring under the trees beyond. He recollected the place where Brom Bones's ghostly competitor had disappeared. "If I can but reach that bridge," thought Ichabod, "I am safe." Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone.
Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a tremendous crash- he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider, passed by like a whirlwind.
The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle, and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master's gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast- dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the school-house and strolled idly about the banks of the brook; but no schoolmaster. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod, and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces.
In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses' hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.
The brook was searched, but the body of the schoolmaster was not to be discovered. Hans Van Ripper, as executor of his estate, examined the bundle which contained all his worldly effects. They consisted of two shirts and a half; two stocks for the neck; a pair or two of worsted stockings; an old pair of corduroy small-clothes; a rusty razor; a book of psalm tunes, full of dogs' ears; and a broken pitchpipe. As to the books and furniture of the school-house, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton Mather's History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanac, and a book of dreams and fortune-telling; in which last was a sheet of foolscap much scribbled and blotted in several fruitless attempts to make a copy of verses in honor of the heiress of Van Tassel. These magic books and the poetic scrawl were forthwith consigned to the flames by Hans Van Ripper; who from that time forward determined to send his children no more to school; observing, that he never knew any good come of this same reading and writing. Whatever money the schoolmaster possessed, and he had received his quarter's pay but a day or two before, he must have had about his person at the time of his disappearance.
The mysterious event caused much speculation at the church on the following Sunday. Knots of gazers and gossips were collected in the church-yard, at the bridge, and at the spot where the hat and pumpkin had been found. The stories of Brouwer, of Bones, and a whole budget of others, were called to mind; and when they had diligently considered them all, and compared them with the symptoms of the present case, they shook their heads, and came to the conclusion that Ichabod had been carried off by the galloping Hessian. As he was a bachelor, and in nobody's debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him. The school was removed to a different quarter of the hollow, and another pedagogue reigned in his stead.
It is true, an old farmer, who had been down to New York on a visit several years after, and from whom this account of the ghostly adventure was received, brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was still alive; that he had left the neighborhood, partly through fear of the goblin and Hans Van Ripper, and partly in mortification at having been suddenly dismissed by the heiress; that he had changed his quarters to a distant part of the country; had kept school and studied law at the same time, had been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court. Brom Bones too, who shortly after his rival's disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar, was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell.
The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the neighborhood round the winter evening fire. The bridge became more than ever an object of superstitious awe, and that may be the reason why the road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the church by the border of the mill-pond. The school-house being deserted, soon fell to decay, and was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the unfortunate pedagogue; and the ploughboy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.
THE END
* The whip-poor-will is a bird which is only heard at night. It receives its name from its note, which is thought to resemble those words.


- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 1:56 PM