This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Premieres)

Jan. 31, 1901— When the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) prepared its third production of an Anton Chekhov play, its actors were baffled, complaining that the script was “not a play, but only a scheme; there are no roles but only hints.” At its premiere on this date, audience reaction was bifurcated, with 12 curtain-calls after Act I “but only a half-hearted one after Act IV.”

In the century and a quarter since, Three Sisters has taken its place in the world’s theater canon, though directors and actors still sometimes struggle, as they do with Chekhov’s other plays, with the delicate balance between rueful comedy and drama.

I myself have witnessed the divergent results from the Russian doctor-turned-writer’s “hints.” Though critical reaction was divided at the time, a 1997 Roundabout Theatre production looks better in retrospect, with a starry cast featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Lily Taylor as the titular siblings and, in supporting roles, Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, David Strathairn, and Justin Theroux.

On the other hand, a smaller-scale 2011 production at the Chautauqua Institution, as I noted in my review, was fundamentally misconceived, filled with “directorial encrustations [that] covered and practically suffocated” it.

This dramedy did not—does not—need such embellishments. Simmering in the playwright’s consciousness for nearly the prior 20 years before the show premiered, it limned the decline of three Russian sisters as they dealt with financial pressures, professional dissatisfaction, and cultural enervation amid an isolated provincial town.

And, as University College London Professor Neil Stoker noted in this May 2019 blog post, the play is suffused with Chekhov’s awareness, for half his life, of the tuberculosis slowly destroying him, heightening a sense that “people were not just struggling with the imperfections of their own and others’ natures, but with arbitrary, relentless and invisible killers that made any apparent worldly success futile.”

In the summer of 1883, while staying at a dacha in south Russia, Chekhov had become fascinated with the Lintvarev sisters, three women of intellect and warmth who stimulated his imagination.

Eventually, he sketched a scenario in which he differentiated their fictional counterparts: the oldest, Olga, a schoolteacher burdened with financial responsibility; Masha, the bitter middle sister, who finds refuge from an increasingly loveless marriage through an affair with a Russian colonel passing through; and Irina, the youngest, whose innocence is lost under the weight of circumstance.

Moscow, their childhood home, looms as a symbol of the sisters’ perceived loss of cosmopolitan enlightenment, entertainment and vivacity.

Chekhov wrote Masha with the MAT actress Olga Knipper—who became his wife later that year—in mind. She ended up outliving her husband by half a century, and on her 90^th birthday—now under a Communist regime that had upended the way of life she and Anton had known so well—she could still recite lines from the play that had been molded around her.

The third of Chekhov’s four full-length plays, Three Sisters was, like the others, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who used it as a template for his ideas on naturalistic acting, psychological realism, atmosphere, and indirect action.

Even though MAT was well on its way to becoming “The House of Chekhov,” the playwright and director often clashed on how to stage the play, with Stanislavski stressing a harsher realism, leading Chekhov at one point to depart from rehearsals in a huff for Nice, France, convinced as late as three days before the premiere that the show would fail.

What united the collaborators, despite their differences in tone, was a sense that their characters and subject matter—ordinary Russians of different classes and occupations, unsure and paralyzed over how to act in a time of shifting socioeconomic change—required a changed treatment of plot and atmosphere.

The large, melodramatic gestures of royalty, for instance, would be replaced by smaller moments that might precede or follow major events. So, as in Three Sisters, audiences see not a duel onstage but its build-up and shattering aftermath.

British actor Ian McKellen, who, according to The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, has “played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his generation,” has underscored an aspect of these plays he began to absorb nearly 70 years ago: “more than any other dramatist, Chekhov brings actors close together on and off the stage. If they fail to respond as a company, the plays don't work.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1970 British film adaptation of Three Sisters, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring, left to right, Louise Pernell, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Watts.)

Quote of the Day (Jill Lepore, Differentiating Patriotism From Nationalism)

“Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.”— Harvard Univ. history professor Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Princess Bride,’ As Buttercup and Her Hero Face Danger)

[On arriving at the Fire Swamp]

Westley [played by Cary Elwes]: “It's not that bad.”

