Archives for 2018

From 2005:

I don’t spend too many evenings by myself: I’m in the company of friends far more often than not, watching performances or just hanging out. Sometimes I find myself hungering for solitude, and there are occasions when I’m almost painfully grateful to spend a night with my prints, my CDs, my iBook, and my trusty TV, watching What’s My Line?, keeping my own counsel, and staying up as late as I like. I’ve recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I even like vacationing alone. At the same time, I’m no hermit, and like most singletons, I find there are other times when being alone is no fun at all. One is when you finish watching a really good movie and, instead of chatting about it over a drink with a friend, retire to an empty hotel room in a city far from home….

Read the whole thing here.

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

Francis Bacon, “On Friendship”

After a hiatus caused by Mrs. T’s illness, I resume my Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column today with a tribute to Neil Simon. Here’s an excerpt.

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All comedy dates, and every pure comedian sooner or later becomes passé—even one as beloved as Neil Simon, who died on Sunday at the age of 91. Not only did Mr. Simon have a quarter-century run as America’s most popular playwright, but “Lost in Yonkers,” his 20th and best play, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. The Pulitzer jurors described it as “a mature work by an enduring (and often undervalued) American playwright,” and pretty much everybody agreed by then that he had evolved into something other than a joke merchant. But Mr. Simon would never again write a full-fledged box-office smash, and none of his plays has since been successfully revived on Broadway save as a star vehicle….

Nonetheless, it’s just as noteworthy that Mr. Simon suited the tastes of American audiences so well for such an extraordinarily long time. His one-two-here-comes-the-punchline style of comedy, which took shape in the Fifties during his tenure as a writer of sketches for “Your Show of Shows,” Sid Caesar’s classic TV series, continued to come across with freshness and immediacy throughout the Sixties and Seventies, even as the culture around him was changing in ways that were radical in every sense of the word. And as Mr. Simon grew older, he chafed at its limitations and started turning out stage comedies like “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971) and screenplays like “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972) that were tougher than their predecessors….

Alas, Mr. Simon was unable to build on the artistic success of “Lost in Yonkers.” This stands to reason: Playwriting tends to be a young man’s game, and his creative flame had dimmed after three decades of exhaustingly hard use. Perhaps he had by then simply said what he had to say. In any case, American comedy in the Nineties was giving way to newer, less specifically joke-based approaches, and what had once seemed fresh and immediate increasingly sounded old-fashioned. Whatever the reason, Mr. Simon would never again ring the gong of unequivocal box-office success on Broadway….

All this notwithstanding, I’ve come to feel in recent years that Mr. Simon’s best plays are worthy of revival—if they’re directed in a way that brings out their seriousness instead of going for too-easy laughs….

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Read the whole thing here.

Johnny Carson interviews Neil Simon on The Tonight Show. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on June 26, 1980:

If you’re keeping up with Mrs. T’s recent medical travails, you’ll want to know that she was transferred on Saturday night from the intensive-care unit of New York-Presbyterian Hospital to the cardiology floor. Her immediate problem is that the blood transfusions she received last week in Cape May as a result of her unexpected gastrointestinal bleeding have weakened her heart muscle. This puts her at risk of right-ventricle failure—a common development for those suffering, as does Mrs. T, from pulmonary hypertension. That’s why she was in the ICU, where her condition could be monitored around the clock.

The good news is that while Mrs. T isn’t anywhere close to being out of the woods, she does appear to be on the mend, albeit slowly. To be sure, she’s still in great need of a double lung transplant, but the doctors at New York-Presbyterian hope to stabilize her condition to the point that she can wait for the Big Call at home (our upper Manhattan apartment is very close to the hospital). To that hopeful end, she’s now being watched over by the hospital’s cardiology team.

No visitors or calls yet—Mrs. T is still too frail to entertain guests. I’ve been passing on your messages of love and support, though, and they’ve done wonders for her spirits. Mine, too. As I said the other day, I can’t tell you how much it means to know how much you care.

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One more thing: don’t call or text me unless you have an urgent reason to do so. I have to keep my cellphone going 24/7 in case I get an emergency call from the hospital, and I’m keeping unusually late hours these days so that I can sit up with Mrs. T, who is (like most people with pulmonary disease) an insomniac. Should you call me at ten a.m., it’s way better than even money that you’ll wake me up. If you need to get in touch with me, please do so via e-mail or through the social media.

Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, and Pearl Bailey sing a medley of “Side by Side by Side” and “What Would We Do Without You?” (from Stephen Sondheim’s Company) on Bing Crosby and His Friends, originally telecast by NBC on February 27, 1972:

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

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

James Boswell, Life of Johnson

Just in case you’re wondering why there’s no drama column in today’s Wall Street Journal, I’ve been so preoccupied with Mrs. T’s illness that my editors strongly suggested I take a week off. Not that they had to push too hard! Ever since my beloved spouse crashed and burned in Cape May a week and a half ago, I’ve spent most of my waking hours at her bedside, watching old movies, running errands, and generally spreading sweetness and light in all directions.

I’m about to restart the professional machine again: I saw two shows in Cape May last week and will be seeing another one off Broadway tomorrow afternoon, and I expect to crank up the word processor and start generating prose early next week. For the moment, though, I’m devoting all of my energies, such as they are, to helping the ICU staff at New York-Presbyterian look after the woman I love. Can you blame me? Like the man says, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell read and talk about their work on an undated episode of USA: Poetry, originally telecast by NET, the predecessor of PBS, in 1966:

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