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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

In the open

April 21, 2015 by Terry Teachout

I love my job, but I don’t much care for April, the last month of the Broadway season, when I have to spend nearly every night on the aisle seeing shows, some of them wonderful and others appalling beyond belief. The problem, though, is not the bad shows but the fact that I get so little time off. I don’t know about you, but there is an upper limit to the number of consecutive evenings I can spend on the town without starting to get a little bit weird, and I reached it…well, let’s just say a few days ago.

CDFI4khUgAA2HSVThus it was with much relief that I looked at my calendar yesterday and saw that I didn’t have to go anywhere until Tuesday. Nor did I, not even to the grocery store. To be sure, I had to get a fair amount of work done during the day, but it was finished by late afternoon, right around the time that the doorbell rang and a smiling UPS man presented me with a big cardboard box containing the signed copy of Romare Bearden’s “Pepper Jelly Lady” on which my wife and I had successfully bid a couple of weeks ago.

It happens that Mrs. T is up in Connecticut this week, having come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that I would be less than perfectly companionable until the theater season was over. She left me with firm instructions not to drive any nails into the walls of our apartment in her absence, but I decided to try hanging “Pepper Jelly Lady” in the spot in the dining room where Kenneth Noland’s “Circle I (II-3)” is normally to be found. Unlike the Noland, which is quiet and delicate almost to a fault, the Bearden all but explodes off the wall. It completely changes the balance of the apartment, to my mind for the better, though Mrs. T will, as always, make the final call.

CDFICedUgAA24KDBy the time the Bearden was hung, the sun had set and the streets of our neighborhood were foggy. I opened the living-room window so that I could feel the cool and humid air on my skin. Then I popped Matchbook, a 1974 album by Gary Burton and Ralph Towner, into the CD player and curled up on the nearby couch. The cool, tranquil sounds of vibraharp and acoustic guitar trickled into the room, and all at once Emily Webb’s anguished question from the last act of Our Town popped unexpectedly into my head. “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” I do, I thought with surprise. Right now, right this moment, I am present—and I am blessed.

My mind flicked over a few other shining hours from the recent past. I dismissed them, knowing that this was not a time for memories. Instead I let the beautiful music wash over me and looked at the beautiful art on the walls around me, and remembered to be grateful for the good fortune that lets me hear and see such things, and know them for what they are.

John Lukacs said it: “Out of what is darkness to our imperfect minds, for sixty or seventy or eighty years we are living in the light, in the open.” That was where I was last night: in the open.

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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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