Wednesday was a very, very long day. I wouldn’t have skipped a moment of it, not for anything in the world.
– I woke up at five-thirty to find my as-yet-unwritten Wall Street Journal review of Jumpers, A Raisin in the Sun, and Bombay Dreams rattling around in my head. It seemed pointless to try and go back to sleep, so I climbed down from the loft, booted up my iBook, and started writing. The piece was slow going–Jumpers isn’t easy to sum up in four paragraphs, which was all I could spare–but I finally got it written.
– Midway through the first draft, I took a break and picked up my copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway from my framer. It turned out that the upper right edge of the print had been slightly damaged in transit, which saddened me. But once I carted it home and hung it over the mantelpiece, I found that the flaw didn’t bother me all that much, especially since the frame is so handsome–the photo the dealer sent didn’t do it justice. Every time I walk into the living room, it’s as if I see A Terry Teachout Reader writ large on the wall. I wonder how long it’ll take before the association fades and I start to see Broadway solely as a work of art in its own right rather than a beautiful symbol of the pride I feel in my new book. Maybe never–and that’ll be all right, too. In any case, I’m hopelessly in love with the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. For the moment, my other prints have receded into the background, and I now find myself staring at Broadway for minutes at a time, drinking it in.
– With Broadway safely hung, I sent off my Journal review, read and corrected the proofs of my Commentary essay, and checked in with the editor of my Washington Post column, which runs in Sunday’s paper. (He had a few last-minute suggestions, all of which I gladly took.) Then I ran downstairs, hailed a cab, and hurtled across Central Park to watch Maria Schneider
and Bob Brookmeyer
rehearse tonight’s concert at the Kaye Playhouse (go here for details). I can’t be there–Thursday is the only night I can see New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer
this season, and it could easily be several years before they do it again–so I talked my way into the sound check instead. I’d never before had the privilege of watching Brookmeyer rehearse his music with a big band, and it was fascinating to watch him put Schneider’s players through their paces on Celebration, the four-movement suite they’ll be performing tonight.
– Back home again to return phone calls, check my accumulated e-mail, and read another half-chapter of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. (Incidentally, Erin O’Connor linked to what I wrote yesterday about the experience of revisiting one of my favorite biographies. Take a look–I like what she had to say.)
– Dinner with an out-of-town friend, then down to the Village Vanguard to hear Jim Hall‘s eleven o’clock set. Hall is my favorite living jazz musician, and I’ve never heard him play guitar other than wonderfully well, but this performance was memorable even by his own rarefied standards. Maybe it was because he’ll be recording live on Friday and Saturday, or because Lewis Nash, the drummer, was in awesome form–I would have sworn he was channeling Shelly Manne. Whatever the reason, I’ve never heard Hall, Nash, or Scott Colley play better. “That’s exactly how I’d want to play all those instruments, if I could play any of them,” a singer friend told me afterward. What she said.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the set was that nobody played above a mezzo-forte all evening long. Even under the best of circumstances, the Vanguard can be an exasperatingly noisy place, but I didn’t hear a single stray peep out of the enthralled crowd. It was a night of whispered confidences and sweet surprises. I’m going back on Saturday, and I’ll be taking Sarah, who’s in town for the week. She’s in for a treat–to put it mildly.
Now that I’m home at last, I’m starting to feel the cumulative effects of the long day. I wish I could sleep in, but I have to haul myself out of bed in the morning and finish writing a speech before I head downtown to lunch with Supermaud. I suppose this whole week has been too much of a great many good things–but is that really possible? I’m not so sure.
I can’t remember the last time it occurred to me to quote William Saroyan (he isn’t exactly a favorite of mine), but a half-remembered line of his popped into my mind as I climbed the stairs of the Vanguard an hour or so ago: “In the time of your life, live–so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.” And that’s what I did on Wednesday: I lived.
UPDATE: This inverted axiom just occurred to me: The unlived life is not worth examining.