MARC record from Internet Archive

LEADER: 04738cam 2200493 a 4500
001 ocm24066783
003 OCoLC
005 20200518094309.0
008 910614s1992 gauaf s000 0aeng
010 $a 91023324
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020 $a0820314137$q(alk. paper)
020 $a9780820314136$q(alk. paper)
035 $a(OCoLC)24066783
043 $an-us-nv
050 00 $aCT275.B3675$bA3 1992
060 4 $aB/B234h
082 00 $a979.3/033/092$220
082 04 $aB$220
100 1 $aBarber, Phyllis,$d1943-
245 10 $aHow I got cultured :$ba Nevada memoir /$cPhyllis Barber.
260 $aAthens :$bUniversity of Georgia Press,$c©1992.
300 $a189 pages, 10 unnumbered pages of plates :$billustrations ;$c23 cm
336 $atext$btxt$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$bn$2rdamedia
338 $avolume$bnc$2rdacarrier
520 $aGrowing up as a Mormon in Nevada during the 1940s and 1950s, Phyllis Barber felt sequestered on the barren margins of a sophisticated and exciting world. Set in and around Las Vegas, America's neon temple of Cold War pop culture, Barber's narrative recalls her early search for any token of artistic and social significance that might survive the austere demands of her religion and the drabness of her desert home. The book is also a coming-of-age story, and the two selves Barber depicts--one on a dauntless quest for culture, the other stumbling through adolescence--often converge and drive each other onward. In the ensuing mix of themes and images, Barber's twisting, turning search for sophistication is further complicated by her burgeoning sexuality and yearning for peer acceptance. Born in 1943, Barber spent most of her early childhood in Boulder City, Nevada, minutes from the Hoover Dam and close enough to an atomic test site that an occasional mushroom cloud could be spied in the distance. Bothered by such tenuously checked, apocalyptic power, Barber found solace in neither the patriotic attitudes of Boulder City's residents nor the ready-made answers of Mormonism. When she was twelve, her father suddenly resigned his high post in the Boulder City ward of the Mormon Church and moved the family to "another planet called Las Vegas." Already awakened to the prospects of the larger life, Barber began in earnest to expand her horizons. Barber was something of a piano prodigy and a proficient dancer as well. The arts, she soon learned, could be the path of least resistance around her parents' objections to her increasing worldliness. Usually centering on lessons, rehearsals, and performances, her recollections are dotted with wonderfully peculiar characters and situations, signposts that guided--or misguided--her search for culture: a piano teacher reputed to moonlight in a cowboy bar; her father's drag burlesque of a hula dancer at a church talent show; a job as a dance studio pianist, where gifted, classically trained dancers shared the barre with hotel showgirls. Bringing into full play the incongruities of Barber's times, the sadly comic "Lenny and the Rhythmette" recalls how she was overlooked by Leonard Bernstein, whom she had greeted at the city airport as one of a delegation of Rhythmettes, her high school's renowned precision dance team. Afterward, looking back at herself in a skimpy cowgirl outfit standing next to the legendary conductor, Barber soliloquizes: "Lenny, wait a minute. You've walked past something wonderful! . . .I know the beauty of the desert is hard to see, so drab, forlorn, and a place where nothing but scrub brush grows. . . Lenny, Lenny, why didn't you notice?" The outcome of Barber's experiences is her recognition that culture is not, like papier-mache, something to be layered onto a person. Rather, it is the cultivation of an abiding sense of self-worth, immune to external pretensions.
600 10 $aBarber, Phyllis,$d1943-$xChildhood and youth.
651 0 $aNevada$vBiography.
650 0 $aMormons$zNevada$vBiography.
600 17 $aBarber, Phyllis,$d1943-$2fast$0(OCoLC)fst00255290
650 7 $aMormons.$2fast$0(OCoLC)fst01026314
651 7 $aNevada.$2fast$0(OCoLC)fst01205660
655 4 $aBiography.
655 7 $aBiographies.$2fast$0(OCoLC)fst01919896
655 7 $aBiographies.$2lcgft
938 $aBaker & Taylor$bBKTY$c24.95$d18.71$i0820314137$n0001979455$sactive
938 $aBaker and Taylor$bBTCP$n91023324
938 $aYBP Library Services$bYANK$n767036
029 1 $aAU@$b000008200665
029 1 $aNZ1$b4119016
029 1 $aYDXCP$b767036
994 $aZ0$bP4A
948 $hNO HOLDINGS IN P4A - 214 OTHER HOLDINGS