How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir - Softcover

University Of Nevada Press

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874172330 ISBN 13: 9780874172331

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 1994

Synopsis

Phyllis Barber grew up in Las Vegas, in the midst of a devout Mormon family. As a small child, she began to feel uneasy with her faith's all-pervasive certainty and righteousness. As she grew, the tensions between her religious beliefs and her desire for a larger, more cultured life also grew. She studied piano and dance, performed with a high school precision dance team, worked as an accompanist in a ballet studio and as a model. How I Got Cultured is a moving, candid, and sometimes hilarious account of an American adolescence, negotiated between the strictures of a demanding faith and the allures of one of the most flamboyant cities in the world.

About this title

Review

"This is an absorbing, often comic, always vivid account of a childhood torn between the demands of a strict Mormon household and the enticements of a thoroughly secular world. . . . In its shape, its tone, its humor, and its verbal authority, this memoir bears comparison to Annie Dillard's An American Childhood." -Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

"The memoir of the remarkable daughter who does splits and cartwheels along her own fine line between fame and damnation." -Sally S. Eckhoff, Voice Literary Supplement
"Simply the best memoir of Mormon girlhood written in this century." -The Association for Mormon Letters

From the Back Cover

Growing 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, andperformances, 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0874172330
• ISBN 13: 9780874172331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277