They Would Be Speechless

By Val Castronovo, Tam Gray, Daniel Levy, Ellin Martens, Michele Orecklin, Alice Park, Julie Rawe, Chris Taylor, Owen Thomas and Josh Tyrangiel

Nineteen ninety-nine was a big year for memorials. Humphrey Bogart, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire and Noel Coward, among others, would have been 100, Pushkin 200, and it was International Chopin Year, marking the 150th anniversary of the composer's death. While some were celebrated reverentially, others received more bizarre treatments.

--Papa's got a brand new shirt--or two. One with a facsimile of Ernest Hemingway's birth certificate and the other with this year's annual commemorative portrait. Perfect for cleaning your trawler.

--Nothing says creepy like a Hitchcock movie, except perhaps the Hitchcock 100th-birthday edition of Clue or the commemorative Bates Motel shower curtain or robe. QVC's Hitchcock beanbag bear was scary in a whole other way.

--What better way to toast the 200th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin's birth than with a Pushkin vodka and a box of Pushkin chocolates? Perhaps with a visit to Yakutia, which touted itself as the place where Pushkin's friends were exiled.

--As well as by concerts, the week of Chopin's death was marked by mimes, jazz interpretations, and--yikes!--the premier of Billy Joel's first classical piece, the Chopin-inspired Reverie.

--For the sesquicentennial of Goethe's birth, 250 illuminated busts of the German poet were lined up in a meadow in downtown Weimar. Fans could buy stockings imprinted with his lyrics or a vibrator bearing his likeness. An exhibition of his drawings was hung at Buchenwald.