Having rung in yet another New Year — on New Year’s Day, for a change, not the night before — I thought I’d better get back on track with a Friday movie. I made a date on Thursday night to see Last Chance Harvey with LXIV, at a theatre just round the corner from his house. After tea and dolce with Kathleen, I got myself onto the IRT in plenty of time. On the ride downtown, I read about half of a terrific essay on video games by the English man of letters, John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books. Mr Lanchester points out (not in the same sentence) that the popular games combine all the tedium and effort of the workaday world with fantasy violence. I endeavor to bear in mind that my remarkable inaptitude at games — I have barely enough hand-eye coordination to operate an iPod — is no excuse for taking a condescending attitude toward Grand Theft Auto IV, but it’s no use.
I climbed out of the subway fifteen minutes before the appointed time. What to do? I could cross Union Square and browse at Barnes & Noble. Or — what’s this? A big Virgin sign hung at a corner a block away. A record store! I couldn’t believe that such a thing still existed. In fifteen minutes I could check the place out.
Like most stores that I’ve been in since Christmas, Virgin was close to empty, which only made its spotlighted lampblack interior look like a horror movie that nobody wanted to see. There were the usual undistinguished beats and jags of crashingly tedious noise, presumably intended to signify a locus of Dionysiac release even at this midday hour. It didn’t take long to find the serious music, downstairs. Jazz and the classics are collected in a large space beneath the entrance. Unless there was a pop-music department hidden away somewhere, I’d have to say that the days when serious music was shoehorned into the odd corner appear to be over. If I’d had more time, I’d have tested my theory that serious music will keep the CD manufacturers in business. Once again, I might add. I picked up Renée Fleming’s new-looking album of Schubert lieder, actually over ten years old. And “The Best of Cal Tjader/Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980.” Why not.
The Virgin store happens to sit beneath the Regal Union Square Theatre, which is where LXIV and I were to see Last Chance Harvey. Twenty yards from door to door. But because LXIV would be waiting at his apartment for my buzz, my route A to B took me in a clockwise direction, round the other way, down Fourth Avenue, across Thirteenth Street and up Broadway. We New Yorkers love walking so much that we don’t mind strolling around the block just to get back into the same building.
I will have more to say about Last Chance Harvey presently, but I can report that LXIV and I liked it very much. There were some rather shattering moments of muted humiliation for Dustin Hoffman’s character, and at first it seemed that Emma Thompson’s character was going to find him as annoying as everyone else did. Instead, Ms Thompson turned Last Chance Harvey into the first true romantic adventure story, one that asks if two dented, middle-aged people who know even less about one another than we know about them (not much!) crazy to give love a try?
Kathleen had been asked to join us for the movie, but she would commit only to lunch at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill. It was her first visit to this University Place landmark, which I didn’t even know about until late last summer. Kathleen put her finger on why I’m crazy about it: the Knickerbocker is “like Schrafft’s.”
After lunch, Kathleen and I caught a taxi, and, as we drove uptown, Kathleen asked about University Place. Where does it start and where does it end? I could have thought about this a minute and essayed an answer, but it would probably have been wrong, so I reached for Manhattan Block By Block, which I carry everywhere, and established that University Place runs from the northeast corner of Washington Square (continuing from Washington Square East) to the southwest corner of Union Square, where it runs into Broadway. Unfortunately, trying to read the map in the back of the cramped taxi not only made me carsick but unleashed the hangover that had, until now, hung fire. I was not to feel entirely well for the rest of the day.
In the evening, Ms NOLA and M le Neveu stopped by, on their way to see Milk, up in our part of town. Kathleen was napping, so they came back after the movie, and we all had a good chat. Our talk came round to Broadway shows. Kathleen proposed getting tickets for the four of us to see the revival of Guys and Dolls, starring, among others, Lauren Graham — as Miss Adelaide! How counterintuitive is that? And wasn’t the show revived just a few years ago? With Nathan Lane and Faith Prince?
How about 1992? No! We couldn’t believe it. Sixteen years ago? But Ms NOLA remembered: in Manhattan Murder Mystery, somebody goes to see Guys and Dolls, and a bit of Googling confirmed her recollection. It seems like only — well, not yesterday, exactly. But 2002, say. In 2002, however Mr Lane was enjoying the Broadway triumph of The Producers. Strangely, that seems to have happened longer ago. As Alan Rich wrote of Le Nozze di Figaro about a million years ago, in New York Magazine, Guys and Dolls, like the Catholic Mass, ought to be celebrated somewhere around the world at every moment.
(Speaking of Nathan Lane, we often say, of an actor whom we particularly like, “Oh, I’d go to see her in anything! I’d pay to see her read the phone book!” Our bluff is about to be called. Mr Lane, together with Bill Irwin, David Strathairn, and John Goodman, will be giving a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the spring.)
I may be back on track, but, as is the case every January, there is more of me to get up to speed.
