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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 23, 2009

TT: Snapshot

December 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Bill Evans plays “My Foolish Heart”:

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

TT: Party with Pops!

December 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

LA%20ON%20STOOP%20WITH%20KIDS.jpgThe Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will be hosting a book party at two p.m. on January 9 to celebrate the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The party will take place inside the home where Armstrong lived during the last quarter-century years of his life, and I’ll be reading from Pops and signing copies of the book.
Here’s what I wrote about the house when I last visited it in 2004, just as I was starting to write Pops:

I rented a car and headed for Queens, accompanied by Stephanie Steward, my research assistant. We’d been planning for weeks to spend a day visiting the Armstrong house and archive–an orientation tour for Steph, so to speak. The house was opened to the public as a museum last October, but as I turned the corner onto what is now Louis Armstrong Place for the first time in three years, I saw that nothing much had changed but the street sign. The block was still shabby but respectable, a textbook example of a working-class neighborhood, and except for the garage, which has been turned into a reception center and museum shop, the house looks the way it did in 2001: the same gaudy wallpaper, the same gold faucets, the same touchingly elaborate furnishings, right down to Tony Bennett’s oil painting of Armstrong. Steph’s eyes were as big as hubcaps. As for me, I felt like laughing and crying at the same time….

I can’t wait to go back.
The party is open to the general public, but space is strictly limited, so if you’re interested in stopping by, call 718-478-8274 or e-mail reservations@louisarmstronghouse.org now to make a reservation.
For more information, go here.

TT: Almanac

December 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Men are what their mothers make them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

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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