Mrs. T posted this message and photograph on her Facebook page yesterday. I asked her if I could make them more widely available, and she agreed. I hope they will give you some idea of how gallantly she is fighting back against the ravages of pulmonary hypertension and sepsis. In addition, her message will answer some of the questions you’ve been asking me.
I am proud beyond imagining to have been blessed with such a partner. Her courage inspires my awe. May she soon receive the Big Call.
* * *
My arms, with PICC lines and medical pumps attached. Yes, they are heavy and awkward, but I’m grateful to live in a first-world country where, despite all the problems with our health-care system, I’m still alive. My FB friends will probably know that I don’t like to talk about my health here, but I wanted you to know I’m very slowly getting stronger. I am spending 24/7 on the couch (very comfy!) in lieu of a hospital bed, and need to be waited on hand and foot (and my family has stepped up to the plate!).
My Eustachian tubes have closed due to the use of a high-velocity bi-pap, so I am mostly deaf for the time being. Talking still takes a lot of energy, so I won’t want visitors until further notice.
Many, many thanks for all the expressions of support—I am more grateful than you can know.
The thirty-fourth 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.
Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
In this episode, Terry is out but Elisabeth and Peter are not alone: They are joined by Tony-winning director (and sometime actor) David Cromer. They chat with him about working alongside Elaine May in The Waverly Gallery, how he straddles the director-performer divide, and the concepts that informed some of his most famous productions, from Our Town to The Band’s Visit.
The critics also talk about the best performances they’ve seen lately…
As mentioned above, I had to skip this episode, and the circumstances that led to my absence were—shall we say—exciting. I was with Mrs. T, who was being treated for sepsis at UConn Health Center. The plan was for me to uplink via Skype from the hospital in Connecticut to the studio in New York, but just as the soundcheck was finished and the red light went on, a nurse interrupted the taping to inform me that I was needed on the double to hold Mrs. T’s hand as she underwent a painful surgical procedure. (She wasn’t kidding, either—you can still see the scars from her nails on my left hand!) Unfortunately, David couldn’t wait—he was on break from a rehearsal across town—so the taping had to start without me, and by the time the doctors were finished with Mrs. T, the episode was in the can. I’ll be back next time, though.
To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.
In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.
(We are, by the way, aware that the audio on this episode is somewhat below par. Our apologies for the technical problems—the board, like Mrs. T, blew a last-minute gasket. We promise to get it fixed before the next episode is taped!)
“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
I’m at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, the Catskills retreat where Mrs. T and I spent part of our honeymoon and to which we’ve been returning ever since. I came to Ecce alone yesterday for what the two of us call a “caregiver’s holiday,” a much-needed opportunity to spend three uneventful nights recovering from the demands, both physical and psychic, of looking after a sick spouse. Instead, I’m being taken care of, and it feels very, very good.
Ecce, which is perched on a wooded bluff some three hundred feet above the Delaware River, is both beautiful and comfortable beyond belief. This is what I wrote about it after my first visit fourteen years ago:
Ecce is not your usual bed-and-breakfast. It was started a year ago by a couple of Wall Street businessmen who heard the chimes at midnight and decided to change their lives before it was too late. Perhaps not surprisingly, the tone and décor of their five-room inn are considerably more urbane than those of the comfy, chintzy country retreats where I typically spend my nights on the road. (I certainly can’t think of another B-&-B that has pencil-signed Hirschfeld lithographs of Carol Channing and Lucille Ball hanging proudly in the upstairs hall!) At the same time, Ecce lacks nothing in the way of country comforts—there’s even a hammock—and my baked spinach omelet, served on a deck overlooking the river, was wonderfully tasty. As I reluctantly pulled out of the parking lot after breakfast, I resolved to come back again as soon as possible.
Reader, I kept that resolution.
I went to a great deal of trouble to make this visit restful. I have no shows to see and no deadlines to hit. Instead, I packed an eclectic assortment of books and DVDs, though I expect I’ll spend most of my time on the patio, looking at nothing in particular. The fact is that I’m here to do as much nothing as possible: I don’t intend to tweet or check my e-mail any more than is strictly necessary. Outside of keeping in close touch with Mrs. T, who is being looked after in Connecticut by her father and nephew, I’m going to try to maintain passably strict radio silence between now and my return to New York on Friday.
Jackie and Roy perform “Mountain Greenery” and “Side by Side” on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show. This episode, one of the earliest surviving high-quality color videotapes of a network TV show, was originally telecast by NBC on May 28, 1961:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
For those of you who’ve been keeping up with my reports about Mrs. T’s respiratory crisis and sepsis diagnosis, I know you’ll be pleased to hear that she was released from New York-Presbyterian Hospital late Friday afternoon. From there we drove straight to our farmhouse in Connecticut, where she’ll be receiving IV antibiotics at home for the next few weeks.
Mrs. T’s discharge was a wholly unexpected development that caught us both off guard, so much so that I had to spend all of Friday scrambling to get her back home. On the other hand, there was no longer any reason for her to remain in the hospital, which is not an easy place to sleep, so it was clearly for the best that she be sprung as soon as was practical. Fortunately, she’s now recovered sufficiently to be able to use home oxygen instead of the high-flow hospital-only kind.
So why is Mrs. T in Connecticut instead of our apartment in Upper Manhattan, a stone’s throw from the hospital? For bureaucratic reasons too labyrinthine to summarize intelligibly, she has to receive her outpatient antibiotic infusions there. In addition, she must also pay a number of visits to the University of Connecticut Health Center (where her pulmonary-hypertension doctors are based—New York-Presbyterian is the home of her transplant team). Once the infusions are complete and her UConn appointments wrapped up, though, she’ll return to New York—preferably not by helicopter—and sit tight until we finally get the Big Call.
Alas, I’d already locked in a long list of work-related travel plans when we found out that Mrs. T was going home on Friday (we’d previously had good reason to expect her to be staying in New York indefinitely). As a result, I had to drive back to New York on Saturday night and spend Sunday and Monday reviewing an off-Broadway show and getting ready to hit the road yet again, while Mrs. T’s father and nephew looked after her in Connecticut.
This “break” turned out to be timely, though, because I’m far beyond exhausted: I’ve been on near-nonstop duty ever since I called an ambulance for Mrs. T on June 8, and I’ve never been so tired in my life. That’s why I’m going to depart New York later today for a caregiver’s holiday, something of which I am in urgent need, after which I’ll return to New York and get back to work. I’ll tell you more about where I’m going once I get there. Then I’ll pay my annual visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, from which I return to Connecticut on July 6, there to start preparations for the complicated process of moving us back to Manhattan.
Mrs. T wants you to know that she has been keeping up with your warm messages of support here and elsewhere. She doesn’t yet have the steam to respond to them, but please believe me when I tell you that she is grateful beyond words—literally—to know how many of you care so much.
