“I mean, this may sound ridiculous, but I’ve never to this day really known what most women think about anything. Completely closed book to me. I mean, God bless them, what would we do without them. But I’ve never understood them. I mean, damn it all, one minute you’re having a perfectly good time and the next, you suddenly see them there like–some old sports jacket or something–literally beginning to come apart at the seams. Floods of tears, smashing your pots, banging the furniture about. God knows what. Both my wives, God bless them, they’ve given me a great deal of pleasure over the years but, by God, they’ve cost me a fortune in fixtures and fittings. All the same. Couldn’t do without them, could we. I suppose.”

Alan Ayckbourn, Absurd Person Singular

Found in a fortune cookie at dinner on Sunday:

ACCEPT THE NEXT PROPOSITION YOU HEAR.

I’m still waiting….

June 2004:

Could it be that I’m through with series TV for good? I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not that I’m a snob about TV. The problem is that I no longer care for the idea of committing myself to weekly installments of anything as repetitive as a dramatic series. I suppose it’d be melodramatic to say that life’s too short to spend it watching the same set of characters each week–but melodramatic or not, I think that might be the best way to explain be how I’m feeling these days. For the moment, anyway….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Elia Kazan’s fee in 1950 for directing the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire: $175,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1,356,567.27

(Source: Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan)

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,–yes,

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,

Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,

The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

Robert Browning, “Abt Vogler”

Four new Top Fives went up this morning and over the weekend. Take a look.

Friday again, and even though I’m not here (I’m off at one of my celebrated undisclosed locations, soaking up silence), Our Girl has been good enough to post the weekly drama-column teaser, in which I gallop wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The trip begins with the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Absurd Person Singular:

Alan Ayckbourn is far from unknown in this country–he’s had one solid Broadway hit and a couple of respectable runs–but the best of his 60-odd plays aren’t nearly as familiar to American audiences as they ought to be. Might that be about to change? Earlier this year, his own production of “Private Fears in Public Places” came to town as part of the “Brits Off Broadway” series at 59E59 and caused a stir, and now the Manhattan Theatre Club, which has long been enthusiastic about his work, has brought “Absurd Person Singular” back to Broadway three decades after its New York premiere, which ran for 591 performances. This revival, directed by John Tillinger, isn’t perfect, but it’s way more than good enough, and if Mr. Ayckbourn’s brand of darkly bittersweet comedy is new to you, it’ll make you wonder where he’s been all your life….

The next and last stop is In My Life:

About a half-hour into “In My Life,” the retchingly whimsical story of J.T. (Christopher J. Hanke), a cute young singer-songwriter who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome and a brain tumor, I turned to my seatmate and whispered, “

– Fee paid in 1924 by Warner Bros. to Alfred A. Knopf for film rights to Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady: $12,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $130,224.65

(Source: Cather: Later Novels)