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March 14, 2005
TT: Out of the box
For a long time I used to file away clippings of my old magazine articles, but I stopped saving them with the coming of Web-based archives. Now I keep only electronic copies of my stuff, and once I'd put together A Terry Teachout Reader, in which I collected some of the pieces I published between 1987 and 2002, I decided the time had come to dispose of my old clips. Suspecting myself of excessive vanity and pointless nostalgia, I decided, like Thoreau, to simplify my life, so I sold two-thirds of my books and threw out a huge pile of clips and other mementoes, keeping only what I could stuff into one small cardboard box.Time, however, has a way of doubling back on you. The current occupant of my previous apartment called the other day to tell me that I'd left behind another box of miscellaneous items. It surfaced, she said, in the course of a major housecleaning. Did I want it, or should she throw it out? I thought for a moment, then told her I'd be right over. Curiosity had gotten the better of asceticism. I picked up the box and toted it home.
Here's what I found inside:
- The printed programs of all the plays in which I acted in high school and college, going back to 1972. (Don't ask--I was awful. I had a lot of fun, though.)
- Three souvenirs from my maiden voyage to New York in December of 1975, a week-long trip organized by one of my college professors.
The first was the program for a performance of New York City Ballet's Nutcracker, my first Balanchine ballet. Peter Boal was one of the children in the first-act Christmas party. Now he's retiring from NYCB to become the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Sic transit!
The second was the souvenir program for Harold Prince's Broadway revival of Candide. (Just last week I reviewed New York City Opera's revival of Prince's opera-house production of the same show.)
The third, scrawled in my still-unformed handwriting on a piece of hotel stationery, was an itinerary of everything I did in New York, including the menus of all the meals I ate. That was the week I first tasted onion soup, vichyssoise, ratatouille, pheasant, chicken Kiev, and chocolate mousse. Most of the restaurants at which I made these happy discoveries have long since closed their doors, but the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are still around, as is the Café Carlyle, where I heard Bobby Short sing Cole Porter (he's retiring this year, too). I also saw Tom Stoppard's Travesties and Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, a mediocre musical called Shenandoah (it starred John Cullum, whom I've since reviewed twice for The Wall Street Journal), a forgettable concert by the New York Philharmonic, Boris Godunov and Puccini's Trittico at the Met, and two mixed bills danced by American Ballet Theatre, including a performance of Spectre of the Rose by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had just defected from the Soviet Union. Lauren Bacall was sitting in front of me that evening, and I regret to say that I spent more time looking at her than at Baryshnikov.
- A photocopy of my first professional newspaper review, published in the September 24, 1977 issue of the Kansas City Star. It was of a recital by a Russian violinist named Marek Piskunov, about whom I had mostly nice things to say:
Some musicians are a picture of their playing, and Marek Piskunov is a case in point. He hurls himself into his work with visible abandon, reinforcing accents with an emphatic stamp of the foot, swaying awkwardly with the phrase.
Piskunov's stage presence mirrored his violin playing last night. His style wants some polish. Occsional lapses of intonation and ungainly swells of tone rough up the surface, but a contagious enthusiasm lights the music from within....
I can't recall anything else about the concert, but I do remember that I got up first thing the next morning and drove to the nearest Kansas City Star coin box to buy a dozen copies of the paper (I only paid for one of them, though). That was the only time I ever heard Piskunov play, and a trip to Google yielded up no information about his later career or current whereabouts. I wonder what happened to him?
- A photocopy of my first magazine piece, published in the July 24, 1981 issue of National Review. It was a review of Liebling Abroad, an anthology of the essays of A.J. Liebling, who at that time was all but forgotten. I sent it over the transom to NR, hoping against hope that they'd print it. This is the first paragraph:
In the fashion-torn world of modern literature, the surest guide to posterity's ultimate inclinations may well be the used-book market. Dealers in used and out-of-print volumes know that the reputations of authors living and dead often rest not so much on best-seller lists or critical quarterlies as on the prices readers are willing to pay for the books they want to own. An A.J. Liebling book, for example, will always sell for at least $25; and even a beat-up paperback collection of Liebling pieces will bring $15, no questions asked. One suspects that Liebling, a connoisseur of the raffish who never sold well during his lifetime, would have appreciated so earthy an estimate of his long-term literary value.
