Archives for May 21, 2020

My wife Hilary died a bit more than two months ago. I wrote a fair amount about her passing at the time, but of late I’ve limited myself to the occasional tweet. That’s not because I’m over it—I doubt I’ll ever really “get over it,” whatever that means—but because I am now simply trying to cope on a day-to-day basis with the violently disruptive combined effects of profound grief and the near-total isolation that has been since imposed on Manhattan by the coming of the coronavirus pandemic. Even in the age of the social media, it is hard to mourn alone.

To be sure, I never stopped working, and I’ve resumed podcasting about theater as well, but these are physically solitary pursuits, conducted from the dinner table that has become in recent weeks the center of my professional life, with the prints and paintings hanging on the walls around me serving as my only “companions.” It has only been in the past week or so that I’ve started to emerge from my apartment building each day and walk briefly in the sunshine. Each time I do, I’m surprised anew to discover that there are other people out there in the world—and after fifteen years of ceaseless companionship and, latterly, devoted caregiving, I still find it cruelly hard to take in the inescapable fact that my beloved spouse will not be there when I return.

Kind friends recently sent me a museum-quality print of a photograph of Hilary that was taken when she was twenty-three, years before we met. It shows a young woman who was fearless and angry and full of life. We had no idea that the two of us would meet a quarter-century later and change each other’s lives forevermore. I haven’t decided where to hang it, but when I do so, I will give it a prominent place in the apartment that the two of us shared so happily until she went into the hospital last December, never again to leave.

Shortly after Hilary died, I wrote in a single sitting an essay about her called “My Gallant Gal” that has just been published in Commentary. For those of you not fortunate enough to have met her, it may give you a clearer idea of what the “Mrs. T” of this blog was like in real life. It comforts me to have been able to put some of her singular qualities on paper. The results are inescapably inadequate but, I hope, heartfelt and suggestive all the same.

You can read “My Gallant Gal” by going here.

*  *  *

Frank Sinatra sings Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in London in 1970. The orchestral arrangement is by Nelson Riddle:

My latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on smaller arts organizations and the neighborhoods they serve. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The media are full of stories about museums, Broadway theaters, opera and dance companies and symphony orchestras that have been knocked to their knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Even after they reopen, it’s impossible to know how long it will take them to rebound. A recent national poll taken by Shugoll Research indicates that 63% of American playgoers will “probably wait at least a few months or more” to return to theaters after they reopen. As Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, put it in a statement: “You have to assume it will be a long time, years not months, before we return to levels of operation approximating where we were just a couple of weeks ago.”But the effects of the pandemic extend far deeper into our culture than can be measured by the well-publicized struggles of, say, American Ballet Theatre (which has canceled all of its spring and summer performances) or the Art Institute of Chicago (which was forced to postpone its latest Monet exhibition, originally set to open last week).

You won’t read anything about the arts more sobering than “Art in the Time of Coronavirus: NYC’s Small Arts Organizations Fighting for Survival,” a report published last month by the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a New York-based think tank that has taken a searching look at the prospects for the city’s smaller arts organizations….

The Staten Island Children’s Museum, for example, expects to lose $630,000 in income, nearly 30% of its annual operating budget. As for Keen Company, a highly regarded off-Broadway theater troupe whose revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” I praised in February as “pleasing in every imaginable way,” it has postponed its annual fundraising gala, which would have brought in a quarter of the company’s $730,000 operating budget….

Yes, ABT and the Art Institute of Chicago are having a tough time, but they are fixed and familiar stars on the long horizon of American art, and their wealthy patrons will ensure that they stay in the sky. But what about Keen Company, to whose productions I have given nine rave reviews in the past 13 years? What happens if we lose them, and hundreds—maybe thousands—of other groups like them?…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Keen Company’s production of Blues for an Alabama Sky:

“Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”

Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”