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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Blossoms in the breeze

January 23, 2013 by Terry Teachout

jackie_gleason_400x400_4.jpgOne of the nice things about being married to a woman who’s exactly your age is that you rarely have to explain things to one another. As Mrs. T and I drove into Miami Beach the other day, she looked over at me and said, “The sun and fun capital of the world!” We dissolved at once in shared laughter, each knowing what the other was thinking. That was the tagline used by Johnny Olson every Saturday night to introduce Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine, my father’s favorite TV program, which was taped in Miami Beach. Mrs. T and I both watched it faithfully when we were small, and recall the show with a fondness that has little to do with its intrinsic merit, such as it was.

Never having gotten myself too firmly entangled in the kind of red-sports-car relationship that Donald Fagen describes sardonically (but sympathetically) in his new album, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be romantically involved with a person who didn’t know what you were talking about most of the time. Mrs. T, who is four days my junior, almost always knows what I’m talking about. She saw the same TV shows, heard the same records on the radio, and sang along with the same commercials. Like me, she remembers with perfect clarity how it felt to be young in the Sixties and slightly less so in the Seventies.

To be coeval with your spouse is an insufficiently appreciated comfort as you steer your uneasy way through middle age, though it’s no less important–for a journalist, anyway–to keep one eye firmly fixed on the windshield. I like it when my younger friends fill me in on current events in the great world of pop culture, and from time to time I cultivate a fresh enthusiasm of my own (most recently for Janelle Monáe, to whom Our Girl in Chicago introduced me last year).

At the same time, though, I cringe at the idea of becoming the kind of ever-so-with-it senior citizen who engages in the blush-making practice of what one of Kingsley Amis’ characters refers to as “arse-creeping youth.” When I take an interest in something new, it’s because I like it, not because I want to be seen liking it, much less because I want to stun my younger friends with my hipness, which never works anyway. I’m not hip, nor have I ever been (though I do take pride in being one of the few jazz writers who can actually play the blues). I’m a fifty-six-year-old man who likes what he likes and does his best never to pretend otherwise.

220px-Grateful_Dead_-_Live-Dead.jpgThis cuts both ways: I don’t like the pop culture of my youth merely because it was the pop culture of my youth. You couldn’t pay me to sit through an episode of The Brady Bunch or listen to Live/Dead straight through. Life’s too short to waste any part of it rehashing adolescent enthusiasms that didn’t pan out.

That said, I wouldn’t dream of denying that I miss the world of my youth, or that I think about it fairly often, perhaps more often than I should. Sometimes I even miss being young–though not usually–and no day passes when I fail to miss my beloved parents. But would I turn the clock back? Not a chance. Television at its best is infinitely better now than it was then, and most of the rock music to which I listened avidly in 1973 bores me stiff now. I vastly prefer my MacBook to the manual typewriter on which I painstakingly taught myself how to be a professional writer, just as I prefer my iPod (yes, I still have one) to the monstrous console radio-phonograph that I inherited from my father’s mother when I was a teenager.

DAD%2C%20TERRY%2C%20AND%20DAVE%20WITH%20THE%20ORANGE%20CAKE.jpgWhat I really miss, I suppose, is the sheer simplicity of childhood, that precious time when other people make the decisions and all you have to do is be. Yet I don’t miss it enough to want to live any part of it over again. Colette, who was exceedingly wise about such things, said something in The Last of Chéri that I take very much to heart: “I love my past. I love my present. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve had, and I’m not sad because I have it no longer.” I loved my childhood, but I love my life with Mrs. T even more–and I also love it that she knows who Crazy Guggenheim was and can sing the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies from memory without getting a word wrong.

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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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