Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

32 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019 Had Trouble in Tahiti been set in Highland Park, Dinah would have had available such leisure activities as this “Day of Beauty”in downtown Chicago, as advertised in Ravinia’s program book around that time. of economic prosperity and population, the Baby Boom. America had become the mighti- est nation on earth, and schoolchildren, includ- ing this writer, were taught that no enemy would dare fly a plane over our country, so great was America’s power. All these new families had to go somewhere, and a great percentage of them ended up in the suburbs, which sprang up and spread like weeds, creat- ing an insatiable demand for new houses and, with them, new schools, new roads, and an unimaginable supply of food, clothing, and manufactured goods. The world has seen nothing like it since. Bernstein’s libretto extols a life lived in “the little white house” with a picket fence in the suburbs, and mentions a dozen of them by name including, remarkably, Highland Park, with which he had become familiar during his Ravinia appearances in 1944 and ’45. An era of rabid consum- erism had begun. Three out of five families owned a car, the bigger the better, and folks waited breathlessly each year for the unveiling of the new models. Two out of three homes were equipped with telephones, although many still had “party lines”—single connections that were shared by multiple homes. In 1952, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened and the first roll-on deodorant appeared on the market. On aver- age, American adults smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. (If that number seems unrealistic, consider that a heavy smoker, con- suming two packs a day, inhaled 14,600 cigarettes annually.) Madison Avenue was swinging into high gear; it is noteworthy that Mad magazine, which originally aimed most of its satire at the advertising industry, published its premiere issue that year. If the opera’s Sam was 30 years old in 1952, his life expec- tancy at birth was less than 60 years, although he might have lived longer since he did get exercise by playing handball at the gym, and science and medicine were making remarkable strides. It was also in 1952 that Dr. Jonas Salk began testing the vaccine that would eventually eradicate polio, but that year the disease still killed 3,300 people and crippled scores of thousands more. At that time the average American woman was married by the age of 20 and was done bearing children by the age of 24. Dinah’s life expectancy at birth was 65. She led a privileged lifestyle, having a per- sonal therapist, although psychotherapy was extremely rare outside of New York City, and she was able to spend her after- noon at the movies, watching the “terri- ble, awful movie” after which the opera is named. At other movie matinees that year, she might have been luckier, seeing Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen , Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain , John Wayne in A Quiet Man , Charlie Chaplin in Limelight , Gary Cooper in High Noon , or a real novelty, the first three-camera spectacular, This Is Cinerama . Dinah was able to enjoy such leisure time thanks to countless new products that made her life easier. Birdseye marketed the first frozen peas in 1952, and Mrs. Paul unveiled her frozen fish sticks, although Swanson had introduced the pot pie the previous year. Lipton debuted its packaged onion soup mix, and Junior, the unseen son of Sam and Dinah, probably began his day with a breakfast of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, also new to the market (and a whopping 29 percent sugar), while Sam and Dinah may have started lightening their coffee with the first non-dairy creamer, Pream. A real luxury for the family would have been their television set; although only one in three homes in 1952 had one, Bern- stein specifies in his scene description that Sam and Dinah’s house has a TV antenna, which enabled them to revel in tele- vision’s Golden Age. (Amazingly, in November 1952, Bernstein conducted a live telecast of Trouble in Tahiti on NBC!) This was the period of American television that still supplies programming for the numerous nostalgia channels that thrive on cable TV today. In 1952, I Love Lucy concluded its first sea- son with the highest average rating for any single season of a RAVINIA ARCHIVE PHOTO