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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 8, 2017

Lovely and wonderful

May 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Evelyn Teachout, my beloved mother, died five years ago this past weekend. Her death is still as vivid to me as if it had happened last night, no doubt in part because I wrote about it in detail not long after the fact. I can close my eyes and see every detail of the nursing-home room in which her long life drew to a close. Yet it really did happen not yesterday but in 2012—the same year, hard as it is for me to grasp, in which John Douglas Thompson first appeared in Satchmo at the Waldorf at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts.

That was quite a year. Among other things, Mrs. T and I drove that summer from San Francisco to San Diego on Highway 1, hitting the road a couple of days after my mother’s funeral. I also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, spent a month working on Satchmo and Duke at the MacDowell Colony, and wrote my five hundredth Wall Street Journal drama column. All these things were and are important to me—yet they are as nothing next to the irreducible, inescapable fact of my mother’s death. We were close my whole life long, and we talked on the phone two or three times each week until her final illness left her too frail to speak. Then, all at once, she was gone, never to return.

I wrote about her often, never more truly than in this 2010 posting about gratitude:

I haven’t mentioned her lately in this space, so perhaps it’s worth saying that my mother did everything right (other than failing to teach me how to cook). Evelyn Teachout, who turns eighty-one in June, mysteriously neglected to make any of the all-too-familiar mistakes that blight the lives of so many of the people I know. She showed me how to laugh, admired my achievements, brushed off my failures, assured me whenever necessary that pretty much anything I wanted to do in life would be fine with her, and never left me in the slightest doubt of her love. She embedded in me what Freud called “that confidence of success that often induces real success.” You can’t get much luckier than that.

A few days after she died, I received and posted this e-mail from a New York friend who sent flowers to her funeral:

I was the white roses, because your mother seemed like white roses to me. When I called the local florist, it was early Monday morning, nine a.m. I figured out where your mother might be from Google, and called around. When I got the flower shop that starts with P, I tried to explain who I was and what I wanted, and who the flowers were for. The woman who answered the phone asked for the family name, and when I told her she sucked in her breath: “Oh, she was a lovely woman, a wonderful woman.” And then in this little Midwestern way, she managed to tell me she was not claiming closeness, just declaring what was obvious. It was so touching, and we had a nice talk.

I couldn’t describe her any better than that kindly florist did in nine simple words.

The same friend asked me the other day to sum up my life. “I had a mother who believed I could do anything I wanted,” I replied. “Now I have a wife who believes the same thing. That’s the whole story, right there.” We make ourselves, but without the steadfast love of those two women, I’d be unimaginably different. Not many people get that lucky twice in a lifetime. I did, and so did my brother.

I miss you, Mom. I always will.

* * *

William Warfield and Aaron Copland perform Copland’s arrangement of “At the River”:

Just because: George Balanchine’s Agon

May 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAA 1960 performance by New York City Ballet of George Balanchine’s Agon, originally telecast by the CBC. The pas de deux is danced by Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell, who created their roles. This ballet was made in 1957 to a score commissioned from Igor Stravinsky:

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

Almanac: Cedric Hardwicke on life and theater

May 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The more I see of life, the more I prefer the world of the theater to the real world.”

Cedric Hardwicke, quoted in his obituary (New York Times, August 7, 1964)

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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