“And, thanks to the standardization of an archaic rule, the past still vibrated in the convent, a high, sweet note. It was the France of the Restoration that was embalmed in the Sacred Heart atmosphere, like a period room in a museum with a silken cord drawn across it. The quarrels of the philosophes still echoed in the classrooms; the tumbrils had just ceased to creak, and Voltaire grinned in the background. Orthodoxy had been re-established, Louis XVIII ruled, but there was a hint of Orleanism in the air and a whisper of reduced circumstances in the pick-pick of our needles doing fine darning and turning buttonholes. Byron’s great star had risen, and, across the sea, America beckoned in the romances of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper and the adventures of the coureurs de bois. Protestantism did not trouble us; we had made our peace with the Huguenots. What we feared was skepticism, deism, and the dread spirit of atheism–France’s Lucifer. Monthly, in the study hall, the Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, adjured us, daughters of dentists and lawyers, grocers and realtors, heiresses of the Chevrolet agency and of Riley & Finn, contractors, against the sin of doubt, that curse of fine intellects. Her blue eyes clouded and her fair white brow ruffled under her snowy coif as she considered, with true feminine sympathy, the awful fate of Shelley, a young man of good family who had contracted atheism at Oxford.”

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

While most of the rest of the world was thinking about what it’d be doing come the Fourth of July, I was on the road, seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal, sleeping in country inns, and rattling down back roads in the cutest little rental car imaginable (mine was purple).

My theatrical odyssey began on Thursday when I picked up my car, escaped from the sickening heat of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, and made my unhurried way up Route 9 to the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison, where I ate a catered picnic supper and watched the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival perform The Tempest under a tent pitched on a lawn overlooking the Hudson River. (The “backdrop” looked like this.) It was a humid but otherwise lovely night, and though thunder rumbled onomatopoeically in the distance, the rain was kind enough not to start falling until the show was over.

I found my car in the soggy darkness, drove over Bear Mountain Bridge, and headed north for Storm King Lodge, a cozy B&B housed in a handsome converted barn built into the side of a hill that overlooks the Storm King Art Center. Hal, the genial innkeeper, plays trombone with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, so I got a tasty plateful of music-business gossip along with my Friday-morning omelet. Then I crossed the Hudson for the fourth time in 24 hours and set a course for the Berkshire Mountains, driving along the Housatonic River to Sheffield, Massachusetts, where I saw Barrington Stage Company‘s new revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

After the show, I checked into Race Brook Lodge, a brookside inn reminiscent of the set for a movie about a hijinks-fraught summer camp. The owner bills it as a “chintz-free rustic alternative” to the twee B&Bs of Sheffield and Great Barrington, and he’s right on all counts: Race Brook Lodge is casual, slightly askew, the opposite of fancy, and wholly companionable. I awoke the next morning to the friendly smell of home cooking, came downstairs to breakfast, packed my bags, and went south. The heat wave had broken in the night, so I rolled down my windows and cranked up Erin McKeown on the CD player, in no doubt whatsoever that I have the best job in the world.

As for the rest of the weekend, I spent it holed up in my adopted home town, which was balmy, breezy, and half-empty, the majority of New Yorkers having long since departed for points north, south, east, and west. Given good weather and nothing to do, the Upper West Side is wonderfully habitable on holiday weekends, and I took advantage of its tranquil delights, dining at an uncrowded Good Enough to Eat, hanging out with a couple of friends who, like me, had chosen to stay in town, and communing with the Teachout Museum.

Today Manhattan is full of sunburned travelers, few of whom look as though they’d profited greatly from their travels. Believe me, I’m not feeling smug: I went for more than a decade without taking a vacation, and it’s only been in the past year that I discovered the value of getting out of town. I know, too, how fortunate I am to be able to live perpendicular to the rest of the world, slipping away in the middle of the week and coming back on Friday to write and go to the theater. In fact, I’m just about to do it all over again: I’m taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off, and I’m not even going to see any plays while I’m gone. Instead, I plan to spend three computer-free nights reading Proust, listening to my iPod, and sleeping next to three different bodies of water, one of which will be an ocean. I think I deserve it, don’t you?

