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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Boundless

January 28, 2005 by Terry Teachout

Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine’s admirers refer to as “the Greek program”: Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine’s ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I’d expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we’d all had one too many. Or maybe two.


I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I’m typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don’t really need to tell each other what we’re thinking, but we do it anyway.)


At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do…nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can’t wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it’s so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I’m looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I’m going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.


I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can’t see straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I’ve been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” Mr. B used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for–for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” And that’s where I’ve been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.


I’ll see you Monday.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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