Camelot on the Connecticut, Act 2: Liz and Dick Booze Cruise

(attenuation, as in Act 1... )

My Welsh fellow-countryman Richard Burton would be 85 years old today.  Of course, when in Rome, Elizabeth Taylor and I love to celebrate our birthdays every year on February 27.  And when in Hadley, MA we can't get enough of the Aqua Vitae restaurant.

"What a Dump!" - Elizabeth Taylor, as Martha, impersonating Bette Davis' performance from Beyond the Forest (1941)

Segments of the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were filmed during autumn 1965 on and around the Smith College campus in Northampton, MA. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor portrayed George and Martha, in the intense screen adaptation of Edward Albee's literary 1962 Broadway production.  When not filming, Burton & Taylor frequented Northampton's Academy of Music, where they sat in the balcony to watch movies.  I imagine they must have watched Heston & Harrison in The Agony & The Ecstasy "back at the Academy."

Mano a mano, Tete - a - tete

Mike Nichols' masterpiece is a bourbon-fueled psychological opus of taunting marital tirades and disemboweling professorial jousting - not that there's anything wrong with that.  The stage play took place entirely in George and Martha's house, but the film sets a segment in a roadside bar, where drunken Martha dances suggestively with Nick until George flips his wig and yanks the jukebox power cord from its outlet.  Local legend has it that the small production crew trucked over the Coolidge Bridge to shoot this scene in the Aqua Vitae Restaurant at the Hadley end of the vaunted span.

In the early 60's the Aqua Vitae was the only local place that served spaghetti, and my (Naples born) mama taught me early that the label "Italian-American" (contra facto "Italian") means trouble.  Our family ate a first and last meal at AV in 1965.

I never forgot the place.  Thank heaven that I had the chance to take my own family there for a meal before Christmas in 2004 (it wasn't any better, although the owner had dropped "-American" from the menu and sign).  But the decrepit atmosphere was magical.

Magical most of all for having been occupied by Liz and Dick, in their hard-drinking, insult-trading, hair-pulling, b**ch-slapping glory.

Get Ready...

Aqua Vitae is gone.  Richard Burton is gone.  and...

[DREAM SEQUENCE ALERT:]

 Liz Taylor and I will celebrate our birthdays next February... together - at a nice, out-of-the-way Italian restaurant, and with a couple of large, bottomless glasses of whisk(e)y on the rocks!


See also: Camelot on the Connecticut, Act 1: John F. Kennedy
                Camelot on the Connecticut, Act 3: ... Slept Here