It's hard to know-or maybe, really, to admit that you drink too much. After all, you might just be a fun guy. The sort who orders half the menu at a dinner for two, using each cocktail or glass of wine as a kind of musical notation, a mark of rest between courses, helping the unhurried night grow long and lively.
Three drinks in, or four, neon signs blur with companionate charm, and the lights dotting bridges (you see them from the back of your car as you head to the next party) spread calmly over the water, offering you peace.
Drink might help you speak up, speed your charisma. It might lift a scrim and put you in better contact with others, and with your own senses. Seamus Heaney once wrote:
When I unscrewed it I smelled the disturbed tart stillness of a bush rising through the pantry.
When I poured it it had a cutting edge and flamed like Betelgeuse.
If that bright flame makes you too wild now and then, makes you wake up with a tart taste in your mouth, having forgotten how you ended up in bed, and you start to measure hangovers in weeks instead of mornings... who can say? You might've just had a bad month. You've been looking for light.
One such fun-loving innocent is Joe Clay (Brian d'Arcy James), the rascal whose penchant for drink is the igniting spark of "Days of Wine and Roses," a new musical at Studio 54, directed by Michael Greif-based on the play by J. P. Miller from 1958 and the Blake Edwards film from 1962-with a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. We first meet Joe at a work event in nineteen-fifties New York, a glass of amber liquid in hand, chatting up his boss's pretty, new secretary, Kirsten Arnesen (Kelli O'Hara).
Joe's a Korean War veteran, recently back Stateside. Kirsten's the daughter of a taciturn Norwegian. She grew up on a farm; her wit is city-ready.
Denne historien er fra February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
