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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

March 14, 2005 by Terry Teachout

• I got an e-mail last week from a priest I know who reads my Wall Street Journal drama column and likes it. At least I think he does. “So far,” he wrote, “you’ve managed to avoid pseudo-sophistication.” That dark qualifier–so far–made me smile. Has he detected a hint of phoniness in my other writings? Or is it merely that he knows most critics don’t feel comfortable unless they’re running with the pack?

Whatever he meant, I appreciate both the implicit warning and the explicit praise. I know what he means by “pseudo-sophistication,” though I can’t imagine falling victim to it. Perhaps because I took up drama criticism at a comparatively advanced age, I’m simply not interested in theatrical fashion. In fact, I often don’t know what it is at any given moment (though it’s rarely hard to guess). Even when I do know, I don’t pay any attention: I simply come home from a show, sit down at my iBook, and write what I think. Every once in a while I suspect I’m going to find myself way out on a limb come Friday morning, a prospect that neither pleases nor scares me.

• The Game Show Network’s nightly installments of What’s My Line? have now reached 1955, the year in which Fred Allen replaced Steve Allen as the show’s fourth regular panelist. I doubt that many readers of this blog know who Fred Allen was, since he died in 1956 and is now mainly remembered, if at all, for his long-running radio series of the ’30s and ’40s. Yet he was one of the best-known comedians of his day, and was widely considered to be not merely a radio comic but a full-fledged wit (James Thurber was one of his biggest fans). Among other things, he wrote two very good books, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me, and a posthumous collection of his letters was published in 1965. An anthology of his writings came out just four years ago. I wonder how many other people my age or younger have read any of these books, much less all of them.

Of all my peculiar claims to singularity, this one may be the most revealing: I’ve never met another person whose head was crammed full of so much miscellaneous information about people like Fred Allen, most of it utterly useless. To put it another way, I can be boring about more subjects than anyone I know. Fortunately, I’m painfully aware that I suffer from this chronic disability, and sometimes even manage to guard against inflicting it on my friends. I once had an insomniac significant other who claimed to find it tranquilizing to listen to me delivering impromptu lectures on random subjects (she claimed to be particularly fond of hearing me talk about the use of the rhythm guitar in swing-era jazz).

If only I knew half so much about making large amounts of money! Alas, none of my preferred subjects is more than modestly renumerative….

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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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