See you Friday. Or maybe Monday.

P.S. If you’re in urgent need of something to read, you’ll find it in the next posting, not to mention the right-hand column, which is chock full of fresh stuff.

I thought I ought to leave some reading matter behind to tide you over until I get back, so here’s a bunch:

– John Lahr is onto something here:

Bannered across the poster for London’s new hit musical “Billy Elliot” (at the Victoria Palace)–a collaboration between two of the country’s mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John–is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? “Salad Days”? “The Boy Friend”? “Cats”? The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity–the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it….

– On the other hand, this is one of the most vulgar pieces about theater (or anything else) that I’ve run across in ages:

The true legacy of Shakespeare in the Park is not the education of the unlettered masses; nor did [Joseph] Papp create (or desire to create) a stateside equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers–an attempt to convince us that a few hours spent sweating in Central Park is culture earned the hard way….

(The inspiration for this pissy little essay, by the way, was Mark Lamos’ production of As You Like It. To be sure, I haven’t seen it yet, and I’ve written some very sharp things about the past couple of years’ worth of Shakespeare in the Park productions. On the other hand, Lamos is one of the best stage directors we have, which suggests to me that the author wrote his piece before he saw the show–not an unheard-of practice among journalists.)

– I’ve done this–though never on the way to a show! (If the reference doesn’t ring a bell, go here for, er, enlightenment.)

– Mr. Modern Art Notes
drew my attention to this painter, and now I’m soooo curious to see his stuff in the flesh. Take a look and see if you don’t feel the same way.

– For those who wonder why I’m forever singing the praises of Bob Brookmeyer, go straight to this amazon.com list of his best CDs and buy one. You can pick at random–they’re all terrific.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener has gone all warm and fuzzy over the great jazz pianist Hank Jones….

– …while Jonathan Yardley waxes appreciative of Wilfrid Sheed’s half-forgotten comic novel Office Politics:

Its singularly unheroic protagonist, George Wren, is “number-four editor” at a little magazine called the Outsider, based in shabby New York offices, that boasts “21,000 subscribers (it used to be 27,000), a small, nagging deficit, a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died.” It’s “just another little magazine . . . staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion,” but–ta-da!–it “had once been endorsed by Adlai Stevenson and Madame Pandit Nehru” and George believes in it passionately, so much so that three months ago he took a pay cut from $13,000 (at CBS) to $7,500 just for the privilege of becoming a part of it.

Actually, put that in the past tense, because George is no longer sure there’s much at the Outsider worth believing in. Its charismatic editor, a transplanted Brit named Gilbert Twining, has loads of facile charm and wields a keen editorial pen, but whether there’s anything behind the charm is open to question. The rest of the magazine’s tiny staff is a conglomeration of oddballs and misfits “hand-picked” by Twining, apparently “on some principle of interlocking incompatibility.”…

To which I would only add that Sheed’s Max Jamison is at least as good.

– In case you haven’t read The Skeptic, you may not know that H.L. Mencken translated Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. I recently stumbled by chance across a Web-based e-text of his English-language version, complete with an utterly characteristic preface in which Mencken’s good and bad sides are placed on simultaneous display. (Rarely has his weirdly idiosyncratic anti-Semitism, for example, been epitomized so concisely.) It’s one of his least well-known essays, and shouldn’t be.

– Finally, some thoughts from Lileks about the joys of staying off interstate highways:

Ten connects Minneapolis to Fargo. And vice versa, of course. It always has. Before the Interstate, Ten was the road between here and there, two lanes of concrete slabs that bothered your shocks and made the wheel jump in your hands. But it kept your attention. Strung along Ten were all the towns set up in the early days of the trains, improbable hamlets with names like Motley and Dilworth. Each larger town was halved by a perpendicular artery, and each of those roads split off into endless capillaries. If you wanted to get lost, you started on Ten and kept going until the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to dirt. If you wanted to, that is. We didn’t; we were headed to Fargo.

