Archives for June 2006

Nobody walks anywhere in a small town, except maybe next door or across the street. When I told my mother I was going to walk downtown to buy a belt, she boggled. It took me a good ten minutes to persuade her that I wasn’t kidding, and another five to talk her out of driving downtown to pick me up after I’d made my purchase.

It’s been years since I last took a long walk in Smalltown, U.S.A. Much has changed since then, though mostly only on the surface. I walked across a couple of dusty, weedy vacant lots that once held stores at which I shopped when young, and I saw quite a few buildings that had changed virtually beyond recognition in the thirty-two years since I went off to college. One of them used to be a fire station, the same one I visited on a first-grade field trip. Now it’s a schoolhouse, an Adult Basic Education Center. I wonder if the fire pole is still there.

Yet most of the sights I saw were as familiar-looking as my own name. I strolled by a white water tower with SMALLTOWN painted on the tank in big black letters. I passed half a dozen boxy brick churches whose outdoor signs bore inviting messages (“Where Friends Become Family”). I peered into the show window of Collins Piano, the store where my parents bought me the spinet on which I learned to play, and where I later purchased my very first album of modern classical music, an LP containing Isaac Stern’s performances of the Berg Violin Concerto and the Bartók Rhapsodies. How on earth did it get there? I’ve always wondered.

Not only did most things look the same, but they sounded and smelled the same. I heard the purr of air conditioners and the whine of lawnmowers. I smelled fried onions on the morning air and knew I was a block away from Kirby’s Sandwich Shop. I heard a loud roar far above me, looked up, and saw a twin-engine plane descending from the cloud-filled sky, headed for the Smalltown airport.

At length I arrived at Falkoff’s Men’s Shop, where I’ve been buying clothes for nearly forty years. David Friedman, the proprietor, greeted me with a smile, and smiled even more broadly when I told him that my old belt was two sizes too big for me now. He last saw me six months and forty pounds ago, and he was happy to see how well I looked.

It was two degrees hotter by the time I left for home, but a breeze was blowing, and most of the streets down which I walked were lined with tall, shady trees that made my return trip pleasant. Just as I was crossing Malone Street, I heard a familiar roar, looked up, and saw the same twin-engine plane that had landed a half-hour before climbing back into the sky, this time headed in the opposite direction.

An hour later my mother and I were eating potato soup at Vanessa’s Coffee Shop, the newest restaurant in Smalltown. “I can’t believe you walked all that way,” she told me.

“I needed the exercise,” I told her. “Besides, it was fun.”

“Did you see anyone you knew?”

“Not a soul. Except for two kids dribbling a basketball, I didn’t see anyone else on foot.”

My mother shook her head. “Nobody walks anywhere in Smalltown,” she said.

“Someone once defined to me craft–or technique as I’ve always thought of it–as being what you use when you don’t feel it anymore.”

Patrick Stewart (quoted in Acting: Working in the Theatre)

I got up this morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal drama column in a setting different from the office-bedroom where I normally pass my working hours.

In New York I sit at a desk placed next to a window that looks down on a quiet block of brownstones. When I glance up from my iBook, I see Fairfield Porter’s Ocean II, a Max Beerbohm caricature of Percy Grainger, a pair of etchings by Degas and Matisse, and a bookshelf containing Fowler’s English Usage, the two-volume New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, A Terry Teachout Reader, the Library of America’s one-volume Flannery O’Connor collection, and well-thumbed copies of the Viking Portables devoted to Johnson and Boswell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad. Behind me is a set of wooden shelves holding three thousand compact discs.

In Smalltown I sit at a rickety, ink-stained card table that’s as old as I am, set up next to the bed in which I slept as a teenager. When I glance up from my iBook, I see a homemade bookshelf (my father built it) full of tattered paperbacks, a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best-Loved Books for Young Readers, and a short stack of dusty 45s by such artists as Ray Anthony, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Daniels, Vic Damone, Stan Kenton, the McGuire Sisters, and Jo Stafford. A chromolithograph of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the wall behind me. To my left is a telephone with a dial. The only modern things in sight are the laptop computer on which I’m writing these words and the iPod on which I listen to music, both of which I brought with me.

