Archives for February 15, 2010

I left Mrs. T behind in Tampa last Thursday (she’ll be keeping warm in Florida and Los Angeles for another couple of weeks) and flew north to New York. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to her, or to give up being a visiting scholar-in-residence at Rollins College and return to the land of dirty snow, and it didn’t help that I had to jump on the merry-go-round right away. On Saturday I drove up to Massachusetts to review Shakespeare & Company’s production of Dangerous Liaisons, then returned home the next morning and gave myself a night off–the night of Valentine’s Day, alas–before plunging back into my everyday life. No doubt I’ll be up to speed by week’s end, but for the moment I’m finding it hard to shift gears.
It’s not that I’ve been goofing off. In addition to lecturing, teaching, giving interviews, hitting deadlines, and seeing shows all over the state, I wrote the first draft of a one-man play about Louis Armstrong in my spare time. Yet all these things somehow seemed less stressful in Florida, partly because of the (mostly) pleasant weather and partly because of the change of scene, of which I was in desperate need. I was too busy with Pops and The Letter to take any noticeable amount of time off in 2009, and spending six weeks working in Winter Park was as close as I managed to get to putting my feet up.
I know I can’t go on like this, nor do I want to. After spending several hours last week working on my summer theater calendar, I managed to hack out enough time for a no-fooling pull-the-plug two-week vacation at the end of May. No shows, no deadlines, and maybe even no e-mail! Mrs. T insisted on it, and she didn’t have to do much pushing. I can’t wait to go up the spout three months from now. All I have to do is keep moving until then, and I think I’m equal to the task. Unlikely as it sounds, it’s going to help that so many shows are opening in New York during the second half of the theater season. I won’t be able to squeeze in any more out-of-town playgoing trips from now to the end of April, so instead of bouncing from coast to coast and back again, I’ll content myself with bouncing between New York and Connecticut.
For the moment, though, I’ve got three shows to see, three weeks’ worth of mail to open, and two Wall Street Journal columns to write, so excuse me if I disappear. I’ll be back next week. Until then, take it away, OGIC and CAAF! Your trusty co-blogger is about to be otherwise occupied.

“Our intentions make blackguards of us all; our weakness in carrying them out we call probity.”
Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (trans. P.W.K. Stone)