It’s three and a half hours by Interstate, if you speed, and you get out of the city in good time. It’s four and a half on the Highway. You spend part of that hour slowing to limp through towns great and mean, places that have a swinging yellow light and a bar and a gas station, places that creep up to the road like some old wounded beast, places that had the lucky to have Ten march right through the center of things so you could sample the signage: Kiwanis Lions Elks Guns Gas Food Camping Liquor Motel Bait Feed, and incidentally speed limits are strictly enforced. You don’t doubt it. You slow. Everyone does. Then the sign says 65 and you do 75. Twenty miles later there’s another. These are the towns you usually know only as a name on the Interstate signs. It’s nice to finally meet them….

By the time you get around to reading these words, I’ll be doing the same thing, only in a different place. I hope I enjoy it half as much. (I expect to.)

“Some are ‘industrious,’ and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,–work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’m on pins and needles over here. Every so often my lovely iBook starts to clickety-clack somewhere in its forward left innards, and functionality is temporarily suspended. This morning the phenomenon persisted for three hours, and I thought the computer was a goner. It came back to life, however, and I was able to back up the important files. No fits and starts since early afternoon now, though I’ve been laying off using it much for fear of inadvertently administering the coup de grace to what has been a much-loved machine. So far so good this evening, but I’m breathing in its direction as little as possible.

The jury’s out on whether I’ll try to get this guy fixed or take the plunge and replace him. He’s three and a half years old, which is twenty-four in dog years and some far more advanced age in computer years. The current version of the same machine has twice as fast a processor and costs $300 less than what I paid in 2002, so it’s tempting and probably a smart way to go. In any case, I’ll be leaving the computer with the Mac docs and thinking over my options while in Los Angeles this week for some gallivanting around the Getty, taking meetings with a fellow blogger or two, and generally taking a break from everyday things. What I won’t be doing is blogging, but with any luck will be back next week with one or another properly functioning machine, a few LA stories, and a fresh head of steam. In the meantime, do visit all our fine feathered friends to the right, and enjoy the short week.

Like many a middle-aged man with a taste for poetry and a preoccupation with lost possibilities, I caught myself thinking the other day of the first stanza of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It can be translated in countless ways, but comes most fully to the point in the most literal of renderings: In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood,/for the straight way was lost. One of my fellow bloggers has lately been reflecting on the meaning of the expression “midlife crisis,” but she and her readers are so preoccupied with the more florid symptoms of that often-absurd phenomenon that they seem to have lost sight of the thing itself, the terrible moment in the middle of the journey when you wander into a dark wood and suddenly notice that you can no longer see the signposts that led you there.

That moment came for me when death first touched my life. I’d somehow managed to make it to the age of thirty-nine without losing anyone to whom I was close. Then one day the bolts of lightning started falling all around me. First my best friend, then my father, and in the twinkling of an eye I was picking up the paper each morning and turning to the obituary page. I’d joined the club, the society of those who no longer need reminding that we all die sooner or later–and that some of us die too soon. Such knowledge changes a man permanently, and often the first outward sign of the change is the predictably embarrassing behavior popularly associated with midlife crises.

Aside from these transient embarrassments, the trouble with middle age is that people keep dying on you, and the longer you live, the more often you lose the ones who mattered most when you were young. A few months ago I checked my e-mail and discovered that Richard Powell, my first music teacher, had died. On Friday I called my mother and learned with like abruptness of the death of Gordon Beaver, who taught me how to play piano and led the choirs in which I sang as a boy.

A few quick clicks on my iBook brought me to his obituary:

Born May 8, 1933, in St. Joseph, son of the late Leroy C. and Julia Waite Beaver, he had been a member of the Army National Guard and received a degree in music arts at Central Methodist University in Fayette in 1955 and a master’s degree in music education from the University of Missouri in Columbia. He was a member of the First United Methodist Church in Sikeston where he directed the church choir for over 25 years. He directed and helped form the Sikeston High School Concert Choir, taught music at the Sikeston Junior and Senior High Schools for 30 years, and took high school choir students from Southeast Missouri to Europe during the summers for three years. He also gave piano lessons and directed the Sikeston Community Choir for 20 years and played for the Sikeston Little Theatre musical productions for many years.

