Archives for June 2, 2008

• TUESDAY, MAY 20 To New Haven with Mrs. T to see Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Carousel, which I liked enormously in spite of the fact that I’ve never cared much for the show. I’m a Rodgers-and-Hart man, not a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein man. (Mrs. T is the opposite.)
• WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 Up early to write my Carousel review in our hotel room in New Haven, then file it via e-mail. I try to avoid writing on the road whenever I can, but sometimes it’s inescapable, so I grit my teeth and make the best of it. After a late breakfast, Mrs. T and I drive to Boston to dine at Brasserie Jo with Tracey Jenkins (who designed our engagement ring) and see the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of She Loves Me, one of my favorite musicals. It’s new to Mrs. T, and she loves it, too. We get stuck in a traffic jam on the way back to our hotel in Cambridge and spend forty-five minutes making what would normally be a seven-minute drive. The Art of Segovia soothes our nerves en route.
• THURSDAY, MAY 22 Back to Connecticut–no show tonight! Today’s New York Times contains an interesting story about Tom Ford, who is designing the costumes for The Letter. I read it with close attention, then send a link to Paul Moravec, my collaborator, in Princeton.
• FRIDAY, MAY 23 Mrs. T and I pack a picnic lunch and go to Diana’s Pool to eat it. In the evening we drive to Hartford to see The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Tennessee Williams has always gotten on my nerves, and this play is no exception, even though Hartford Stage is one of the best companies in New England and the production is top-notch. According to the program, Rupert Everett once starred in a London production in which he played the role of Flora Goforth in drag. That I would have paid to see.
• SATURDAY, MAY 24 Mrs. T waves goodbye as I return to New York, where I spend the afternoon dredging through a pile of snail mail. One inexplicably large package turns out to contain my new Arnold Friedman lithograph. It’s even more beautiful than I’d expected.
To Joe’s Pub in the evening to hear the Lascivious Biddies, whom I haven’t seen on stage since they played at my wedding last October. After the show I meet the Biddies’ new guitarist, Ila Cantor, about whom I’ve been hearing good things ever since she joined the band a few months ago, all of which turn out to be true. Back at home, I Google Ila and am sent to her MySpace page, where I listen to an original composition for solo acoustic guitar called “Dance of the Chromozomes” that knocks me sideways.
• SUNDAY, MAY 25 In the morning I spend three hours conferring with Paul Moravec at his apartment, conveniently located just two blocks from my place. Paul has come into town to discuss possible cuts in The Letter, which is running a bit longer than we planned. We pare five minutes from the score, then go through the last scene measure by measure looking for possible weak spots. After lunch I pay a visit to a sick friend who has moved to an East Side nursing home, then have dinner with another friend who lives nearby.
To bed at eleven–tomorrow is another travel day.
(First of three parts)

As longtime readers of this blog know, I get steadily increasing amounts of spam and unsolicited press releases in my mailbox, thus making it harder and harder for me to winnow out the legitimate mail. In an attempt to get less junk and more good stuff, I’ve been tinkering with my spam filter, and the results have been…well, not quite what I’d hoped. On Sunday I deleted a couple of thousand pieces of unwanted mail, and now find myself left with seventy-seven pieces of what looks like wanted mail. I’ve just started to go through these incoming messages, but I’m currently bouncing from hotel room to airport and back again, so it may be slow going. Be patient!
In the meantime, please accept my apologies, along with a double-barrelled warning:
(1) I wouldn’t be surprised if some legitimate mail that was sent to my blogbox in the past couple of months got tossed out with the bathwater.
(2) I just raised my antispam deflector shield even higher, which will doubtless have the same result.
For both of these reasons, do write to me again if you wrote recently and didn’t receive a reply–but could you wait until Friday? By then I’ll have had a chance to answer my accumulated incoming mail.

While over Alabama earth

These words are gently spoken:

Serve–and hate will die unborn.

Love–and chains are broken.

Langston Hughes, “Alabama Earth (At Booker Washington’s Grave)”