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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 22, 2015

“Merry Christmas, Louis!”

December 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

560642_10151399168392193_327621121_nMrs. T and I put up Christmas trees last year and the year before that, and both of them meant the world to me. Things have been more than a little bit hectic for both of us in recent months, though, and since we’re only going to be together in Connecticut for nine days before we fly south to Florida, we discussed it on the phone while I was in Chicago and decided to forgo a tree this year.

On Monday afternoon she picked me up at the train station in New London and drove me to our place in rural Connecticut. We talked about our decision again, agreeing that we’d made the right call—which didn’t keep me from feeling wistful about not having a Christmas tree to enjoy.

No sooner did we get home than she jumped out of the car and ran inside while I opened the trunk, took out my suitcases, and dragged them to the door. I pushed it open and saw…you guessed it…a fully trimmed tree, all lit up.

1224_louis-wife-e1387980884442I couldn’t say anything at first. I’m sure you can guess why. Then I had the presence of mind to quote from memory the last couple of lines of a scene from Satchmo at the Waldorf that Barry Shabaka Henley, Charles Newell, and I were working on just last week in the rehearsal room of Chicago’s Court Theatre. “Lucille” is, of course, Louis Armstrong’s fourth and last wife, and the story he tells in the play is one that Armstrong loved to tell in real life:

We get married, Lucille goes out on the road with me and it’s Christmas. Come back to the hotel after the show and there’s a little tree right there in the room, all lit up like nothing you ever seen before. She done trimmed it and put on the lights for old Pops! Now I ain’t never had no Christmas tree before. We couldn’t afford nothing like that back in New Orleans. Then I go out in the world, hit the road, nobody ever thought to put up no tree for me in no hotel room—not till Lucille. I come in, see that tree in the corner, and she say, “Merry Christmas, Louis!” And you know what? I wouldn’t let her turn it off. Lay in bed all night looking at them pretty lights winking and blinking, and I say to myself, “Satch, you done lucked out. Better do what you gotta do to hang onto that gal. You ain’t gonna do no better long as you live.”

You never saw anybody smile as big as Mrs. T did right then. Unless it was me.

What a difference a decade makes

December 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

The so-called Proust Questionnaire circulates in a number of variably authentic versions. I filled out one of them earlier this year, having forgotten that I filled out a different version a decade earlier. It turns out that most of the questions overlap, so I thought it might be interesting to compare my answers:

What is your most marked characteristic?
• In 2005: curiosity
• In 2015: determination—and, I hope, fairness

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
• In 2005: impatience
• In 2015: the same

What do you most value in your friends?
• In 2005: kindness and warmth
• In 2015: patience

What is the quality you most like in a man?
• In 2005: the ability to argue without becoming angry
• In 2015: kindness

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
• In 2005: a sense of the absurd
• In 2015: kindness

What is it that you most dislike?
• In 2005: smugness. “I detest a man who knows that he knows” (Justice Holmes)
• In 2015: any species of ideology, secular or religious, that issues in mass murder

davetoughWhich talent would you most like to have?
• In 2005: I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire. (I wish I could walk like Fred Astaire.) Failing that, I wish I could play drums like Dave Tough
• In 2015: I wish that I could play piano like Nat Cole and/or dance like Fred Astaire

What is your favorite occupation?
• In 2005: conversation with a loved one over a good meal
• In 2015: writing—but when I’m engaged in it, I’m not conscious of enjoying myself

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
• In 2005: the same as my favorite occupation, minus the meal and in closer proximity
• In 2015: rehearsing a show

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
• In 2005: Siegfried
• In 2015: sitting through any opera by Philip Glass

Where would you like to live?
• In 2005: America, in the Fifties
• In 2015: Florida’s Sanibel Island

Who are your favorite writers?
• In 2005: Johnson, Trollope, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Colette, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, M.F.K. Fisher
• In 2015: Kingsley Amis, the Boswell of the Life of Johnson, Colette, Edwin Denby, M.F.K. Fisher, Justice Holmes, A.J. Liebling, John P. Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, I.B. Singer, Trollope, Waugh. For entertainment: Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse

Who are your favorite poets?
• In 2005: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Larkin
• In 2015: Anna Akhmatova, Dickinson, Frost, Hardy, Larkin, Shakespeare, Yeats

Who is your favorite male character in fiction?
• In 2005: Father Hugh Kennedy, in Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness. Runner-up: Lucky Jim Dixon
• In 2015: Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

51Fl5pjpRmL._UY250_Who is your favorite female character?
• In 2005: Vicky Haven in Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born
• In 2015: the same

What are your favorite names?
• In 2005: Anne, Ali, Erin, Heather, Kate, Laura, Libby, Tanaquil (all accented on the first syllable, for what it’s worth)
• In 2015: Emily, Julia, Laura

What is your present state of mind?
• In 2005: frazzled but expectant
• In 2015: distracted and somewhat anxious

How do you wish to die?
• In 2005: in a state of grace, after having seen my last, best book through the press
• In 2015: with sufficient presence of mind to mutter “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

What is your motto?
• In 2005: “Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize” (Henry James). Alternate motto for especially hectic days: “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem” (James Burnham)
• In 2015: “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem”

* * *

Fred Astaire plays drums in A Damsel in Distress, directed by George Stevens in 1937. The song is “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” by George and Ira Gershwin, and the dance was choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan. This scene was shot in a single continuous take:

Lookback: on getting out of the hospital

December 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2005, ten years ago today:

All changed, changed utterly, I told myself, knowing too well that it won’t be so easy as that. Every day I’ll get out of bed and do battle with the demon who drives me, and every night I’ll go to bed and rest up for the next day’s fight. Some days I’ll win, some days I won’t. The trick, I suppose, will be to win more often than not, to slowly drain the congestion of overwork from my life as the doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital drained the excess fluid from my heart and lungs. Would there were a pill for that! Instead I must teach myself to make more room for life and love and everything else I spent the past few years pushing away. That’s something I learned in the hospital: if you want to be loved, you have to make room….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: George Santayana on happiness and the meaning of life

December 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

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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