The lead is pretentious, but it was clever of me to mention those used-book prices (I still love tucking facts like that into my pieces). The rest of the review, alas, is stiff as a board, except for one phrase I like: I called Liebling "a Beerbohm of the Bowery." Otherwise, I can see why I passed it over for the Teachout Reader. I'm not that sentimental.
Incidentally, those were the days when novice writers enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope with their typed manuscripts, and Chilton Williamson, who was National Review's back-of-the-book editor in 1981, used mine to send me his letter of acceptance. I was sure it contained a rejection letter, and I nearly fainted when I tore it open and saw that I'd cracked NR on my first try. I didn't save the letter, but I'll never forget how I felt when I read it.
- A 1986 NR review of The Cosby Show that I almost put in the Teachout Reader, mainly because of the first paragraph:
Situation comedies are the stock exchange of American desire. When breadwinning and housewifery were up, television gave us Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons. As Americans gradually abandoned the crumbling ideal of the nuclear family and began to look for emotional satisfaction in the surrogate womb of the workplace, new shows like Barney Miller and M*A*S*H began to dominate the sitcom scene. Even Mary Tyler Moore, who cheerfully kept house for Dick Van Dyke in the forgotten days of the New Frontier, worked for a Minneapolis TV station and discreetly slept with handsome young men throughout the reign of Richard Nixon. It wasn't Mary's fault. It wasn't even Nixon's fault. The Nielsens made her do it.
I was thirty years old when I wrote that piece, by which time I was finally starting to sound like myself. It took me long enough!
- A 1987 essay for The American Spectator in which I made the following predictions about television in 2007:
No anchormen. "The entire network news system as we know it is doomed to extinction by the year 2007. The ‘talent,' as they say in the business, costs too much."
More dumb shows. "As usual, the futurologists miscalculated about cable. They thought it would spread faster than it did. But that spread is finally beginning to suck viewers away from the Mighty Three. The major networks will continue to exist, even to thrive, but only by becoming more sedulous in their attempts to pull in the maximum number of morons." (Yes, I'd been reading too much Mencken.)
More smart shows. "On the other hand, the bigger the cable audience, the more cost-effective it becomes for medium- and small-sized outfits to put together shows targeted at a tiny but affluent group of viewers."
No PBS. "Commercial cable services devoted to cultural programming are already competing with PBS for new shows from England and elsewhere....The more first-rate shows they steal from PBS, the harder it will become to justify subsidizing a network which already spends most of its air time broadcasting fund appeals."
All this in 1987, mind you. Maybe I should have become a TV critic.
- A 1994 copy of Mirabella into which I'd tucked a sheaf of clippings about Nancy LaMott, who died one year to the month after my profile of her appeared in that now-defunct magazine. One of them was a photocopy of the article I wrote about Nancy for the New York Daily News a few days after we first met. I hadn't seen it for a decade, and I'd forgotten two of the things she told me that night:
My family visited [New York] when I was 12, and I was already the kind of kid who read Earl Wilson's column and wanted to go to Sardi's and a Broadway show. Instead, we went on a Gray Line tour and saw the Empire State Building.
You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to have a sitcom of my own. I'd like to be the Mary Tyler Moore of the '90s.
Unlikely as it may sound, I've never felt the slightest pang of regret about consigning so much of my past to the Staten Island landfill. I try as best I can to live in the present, and for the most part I seem to be pretty good at it. But neither am I sorry that I accidentally preserved a few souvenirs of my lost youth, and I think I'll hang onto them, at least for now. Perhaps some loved one of the future will smile at them one day.
Posted March 14, 2005 12:01 PM
