Lucking Out - James Wolcott [104]
The audience whose loss Lebowitz mourned was still bumble-beeing when I made my first sortie into Lincoln Center, not realizing that I was about to embark on the longest romance of my life and the most incongruous. It began on a Sunday afternoon that might have otherwise lay fallow, with me lying fallow in it. I had bought a single ticket for a matinee performance of New York City Ballet, a seat in the fourth ring, the equivalent of the upper mezzanine at the old Yankee Stadium, absent the wind gusts and rustling hot-dog wrappers. I’m not sure what the source of the impulse was that tugged me there to Lincoln Center’s State Theater that Sunday, but whatever was on the other end of the fishing line knew me better than I knew myself. Ballet was just a big fluffy cloud to me then, just as opera was a complicated bawl. I hadn’t seen any ballet when I was growing up in Maryland, not even a childhood rite-of-passage Nutcracker, and my look-in on modern dance consisted solely in catching a touring performance of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Frostburg State, my primary takeaway being what a godlike torso Hawkins brandished, an Apollo shield form-fitted to his body and burnished in battle, even though he may have been in his sixties then. He made the rest of us look like cookie dough. Hawkins’s history with Martha Graham, the mythopoeic roots of his choreographic philosophy and action-painting attack—of these I would have known nothing beyond what was in the program notes, assuming there were program notes. But that I went and that I remembered that I went meant it had dropped a dime in my imagination, made a deposit. Here I am, I thought, holding my program like a missal—my first ballet. If they could only see me now, I thought, “they” being nobody in particular. The arrival of the orchestra conductor, who it pleased me to think had just gotten off the phone to his bookie, was greeted with a flock of applause that sounded as if it were deriving from an adjacent banquet room, and as the musicians poised their instruments, the curtain rose with a wheely noise suggesting a crew hoisting sails.
It was probably The Firebird on the bill that tapped my interest when I was leafing through The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town listings, foraging for something cultural to do for my merit badge. The Firebird had a score by Igor Stravinsky, sets by Marc Chagall, and costumes by Karinska that from photographs really turned up the Cyd Charisse red. And choreography by George Balanchine, who even I understood in my heathen condition was regarded not simply as a creative genius but as God’s junior partner, handing out one ballet classic after another like year-round holiday bonuses. The Firebird would have made for just the sort of combo platter I was seeking in my continuing efforts at self-improvement, my knowledge of classical music, art, and theatrical costume needing some filling in, along with all the other cavities. I had an incomplete set of Time-Life books devoted to the great painters purchased secondhand at outdoor stalls in the Village—volumes on Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir—whose biographical content I would munch on before moving to the main course: studying the color-plate reproductions to educate my “eye.” Mailer wrote about how the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso taught him to see in a new surface-destroying way, and my “eye” was still stuck on the boring flat-planed obvious. I also turned on the classical music stations (there was more than one then) whenever I felt it incumbent upon me to listen to classical music because I thought it was something I should be doing, but it usually wasn’t long before my mind wandered out of the yard. Rock music had shattered my attention span into Flintstones vitamins, which may have been why I went to a mixed bill at NYCB rather than to a full-lengther such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Firebird, my first ballet, didn’t disappoint, but it didn’t ring steeple