President Barak Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minutes, the duration between Billie Whitelaw's stage presentation in early 1973 of Samuel Beckett's Not I in New York City which lasted 19 minutes and the London presentation which lasted 17 minutes. When SB learned that it lasted 19 minurtes in New York he ordered Whitelaw to cut it down to 17 in London where I saw it at the Royal Court Theatre in the evening of 16th January 1973




There are money-minded people, there are sex-minded people, there are religion-minded people, there are politically-minded people, I am a Beckett-minded person, as once I knew that Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minuets, it flashed in my mind that this address lasted between New York's and London's Not I. I think I have a Beckett idee fix, ie, Beckett fixation, like the mother fixation Norman Bates, the hero of Hitchcock's Psycho, played by Anthony Perkins had, and as fixation, whether a mother fixation as in Norman Bates' case or a Beckett fixation as in my case, is a mental disorder, I therefore am in need of psycho-therapy. I wonder if this happens to every Beckettian, or, to use Ruby Cohn's term, Becketteer!