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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for September 2, 2015

From the diary of a peripatetic drama critic (II)

September 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

mediumMONDAY, AUGUST 10 I’m not afraid to fly anymore, but I still hate it with a passion. I sometimes say that The Wall Street Journal pays me to sit in airports and on airplanes, not to write about the plays I see once I finally get to wherever I’m going. My recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was a case in point—not horrific, just disagreeable, rather like a protracted bout of chronic but tolerable pain.

Judging by the preponderance of evidence, I might as well stay up all night before embarking on an early-morning transcontinental flight. Yet I find it impossible to do so, even though I never manage to get more than three hours’ sleep. You’d think I would have known better this time, seeing as how I had to hit the road at five-thirty in order to reach Kennedy Airport in time to stumble through security and board a plane bound for Portland. No such luck: I didn’t turn the lights out until three-thirty.

Why Portland? Because there are no nonstop flights from the New York area to Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. You have to fly somewhere else, usually Los Angeles or San Francisco, then change planes, and long experience has taught me that this is more flying than I care to do in a single day. So I decided to fly into Portland and drive from there to Eugene, which is roughly halfway to Ashland, which is three hundred miles from Portland.

The flight itself was uneventful. Suffice it to say that I amused myself by listening to my iPod and watching a couple of old movies, and that I felt only moderately battered when we finally landed in Portland. Alas, the drive that followed was unpleasant in every possible way. As I tweeted shortly after checking into my Eugene hotel, “The highways of Oregon are made of coarse-ground rubble lightly coated with used motor oil. So are the drivers.” Had it not been for the whirlpool and Dungeness crab chowder at Valley River Inn, I might well have turned around and gone back home.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11 Twitter being what it is, I heard the next morning from a sympathetic Oregonian who advised me to get off the interstate just south of Eugene on Highway 58 and spend the next couple of hours driving through the Willamette National Forest. It would, he assured me, soothe my soul.

beaver-pond-1976-Neil-WelliverI took his advice, and within a few minutes I found myself approaching the Lowell Covered Bridge, which was so pretty that I pulled off the highway for a closer look. It was a good omen. The rest of the trip was exactly as advertised, and the further I drove, the happier I felt. I ascended by easy stages into the Cascades, noting the terse signs that indicated the changing altitude and other relevant local phenomena: ELK. ROCKS. SLIDES. The traffic on the two-lane highway was sparse, the views breathtaking. It was as if I’d somehow wandered into a mural by Neil Welliver. Every time I passed an RV, I recalled my as-yet-unfulfilled dream of renting a Steinbeck-sized camper and driving from coast to coast without benefit of itinerary, governed solely by whim. Alas, Mrs. T would never go for it—she likes to plan ahead—but the dream, inspired by my youthful admiration for Charles Kuralt, lingers in my soul to this day.

2317aa5c-0e10-44f1-92b5-478adad993f9_dSomewhere along the way it hit me: Nobody in the world knows where I am right now. That thought filled me with a pleasure bordering on ecstasy. At fifty-nine, I find that my life is at the mercy of curtain times, deadlines, and endless responsibilities, and I spend far too much of it sitting in front of a laptop, plugged into the world. Now the plug had been pulled, if only for a day. No one was waiting for me in Ashland, nor did I have a show to see that evening, and Mrs. T, who was tired of travel, had stayed behind in Connecticut. I was beholden only to myself.

At length I reached Odell Lake and noticed that both my stomach and my gas tank required attention. A sign told me where to fill the former, and shortly thereafter I pulled into the parking lot of Odell Lake Lodge & Resort, a rustic mountain hideaway patronized by outdoor types. I went into the restaurant and ordered a smoked salmon salad sandwich, and the young waiter brought me a thick slab of fish stuffed between two buns. I took a savory bite, then asked him, “Did you guys smoke this fish here?”

odell-lake-lodge“Sure,” he said matter-of-factly, as if such culinary miracles were commonplace.

After lunch I picked up an Odell Lake Lodge brochure at the front desk and poked my head into one of the rough-hewn cabins, longing as I did so to shred my schedule and spend the rest of the week there. Then I drove to the nearest gas station. As I filled the tank, my long-forgotten cellphone rang for the first time in two days. It was Mrs. T, calling all the way from the other side of North America to see how I was.

“You won’t believe where I am right now,” I said, the spell of the Cascades not yet broken.

“Probably not,” she replied.

(To be continued)

* * *

The Lemonheads sing “The Outdoor Type”:

Snapshot: Ray Price sings “Invitation to the Blues”

September 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERARay Price and the Cherokee Cowboys perform “Invitation to the Blues” on a 1959 episode of Country Style, USA, a TV series produced by the U.S. Army. The song was written by Roger Miller, who sings the backup vocals in this performance:

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

Almanac: Wyndham Lewis on laughter

September 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.”

Wyndham Lewis, “Inferior Religions”

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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