Love, Love, Love review old-fashioned #richardarmitage

So, I guess, once upon a time — or maybe it’s only in film — after the press night performance, the cast retired to a bar to await reviews of their play. The New York papers are “put to bed” around midnight and one could get a copy of the review in the very early hours of the morning, by 2 a.m. or so. That seems to have changed as almost every review that appeared last night broke while they were still on stage. (Which probably really enhanced the mood at the party.) Or maybe it was only a thing we saw on screen, the young factotum who walks into the bar with copies of the New York papers that were still damp from the presses and the actors who rush for a copy to see what the critic has said.

In any case, never having lived in the city, getting the New York Times was always a different thing for me. They used to fly them around the country — they got loaded on to the first flights out of New York and then appeared in the urban centers around the country in bales and gradually trickled outward. When I was in college in Texas, when I had a subscription and there was only a paper edition, I got the combination to a locked box on campus and when I walked past, I could pick up the morning edition after 8 a.m. When I lived in Missouri, at the beginning of the Internet paper phenomenon, it was impossible to get the paper the same day — it came one or two days later — and there was only one store in town and it only got five copies. Here near my home town, you could always get it on the same day at the airport and at three or four stores in town (keeping in mind that in Wisconsin terms, I have very good access to an urban setting — very much further north or west of here they have no access to the paper edition, and probably don’t want it). This morning I had to scrounge a bit but I finally found a copy at — of all places — a Shell station.

Somehow, even though I read the paper last night online, I’ll always appreciate the experience of the paper papers. I don’t buy one very often but this seemed like the right occasion. (Now I want to crawl back into bed with it and some coffee and a croissant. Cough. I am a living breathing stereotype dinosaur.)

~ by Servetus on October 20, 2016.