About Last Night

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dance the death scene from Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet version of Romeo and Juliet. The score is by Prokofiev:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.”

Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living

From 2015:

Milwaukee contains five buildings designed by Wright, most of them private residences. More often than not, his houses were commissioned by people who had a fair amount of money to spend, meaning that they were either built on large sites that are still surrounded by trees or in upscale neighborhoods that have stayed that way. The Bogk House, a two-story masonry residence built in 1916, is one of the latter, and it makes an impression that will be familiar to anyone who goes out of his way to look at Wright houses. It’s an unostentatious building that fits perfectly onto its small lot and is surrounded by far more imposing homes, but no sooner do you catch sight of the Bogk House than they all seem to disappear from view….

Read the whole thing here.

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.”

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

I miss Hilary and, I expect, always will. I gather that’s what happens when you lose a partner in the heartbreakingly unexpected way I did. Just the other day I muttered to myself, “Darling, I can’t remember—did you go to that Skin of Our Teeth with me in Stockbridge last July, or were you feeling too sick?” Silence. “Oh,” I said, then sighed deeply.

In recent days, though, my strongest emotion has not been grief but homesickness. It’s been more than a year since I last saw my family, and while I was too preoccupied wth Hilary’s final illness and untimely death to think much about them during the first half of 2020, they are now constantly on my mind, as is Smalltown, U.S.A., the tiny home town in southeast Missouri that I love so much.

It was our custom to spend Thanksgiving with Hilary’s family in Connecticut and Christmas with my family in Smalltown, but the latter tradition came to an end after my mother died in 2012. After that, my visits to Smalltown grew increasingly sporadic, and I no longer went there for the holidays. It had become challenging for Hilary to travel by air, and we both felt that her declining energy, such as it was, would be best spent getting her to and from Florida’s Sanibel Island, her favorite place in the world and one whose comfortable winter climate was well suited to the needs of a middle-aged person with chronic respiratory disease.

We planned to spend Christmas of 2017 on Sanibel, but Hilary was too sick to travel, so we stayed home instead. In 2018 she celebrated Thanksgiving in the hospital in Connecticut, where I brought her a full-scale dinner from the best restaurant in town. She cleaned her plate with delight, not knowing that it would be her last Thanksgiving dinner: a year later, she was unable to do much more than pick at food.

By then I’d mostly stopped traveling by air, fearing that Hilary’s condition might worsen without warning and wanting to be nearby in case of an emergency. In July of 2019, though, she urged me to take one more trip to Chicago and Smalltown while I still could, and so I did. That was the last time I saw my hometown and my family. It was, as I wrote shortly after returning to New York, a glorious visit:

I contrived to pack a whole string of soul-satisfying events into a three-night stay. Most of them, to be sure, were the same homely things I always do when I go to Smalltown: I drove around town, visited my parents’ grave, and breakfasted on biscuits and gravy at Jay’s Krispy Fried Chicken. I’d made a special point of asking my brother to cook out, so he smoked huge chunks of ribeye steak on which the three of us dined one evening. I’ve never eaten a tastier piece of meat, though I would have been just as glad to eat ham sandwiches with David and Kathy, sitting at the kitchen table and catching up on the commonplace things that James Agee’s people chat about in the after-dinner gathering that he describes so lovingly in A Death in the Family: The talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The point of such talk is the talking itself, an act of secular communion that tightens the myriad ties of memory that bind a close-knit family.

Hilary grew much sicker very soon thereafter, and I never again left her side save to review shows in New York and run essential errands. At some point after she died in March, I briefly gave thought to flying out to Smalltown, but by then the ravages of the pandemic had made air travel unsafe, and I never even considered going there for Thanksgiving or Christmas, just as I decided to postpone for a year flying to Sanibel Island to scatter Hilary’s ashes on the beach. My roomie and I are mostly locked down in upper Manhattan now, and I don’t expect to hit the road again, whether for work or pleasure, until a COVID vaccine becomes available.

I long passionately for that day to come. I talk to David and Kathy on the phone every couple of weeks, which is absolutely better than nothing but not nearly as good as seeing them in Smalltown. Just the other day I looked at the online menu of Lambert’s Café, the throwed-rolls restaurant that is my home town’s main claim to fame, and fantasized about what I’d order the next time the three of us ate there. I read the Smalltown Standard-Democrat on line most days and check out the local news. Just last week I ordered a bottle of Durkee Famous Sauce, my father’s favorite sandwich spread, which I hadn’t tasted for a quarter-century, and was overjoyed to discover that it tastes as good as ever.

Would that I could spread it on sandwiches made out of leftover Thanksgiving turkey, but my roomie is a vegetarian. Fortunately, she picked up a pumpkin pie on Saturday, and I ordered a box of Stove Top Stuffing from the neighborhood grocery store (we get everything delivered now). I’ll serve it to myself on Thursday, accompanied by a toasted smoked-turkey sandwich slathered with Durkee Famous Sauce and some sort of cranberry dish prepared by my roomie, who is a very good cook.

As I eat, I will try my best to give honest, heartfelt thanks for the blessing of the fifteen gloriously happy, largely unshadowed years that I spent with my beloved Hilary before her health started at last to fail—as well as for David, Kathy, and Smalltown, U.S.A. I long with all my heart to see them, and though it will likely take a while, I know a time will come when I spend Thanksgiving in Smalltown once again and remember how very, very lucky I am.

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Dave Frishberg sings his own “The Difficult Season”:

I’ve written a “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal about the reason why so few regional theater companies are webcasting their shows. Here’s an excerpt.

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Since America’s theaters shut down in March, I’ve been reviewing streaming webcasts of theater productions. Not only have I been consistently impressed by the artistic and technical quality of these performances, but I quickly realized that they were good for theater in all sorts of ways: putting a company back in touch with its patrons, putting unemployed actors back to work, and providing theaters with an income stream that is small but potentially significant (San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre brought in $60,000 with its first two webcasts). It can also give a regional theater a national profile that would be impossible to get in any other way….

But I’ve also noticed that only a small proportion of American theaters are putting their shows online. When I ask their artistic directors why, they typically say the same thing: “Actors’ Equity.”

Actors’ Equity Association is the union that represents professional stage actors and stage managers. It has long been opposed on principle to pay-per-view webcasting, arguing that it discourages people from coming to the theater to watch a live performance, thus leading to shorter runs and fewer work weeks for Equity members.

Even after the pandemic closed American theaters, Equity initially insisted on putting a tight cap on admission to webcasts, limiting it to the number of people who could theoretically have seen the show in the theater had it been open….

For this reason, several theaters, most notably New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, started working instead with SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents film and TV actors (the initials stand for Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), whose policies on streaming webcasts are less restrictive. This triggered a jurisdictional dispute between the two unions…

The good news—of a sort—is that Equity and SAG-AFTRA announced on Thursday that they’d signed an agreement giving Equity the right to represent stage actors appearing in webcasts through the end of 2021….

But the restrictions on theater companies remain onerous….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“When prosperous the fool trembles for the evil that is to come; in adversity the philosopher smiles for the good that he has had.”

Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams