• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

“Inspire us to be brave”

March 23, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Thanks to a kind-hearted, quick-witted nurse in New York-Presbyterian’s cardio-thoracic ICU, I was able to see and speak to Mrs. T via Skype on Sunday night. That sentence really ought by all rights to end with an exclamation point, for it was the first time I’d laid eyes on her, virtually or in the flesh, since last weekend. The experience of seeing her face on the screen of my MacBook Air was overwhelming, so much so that I had to bite a good-sized hole in my tongue to keep from bursting out in tears (something of which she would have disapproved, Mrs. T being a bred-in-the-bone New England girl).

She didn’t talk back to me, of course: Mrs. T has two ventilator tubes in her nose and a tracheostomy in her neck. She did, however, blink “appropriately“ (that’s nurse-speak) when I asked if she could see and hear me. The nurse warned me that she becomes really tired at the end of the day, so I kept our “conversation“ short and to the point. I tried to tell her a bit about the coronavirus pandemic—she was in a medically induced coma from March 1 until last Friday—and explained that because of it, the hospital is now closed to all visitors, spouses included. I assured her that I was checking twice each day by phone on her condition and keeping her family and friends up to date on the latest developments, adding that thousands of people all over the world were pulling for her. I promised that we’d go back to Sanibel Island as soon as she was ready and told her that I loved her more than anything in the world, then hung up, drained and stunned and very, very happy.

Not only is Mrs. T well on her way toward full consciousness, but she’s making solid progress on all other fronts. All her vital signs are favorable. The nurses turned her ventilator down to the lowest possible setting this afternoon to give her a chance to exercise her new lungs, and she breathed more or less on her own for a half-hour. She looks pale, puffy, and wan—so would you—but to my eyes she was as beautiful as she was on the night when, fifteen years ago, I fell in love with her at first sight.

I wish I could have played some music for her. Had I been able to do so, I would have played Music, Awake!, the anthem for chorus and orchestra that Paul Moravec and I wrote four years ago to celebrate our good friend John Sinclair’s twenty-fifth anniversary as the artistic director of the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, Florida. By that time, Mrs. T’s doctors had grounded her, and she was unable to fly down to Winter Park for the premiere—the first of my premieres, though not the last, that she had to miss because of her illness. (It never did get any easier for either of us.)

Inspired by the climactic transformation scene of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, a play that Paul and I both love, Music, Awake! is an ode to the magical, life-changing power of music, though I also had Mrs. T’s own indomitable courage in mind when I wrote this stanza:

Teach us songs whose melodies
Inspire us to be brave,
Require us to be bold,
Command our souls.
Let every note ascend,
Let every phrase ring out
With certitude and power
In the darkest hour.

Mere days ago I feared that my brave companion might never awaken from her drugged sleep. But seeing and speaking to her has inspired me to try to be as brave, as all of us will need to be in the weeks and months that lie ahead of us. So long as she is awake and aware, I know I’ll be able to cope with whatever is to come.

*  *  *

For previous reports on Mrs. T’s surgery and subsequent recovery, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

To learn more about her rare illness, go here.

To find out how to become an organ donor, go here.

*  *  *

Music, Awake!, composed by Paul Moravec and performed by John Sinclair and the Bach Festival Society Chorus and Orchestra, with Amanda Pabyan, Margaret Lattimore, Robert Breault, and Kevin Deas. The text is by me:

Filed Under: main

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

March 2020
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Snapshot: FDR’s 1933 inauguration
  • Almanac: Ralph Ellison on power
  • Lookback: “Call me Bartleby”
  • Almanac: Thomas Fuller on memory
  • Just because: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays Ravel

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in