By Stuart Mitchner

Somewhere beyond the afterlife, beyond infinite suspensions of disbelief and leaps of faith, four people born on the same day are sharing an after-hours gathering in the Comfort Zone, where anything is possible, all bets are off, and Soul-Making is the order of the day. This is a place where a German philosopher born on August 27, 1790 is not only responsive to the visual art of a Dada photographer born on the 27th day of August in 1890, but knows in his heart the life and music and idiosyncrasies of a black tenor saxophonist born on August 27, 1909, who has just performed a composition based on the opening sentence of An American Tragedy, the masterwork of a novelist born in Terre Haute, Indiana on August 27, 1871.

These Foolish Things

After Lester Young plays the coda to “Dusk of a Summer Night,” Georg Fredrich Wilhelm Hegel, who is still savoring the moment the pork-pie-hatted tenor man addressed him as “Lady Hegel,” declares in perfect English, “Such sounds raise men’s eyes to the stars. I know the song under another name, ‘Foolish Things’ I think.”

“Good guess,” says Theodore Dreiser, “Lester’s playing my sentence to the changes of a wonderful old song, ‘These Foolish Things,’ which was written for a British cabaret singer named Jean Ross by her lover, a guy named Maschwitz, between sips of coffee and vodka in his London flat, according to wikipedia.”

“Some say it was written for Anna May Wong,” says Man Ray. “I painted her — in light — in 1930, one view facing me, one gazing to the side. Meanwhile, I much prefer this,” as he produces a Rayograph he made of Billie Holiday’s June 30, 1936 performance with Duke Ellington, a replica of “These Foolish Things” in shadow and light, capturing what he calls its “most stirring calm-before-the-storm-that-never-comes moment,” in which “the ghost of you clings … these foolish things remind me of you … How strange, how sweet to find you still…” — and, the artist adds, as he passes round the image, “how sweet to see the shadow of these sounds painted with light.”

“My Stars!”

I’ll admit it, the only one of these birthmates who speaks to me is Lester Young. It’s been decades since I read my fellow Hoosier Dreiser, and the only way I connected with Hegel was to look for him in volume 2 of

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Marginalia (Princeton University Press), my favorite source for all things wise and humanly wonderful. Although he goes somewhat deeper into Hegel in the Princeton edition of his Opus Maximus, Coleridge is at his in-the-moment best in a borrowed copy of Wissenschaft der Logik (1812). Responding to Hegel’s statement (his italics) “Being first determines itself or makes itself into Being or the One, which is Repulsion and is converted into a multiplicity of ones,” which is “annihilated by attraction” and “quality … which turns into quantity,” S.T.C. exclaims (his italics) “My stars! Now we pop upon it all at once!…And so come Repulsion, Attraction, and Quantity. What Christian heart could desire a clearer account — a more luminous elucidation?”

My Stars! Why does this cry from 1818 have such resonance for me? Because I can still hear my maternal grandmother all but singing it on hot summer afternoons in the Fifties in Overland Park, Kansas.

It’s Lester’s Day

Admit it, again, although this is Hegel’s 235th and Man Ray’s 135th, the man of the hour is the one “who invented cool,” as B.B. King once said: “Rather than state a melody, he suggested it. He barely breathed into his horn, creating an intimacy that gave me chills.” — which says it well if you’ve just listened to his rendition of “These Foolish Things,” live at Birdland, February 24, 1951. When I saw him there six years later, an underage teen in the bleachers, it was as if every breath really was his last (he had two years to live).

Why “Lady”?

According to drummer Willie Jones, Lester’s reason for addressing other musicians as “Lady” was, “because, you know, his playing was with finesse, was so beautiful that he would be addressing your soul. To him a woman represented sophistication, dignity, delicateness, beauty, you know, so this is a quality that should exist in all human beings, so that’s the reason why he would address you in that manner.”

The most famous instance of this quaint peculiarity of address began with “Lady Day,” for his soulmate, Billie Holiday, who returned the favor by dubbing him the President or Pres (after F.D.R.), which no longer fits in August 2025. Having said that, I have to make an exception for the time he was having problems with the keys on his sax, and turned for help to his friend and fellow tenor man Flip Phillips, who was good at fixing things. “Lady Flip,” he lamented, “my people won’t play.” For the President, it stands to reason that his keys are his people, but more often than not, his verbal inventions left innocent bystanders scratching their heads. Old girlfriends were “waybacks,” the bridge to a tune was a “George Washington,” and something bad was “von Hangman.” When he was uneasy, he’d say, “I feel a draft.” Language was his to perform, no less than music. He had the eyes and ears of a poet, and his lexicon could fill a book. Some even credit him with coining the word “cool” as an expression of approval.

The President also had a fondness for certain obscenities, his particular favorite being one four-syllable expression that has since become almost fashionable. He had “the oddest gentle way” of saying it, according to pianist/composer Bobby Scott in his reminiscence, “The House in the Heart,” one of the most affectionate and revealing portraits of the man in his later years. “Pres used profanity — and all language — creatively…. Lester was very aware of how people broke hearts with their tongues.” Scott thinks that because Young was himself “offended so easily,” he “couched” his own observations in “‘unknown’ terms, that he might not give offense.”

Lady Tuesday

The only way I could imagine bringing a living member of the August 27 Club into the Comfort Zone, was to have the four members watch some faded videos of Tuesday Weld singing “I Never Had a Sweetheart” and “Little Blue Wren,” from the 1956 movie Rock Rock Rock. Maybe Lady Ray could have worked some magic on those images, but somehow the faded quality evokes the song I began with, “the ghost of you clings…these foolish things remind me of you … How strange, how sweet to find you still….” Strange for sure, since I know Tuesday best as Thalia Menninger from the Dobie Gillis sitcom where the only song she sang was “forget about it,” always exceeding Dobie’s grasp, with “put your money where your mouth is” rationales like: “My father’s sixty years old and has a kidney condition, and my mother isn’t getting any younger either. I have a sister who’s married to a loafer, and a brother who shows every sign of turning into a public charge.”

The strangest thing about the videos is that Tuesday’s actually lip-synching the voice of Connie Francis, who died at 87 on July 16 of this year. The most frequently found Tuesday quotes online are “You need a man to go to hell with…It seems the brighter you are, the deeper the hole you get into.”

Man Ray at the Met

In a little over two weeks, on September 14, Man Ray: When Objects Dream, will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first major exhibition to examine the “media-crossing, radical experimentation” of American artist (and member of the August 27 club) Man Ray “through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph, a term he coined “to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. …Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” The exhibition will be on view through February 1, 2026.