Vincent Price's daughter on 25th anniversary of his death
Oct 29, 2018 6:36:29 GMT
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Post by Primemovermithrax Pejorative on Oct 29, 2018 6:36:29 GMT
From Loss to Love: Lessons from My Dad on the 25th Anniversary of His Death
Yesterday I participated in a packed matinee screening of Dragonwyck — the 1946 Gothic thriller starring my father and Gene Tierney — at the Museum of Modern Art, part of a six-week series there celebrating the 65-year film career of Vincent Price.
Today, which is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s passing, another matinee will be shown at MOMA, and tonight we celebrate my dad with three more movies at New York City’s Quad Cinema. Almost every day this month, my father’s films are being shown on TCM or Comet TV. Many more screenings are taking place at movie theaters around the world this Halloween season.
In other words, twenty five years after my father’s passing, his legacy feels as alive as it has ever been.
As a daughter who not only adored my dad, but who also has dedicated a big part of my adult life to keeping his legacy alive, needless to say, this fills me with so much joy.
So yesterday, when a gentleman in the MOMA audience told me that he was “sorry for my loss”, it took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. My father has been gone for a quarter century, yet not a day has gone by when he hasn’t feel fully alive in my heart. So alive that I don’t feel him as absent. Rather, I feel him every single day as the immense joy-filled presence he has always been for me.
On some level, this is because he had such a larger-than-life demeanor — on that even death could not diminish. But on another, it is also because, from the time I was a baby, I never felt that I had my father all to myself. He was gone more than he was home, a part of other people’s lives as much as he was part of my own. Even as a little girl, I knew that I shared my dad with the world. Yes, I was his beloved daughter. But he was also beloved by people too countless for me to number. That might seem like a sad thing for a little girl to know. It never felt sad. Yet it has only been in the last five years that I have come to understand the true beauty of that shared experience of my father.
Yesterday I had a lovely conversation with a woman much younger than I, who named her son after my dad, who wrote her doctoral thesis in part about my father, and who continues to show my father’s movies in the Brooklyn theatre that she runs. I sat next to an older lady who remembered the thrill of seeing Dragonwyck when she was 18 years old, and clearly enjoyed it all over again. A man and I chatted after the show about how his love of classic horror inspired him to become a teacher and how his favorite part of each school year was always doing dramatic readings of Edgar Allan Poe for his students. These kinds of conversations have become a daily part of my life — and they bring me more joy than I can put into words.
Now that I am in my fifties, many of my friends have lost one or both of their parents. For many of them, the death of their parent felt like a limb being cut off. Years after their parents’ passing, they still miss and mourn their mother or father. They carry their memories with a bittersweet melancholy — a mixture of sorrow and gratitude. Their memory remains, but tinged with an ever-present sadness.
My dad knew that feeling. After my stepmother passed, my father said, “I have come to believe that remembering someone is not the highest compliment — it is missing them.”
Yesterday I participated in a packed matinee screening of Dragonwyck — the 1946 Gothic thriller starring my father and Gene Tierney — at the Museum of Modern Art, part of a six-week series there celebrating the 65-year film career of Vincent Price.
Today, which is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s passing, another matinee will be shown at MOMA, and tonight we celebrate my dad with three more movies at New York City’s Quad Cinema. Almost every day this month, my father’s films are being shown on TCM or Comet TV. Many more screenings are taking place at movie theaters around the world this Halloween season.
In other words, twenty five years after my father’s passing, his legacy feels as alive as it has ever been.
As a daughter who not only adored my dad, but who also has dedicated a big part of my adult life to keeping his legacy alive, needless to say, this fills me with so much joy.
So yesterday, when a gentleman in the MOMA audience told me that he was “sorry for my loss”, it took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. My father has been gone for a quarter century, yet not a day has gone by when he hasn’t feel fully alive in my heart. So alive that I don’t feel him as absent. Rather, I feel him every single day as the immense joy-filled presence he has always been for me.
On some level, this is because he had such a larger-than-life demeanor — on that even death could not diminish. But on another, it is also because, from the time I was a baby, I never felt that I had my father all to myself. He was gone more than he was home, a part of other people’s lives as much as he was part of my own. Even as a little girl, I knew that I shared my dad with the world. Yes, I was his beloved daughter. But he was also beloved by people too countless for me to number. That might seem like a sad thing for a little girl to know. It never felt sad. Yet it has only been in the last five years that I have come to understand the true beauty of that shared experience of my father.
Yesterday I had a lovely conversation with a woman much younger than I, who named her son after my dad, who wrote her doctoral thesis in part about my father, and who continues to show my father’s movies in the Brooklyn theatre that she runs. I sat next to an older lady who remembered the thrill of seeing Dragonwyck when she was 18 years old, and clearly enjoyed it all over again. A man and I chatted after the show about how his love of classic horror inspired him to become a teacher and how his favorite part of each school year was always doing dramatic readings of Edgar Allan Poe for his students. These kinds of conversations have become a daily part of my life — and they bring me more joy than I can put into words.
Now that I am in my fifties, many of my friends have lost one or both of their parents. For many of them, the death of their parent felt like a limb being cut off. Years after their parents’ passing, they still miss and mourn their mother or father. They carry their memories with a bittersweet melancholy — a mixture of sorrow and gratitude. Their memory remains, but tinged with an ever-present sadness.
My dad knew that feeling. After my stepmother passed, my father said, “I have come to believe that remembering someone is not the highest compliment — it is missing them.”
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