{"id":1056,"date":"2015-02-03T17:17:06","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T22:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/?p=1056"},"modified":"2015-02-03T23:19:24","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T04:19:24","slug":"andrew-patner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/2015\/02\/andrew-patner\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Patner"},"content":{"rendered":"

I told arts journalist and advocate Andrew Patner, who passed away today, my short\u00a0career story, which starts with a marketing internship at McCarter Theater in Princeton. Andrew knew McCarter artistic director Emily Mann\u2019s late father, Arthur. Arthur Mann was an American history professor at the University of Chicago who had written a book on New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I told Andrew I\u2019d seen George Lucas at the Hollywood Bowl. Andrew explained that Lucas had married Mellody Hobson, who was responsible for the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art coming to Chicago. The plan was to build the museum on the lake, which was sacred and allegedly protected ground in the city. But Hobson knew the mayor and the Obamas so maybe it would happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I told Andrew that someone had just texted me, \u201cReal talk: is Gustavo Dudamel handsome?\u201d \u201cDepends on the hair and the angle,\u201d Andrew said.\u00a0This was correct and did not require a customary Andrew elaboration; we moved on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Know-it-alls are annoying, and Andrew did know it all. But Andrew’s was a knowledge rabbit hole you wanted to jump down. He didn\u2019t talk over you, he didn\u2019t talk at you; he told stories. So many of our stories are about ourselves, but his weren\u2019t:\u00a0his were about a city, a time, a family, a cultural moment.\u00a0Even the one\u00a0about watching\u00a0Behind the\u00a0Candelabra,<\/i>\u00a0the HBO Liberace movie, was about more than that: \u201cTom and I watched it with Jean-Yves Thibaudet at\u00a0the Four Seasons – it was Jean-Yves\u2019 idea. My parents saw\u00a0Cats<\/i>\u00a0on tour in Japan in Japanese and they said, \u2018well that\u2019s the only way we\u2019d ever want to see\u00a0Cats<\/i>\u2019. That was me, Tom, Jean-Yves, the Four Seasons, Liberace and HBO: how else are you going to watch that?\u201d Andrew didn\u2019t drop names: he held them up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was cold in Chicago when I saw him on January 9 of this year, so he drove me from Symphony Center to the Lyric Opera. The 7 minutes in the car was the city tour from the hilarious quirky guide you always hope to get. \u201cThat was a commie hotel\u2026[The W]\u201d \u201cI picked up\u00a0a sailor when I was an intern and brought him back there because hello you have to do that once, right?\u2026 [the Sears Tower]\u201d. Coincidently or tragically, I had lunch with a new mutual friends of ours just yesterday. \u201cDoes Andrew actually know everything?\u201d I asked. \u201cYeah: people ask Andrew for tours of their own cities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I looked through some old emails\u2014pitches, plans for Chicago or New York visits, nothing of any great importance. I noticed that a few years ago I had tried to get Andrew to do an interview for WFMT via phone. That didn\u2019t work. “An interview is a conversation between two people in a room together listening to and looking at each other,\u201d he wrote me back. I remember thinking at the time that was pretty grand and totally unnecessary, but this was before I\u2019d been in a\u00a0room with him. That was a person to meet in person.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My\u00a0condolences\u00a0to Andrew’s\u00a0partner, to his mother, his brothers, and to his friends. I’ll really miss him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Andrew<\/a><\/p>\n

(Photo by Todd Rosenberg via Twitter<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some memories of Andrew Patner, who will be missed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-main","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}