“Saw your picture in the paper this morning,” said the driver of the shuttle that runs between the parking lot and the front door of the southeast Missouri hospital where my mother is recovering from surgery. Three more people told me the same thing in the lobby, elevator, and fourth-floor corridor. By the time I finally got to her room, I’d figured out that a reporter from one of our two local papers must have come to my Tuesday-night lecture at the Smalltown Depot, and a quick look at the carefully folded copy of the Southeast Missourian conspicuously placed on her bedside table confirmed it: I’d received what small-town newspaper readers universally refer to as “a write-up.” What’s more, it was a good one, meaning that (A) I was quoted accurately and (B) my photo looked rather more like the fellow I see in the bathroom mirror than the one portrayed on my driver’s license.

Not that I would have expected anything different. Small-town newspaper reporters rarely go out of their way to publish hatchet jobs, least of all about the Hometown Boy Made Good who comes back for a nostalgic visit. The rules of small-town journalism are very different from those prevailing in the big city. Reporters are not your friends, I’ve told any number of friends and colleagues preparing to be interviewed by a big-city journalist for the first time. Some of them take my word for it and act accordingly, but others march off to their doom sure that I’m a hardened old cynic and thus not to be trusted. “I just had an epiphany,” one of the latter told me after emerging, somewhat scathed, from the lion’s den. “A reporter risks nothing by inappropriate revelations, whereas the subject risks everything.” I was kind enough not to say I told her so.

Be that as it may, I haven’t any complaints with the way the Southeast Missourian and the Standard-Democrat wrote me up. Besides, it was fun to be recognized on the street, though I can see how it might get old. Alas, my fame will last only through Friday, when I fly back to Manhattan and resume the genteel obscurity of a middle-to-highbrow critic who can count his network TV appearances on some of the fingers of one hand. I realized long ago that in America, there’s no such thing as a famous writer, only famous actors. My all-time favorite joke is about the, er, Polish starlet who, er, slept with the screenwriter. If I ever write a book about Hollywood, which isn’t likely, that’ll be the title: She Screwed the Writer. (Or something close to that, anyway.)

I returned from the hospital to find an e-mailbox full of increasingly urgent communications. Among other things, it seems that the producers of one of the shows I was supposed to review in next Friday’s Wall Street Journal have postponed its opening night, a decision which forced me to spend a full hour rearranging my schedule for the next two weeks, with further juggling in the offing. In addition, I have three thousand words of deathless prose due in the e-mailbox of a Manhattan editor at some point in the next twenty-four hours, though the editor in question was kind enough to call on Wednesday morning and offer me an unsolicited deadline extension, an act of mercy for which he will store up much heavenly treasure. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to get the piece in on time, but it does mean I can breathe a little easier tomorrow morning, especially since I’m supposed to tape a local radio interview at one o’clock, arrgh….

Sounds like I’m already back in New York, doesn’t it? I got a call yesterday from Bass Player, my great friend, kindred spirit, and fellow workaholic, who is somewhere on the West Coast this week for reasons not dissimilar to the ones that brought me to Smalltown, U.S.A., last week. We traded notes on our respective situations, complained about the work we’d brought home with us, then swore up and down to one another that in spite of everything, we were still managing to set aside A Little Time for Ourselves.

“You know what we sound like?” I said. “A couple of drunks bragging about how many days we’ve been sober.”

She laughed so hard I thought my cell phone was going to explode.

Enough already. It’s not too late for me to to get a good night’s sleep, so I’ll turn off the iBook and give it my best shot. You wouldn’t hear from me again until Friday if I had any sense, but who says I have any sense?

“‘You Stewart?’ he asked.

“‘Yeah.’

“‘You did a thing in a picture once,’ he said. ‘Can’t remember the name of it, but you were in a room and you said a poem or something about fireflies. That was good.’

