Archives for May 10, 2010

Mrs. T and I met on Friday at O’Hare International Airport, made our way to a downtown hotel, met Our Girl shortly thereafter, and proceeded to the first of the five shows that we’ll be seeing in Chicagoland this week. The list includes Strawdog Theatre’s Good Soul of Szechuan, TimeLine Theater’s The Farnsworth Invention, Chicago Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Profiles Theatre’s Killer Joe, and Writers’ Theatre’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the last of which is directed by David Cromer, about whose gifts longtime readers of this blog will need no reminding. That strikes me as an appropriately wide-ranging list, and I have no doubt that it will keep the three of us hopping between now and week’s end, when Mrs. T and I fly back to New York.
This is my first full-scale theater-related road trip since February, and I’m glad to be on the move again after being stuck in New York for two near-solid months. I was no less pleased to be able to spend three days at home with my family, though I broke my glasses and watchband during my visit, subsequently discovering that neither object could be repaired or replaced in Smalltown, U.S.A. My brother, who is handy like Mozart was musical, did his best to glue my glasses back together but finally gave it up as a bad job, so I drove from Smalltown to Kansas City on Thursday without benefit of eyeware. I got there in one piece, didn’t kill or maim anyone along the way, and managed to read a lecture about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong out loud to a full and enthusiastic house at the Kansas City Public Library, thereby demonstrating the wisdom of my longstanding precautionary practice of printing out my speech texts in twenty-two-point Comic Sans MS Bold type, which may be totally unhip but is big and clear enough for me to read without glasses.
I have to write two columns for The Wall Street Journal during our stay in Chicago, so I won’t be blogging much while we’re here. I’ll be back at the old stand next Monday. In the meantime, make the most of the usual daily offerings, which will, as always, appear like clockwork.

“Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”
Anton Chekhov, “Ward No. 6”