While most of the rest of the world was thinking about what it’d be doing come the Fourth of July, I was on the road, seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal, sleeping in country inns, and rattling down back roads in the cutest little rental car imaginable (mine was purple).
My theatrical odyssey began on Thursday when I picked up my car, escaped from the sickening heat of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, and made my unhurried way up Route 9 to the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison, where I ate a catered picnic supper and watched the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival perform The Tempest under a tent pitched on a lawn overlooking the Hudson River. (The “backdrop” looked like this.) It was a humid but otherwise lovely night, and though thunder rumbled onomatopoeically in the distance, the rain was kind enough not to start falling until the show was over.
I found my car in the soggy darkness, drove over Bear Mountain Bridge, and headed north for Storm King Lodge, a cozy B&B housed in a handsome converted barn built into the side of a hill that overlooks the Storm King Art Center. Hal, the genial innkeeper, plays trombone with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, so I got a tasty plateful of music-business gossip along with my Friday-morning omelet. Then I crossed the Hudson for the fourth time in 24 hours and set a course for the Berkshire Mountains, driving along the Housatonic River to Sheffield, Massachusetts, where I saw Barrington Stage Company‘s new revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.
After the show, I checked into Race Brook Lodge, a brookside inn reminiscent of the set for a movie about a hijinks-fraught summer camp. The owner bills it as a “chintz-free rustic alternative” to the twee B&Bs of Sheffield and Great Barrington, and he’s right on all counts: Race Brook Lodge is casual, slightly askew, the opposite of fancy, and wholly companionable. I awoke the next morning to the friendly smell of home cooking, came downstairs to breakfast, packed my bags, and went south. The heat wave had broken in the night, so I rolled down my windows and cranked up Erin McKeown on the CD player, in no doubt whatsoever that I have the best job in the world.
As for the rest of the weekend, I spent it holed up in my adopted home town, which was balmy, breezy, and half-empty, the majority of New Yorkers having long since departed for points north, south, east, and west. Given good weather and nothing to do, the Upper West Side is wonderfully habitable on holiday weekends, and I took advantage of its tranquil delights, dining at an uncrowded Good Enough to Eat, hanging out with a couple of friends who, like me, had chosen to stay in town, and communing with the Teachout Museum.
Today Manhattan is full of sunburned travelers, few of whom look as though they’d profited greatly from their travels. Believe me, I’m not feeling smug: I went for more than a decade without taking a vacation, and it’s only been in the past year that I discovered the value of getting out of town. I know, too, how fortunate I am to be able to live perpendicular to the rest of the world, slipping away in the middle of the week and coming back on Friday to write and go to the theater. In fact, I’m just about to do it all over again: I’m taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off, and I’m not even going to see any plays while I’m gone. Instead, I plan to spend three computer-free nights reading Proust, listening to my iPod, and sleeping next to three different bodies of water, one of which will be an ocean. I think I deserve it, don’t you?
See you Friday. Or maybe Monday.
P.S. If you’re in urgent need of something to read, you’ll find it in the next posting, not to mention the right-hand column, which is chock full of fresh stuff.