About Last Night

I loved the family Christmases of my youth and awaited them eagerly each year. In adulthood, alas, the holiday season became for me a time of increasingly fraught memories. The first of these was the grievously untimely death a quarter-century ago of my friend Nancy LaMott. Then, fifteen years ago, I came close to dying myself shortly before Christmas, though I met Hilary, my wife-to-be and future life’s companion, right around the same time, which drew much of the sting from my first-hand brush with death. But the holiday troubles continued: my mother fell gravely ill around this time in 2011, and went into hospice care shortly thereafter. As for Hilary, she entered the ICU at New York-Presbyterian last December, never to emerge. Now I find myself in the same boat as pretty much everybody else, staying home, missing Hilary and my family, not seeing my friends save on a screen, and feeling…well, blue.

At my age, of course, you have no choice but to accept the increasingly obtrusive presence of death in your life. The fact that it has come so often around Christmastime, though, is a thing I find hard to tolerate. Something had to give, and what gave was my ability to celebrate Christmas. It’s not entirely gone: I still love A Christmas Carol, Meet Me in St. Louis, and all the wonderful seasonal songs. But there is no tree in my home, nor is my heart light, and both of these things were true last year as well.

I suspect that’s why my favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which speaks forthrightly of the sadness that so many people feel at this time of year, perhaps never more so than in 2020: 

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

As it happens, I’m muddling through surprisingly well—I feel much better than I did a couple of months ago—but I know the next couple of months will inevitably be full of sadness. So if you incline the same way, try to keep on muddling the best way you know how, and hold in your bruised heart the second line of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”: Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

May it be so, and may love get us all from here to there in one piece.

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James Taylor sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on NBC’s Sunday Today in 2016:

“It is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.”

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (May 26, 1759)

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I talk about how good plays get turned into bad movies—and who’s to blame. Here’s an excerpt.

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The universal critical acclaim that greeted George C. Wolfe’s superlative Netflix screen version of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is rare. First-rate plays, after all, almost never get turned into equally good films, and on occasion the result is a duck-and-cover disaster. What’s more, virtually all such disasters are caused by the same fatal error in judgment: Somebody in Hollywood thought he knew better than the playwright, and so decided to rewrite the very play whose excellence is the main reason people thought it should be made into a film.

In such fiascoes, the question, then, is not so much what went wrong as who deserves the blame. Since filmmaking is a collective art, it can be tricky to tag the guilty party, but in most of the truly ignominious cases, you can pin the tail on the donkey with embarrassing ease.

Here are four of the most notorious offenders, categorized by culprit….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Arsenic and Old Lace:

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

From 2011:

Yesterday’s reminiscence of the first movie I ever saw in a theater has put me in a nostalgic mood, so with the help of Wikipedia, I’ve compiled a list of interesting things that happened in 1956, the year in which Mrs. T and I were born….

Read the whole thing here.

“To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.”

E.B. White, “The Distant Music of the Hounds”

Charles Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale perform “Nova, Nova,” the second movement from Jean Belmont’s Nativitas:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)