Among the many joys of this year’s New York Public Library Spring Dinner held in the Celeste Bartos Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the spacious hall where Salman Rushdie, while still in hiding, gave a reading and talk, and where French intellectual Bernard Henri Levy beseeched some brave woman to have sex with GW Bush to encourage his impeachment, if that’s all it would take, was a performance by Bernadette Peters of “There Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific, and “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods, that Stephen Sondheim classic. Peters revealed: though she comes from Queens, N. Y., the first time she came to this, the NYPL’s gorgeous central branch, was for the recent opening of another Sondheim revival, Sunday in the Park with George.

NYPL President Anthony W. Marx kicked off the speeches, expressing special pride in the library’s acquisition of the papers of James Baldwin, as announced in April, to be housed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This year’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro put Baldwin in the spotlight, but now, this important archive will allow scholars to re-evaluate Baldwin’s oeuvre and situate him in his rightful place in the canon of American letters. This is the essential work that libraries do, as well as provide resources for children. The children’s reading room has on permanent display Winnie the Pooh, his pals Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, and Kanga against a map of the Hundred Acre Wood. Bernadette Peters has a lot of catching up to do.

Regina Weinreich

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