Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important?
• If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.
• You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.
• Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.
Having attained an age when I find it increasingly difficult to retrieve names with the effortless ease of my youth, I’m fascinated by the persistence, vividness, and exactitude of my earliest memories, many of which have to do either with music or with things I saw on television as a boy.
Here’s a double-barreled example. On September 21, 1963, my family watched the chaotic debut episode of The Jerry Lewis Show, a two-hour-long live prime-time talk-and-variety show for whose forty-week season Lewis was reportedly paid a cool $8 million—at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a TV performer. The series, a legendary fiasco, was canceled after thirteen weeks. (You can read all about it here.) So far as I know, the first episode was never rerun, meaning that I only saw it once. Even so, I clearly recall that Lewis sang a song that night called “Think Pink.” Not only did the refrain lodge permanently in my mind, but I remembered that it was in the key of F major.
Such, at any rate, was my memory—and now, thanks to the queer miracle that is YouTube, I’m in a position to check its accuracy. Scroll forward to 12:45 and you can see and hear “Think Pink” for yourself:
You’ll have to take my word for it, but my recollection of the refrain is note-for-note accurate…and sure enough, it’s in F major.
Why on earth would so trivial a ditty have made so deep an impression on me fifty-two years ago? I can only suppose that childhood memory functions in much the same way as the capacity for language acquisition: once heard, never forgotten.
Whatever the reason, it makes me tremble to imagine the unwanted pieces of pop-culture flotsam and jetsam that will clutter my consciousness on my deathbed. I’d like to think that my head will be full of Das Lied von der Erde or the slow movement of the Schubert Cello Quintet as the Distinguished Thing approaches—but it’s probably just as likely, and far more humbling, that my final thoughts will be of “Think Pink.”
Fats Waller sings and plays “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in Stormy Weather, directed by Andrew L. Stone and released in 1943. The band includes Benny Carter on trumpet, Slam Stewart on bass, and Zutty Singleton on drums. Also seen briefly in this scene are Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
At long last, here’s an online video of Theater Talk’s 2015 Broadway end-of-season critics’ panel, featuring Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, John Simon of the Westchester Guardian, and me. The hosts are Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel. The shows that we discussed on the telecast, which was taped last month, are Skylight, Fun Home, Finding Neverland, On the Twentieth Century, and Something Rotten!:
“My feeling that not just America but the West is finished is based on a conviction that when a civilization becomes obsessed with its deficiencies, it is degenerating.”
Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (Jan. 28, 1971)