“I knew right away what he meant. That’s all he said. He was talking about a scene in the picture Come Live with Me that had come out before the war in 1941. He couldn’t remember the title, wasn’t even sure I was the same guy, but that little thing–didn’t even last a minute–he’d remembered all those years. And that’s what’s so great about the movies. If you’re good and God helps you and you’re lucky enough to have the kind of personality that comes across, you’re giving people little, little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

James Stewart (quoted in Donald Dewey, James Stewart: A Biography)

If you came here from the New York Times‘ new Blogs 101 page, welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/5-to-7 blog (we come and go on weekends) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago under the no-longer-a-pseudonym “Our Girl in Chicago.” (Terry is blogging from his Missouri hometown this week.)

In case you’re wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you’re seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.

All our postings from the past week are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Laura’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about “About Last Night,” by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You’ll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read, and otherwise do, links to Terry’s most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and “Sites to See,” a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you’re curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you’ve come to the right site: “Sites to See” will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to “About Last Night.”

As if all that weren’t enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the “Write Us” buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you’re minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that “About Last Night” is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren’t sure which way to turn.

If you’re one of the above, we’re glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

Attention, Yale University Press: I just sold a caseful of Teachout Readers. The occasion was the lecture I delivered on Tuesday at Smalltown’s old train depot, which has been turned into a museum. I spoke about how the new information technology has changed my life as a journalist, and when I was done I spent a good half-hour selling and signing copies of A Terry Teachout Reader. Granted, half the people in the audience knew me when I was in kneepants, but that’s still a whole bunch of books.

Four things:

– This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever given a formal lecture without a script or written notes. I was too busy taking care of my mother last week to do my usual painstaking preparations, so I flew blind. It seems to have gone well, though I would have felt more comfortable reading from a prepared, rehearsed text.

– As always, I spoke for a half-hour and took questions for a half-hour, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve never been asked sharper or more pertinent questions by a lecture audience. Go, home team!

– In the audience was Dr. Joseph Blanton (known to Smalltownians of all ages as “Doctor Joe”), the kindly, all-knowing pediatrician who looked after me from infancy to high school and beyond. It is an awesome thing to gaze out into the upturned faces of a listening crowd and see for the first time in years a man who used to know you inside and out. I had to bite my tongue to keep from choking up.

– The Smalltown Depot is the place from which I caught my very first train. The year was 1962 and my kindergarten class was taking a field trip. We rode a passenger train thirty miles north to Cape Girardeau and were collected by our parents at the station. I vividly remember thinking to myself that riding a train was the most exciting thing I’d ever done in my life and that I wanted to do it again as soon as possible. Alas, passenger service to Smalltown was terminated a couple of years later, and it wasn’t until I grew up and moved to New York that I rode another train, realizing at once that my six-year-old self had been right. I think of that maiden voyage every time I ride the Metroliner between New York and Washington, and I always smile at the memory.

I’m so tired now that I could tip over: I got three hours’ worth of sleep last night and have dark circles all the way around both my eyes. (I wore one of my black outfits to the lecture so that I’d look dissipated rather than merely exhausted.) I have to wrench myself out of bed at seven this morning to get my mother’s car inspected, after which I’ll be putting in at least three hours’ worth of hard slogging at the iBook. That spells bedtime to me. I may blog again twenty-four hours from now, or I may not….

P.S. I’m sorry I haven’t called, OGIC–I miss you!

“We all have original sin. I would much rather be able to terrify than to charm.”

Sir Ralph Richardson (quoted in Garry O’Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor’s Life)

I got back from St. Louis at two this morning, having spent the evening watching an outdoor performance of Mame. The temperature in the city climbed to 102 during the day, and it couldn’t have been much cooler by the time I got to the theater. Now I have to hit a deadline, give a speech, visit my mother in the hospital, and–if possible–take a nap.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to be blogging again until Wednesday, don’t you?

“Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

The weather in southeast Missouri is a constant topic of discussion around these parts, mainly because it tends to change so frequently and unexpectedly. Alas, it hasn’t changed at all for the past few days, and we’re getting sick of it, in some cases literally. On Sunday the bank thermometers touched 100 for the first time this year, and they weren’t kidding, either. I drove up to St. Louis at midday to cover a production of Henry V for The Wall Street Journal, and the weather on the far side of my windshield put me in mind of this passage from Louis L’Amour’s Hondo:

It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert’s face.

Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard.

Fortunately, no buzzards pursued me to St. Louis, nor are they wheeling in the sky over the hospital where my mother is recovering from an operation on her spine. Be that as it may, she had a rocky time of it last week. At one point a misjudged combination of painkiller and muscle relaxant caused her to hallucinate off and on for the better part of two days, and even after what she saw started to tally more closely with what was really there, I had more than a little bit of trouble persuading her to stay in bed.

Never having been a parent or spent more than a day or two at a time nursing anyone, I didn’t know how enervating it can be to take care of a loved one who is for all practical purposes helpless. Nor can I imagine what it would feel like to nurse someone with no hope of recovery (my mother has every expectation of returning to good health). The hospital is a forty-five-minute drive from the front door of my mother’s house, and I come home each night so tired that it’s all I can do to take my clothes off. In addition to giving a lecture on Tuesday, I’m supposed to write three pieces between now and Friday, when I fly back to New York, and though I’m sure I’ll get them finished, I’ve only managed to come up with a single sentence so far. Blogging is easier, but not so easy that the prose comes spurting merrily out of my fingertips, polished and ready to upload. I generally have to sit in my late father’s easy chair for at least an hour after coming home before I can think of anything much more coherent to say than My God, I’m tired!

Part of the problem is that I’ve been ripped out of my daily routine and plunged into a radically different one. I sleep in an unfamiliar bed to the accompaniment of unfamiliar sounds, surrounded by shelves full of unfamiliar books. My iBook rests on a creaky, ink-stained card table, plugged into a sluggish dialup connection that makes Web surfing a chore. My stereo, CDs, and DVDs are halfway across the country (though not my iPod and miniature speakers, glory be). So are my friends. The restaurants here close early, the stores even earlier. It’s as if I’m experiencing the disagreeable parts of a vacation without any of the offsetting novelties.

Of course it’s for the best of all possible causes, and no sooner do I catch myself complaining than I remember why I’m in Smalltown, U.S.A., and feel a pang of shame. For years my mother took care of me whenever I needed taking care of, wiping my brow and mending my scrapes, listening to me gripe about the slightest ache or pain (I was no better a patient as a boy than I am as a man). If she ever complained, it wasn’t to me. Now it’s my turn, and you’d think I’d be able to face the moderate rigors of two weeks’ part-time nursing duty with more grace.

If I were a better person, I could at least assure myself that this is a spiritual exercise, a refiner’s fire that will toughen my character and make me more considerate and forgiving upon my return to Manhattan. Would that it were so. I’m sure the sheer relief of shedding my cares will leave me dizzy with joy come Friday, but I’m no less sure I’ll be my old impatient self within a week at most, wondering why the world isn’t capable of ordering itself with a more comprehensive regard to my immediate needs. We singletons have a way of expecting such consideration, especially those of us who keep neat apartments in which everything is just so. Solitude makes finicky, self-regarding connoisseurs of us: it’s our compensation for living alone.

Interestingly, I haven’t thought much about the Teachout Museum since returning to Smalltown, perhaps in part because the drive from here to the hospital is so pretty. I steer clear of the interstate and take Highway 61, known to southeast Missourians as “the old highway,” through a couple of dozen miles of rolling farmland. The trees along Highway 61 are so green this week that Technicolor couldn’t begin to capture their intensely saturated hue, while the fields really are the “amber waves of grain” New Yorkers sang about so ardently in the days and weeks after 9/11. Art, I’m sure, means more to city dwellers who live far from such natural pleasures, and when I return home to the city, mine will mean more to me. At present, though, I’m happy to revel in the world around me as I drive to and from my temporary job as a caregiver. That seems to be all the beauty I need.