Archives for December 2008

Yesterday I wrote two Wall Street Journal columns back to back, which is something I try never to do unless it’s absolutely necessary. Shortly after I finished reading proof on the second column and my upcoming Commentary essay on Alfred Hitchcock, Mrs. T and I hopped in the car, picked up two big bags of Chinese food, and took them to a between-holidays family gathering in Connecticut. That part of the day was fun.
Today we’re looking out the window at a snowstorm through which we’ll be driving this afternoon, or possibly this evening, en route to an airport hotel in Queens, about which more tomorrow, assuming that we get there. The life of a traveling drama critic is sometimes fun, sometimes wearisome, and not infrequently both.
I just read the following paragraph from a New Republic story about campaign reporters:

CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley has taken to running through a checklist before bed. Every night she travels with the Obama campaign, she orders a wake-up call, sets one regular alarm and one back-up on her cell phone, which she places strategically out of slapping distance across the room. Then she writes down her vitals: What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it? With that, she can drift off before the next day’s campaign coverage. Most of the time, though, Crowley is so scared to oversleep that she’s awake and waiting, long before the alarm–any one of them–ever rings….

Time was when that would have made me laugh. Now it makes me sigh.

The TV was on at my sister-in-law’s house last night, so I happened to see the famous-dead-people-of-2008 feature on ABC’s World News Tonight. Not surprisingly, Eartha Kitt and Paul Newman (in that order) got the deluxe treatment, which stands to reason (if you want to call it that). What did surprise me was that two of the other names that flashed by on the screen were misspelled: Bobby Fischer came out “Bobby Fisher” and Arthur C. Clarke’s last name was shorn of its terminal “e.”
I’m an immaculate speller, but I know a number of fair-to-poor spellers who also happen to be intelligent, and I always hasten to remind them that Flannery O’Connor and F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t spell at all. O’Connor once described herself as an “innocent speller,” which was putting it mildly. As for Fitzgerald, I discovered in the course of researching The Skeptic that the author of This Side of Paradise misspelled H.L. Mencken’s name when he inscribed a copy of the book to the editor of The Smart Set:

As a matter of fact Mr. Menken, I stuck your name in on Page 224 in the last proof–partly I suppose as a vague bootlick and partly because I have since adapted [sic, maybe] a great many of your views….

Be that as it may, the failure of the anonymous staffer who put together World News Tonight‘s in-memoriam feature to check the proper spellings of the names of those celebrities who died in 2008 says something fairly grim about…well, about something or other.
Mrs. T and I were chatting about the decline and fall of Western civilization while driving from Smalltown to St. Louis the other day, and I offered the following Universal Explanation of everything bad about the world: Most people are stupid. She agreed, reluctantly.

Vladimir Horowitz plays his Variations on a Theme from “Carmen” at Carnegie Hall in 1968 for a CBS prime-time special:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping–rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas–But, goodness, why need they do it?”
John Dos Passos, diary, Dec. 31, 1917

“The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.”
Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son, Dec. 26, 1749

Mrs. T and I spent the whole of Sunday traveling from Smalltown to New York to our place in rural Connecticut. We left point A at six-thirty in the morning and arrived at point C at nine-thirty in the evening. I have two pieces to write between now and Wednesday afternoon, when we hit the road again, so if you don’t hear from me until Thursday, which seems not unlikely, have a happy New Year’s Eve!

A reader sighted this a pair of super-geeky vanity license plates:
• A 2 BRUTE
• GSAMSA (seen on a VW bug)

“No one likes the authority of superior intellect.”
Rex Stout, In the Best Families

My drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal consists of a retrospective look at the best shows and performances that I reviewed in 2008. Regular readers of the Journal and this blog will recall the enthusiasm with which I traveled from coast to coast in search of good theater, and it was a pleasure to remember some of the exciting nights that I spent on the aisle–most of them, as it happens, out of town.
Some highlights:
• I chose the amazing Zoe Kazan, who spiced up Broadway with her performances in Come Back, Little Sheba and The Seagull, as the most promising young actor of 2008.
• Itamar Moses, author of Back Back Back and The Four of Us, was my pick for the year’s best young playwright.
• For me, the best Broadway shows of the year just past were an easy call: I went for Gypsy and Dividing the Estate.
• Writers’ Theatre, based in Glencoe, Illinois, was my pick for America’s best drama company in 2008, and its extraordinary revival of William Inge’s Picnic was my favorite show of the year.
Read the whole thing here–there’s much, much more….

“I never thought of anything but a long full life with my love, but a heavy foreboding hit me about two years into this planned bliss, when he said firmly that we must never go back to the fishing village where we had spent our first Christmas. And a cruel mixture of disbelief and sadness filled me as I came to understand how thoroughly and firmly he stood by his conviction, that if people know real happiness anywhere, they must never expect to find it there again.”
M.F.K. Fisher, afterword to The Sophisticated Traveler