I filed my column at one-thirty, then took my mother to lunch at Susie’s Bake Shoppe. People eat early in Smalltown, and no one else was in the dining room when we got there. My mother ordered quiche, the special of the day. “If you’d gone to a restaurant and ordered quiche back when I was a boy,” I told her, “nobody around here would have known what you were talking about.” She laughed.

After lunch we drove to the cemetery where my father was buried eight years ago, then returned home and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting and puttering. At six o’clock we turned on the TV to watch the local news. The anchors were a white man and a black woman, and one of the reporters had a strong Indian accent. “You wouldn’t have seen that when I was a boy, either,” I said, thinking of the lynching my father witnessed in Smalltown six decades ago.

We ate supper after the news. As we were clearing away the dishes, my brother stopped by to watch the second half of Broken Trail with us. Then he went home–he lives three blocks away–and my mother picked up her cane, kissed me goodnight, and went to bed. I retired to my bedroom, booted up my iBook, dialed up Earthlink, and checked my e-mail, which consisted of messages from a blogger and a jazz musician. As I read them, I heard the low whistle of a freight train rolling through town, the same sound that called to me long ago, summoning me to the world beyond the city limits of Smalltown, U.S.A.

The time came when I obeyed that summons, and ever since then I’ve lived in big cities. Yet I keep on coming back to Smalltown two or three times a year, each time returning to the same room in the same house in the same neighborhood, a block from my elementary school and three blocks from my high school. They say that no matter how long you live or how far you travel, you can’t get very far from the place where you grew up. I wouldn’t know–I’ve never tried.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

My mom died in 1979, we emptied her house and sold it and I’ve never been back. My dad had moved, long before, to Alabama and was living with a third wife. Not a home. My dear aunt died in 1999, so the haven she had been to me was gone. There is no home for some of us to get back to…so I felt a little envious reading what you wrote, even though I know there can be a pervading gloom in those shabby old rooms.

Not here–and believe me, I know how lucky I am.

“Horace, I believe that is hitting a man when he is down. One so seldom meets an example of it, as it is so strictly forbidden. That almost suggests it is the natural moment to choose. Hitting a man when he is up, does have to be strongly recommended.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant

No sooner did I come back to New York on Friday than I plunged into a brief but intense stint of playgoing: I saw Pig Farm on Friday night, Susan and God on Saturday afternoon, and Macbeth in Central Park on Saturday night. The last was a near-run thing, for it was raining until an hour before curtain time, and it looked like it was going to start raining again all the way through the performance.

I awoke at five-thirty on Sunday morning, packed my bags, made my way to LaGuardia Airport (about which more here), and flew from there to St. Louis, where I caught a shuttle bus to Smalltown, U.S.A. At two o’clock I was eating chicken-salad sandwiches with my mother and flipping through her high-school yearbook, published in 1946. Five hours later we sat down with my brother to watch the first installment of Broken Trail, and now I’m headed for bed.

This is the first time I’ve been home since Christmas. My mother was pleased to see that I’d lost forty pounds and acquired a rosy hue in my cheeks. (Apparently I was looking a trifle wan for several weeks prior to my visit to the hospital.) I shared the bus from St. Louis to Smalltown with a seventy-seven-year-old woman who asked me where I was from. I told her I’d grown up in southeast Missouri but was now living in New York City, to which she replied, “How nice! Do you go to school there?” I hooted loudly, thanked her kindly, and tried to imagine how weak and scared I must have looked the last time I was in Smalltown.

I’ll be spending Monday morning writing my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal, after which I plan to buy a new belt, eat a very modest amount of barbecue, and take it easy. Not to worry: you’ll be hearing from me at regular intervals between now and my return to New York on Thursday. Right now, though, I’m more than ready to turn in.

Till soon.

In my latest “Sightings” column, published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I discuss a question that’s been on my mind for some time now: why are America’s best regional theater companies not as well known as our museums, symphony orchestras, and opera companies?

Time for a pop quiz: name three important fine-arts institutions that are not located in (A) New York City or (B) the place where you live.

I recently asked this question of 20 art-conscious friends all across the U.S. Between them, they listed 42 different institutions, seven of which received more than one vote. Most frequently cited was the Art Institute of Chicago, with four votes.

Only five of them mentioned a theater company.