[Buttercup looks at him incredulously]

Westley: “Well, I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely.”— The Princess Bride (1987), screenplay by William Goldman, directed by Rob Reiner

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on ICE and the New ‘Loutocracy’)

“Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.

“For a glimpse of what government of, by and for louts looks like, find on the internet the video, taken by a citizen in Minneapolis, in which a participant in the excitement of a melee — tear gas and other instruments for combating citizens — exclaims: ‘It’s like Call of Duty! So cool huh?’ Call of Duty is a video game, away from which some new agents were perhaps lured by the signing bonuses, some up to $50,000, that have fueled the agency’s breakneck expansion….

“Policing is a hard, dangerous profession. Done well, it demands of its practitioners discipline and judgment, and deserves from society a respect approaching reverence. The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will, “With This Loutocracy, Assume It’s Lying About ICE Until Proven Otherwise,” The Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2026

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on the Power of Public Opinion)

“Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.” — American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The View From the Ground (1988)

Flashback, January 1986: Challenger Explosion Rocks Space Shuttle Program

With its new shuttle flight delayed repeatedly by high winds, a frozen hatch handle and other issues, the National Air Space and Space Administration (NASA) gave the go-ahead to launch Challenger STS-51L—and watched along with the rest of the world as it exploded just 73 seconds after blastoff in late January 1986.

Tremendous publicity had been building for the flight in the months before, largely because of New Hampshire educator Christa McAuliffe, a civilian who had been tapped for NASA's "Teacher in Space" program.

The shock was compounded because this represented the first set of NASA casualties since Apollo 1 crewmembers Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee died during a launchpad exercise on Jan. 27, 1967. Space flight, once full of danger, had come to seem entirely safe and routine, with the space shuttle program in particular successfully completing 24 missions in a row.

That night, Ronald Reagan preempted his scheduled State of the Union speech to deliver perhaps the most memorable speech of his Presidency, quoting poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. to evoke how the seven deceased astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”

But his more important action lay less in reassuring a grieving nation than in signing, with bipartisan support, Executive Order 12546 creating the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Tom Reinhardt’s December 2021 post on “The Days Forward” blog on his experience as a staffer for the blue-ribbon Rogers Commission pinpointed how the panel’s deliberations took a decisive turn.

Chairman William Rogers, a former Attorney General and Secretary of State, had just heard from NASA officials that they had seen a plume of flame escaping from one of the solid rocket boosters but had not passed the information up the chain of command. Rogers immediately left the room and phoned Reagan.

When he returned, Reinhardt was told by his boss, “the mission of the Commission had just changed from overseeing the Challenger investigation to conducting it.”

The 11 active commission members (General Chuck Yeager ended up attending only one meeting) were then divided into work groups with support staff tasked with particular investigative responsibilities. Meanwhile, several thousand personnel from NASA and the Department of Defense searched for and collected the surviving shuttle wreckage.

During the investigation, the commission discovered that sharply dropping temperatures on the morning of the flight led to a failure of the O-rings sealing the joints in the boosters. . Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, had been alerted about this by structural engineer Roger Boisjoly, who as early as six months before the disaster had written a memo warning that the defect could result in “a catastrophe of the highest order–loss of human life.” On a teleconference the night before the launch between the company and NASA, he and other engineers at Morton Thiokol urged that the flight be delayed.

But his listeners, in thrall to the recent shuttle safety record, the notion of “acceptable risk,” and the existence of a backup O-ring, dismissed these concerns. As Boisjoly remembered:

I then grabbed the photographic evidence showing the hot gas blow-by and placed it on the table and, somewhat angered, admonished them to look and not ignore what the photos were telling us, namely, that low temperature indeed caused more hot gas blow-by in the joints. I too received the same cold stares as [fellow engineer] Arnie [Thompson] with looks as if to say, ‘Go away and don’t bother us with the facts.’ At that moment I felt totally helpless and felt that further argument was fruitless, so I, too, stopped pressing my case.