That’s all the Web has to say about him, and it isn’t enough. My own memories could easily fill a chapter of a book. We met 35 years ago, the summer before I entered high school. I’d decided that I needed to learn how to play piano in order to be a fully rounded musician; Beaver was generally thought to be the best piano teacher in town, and though it wasn’t his custom to work with late starters, Richard Powell urged him to take me on. He proved to be a genial, slightly cynical fellow and no kind of disciplinarian whatsoever, and we soon found ourselves spending almost as much time talking as we did playing, though he did manage to nudge me through a handful of Bach inventions and Beethoven sonatinas, as well as a stack of the semi-popular piano solos that once were the stock in trade of small-town piano teachers throughout America. (Remember John W. Schaum?) I can still play one of them, “Salt Water Boogie,” from memory.

I have a sneaking suspicion that he didn’t much care for classical music–we didn’t sing it very often in the high-school choruses he led–but he was passionate about the making of music, and threw himself into it with unflagging abandon. His enthusiasm was what I took away from the hours I spent with him, along with a feeling that, like me, he didn’t quite fit into the world into which he’d been born. I’m sure that’s why he went out of his way to be so kind to me: he must have sensed that I, too, was something of a fish out of water, and that it might be a long time before I found the right pond in which to swim. So instead of insisting that I spend hour upon hour polishing my scales in contrary motion, he let me tell him of my hopes and dreams and puzzlements, gently encouraging me to chase after whatever distant stars seemed to me most interesting.

I never became much of a piano player, and it wasn’t until I got to college that I started working with teachers who bulldozed me into learning intermezzi by Brahms and preludes by Debussy. But by then I knew I wasn’t destined to be much of a piano player, and that it didn’t matter in the slightest. For me, playing the piano would always be a small part of something infinitely larger, and I think in retrospect I may have been fortunate to have fallen into the hands of a teacher who understood that.

The day after my mother told me of Gordon Beaver’s death, I got an e-mail from an old and beloved friend:

I’m sure your mother called you for this one. I read in the paper that Mr. B. died this week. I believe the service is today, actually. I don’t mean to sound so cut and dried about it, it’s just that all these childhood icons are dying and I DON’T LIKE IT.

Nor do I, Lee, not one little bit. In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, and though I finally seem to have reached its far edge and started to make my way back into the light, one thing hasn’t changed: the people that I love keep dying on me. I noticed to my surprise a few years ago that most of my closest friends were now a good deal younger than I am. This is one of the gifts middle age gives us to compensate for that which it takes away, and I’m as grateful for it as I can be. Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were.

“America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an

I’m in The Wall Street Journal this morning with a report on my visit to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which I found wholly satisfactory.

Some pertinent excerpts:

Rarely has anything so delightful as the Alabama Shakespeare Festival been situated in a more depressing location. To get there, you drive past downtown Montgomery, pull off the interstate and plunge into a tangle of six-lane suburban sprawl so congested as to make the hardiest of urban planners reach for a triple dose of Xanax. Strip malls, fast-food joints, megachurches the size of Wal-Marts…but then you take a sharp right turn and find yourself in the middle of a 250-acre park that looks as though it had been landscaped by Grant Wood and mowed daily by a thousand well-paid gardeners. Down one lane is the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; down the other, the Carolyn Blount Theatre, home of one of America’s most ambitious and impressive theatrical enterprises. It is, if a weekend visitor to the Bible Belt dare say so, the damnedest thing imaginable….

No small part of the fun of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival is the opportunity it gives you to see a smallish troupe of actors playing sharply varied roles in quick succession. Last Thursday and Friday, for instance, I watched Ruth Eglsaer whack it out of the park three times in a row. She was tough and sardonic as the rebellious daughter of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” properly despairing as the anguished fianc