I took this informal poll in the same week that Seattle’s Intiman Theatre won the Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. It’s been presented annually since 1976 to such distinguished ensembles as Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, all of which I covered enthusiastically for the Journal in the past year. Not one of them was mentioned. The only person to vote for the Intiman was a former resident of Seattle….

Each year it grows more difficult to persuade the arts editors of major newspapers and magazines–even those that pay fairly close attention to theater in New York–to send their drama critics to other cities, save for an occasional trip to London. As for TV, forget about it. I can’t remember the last time PBS aired an out-of-town production. Regional theater, it seems, just isn’t glamorous enough to make the journalistic cut.

Yet most of the best live drama in America is to be found in what Variety still insists on calling “the stix.” The vast majority of large and medium-sized American cities can boast of at least one high-quality repertory company, and many have more than that. On any given night you can see about as many plays in Chicago or Washington, D.C., as you can in New York, and Minneapolis-St. Paul isn’t far behind….

The Journal has posted a free link to this column, so to read the whole thing–of which there is much more–go here.

“‘Do you do any work besides teaching?’ said Sarah, in a social manner.

“‘People always regard teaching as a side line. Well, I am writing a book of essays.’

“‘Oh, not a real book?’ said Tamasin.

“‘No, not one with a beginning and an end.’

“‘That would be more difficult.’

“‘Yes, it would.’

“‘Does a book of essays take very long?’

“‘Not the book itself, but I have come to putting in the charm. I put in so much, that I had to take some out; and that seemed a waste, and I put it back.'”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant

Don’t laugh, but I didn’t know that my new iBook was WiFi-enabled until Jools, one of the miracle workers from Ms Mac, paid me a service call back in March. Even then I didn’t have any occasion to use this fancy new feature until last month, when I stayed in a hotel in Oregon where it was taken for granted that all guests would connect wirelessly to the Web. I fired up my untested WiFi gizmo, found it good, used it without incident, and promptly forgot about it from the moment I checked out until today, when I arrived way too early at LaGuardia and decided to see what it felt like to pull my laptop out of my shoulder bag and surf the Web, connected to nothing at all but my lap.

I suppose most of us have felt at one time or another the urge to pull up stakes and go off the grid. As a boy I watched Charles Kuralt on the evening news and dreamed of driving around America in a self-contained motor home, beholden to no one and no place. I didn’t know at the time that Kuralt and his TV crew never actually slept in their motor home, having found it too cramped. Instead, they checked into a motel every night they spent on the road. A number of years later, my father bought a used motor home from which he derived great satisfaction, but it would never have occurred to him to park it off the grid. Whenever he and my mother went “camping,” they drove straight to a trailer park, plugged in the power, hooked up the water and sewer lines, turned on the air conditioner, and partook of the great outdoors from a safe, comfortable distance.

Long ago I promised myself that someday I’d rent a motor home and do some Kuralt-style roaming, staying not in trailer parks or Holiday Inns but wherever I damn well pleased. Alas, I haven’t gotten around to it yet, and at fifty I suspect I never will. Instead I’m sitting at Gate D-8 of LaGuardia Airport, posting these words on my blog and wondering exactly what the big deal is. The point of travel, after all, is to be somewhere else doing something else, and since I routinely spend large chunks of my life in New York sitting at a desk, checking my e-mail and surfing the Web, I can’t see any good reason to do the same thing in an airport. I’m on my way to Smalltown, U.S.A., to visit my family, and when I get there this afternoon I’ll set up a card table in my bedroom and reluctantly establish an electronic beachhead. Why rush the process?

The first time I flew in a plane equipped with Airfones, I made a special point of calling my mother from midair, which impressed her no end. I never did it again. Similarly, I have a feeling that today’s venture into airport blogging will be a one-time-only event, unless I should find myself stuck in STL or LAX with several unexpected hours of time on my hands–and maybe not even then. Airports are for reading and listening to music, not blogging, just as trains are for looking out the window, not checking e-mail. Life is busy enough without plugging up such welcome chinks in the wall of constant activity.

For all these reasons, this study in the effects of postmodern technology on leisure time is now officially concluded. My plane leaves in an hour and five minutes, and two or three hours after that I’ll be in Smalltown, sitting down to lunch with my mother. Tonight will be quite soon enough to plug in again, and tomorrow will be even better. I’ll see you then.