Three songwriters attended the first screening of the film, held at MGM Studios in Culver City, California, for an audience of 200 sophisticated industry bigwigs. “Men were standing on their seats and screaming and women were yelling,” Carol recalls. “Bill, Aynnie and I slouched in our seats. Bill looked over at both of us and said, ‘I think it’s a hit.’ We never knew.”
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.
Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.
Through all this tragedy we see a lot of positive things. I’m a Brit - you cut one arm off and I’ll grow another.
The Mano Fico (fig hand, properly, ‘mano fica’) is an ancient obscene gesture, and is also one of the better known protective gestures against the eye. The thumb and fist gesture is an ancient representation of sexual union. The name is from the Italian word for the female vulva, fica,meaning fig (and also the origin of a well-known English obscenity).
The fig was associated by the Romans with female fertility and eroticism; the fruit was sacred to Bacchus. The gesture is used against the evil eye in the belief that an obscenity serves as a distraction to evil, even that demons are so repelled by the notion of sex and reproduction that they flee at the sign,
Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.
They went out and happened to things.