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News Archive for Tommy Lee Jones

TED KRUCKEL 10.08.08 4:29 PM

The New Yorker Festival Was Mostly Just What You'd Expect

The New Yorker Festival's pedi cabs
Photo: Startraks

In case you haven’t heard, the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem. So here goes: As far as the performing arts are concerned, I am a philistine.

I’ve fought this compulsion privately for years, and now I’m out and proud with it. I went to opening night at the American Ballet Theatre for years, staying through the entire performance (well, only because board member Muffie Potter Aston told me that the board made specific pleas to members not to leave during the show because it’s disheartening to the troupe). I toiled on committees for the New York Public Library and Cooper-Hewitt Museum for years, hosting little cocktail parties, organizing ticket buyers, and worst of all, attending meetings.

I gave up going to the theater because no one would attend with me anymore due to the snoring. The last musical I enjoyed was Sweeney Todd. My friend Bernadette could be counted on to fax me the libretto of just about any opera performance I took in, but I don’t think I could make it through three acts today.

Remember going to the Angelika and sitting through a three-hour French movie about a sad, abused, but ultimately honorable pregnant maid? Yep, me too. But these days I get up and leave the cinema as soon as I can predict the ending—which inevitably occurs about 40 to 45 minutes into the run time.

But I can still read. So I thought, “Maybe the New Yorker Festival is for me.” MORE >>

The New Yorker, The New Yorker Festival, Condé Nast, Malcolm Gladwell, Lillian Ross, Westin, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones