Curren Events

My “Appreciation of the late New Haven Register society columnist Betty Curren ran in this week’s New Haven Advocate, here.

One memory I left out due to space limitations: I am a member of the special club of local folks who were photographed for Curren’s “Here ‘n’ There” column. I am probably the least well-dressed person ever to be pictured in that prissy space.

My “Here ‘n’ There” immortality was clinched due to the happenstance of standing next to the comic actor Howard Hesseman in the buffet line of the opening night party for the first national tour of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor when it played New Haven’s Shubert theater in 1994. I’d gained Hesseman’s attention by remarking “You were in my favorite episode of Dragnet.”

Ms. Curren dutifully  identified me in the photo’s caption, spelling my name right and even acknowledging the New Haven Advocate as my employer. Some Register staff were, and still are, weirdly reluctant to acknowledge the existence of any other media organizations in New Haven, but not Elizabeth Curren.

She carried herself like no reporter I ever knew. She observed manners and decorum I’d never ever heard of. When she happened to show up at a theater by herself, a theater staffer would know to sit next to her, because that’s how it was in her world—women did not sit alone in the theater.

I once asked her what it was like for her growing up in New Haven, and she went into raptures describing carriage races in Edgewood Park. Her stories seemed fantastical to me, and so did the rumors about her. I’m happy to pass on one of these unattributed stories, in hopes that it will further expand her legend: That Betty Curren was at Chappaquiddick when Teddy Kennedy drove off that bridge, but was denied the opportunity to cover the story due to the sexist and hierarchical journalistic practices of the time.

The University of New Haven was so proud to have Elizabeth Curren as an alumna that they had a plaque with her name on it in the lobby of their Dodds Hall auditorium. I once directed a show there, and would pay homage to Ms. Curren’s name on the wall.

It’s customary when someone dies to note that “they will be missed.” But Betty Curren’s entire world was one many of us miss—in the “overlook” or “are never granted entry into” sense—for our whole lives. Her old-fashioned sense of style, society and propriety was utterly at odds with the New Haven arts scene the way I was covering it at the time. When Ms. Curren retired from her post at the Register (where she’d been for 40 years) she was literally irreplaceable.

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