Archives for August 2018

“I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, June 28, 1956

From 2008:

The Old Burying Ground is shady, quiet, and full of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tombstones, some worn almost smooth and others as legible as on the day they were carved. A fair number of Revolutionary War veterans are buried there, and their graves are marked with small flags. It’s not a spot that ordinary tourists seek out, nor does Cather’s grave appear to draw many visitors….

Read the whole thing here.

“One rediscovers the joy of living, but the gaiety no longer penetrates the heart of things.”

Camille Saint-Saëns, in conversation with Emile Baumann (c. 1907, quoted in Brian Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life)

For those of you who’ve been wondering, Mrs. T is in the intensive-care unit of a New Jersey hospital, and I’m at her side.

The two of us drove down last week to Cape May, a seaside resort at the southern tip of New Jersey, to see a couple of shows and celebrate her having successfully weathered a risky medical procedure. As I explained in this space last November, Mrs. T suffers from pulmonary hypertension, a rare but deadly disease for which the only cure is a double lung transplant. The procedure in question was the removal of a pair of polyps from her colon, which was done two weeks ago in New York. The polyps had to be biopsied in order to establish that she is cancer-free, a prerequisite for her being put on the active waiting list for a transplant. (In healthy people, the removal of polyps is routine, but Mrs. T’s underlying illness made it much trickier.)

Several years had gone by since we last visited Cape May, a town to which we have a particular attachment—we took our first overnight trip there after meeting thirteen years ago—and it seemed fitting to return when we learned that the polyps were benign. Alas, Mrs. T unexpectedly developed a life-threatening gastrointestinal hemorrhage a few hours after our arrival, and had to be rushed by ambulance from our hotel to the nearest hospital. She lost roughly a third of her blood supply before the emergency-room team was able to bring the bleeding under control.

The good news is that while Mrs. T is very frail, her condition now appears to be stable. She still requires around-the-clock monitoring, though, and the doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her transplant center, want to move her there as quickly as possible. The bad news is that as of this hour, no ICU beds are available. Hence we’re sitting tight in the Cape May ICU, eating not-bad hospital food, watching TCM and Law and Order, and waiting for orders to return north via ambulance to upper Manhattan. Until that happens, my own professional activities are on hold.

Such misadventures, I regret to say, are part of everyday life for those who require organ transplants in a city that has, as the New York Times recently explained in an important and disheartening feature story, “the lowest rate of organ donor registration in the country.” You wait your turn as patiently as you possibly can, and the longer you wait, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. That’s what happened to us.

To be perfectly frank, I nearly lost Mrs. T last week. But she hung on, that being her way, and as of today she appears to be recovering, slowly but surely. I don’t know when she’ll be getting out of the hospital, but once she does, our lives will return to what we’ve learned in the past few years to think of as “normal.” In fact, we’ll be heading back to Cape May as soon as her health permits. That’s what you do when you suffer from a chronic illness. You wait, hope—and live.

Henry James said it:

Live all you can—it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?….The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

Meanwhile, what I said in this space last November is as true now as it was then: “If you haven’t signed up to be an organ donor, please do so now, and encourage your friends to do likewise. The life you save could be that of the woman I love.”

UPDATE: Mrs. T was finally transferred last night to the intensive-care unit of New York-Presbyterian Hospital. No word yet on when she might go home, but we’re doing everything the doctors tell us to do. I’ll keep you posted.

If you’ve sent her an electronic get-well-soon note, please forgive us for not answering it personally. The problem—if that’s the right word—is that this posting has received nearly ten thousand hits to date. We’re overwhelmed with good wishes!

Mrs. T, alas, is still too frail to read your tweets and e-mails, but she’ll start doing so as soon as she feels a bit better. In the meantime, I’ve been telling her about the avalanche of encouraging words that have reached us via Facebook and Twitter, and she’s touched more deeply than words can say.

Thank you and bless you all. Your love continues to buoy us up.

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Bob Brookmeyer and the New Art Orchestra perform his “Get Well Soon” in an undated European telecast. The tenor-sax solo is by Paul Heller:

Aretha Franklin sings “Skylark,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, on The New Steve Allen Show. This episode was originally taped on May 19, 1964, for syndicated telecast:

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

The devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

The seventeenth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading. In this episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I discuss a controversial topic and take calls from our listeners.

Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

At the top of the show, the critics do a meta-discussion: They review a theatre review and the response around it. Recently Laura Collins-Hughes of The New York Times wrote a review of Smokey Joe’s Cafe, and was then harshly critiqued for allegedly “body shaming” an actor onstage. The critics look at the history of body shaming in theatre criticism as well as how critics judge actors’ appearances and when they are relevant in a review today. They also dissect shows such as Pretty Woman, which by its very title bakes the protagonist’s appearance into the title of the show….

As usual, we wrap things up with a discussion of recent productions, in New York and elsewhere, that we’ve seen and liked—or not.

To listen, download the latest episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

In the online version of today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new Broadway musicals, Pretty Woman and Gettin’ the Band Back Together. Here’s an excerpt.

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No doubt there’s a politically correct opinion of “Pretty Woman,” Garry Marshall’s stupendously popular 1990 movie romcom. I wouldn’t know: I can’t figure out whether Degrading to Women takes intersectional precedence over Sex Work Is Good. Fortunately, to lift a line from my worthy colleagues in the judicial branch, we need not reach this issue in order to render judgment on the new musical version of Mr. Marshall’s film. Not that “Pretty Woman” is terrible—it’s just mediocre, albeit to a mind-boggling degree….

Of course you already know the well-worn plot of “Pretty Woman,” a big-bucks update of “Cinderella” in which an obscenely rich businessman (Andy Karl) hires a trashy but lovable Hollywood hooker (Samantha Barks) to be his round-the-clock escort for a hectic week of deal-making, at the end of which they fly off into the sunset in his private jet and live wealthily ever after. Since this is a safety-first commodity musical whose sole purpose is to extract cash from middle-aged fans of the film by reminding them of how much they liked it once upon a time, Mr. Marshall and J.F. Lawton, who wrote the screenplay, stuck to their script with immovable rigidity. The only thing new (so to speak) is the pop-rock score by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, an exercise in applied cliché coinage …

Ms. Barks, who has evidently been hired to impersonate Julia Roberts, does so with impressive accuracy and no trace of originality. Mr. Karl, who lit up the stage two seasons ago in “Groundhog Day,” is an immensely likable performer who has no notion of how to portray an emotionally stunted squillionaire who is liberated by love….

Any other week, “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” would have locked up Broadway’s booby prize, but it looks positively adequate by comparison with “Pretty Woman.” A spoofy little musical about a 40-year-old Manhattan stockbroker (Mitchell Jarvis) who loses his job, returns to deepest New Jersey, moves back in with his sexy mom (Marilu Henner) and decides to restart Juggernaut, his high-school garage band, “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” was made for summer theaters. What it’s doing on Broadway is hard to figure, but the members of the cast of “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” are so amiable that it’s not too unpleasant—up to a point—to spend an evening watching them tell corny jokes and sing Mark Allen’s lame but innocuous songs….

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Because of Aretha Franklin’s death, the print version of today’s Journal contains only an abridged version of my Pretty Woman review. To read my complete reviews of both shows, go here.