The next morning, Thompson couldn’t bear to watch the launch live on TV. After denouncing the dismissal of his warnings and his colleagues’ admonitions as “unethical” at the Rogers Commission hearings, Boisjoly felt the attitude towards him at Morton Thiokol uncomfortable enough that he eventually resigned.

(Olivia Burgess’s excellent post about Boisjoly’s dilemma as participant-turned-whistleblower can be found here.)

The NASA decisionmakers, according to the Rogers Commission, “were unaware of the initial written recommendation of the contractor advising against the launch at temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit [11.7 degrees C] and the continuing opposition of the engineers at [Morton] Thiokol after the management reversed its position."

The final report of the commission, released four months after it was formed, made the following recommendations on how to avoid future disasters, including in the areas of:

*design;
*independent oversight;
*shuttle management structure;
*astronauts in management;
*a shuttle safety panel;
*criticality review and hazard analysis;
*safety organization;
*improved communications;
*landing safety;
*launch abort and crew escape;
*flight rate; and
*maintenance safeguards.

Although Morton Thiokol executives never faced criminal charges over the disaster, they, along with NASA, absorbed blame for it, and were hit where it hurt—in the pocketbook (a reported $4.6 million settlement paid to the families of four crew members and a $10 million penalty taken out of future profits) and reputational loss (as an avatar for engineering negligence and prioritizing financial contract pressure over safety).

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Almost Famous,’ on ‘The Only True Currency in This Bankrupt World’)

Lester Bangs [played by Philip Seymour Hoffman]: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”— Almost Famous (2000), written and directed by Cameron Crowe

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a Writer’s Difficulty)

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” —Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), “Truth of Intercourse” (1881), in Virginibus Puerisque

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ With Granny’s Bone to Pick with the Weather Bureau)

[Despite the U.S. Weather Bureau’s new satellite service predicting fair and clear skies, Granny insists that her beetles indicate rain.]

Justin Addison [played by John McGiver]: “Today, we no longer have to rely on such things as prognosticating beetles.”

Daisy Moses (aka Granny) [played by Irene Ryan]: “Don't you call my beetles whatever it is you just called them!”— The Beverly Hillbillies, Season 2, Episode 25, “Granny Versus the Weather Bureau,” original air date Mar 25, 1964, teleplay by Paul Henning and Mark Tuttle, directed by Richard Whorf

Well, many people in my part of the Northeast think that ol’ Granny might be onto something with her disdain for the Weather Bureau. Sure, the agency (now known as the U.S. Weather Service) kept warning through the past week to expect a major storm. But their initial “prognostication” for my corner of Bergen County, NJ indicated 10-14 inches. Throughout last night, that prediction ended up nearly doubling.

Of course, the bureau had its escape clauses: it could depend on where and when it shifted to sleet. But the fact is, the snow totals kept ratcheting up the closer they got to the event.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. Maybe it has been, but those still left in the service (which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) might be afraid to talk following the nearly 600 colleagues who left it through terminations, buyouts, and resignations pushed by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year.

By last summer, enough alarms were being raised about these reductions’ potential for slowing down warnings of extreme weather events that the service received permission to hire up to 450 meteorologists to restore some of those slots.

Only, as part of the rehiring process, applicants were asked to identify one or two of Trump’s executive orders “that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” as well as how they would use their skills to improve government efficiency and effectiveness,” according to an August 2025 report by the Associated Press.

How much does anything of this relate to knowledge of meteorology? How many applicants were tempted to answer that it would help the President better anticipate major storms around his properties in Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, NJ?

