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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

January 12, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– A kind but candid friend once told me that I was “pathetically undomestic,” which seems about right. Among other things, I can never remember from one bottle to the next how to use a corkscrew (which may be a blessing in disguise), nor have I any other kitchen-related skills beyond the primeval. But my worst moments come at the rare intervals when I feel obliged out of common decency to change the sheets in my loft. Even when I slept in an ordinary bed, I was never capable of correctly aligning a contour sheet without a minimum of three preliminary tries–and that was when I had patterned sheets. Upon moving to my present loft-equipped apartment two years ago, I switched to black sheets, thinking they’d look more stylish. They did and do, but if you were to see me thrashing around up there, trying without success to figure out which corner to grab first, you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Middle-aged bachelorhood is no joke.

– I got a cardboard tube in the mail the other day containing the official presidential commission appointing me to the National Council on the Arts. No, it’s not calligraphed on sheepskin, but it’s still pretty damned impressive, and wonderfully quaint-looking to boot. I took it straight to my framer, even though I don’t have a proper place to hang it (presidential commissions are a lot bigger than, say, your average college diploma). I want to hang it in plain sight of all my guests, but would I really be willing to take down a piece of art for the sole purpose of assuaging my vanity?

Perhaps this is a character test in disguise.

– A friend of mine writes to tell me that I was “courageous” to have praised
Kathie Lee Gifford’s new musical. This made me laugh. “Courage” is when you stare down a crazy man with a gun in a dark alley. It doesn’t take “courage” to disagree with the conventional critical wisdom, especially when you don’t hang out with theater people, which I mostly don’t. I know a grand total of two actors and three drama critics, none of whom is likely to pull a switchblade on me for having rather liked Kathie Lee’s show. (O.K., maybe John Simon.)

No doubt it helps that my publishers stand so solidly behind me. When Paul Gigot, the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal, asked me to become the paper’s drama critic, I warned him that some of the things I wrote would be likely to bring heat. “That’s what we had in mind,” he replied. From that day to this, I’ve never been asked to water down a review prior to publication, nor has the paper’s management ever criticized me retrospectively for any opinion I’ve seen fit to express on the drama page. That kind of backing makes it easy to be “courageous.”

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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, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [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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