Patrick Dennis

Whatever the explanation, we'd attend each week, my mother and I, and each select a few books.

And it was here at age 10, in about 1968, I came across the Patrick Dennis novel, Auntie Mame.

I know most people know it as a film or a musical, but I...

It's a book, and a week later, I read its sequel, Around the World with Auntie Mame, and it was the first time I'd read a properly funny novel, and I couldn't stop rereading it and marveling how words sitting passively on a page could cause a reader to explode into laughter.

It's one way you could say it's a trailer that does keep the movie hidden, but it keeps it a little too hidden in a sense.

But having said that, it's based off, at that time, a 1955 novel, Anti-Mame, written by the pseudonym Patrick Dennis, who was really Edward Everett Tanner III, based off... loosely based off of one of his real aunts.

I mean, most of the stuff is fictional, but his aunt was eccentric.

And that of course became the play in 1956, Auntie Maine by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which was directed by Morden DaCosta, who was also the director of this film, which came out in 1958.