Some of you will recall that I was in Chicago a few weeks ago, visiting the shockingly beautiful Our Girl, admiring her Eames chair, and covering three new plays for The Wall Street Journal. I went there and came back to New York via Amtrak sleeper, and I wrote up the experience in a short essay published on the Arts & Leisure page of this morning’s Journal:
I grew up dreaming of long-distance trains. They were in the songs I loved (“I took a trip on a train/And I thought about you”) and the movies I watched (“I tipped the steward $5 to seat you here if you should come in”). Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood, and their braying whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I’d never been.
Alas, the highways and airlines were killing off passenger trains long before I figured out exactly what Cary Grant wanted to do to Eva Marie Saint on the Twentieth Century Limited. By the time I was old enough to travel alone, I took it for granted that I’d never spend a night in a sleeper car, watching the world rumble by. So when the Department of Homeland Security raised America’s alert status from yellow to orange a few days before I had to fly from New York to Chicago to look at plays, it struck me that this might well be my last chance to satisfy a longtime craving. I tore up my plane ticket, paid a visit to www.amtrak.com, booked a Viewliner Standard Bedroom on the Lake Shore Limited, and prepared to find out what I’d been missing all these years….
No link, blast and damn it, so if you’re not covered with 10 inches of snow, do pick up today’s Journal and take a gander. I’m kind of pleased with the way this one came out.