I just got back from Theater Row, where I thought I was going to see the budding young actor who doubles as my trainer carry a sword in a studio performance of Terence’s The Eunuch. (Keep the jokes to yourself, please.) Alas, the studio door was locked and the box office unhelpful, so I hailed a cab and headed uptown to my apartment, which is currently in a fleeting state of grace, the cleaning lady having come and gone. All surfaces are dusted, all corners straightened, all flowers watered. A fellow blogger poked her head in to see the Teachout Museum yesterday afternoon and said, “It looks…monastic!” Well, maybe not quite, but ’twill serve, ’twill serve.
I have one more piece to finish before I shut the shop down, a Commentary essay on Jerome Robbins, and on the way home I tried to decide whether to stay up late or get up early. As the cab picked its way north, I saw that the night sky over Manhattan was full of alien presences–low-flying blimps and helicopters hovering in all the wrong places–so I decided to knock off for the evening, watch Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in Father Goose, and leave Robbins for tomorrow morning. If the bad guys are planning to pay a visit, I’d prefer not to be writing about West Side Story when they come. Besides, I don’t often get to spend a quiet evening in my apartment when it’s neat and tidy, and I’d just as soon spend it sitting in the living room, alternately watching TV and communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum. You don’t really appreciate your surroundings when you’re hunched over a hot iBook, tapping away.
Of course I don’t really think there’s trouble afoot, at least not imminently. I’m mainly just beat to the socks–it’s been a long, long week–and happy to have an excuse, however far-fetched, to down my tools. I took a nap this afternoon and dreamed I was editing a paragraph from my Robbins essay. It’s bad enough when you dream about the piece you’re writing, but when you dream about editing the piece you’re writing, you know you need to take a break. This, needless to say, is exactly what I’m planning to do. You won’t be hearing from me again until September 6. Like the cleaning lady, I’ve done my best to make things neat and tidy for Our Girl in Chicago. In fact, I just finished updating the Top Five module of the right-hand column, which now contains four brand-new postings for your edification. I was briefly tempted to check my e-mailbox one last time before signing off, but I decided against it, so if you wrote to me today in the hopes of getting an immediate reply, you’re out of luck.
Me, I’m in luck. Not counting Christmas, it’s been a year since I took a whole week off, and I can already taste it. In the meantime, Cary Grant awaits, followed by rapid eye movement, followed by a couple of thousand words on the iBook, followed by…but that’s a secret. I’ll tell you what I did after it’s done.
For now, have fun with Our Girl. I see that people in thirteen time zones are reading “About Last Night” as I write these words. May all of them, and all of you, wish me well.