For those of you who were wondering, I finally finished writing that really long piece for Commentary, and I don’t see to be showing any obvious signs of mental or physical disintegration other than being unable to keep my eyes open. I’ll be devoting the morning to this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, as well as some as-yet-unknown portion of a book review for the Journal. Come lunchtime, though, I’m off to Washington, D.C., where I’ll be spending the evening dining with a v. cool friend (maximally cool, as a matter of fact) and taking her to see Shakespeare Theatre’s new production of The Tempest, about which I hear interesting things.

Barring the installation of Star Trek-style transporter tubes at my hotel, I won’t be back in New York until some time on Wednesday afternoon, so don’t expect any postings until Thursday, when I’ll return to the blogosphere with, er, something or other. If I haven’t finished the second chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong by then, the something-or-other in question might well be a snapshot of me waving goodbye as I assume a new identity and disappear into the Delinquent Author Protection Program forever. (Probably not, though.)

See you Thursday, one way or another.

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker who wanted to know whether H.L. Mencken actually sent the following form letter to angry correspondents: Dear Sir or Madam: You may or may not be right. Would that he had–it’s a great story–but in the decade I spent researching and writing The Skeptic, I found not the slightest bit of evidence that he ever sent such a letter to anyone.

What tickled me about this call was that it made me feel like a Grand Old Man. The nice young fellow from The New Yorker asked, “Is this Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic?” in tones that made me wonder whether I’d just heard a preview of my obituary. I hope my Louis Armstrong book is better than The Skeptic (with which I was pretty damn pleased, to be sure), but for the moment I guess that label is firmly fixed to the bottom of the screen: World’s Greatest Authority on H.L. Mencken. Three years after my biography was published, I continue to get a call or two every month from fact checkers and other earnest souls seeking to establish whether or not Mencken really did make some snappy crack or other.

Here’s the interesting part: the Mencken quotes about which I get called are always spurious. No exceptions.

After I posted last week’s Wall Street Journal review of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which John C. Reilly plays Stanley Kowalski, I got this e-mail from a reader of the blog who is a well-connected theater buff:

I’ve heard that when John C. Reilly was beginning the shoot of CHICAGO with his costars, the producers–Marty Richards and others–wanted to see what
they had before a foot of film was shot. So the cast–Reilly, Zeta-Jones,
Zellweger, Gere–assembled for a run-through in some performance space or
other, and took seats onstage, with the producers down below. Reilly
noticed that Zellweger was REALLY scared; he leaned over and said,
soothingly, “Don’t worry, Renee, it’s just like a play…we’re onstage and
they’re the audience.”

Zellweger looked at him, and said, quivering, “But
I’ve never been in a play!'”

If it’s not true, don’t tell me.

“‘The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.’

“Anne Marie, surprised, said, ‘Really?’

“‘You may have seen the one,’ Chester said, ‘where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.’

“‘Wow,’ Anne Marie said.

“‘That was me,’ Chester told her. ‘We gotta do it in one take, otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.’

“John said, ‘Was it you in the rest of the picture?’

“‘Nah,’ Chester said, ‘that was some movie star. They even had to bring in somebody else to do his swimming. Anyway, the problem was, that career dried up. They don’t need the guys like me now, they got computers to do the stunts.’ He shrugged, but looked disgusted. ‘People wanna look at a cartoon, a car on a diagonal down the alley, nobody at the wheel, nobody’s life at stake, what I say is, it isn’t the pictures got worse, it’s the audience.'”

Donald E. Westlake, The Road to Ruin

Wonderful news from playbill.com:

Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ new musical The Light in the Piazza has extended its run at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre through the summer.

The show, which opened on April 18 after a month of previews, will now play until Sept. 4. It was to have closed on June 12.

Though it opened to mixed reviews, Piazza has since become a favorite of New York’s awards organizations. It led the Outer Critics Circle Awards nominations with 11 nods, while the Drama Desk organization also nominated it in 11 categories.

In case you missed it, here’s part of my Wall Street Journal rave.

What are you waiting for?

I got out of Sweet Charity late Sunday afternoon, caught a cab going north, went straight home, threw off my clothes, and made ready to climb into the loft and grab a little shut-eye preliminary to spending the evening at my desk, working on all the stuff I’ve got to write and deliver to various editors between now and Thursday, when I fly the coop to read a Shakespeare sonnet at an upstate wedding (about which more next week).

Fortunately, I decided to check my e-mailbox before crashing, and the first piece of mail I opened was from a friend who wrote, “Are we still on for tonight?” I uttered a well-known monosyllable three or four times in a row, having remembered in a sudden flash of prospective horror that I was supposed to be at the Jazz Standard in forty-five minutes to hear Dena DeRose. I threw my clothes back on, ran downstairs, and caught yet another cab, this one headed south. Somewhat to my surprise, I got to the club on time, and even managed to remain upright and conscious throughout the whole set. (Dena was hot, of course–it was my fault, not hers, that I was a little fuzzy.)

I’m still somewhat shaken by the closeness of my shave. It’s true that my itinerary for the week is pretty alarming, but it’s been at least a decade since I’ve flat-out forgotten a show I was scheduled to see. That’s the critic’s nightmare–especially when his schedule is so tightly packed that he can’t work in a repeat performance before filing his review.

I’m not going to try to tell you I’ve learned my lesson, but I do think it might possibly be a smart idea for me to take my phone off the hook, go straight to bed, and remain horizontal for an absolute minimum of eight hours.

You can wait to hear about the rest of my weekend, right? Good.

P.S. If you still long for fresh copy, I’ve updated the “Teachout in Commentary,” “Second City,” and “Teachout Elsewhere” modules in the right-hand column with links to my latest print-media pieces. Read ’em and weep. Or whatever.

As regular readers of “About Last Night” know, I’m hopelessly addicted to the What’s My Line reruns that can be seen early each morning on the Game Show Network. But even if you’re not especially interested in the early days of network TV, I absolutely guarantee that you’ll be fascinated by the episode scheduled to air early Tuesday morning (it was originally seen on June 3, 1956). Why? Because the first guest is none other than Frank Lloyd Wright.

Set your VCR for 3:30 A.M. Eastern time this Tuesday. This one’s a must.

“I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilisation not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it. To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect & a drawback; but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen. We must of course have something of our own–something distinctive & homogeneous–& I take it that we shall find it in our ‘moral consciousness,’ our unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour. In this sense at least we shall have a national cachet.–I expect nothing great during your lifetime or mine perhaps: but my instincts quite agree with yours in looking to see something original and beautiful disengage itself from our ceaseless fermentation and turmoil.”

Henry James, letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry (Sept. 20, 1867)