A police car and a screaming siren–

A pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete–

A baby wailing and a stray dog howling–

The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking–

that’s entertainment.

A smash of glass and the rumble of boots–

An electric train and a ripped-up phone booth–

Paint-splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat–

Lights going out and a kick in the balls–

that’s entertainment.

Days of speed and slow time Mondays–

Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday–

Watching the news and not eating your tea–

A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls–

that’s entertainment.

Waking up at six a.m. on a cool warm morning–

Opening the windows and breathing in petrol–

An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard–

Watching the telly and thinking about your holidays–

that’s entertainment.

Paul Weller, “That’s Entertainment” (music by Weller)

Deadline No. 4 is done, and so am I. Totally.

Unless Our Girl decides to poke her head in, don’t expect any more posting (outside of the usual routine weekly stuff) until Monday.

See you later.

The first installment of my ex post facto travel diary is well under way, but I got back from a Broadway preview too late to finish writing it, and Deadline No. 2 is already beckoning. Discretion being the better part of valor, I’m going to go to bed instead of staying up too late blogging.

More as it happens….

– Fee paid to Truman Capote by Paramount in 1958 for the film rights to Breakfast at Tiffany’s: $65,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $426,394.11

(Source: Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography)

Let me love you,

Let me say that I do,

If you’ll lend me your ear,

I’ll make it clear

The way that I do.

Let me whisper it,

Let me sigh it,

Let me sing it, my dear,

Or I will cry it.

Let me love you,

Let me show that I do,

Let me do a million impossible things

So you’ll know that I do.

I’ll buy you the dawn

If you’ll let me love you today,

And if that’s not enough,

I’ll buy you the first of May,

And tomorrow I’ll send you

Merrily on your way.

Bart Howard, “Let Me Love You” (music by Howard)

…to our far-flung readers in Australia, Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Israel, the Ivory Coast, Japan, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates!

(Translation: I arose early to write my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal and took a quick peek at our world map before settling down to work.)

“You lead a really interesting life,” Ms. Pratie Place told me on Sunday afternoon, sounding a bit wistful as I described my daily rounds. I didn’t disagree. Whatever else I am, I’m never bored, except on the rare occasions when I find myself watching a really dumb play or listening to the kind of music Igor Stravinsky dubbed “an exercise in pure duration.” (He had Bruckner in mind–I’m thinking Philip Glass.)

The trouble with my life is not that it’s dull but that it sometimes becomes too interesting, at which point successive waves of beauty can start looking suspiciously like one damn thing after another. Experience has taught me the dangers of overscheduling myself, but though I’ve learned the lesson fairly well, it doesn’t always stop me from signing up for one event too many. Nor do I ever have total control over my schedule: press previews and deadlines fall where they will, not where I would, and every once in a while they become fused with the other parts of my life in such a way as to rob me of the ability to fall asleep. “Oh, God, I’m wired,” I find myself muttering grimly at three in the morning, knowing I’ll have to go on booming and zooming for several days past the last deadline before the adrenalin finally leaches out of my pores and I become my even-keeled self once more.

I’m still in the booming-and-zooming phase of my most recent tumble off the wagon of schedule-related sobriety, the bare outline of which I shared with you on Tuesday, and–you guessed it–I’m wired. I awoke without benefit of alarm at six this morning, my head already half-full of the drama column I was to deliver at eleven-thirty, and I knew even before I was completely awake that there was no point in trying to go back to sleep. I came down from the loft, wrote the column, sent it in, then went back to bed for a couple of hours. Then I got up and wrote another piece. I used to do that kind of thing all the time back when I was young and full of beans, but with the half-century mark a mere three months away, I know such spurts are deceptive: they mean I’m running on fumes and ready to crash.

I could probably knock off Deadline No. 4 tonight, or finish up that really long posting about my Manhattan-Washington-Brooklyn-North Carolina adventures. Instead, I’m going to switch off the iBook, go get dinner, return to the apartment, and watch some totally irrelevant TV. I have an old George Sanders movie tucked away on my DVR, which sounds like just what the doctor ordered. After that I’ll listen to some music and revel in the joys of the Teachout Museum, followed by (do I hear the earth moving?) an early bedtime. Such, dear readers, is the wild and crazy life of a Manhattan singleton-boulevardier.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a hamburger….

UPDATE: Birds of a feather blog together.

Or, to be more exact, where was I yesterday? In an airport motel outside Greenboro, N.C., of course! Inclement weather prevented me from returning to New York on schedule, so I spent Sunday night dining in a sports bar and watching The Matrix on WTBS. Not having packed my iBook, I couldn’t blog (which was probably a good thing).

And where was I before that? Well, life has been the least little bit hectic of late. To be exact, here’s what I’ve been up to since last Wednesday night:

– I saw Jersey Boys on Broadway and Propeller‘s all-male version of The Winter’s Tale at BAM Harvey (about which more in Friday’s Wall Street Journal).

– I attended a meeting of the National Council on the Arts in Washington, D.C.

– I saw Carolina Ballet dance two performances of Robert Weiss’ new version of Swan Lake in Winston-Salem.

– I took a young friend to see her very first performance of George Balanchine’s Serenade, danced by the Washington Ballet.

– I brunched with an out-of-town blogger.

Had I gotten home on Sunday night, I would have written all this up for your delectation, but since I got home on Monday afternoon in a severe state of sleep debt, I took a nap instead. This is a four-deadline week, meaning that work must take precedence over reminiscence, but I promise to share some of my adventures with you in the course of the next few days.

For now, though, I think I ought to go back to bed….