More than 60 years have passed since Granny faced off against the government’s weather forecasters, but we may be edging closer to her “prognosticating beetles” than we think.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, Evoking a Couple’s ‘Winterlude’)

“Come on, sit by the logs in the fire
The moonlight reflects from the window
Where the snowflakes, they cover the sand.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, “Winterlude,” in the New Morning LP (1970)

A beautiful scene to think of as much of this country becomes snowbound…

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David French, on ‘Christianity Properly Lived’)

“In the upside-down kingdom of God, religion is still dangerous, but the danger has flipped. Fundamentalist faiths make religion dangerous to others, the nonbelievers and heretics who must be made to yield. But Christianity properly lived is dangerous to Christians. It’s dangerous to people who refuse to hate those they are told to hate, to people who refuse to oppress, to conquer, to exploit — even when they’re told to conquer in the name of God.”—Opinion columnist David French, “Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith,” The New York Times, Dec. 23, 2025

The image accompanying this post, from the 1959 Best Picture Oscar-winner, Ben Hur, shows Jesus awaiting Pilate as the Roman procurator washes his hands. It illustrates why Jesus, in saying "My kingdom is not of this world," disappointed those who expected, in French's words, “a true Messiah [who] was supposed to lead the people to political triumph.” 

Today, their counterparts are often labeled Christian nationalists. I wish there was an alternative name that didn’t spark a negative reaction, but “Dominionism,” “Christian Supremacy,” and “The Seven Mountain Mandate” are not immediately understood. 

But Patrick Shreiner’s 2023 post “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Christian Nationalism” on the Website of the Gospel Coalition identifies two elements that make this ideology problematic: it desires either a fusion of Christianity with civil life, or even a supremacy over it, often with a resort to power to force belief in tenets that violate notions of freedom of conscience and separation of church and state.

Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on Happy Endings)

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”—American actor, director, and screenwriter Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Orson Welles: Interviews, edited by Mark W. Estrin (2002)

Joke of the Day (Bill Hicks, Comparing the Intelligence of Children and Adults)

“Children are smarter than any of us. Know how I know that? I don’t know one child with a full-time job and children.”—American stand-up comic and satirist Bill Hicks (1961-1994) quoted by Brent DeBoer, “From the Desk of the Dandy Warhols’ Brent DeBoer,” Magnet Magazine, June 9, 2012 

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Flattery, the One Industry Unaffected by Technology)

“The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.”— “World View” columnist Simon Kuper, “How Flattery Became a Big, Beautiful Industry,” The Financial Times, Nov. 29-30, 2025

For years, the dubious honor of being the most outrageous sycophant belonged to villainous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by Roland Young (right, with Frank Lawton as the adult title character in the 1935 film adaptation) in the attached image.

But Simon Kuper is right to focus on actual, more current examples. I had always thought, from reading Cary Reich’s marvelous 1996 biography of Nelson Rockefeller, that, in his early rise as a midlevel Washington bureaucrat, the future New York governor had perfected the art of governmental brown-nosing.

Then I found out that Rocky had his own Mini-Me, albeit with a Teutonic accent, in foreign-policy adviser Henry Kissinger, who then turned around and performed the same function for Richard Nixon.

But the true horror, as Kuper notes, lies in the current group of advisers now surrounding Donald Trump. Their sole qualification for high office is not competence but absolute shamelessness in stroking their boss’s tender ego.

More than ever this week, Trump needs his own personal Uriah Heeps in the wake of public appearances on Greenland that were so unfocused, rambling and dangerous that they sparked renewed, urgent calls for invoking the 25^th Amendment to stop his insanity.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (John Heisman, on a Grave Football Sin)

“What is this?  It is a prolate spheroid, an elongated sphere in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.  Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football."—American football coach, writer, and actor John Heisman (1869-1936), in his annual preseason speech to his squads, quoted by Samuel T. Pees, “John Heisman, Football Coach,” www.OilHistory.com , 2004

After this weekend, I have concluded that pro football is proof positive that Darwin’s theory of evolution was incorrect—human beings regress rather than evolve into a higher form.

When John Heisman said that line about “a prolate spheroid” over a century ago, I wonder how many of his players knew what he was talking about?

At the start of the 1961 preseason, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was more direct than Heisman: “Gentlemen, this is a football."

Packers wide receiver Max McGee raised his hand and cracked, “Um, Coach, you’re going a little too fast!”

To their credit, Lombardi’s squad eventually absorbed this elementary lesson.

