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Two to a customer

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

600_037When I was a boy, my family went to the SEMO District Fair in Cape Girardeau every September without fail. It was one of the supreme treats of a happy childhood, my annual opportunity to ride the thrilling giant double Ferris wheel, eat my fill of Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy, gorge on the Trinity Lutheran Men’s Club’s incomparably greasy and flavorful cheeseburgers, and—on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion—wander off all by myself and get hopelessly and predictably lost.

The last time I went to the SEMO District Fair, or any other fair, was in 2001, a couple of days after 9/11. I recalled the occasion in this space a decade ago:

I was stranded in Smalltown, U.S.A., waiting for the planes to start flying again so that I could make my way back to Manhattan. Though all of us in Smalltown were stunned by the horrors that had just played out on our TV screens, we knew we needed a break from reality, so I drove up to the fair with my mother, my brother, and his family, and we bought taffy and rode the rides. Alas, the double Ferris wheel was long gone–no doubt it had proved too tame for a generation of thrill-seeking youngsters raised on modern-day theme-park roller coasters–but the taffy hadn’t changed a bit.

Woodstock-Fair-Midway-12-1024x683Since then I’d assumed that my fairgoing days were over. But Mrs. T pointed out a few weeks ago that the Woodstock Fair isn’t far from our place in Connecticut, and she suggested that we go there this year. That struck me as a wonderful idea, so we jumped in the car on Saturday and drove to Woodstock, where we spent a balmy afternoon eating corndogs and cotton candy, inspecting pumpkins, melons, chickens, rabbits, and farm machinery, and (best of all!) riding the Ferris wheel and bumper cars. We even brought home a sack of taffy.

I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that our trip put me in mind yet again of Walking Distance, the 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone in which Martin Sloan, a harried advertising executive from New York, visits Homewood, the small town where he grew up, one fine summer day. He notices that nothing about the town has changed and in short order realizes that the clock has somehow been mysteriously turned back and that he is in the Homewood of his youth, where the carousel still turns and the calliope still plays.

1517448_10152185526052193_1052931777_nThe way Martin Sloan felt on that mysterious day in Homewood was the way I felt, more or less, when I returned to Smalltown for a visit shortly after my brother began to remodel the house in which we’d grown up together and in which he and his wife now live. He started, logically enough, by stripping my old, long-unoccupied bedroom to the walls, and I was briefly but thoroughly nonplussed when I entered the room and found it bare:

The bed I’d slept in, the bookshelf that once held my burgeoning library of paperbacks, the chest of drawers in which I placed my neatly folded clothes–all had vanished. Even the carpet was gone….

I stepped inside and was no less startled by how small the room looked. Could I really have grown up in this cramped chamber? Was this the place in which I dreamed my youthful dreams of glory? It was—or, rather, it had been. Now it was an empty, memory-free space waiting to be brought to life once more.

BwUXvAfCYAESG-AGoing to the Woodstock Fair, on the other hand, made me feel, if only fleetingly, that Martin Sloan’s father was wrong to warn his son that you can’t go home again: “We only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to every customer.” Maybe so, but you couldn’t have proved it by me on Saturday. Most of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Woodstock Fair proved to be all but indistinguishable from what I’d seen, heard, and smelled in Cape Girardeau a half-century ago, and I found it unexpectedly easy to relax my grip on the present and revel for a couple of blissful hours in the simple joys of an old-fashioned midway. All that mattered was the perfect moment in which I was suspended, and the presence of the loving and beloved companion with whom I shared it. If only for the space of a single blessed August afternoon, time had been regained and the carousel still turned.

* * *

The epilogue of “Walking Distance,” a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone written and narrated by Rod Serling. The score is by Bernard Herrmann:

Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormé, and Edd Byrnes sing “County Fair” (by Tormé and Robert Wells) on The Jo Stafford Show, a 1961 TV special:

Lookback: on being a late adopter of information technology

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2004:

For some reason I seem to have a knack for intuiting the large-scale cultural effects of technologies I have yet to adopt. I understood what digital downloading would do to the recording industry years before I downloaded my first piece of iMusic. Yet I wish I were more comfortable with those technologies, which may simply be another way of saying that I wish I were ten years younger. Or perhaps not: I’ve always known that part of me is inclined by temperament to live in the past, and the fact that I don’t never fails to strike me as something of a minor miracle….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Elmore Leonard on the secret of a happy life

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Carl said his dad knew how to live; he watched the world go by but only paid attention to certain parts.”

Elmore Leonard, The Hot Kid

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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