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Dear Garrison, The spouse and

December 23, 2004 |

Dear Garrison,
The spouse and I love your show and for the past two years we've seen you in person at Tanglewood and loved every moment. I've been watching the schedule to see when tickets would be available for Tanglewood but so far it's not listed.

In a recent Post to the Host you mentioned that you were doing less traveling this year — does this mean you're not coming to Tanglewood? (Rats.)

By the way, the new program, "Literary Friendships," sounds terrific. I wish it were
being broadcast for those of us who don't live nearby.

Jane Reel
Watervliet, NY

Jane, we'd find it hard to give up going to Tanglewood and the show will play there on Saturday, July 2, unless Albert Webster, our tour manager, is delusional, in which case we have major problems here. All of us love Tanglewood as a glorious venue — the rolling terrain of the Berkshires, the pretty towns, the crack staff of the Boston Symphony that runs the place, and especially we adore the audience that comes and sits under the Shed or out on the grass and hangs around afterward to press the flesh. It's an audience that is quick and warm and capable of making sharp turns, so you can give them Pat Donohue singing the blues and in the next minute, after a word about ketchup, Emmanuel Ax playing Debussy, and they soak it all up. As they soak up the sun. Or (a few years ago) a summer downpour. I'm especially fond of Tanglewood because my wife loves it so much, having been a violin student there in her teenage years and having the chance to play in a student orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So we go out and stay at the Red Lion in Stockbridge and it's always the last show of the season before the summer break and sometimes we're joined by Boston relatives and late on Saturday night we sit on the porch of the Red Lion and feel the lovely summer stretch out ahead of us.

"Literary Friendships," our series of duo-artist readings mit conversation starts January 18 at the Fitzgerald with Robert Bly and Donald Hall who have been friends for more than fifty years, since their student days at Harvard. A friendship that took form in thousands of letters written back and forth. Each of them seems to have shown the other everything, every work in progress, and told the other exactly what he thought, and this is an amazement. Plus which both of them are wonderful poets. We'll be producing this series for broadcast and hope it turns up next year on your local public radio station.

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