Archives for August 22, 2011

Mrs. T and I spent most of last week seeing four plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Today we drive back to Portland, then fly from there to Chicago. We were supposed to spend the night at an airport hotel, then drive up to Spring Green, Wisconsin, home of American Players Theatre and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, there to spend another week seeing another four plays.
Life, however, dealt us a fresh hand: my mother had emergency surgery in Missouri on Sunday afternoon and will likely have a second operation on Tuesday. It isn’t easy to get from southern Oregon to southeast Missouri, so we won’t be arriving in Smalltown, U.S.A. until well after midnight.
Needless to say, that’s a whole lot of travel, and we expect to be completely worn out by the time we finally get where we’re going, so don’t expect anything more than brief updates for the rest of the week.
For now, I’ll pass on a posting by Levi Stahl, who’s gotten hold of the new University of Chicago Press paperback editions of Richard Stark’s Flashfire and Firebreak and likes my introductions. He’s ahead of me: I’ve been on the road for the past couple of weeks and have yet to see finished copies of either book.
As for the week just past, suffice it to say that I’m exceedingly partial to Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The only reason why I’m not sorry to say goodbye is that I like Spring Green just as much, and with a little bit of luck–well, maybe a whole lot of luck–we’ll be there by Friday night.
More anon.
P.S. Mrs. T took this photo outside the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s New Theatre, where we saw Amanda Dehnert’s production of Julius Caesar on Friday. The courtyard and lobby are decorated with similar posters of various politicians who have been assassinated. It amused Mrs. T to see me standing next to Che Guevara, especially in light of the fact that the city where we saw the play in question is popularly known among its own residents as “The People’s Republic of Ashland.” (Earlier that day I’d seen a teenage boy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with that very nickname.)
I really do love Ashland. Mostly. Usually. Frequently.

Carmen McRae sings Alec Wilder’s “Trouble Is a Man” on Jazz Casual, originally telecast in 1962:

“As much as gastronomy applauds novelty, it is based in equal part on nostalgia. In the mind, food, being an ephemeral creation prepared from ephemeral materials, is necessarily located in the past, and there is a tendency to believe that the best must behind us; that, in a sort of theory of epicurean entrophy, flavor and goodness are ebbing as time moves forward.”
Robert Clark, James Beard: A Biography