Archives for January 23, 2012

Mrs. T and I departed Florida’s Sanibel Island with the utmost reluctance on Saturday morning. We then drove across the peninsula to Miami Beach, had lunch at Joe’s Stone Crab, made our way to Coral Gables, and checked into the Biltmore Hotel. In short, we reversed the first half of our itinerary of three years ago, leaving out the part where I then went from Miami to New York to San Francisco to San Diego to Kansas City to Chicago to New York to Connecticut to Lenox, Massachusetts. I’d forgotten how much travel I packed into that marathon. The thought of it makes me shudder now, even though it was fun–mostly–while it was happening.
Things are different this time around. On Tuesday we’re driving up to Winter Park, and I’ll be flying back to New York on Wednesday to see Wit, Look Back in Anger, and the DiCapo Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, after which I return to Winter Park and stay put, more or less, until the end of February. That’s kid stuff!
From the (admittedly narrow) point of view of a drama critic, one of the most convenient things about the Biltmore is that GableStage, the company that I came to Coral Gables to see, is in the same building as the hotel, meaning that it’s a five-minute stroll from our hotel room to the lobby of the theater. I can think of a number of other hotels that are unusually close to a major regional theater, among them San Francisco’s Hotel Diva, but the only other company in America, so far as I know, that shares a roof with a first-class hotel is the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where Mrs. T and I saw The Norman Conquests six years ago in the middle of an eyelash-freezing cold spell. It was nice enough not to have to go outside to get to the theater, but this is even nicer.
While we’re always glad to be at the Biltmore, we already miss Sanibel and can’t wait to arrive in Winter Park, where I plan, among other interesting things, to conduct a public conversation with Pat Metheny and roll up my sleeves and write three chapters of Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. Time and inspiration permitting, I’ll also try to get started on the first draft of my next opera libretto. Today, though, I’ll settle for writing the second half of Friday’s Wall Street Journal column, a review of the show that Mrs. T and I saw last night at the Biltmore, after which we’ll have breakfast and pay a visit to the pool.
See you around, somewhere or other.

I’m always intrigued by the ill-sorted books that lurk randomly on the shelves of hotels and inns. Our room in the Biltmore Hotel, for instance, contains a bookshelf on which can be found the following volumes:
• A Trial by Jury, D. Graham Burnett’s account of the experience of serving on the jury for a murder trial
• Viana La Place’s La Bella Cucina: How to Cook, Eat, and Live Like an Italian
• Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
• A Reader’s Digest Select Editions volume from 2000 containing condensed versions of novels by Nelson DeMille, Linda Nichols, Michael Palmer, and Jennifer Chiaverini
• Pandora’s Daughter, a novel by Iris Johansen
• Stormy Petrel, a novel (I think) by Mary Stewart
• The Runway of Life, a self-published book by Peter Legge whose genre was not apparent to me in the modest amount of time I was prepared to spend flipping through it
• Little Women
• Webster’s New Century Dictionary
No doubt a more imaginative person than I could write a witty poem or a wistful short story about these nine books, just as Mrs. T is capable of whipping up an edible meal out of whatever happens to be in our refrigerator at any given moment. Alas, all I can do is post their titles and wonder: did any of their authors ever imagine that the books over which they once slaved so hopefully would end up gathering dust in a resort hotel in Florida?
While we’re on the subject, here’s another question: will the day ever come when I stumble across a book of mine in a similar setting? And if I do, will I have the grace to smile wryly and reflect on the vanity of human wishes?

An excerpt from Sinatra: An American Original, originally telecast on CBS in 1965, in which Frank Sinatra is seen recording “It Was a Very Good Year.” The conductor is Gordon Jenkins and the narrator is Walter Cronkite:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Where ambition can be so happy as to cover its enterprizes, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of all human passions.”
David Hume, The History of England