This past weekend, it looks like the survivors of the National Football League’s latest brutal season experienced the professional counterpart of the death that hyperbolic Coach Heisman warned about.

In the latest round of the playoffs, here’s how it broke down, with fumbles counted along with interceptions (which, perhaps, Heisman didn’t worry much at the start of his career, before the widespread adoption of the forward pass) and the winners in each contest listed second:

AFC:

Buffalo Bills: 5 fumbles, 2 interceptions; Denver Broncos: 1 fumble, 1 interception

Houston Texans: 2 fumbles, 4 interceptions; New England Patriots: 4 fumbles, 1 interception

NFC:

San Francisco 49ers: 2 fumbles, 1 interception; Seattle Seahawks: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Chicago Bears: 0 fumbles, 3 interceptions; Los Angeles Rams: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Notice a pattern here? The team with fewer mistakes ended up winning.

The agony in Buffalo since Saturday (exacerbated by controversial officiating) made me think that more than a few people are taking Heisman’s claim—well, almost literally. 

Quarterback Josh Allen was in tears over his subpar performance, and the team’s owner decided to part ways with head coach Sean McDermott after nine seasons, perhaps on the questionable premise that his replacement can help the Bills take the Super Bowl at last.

As for that Texans-Patriots game: well, I couldn’t believe what I was watching in that first half, with the four interceptions by Texans’ quarterback C.J. Stroud.

Players, coaches, and owners may have taken all these mistakes seriously, but I’ll tell you about another group that probably has, maybe to the point of heart attacks: those who bet on the game. 

“Prop bets” are facilitating so many more varieties of gambling than before, and anybody following the pregame odds here are likely to have lost their shirts by now.

Quote of the Day (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Non-Violence and Oppressors)

“The non-violent way does not bring about miracles in a few hours, in a few days, in a few years, for that matter. I think the first reaction of the oppressor when oppressed people rise up against the system of injustice is an attitude of bitterness. But I do believe that if the non-violent resisters continue to follow the way of non-violence, they eventually get over to the hearts and souls of the oppressors, and I think it eventually brings about that redemption that we dream of. Of course, I can’t estimate how many people we’ve touched so far; this is impossible because it’s an inner process. But I’m sure something is stirring in the minds and souls of people and I’m sure people are thinking anew on this basic problem of human relations.”—American minister, civil-rights advocate, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), “Meet the Press” appearance transcript, Apr. 17, 1960, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Injustice and Loving Our Enemies)

“To love our enemies cannot mean that we must connive with their injustice. It does mean that beyond all moral distinctions of history we must know ourselves one with our enemies not only in the bonds of common humanity but also in the bonds of common guilt by which that humanity has become corrupted.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Our Responsibilities in 1942,” Christianity and Crisis, Jan. 12, 1942

Flashback, January 1976: Massive ‘Comes Alive’ Success Nearly Undoes Frampton

Frampton Comes Alive! came charging out of the gate at the start of 1976 and maintained its momentum throughout the year, and beyond. English guitarist Peter Frampton experienced the kind of success he’d never enjoyed before, as the double-live set became the best-selling LP of the year—and, with more than 8 million copies sold in the U.S. and 11 million worldwide, it remains one of the bestselling live albums of all time.

All of it came at a price, though, that left him, in the words of screenwriter-director Cameron Crowe (a friend since interviewing him for Rolling Stone) “strapped to the nose cone of rock 'n' roll.”

It wasn’t a case of success too soon—Frampton’s lack of a commercial breakthrough after four solo LPs had left him craving more. But it was a case of too much, as the 25-year-old loathed himself for following management’s urging to follow up with an ill-conceived studio album and a film adaptation of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The lack of preparation for overwhelming success contrasted enormously with his careful buildup as a live performer. 

As the opening act for a number of more seasoned performers—Edgar Winter, J. Geils, ZZ Top, and “the best teacher” Steve Marriott—Frampton “learned something new from every act—how they got the audience going, how they built their set. I would steal stuff from everyone, watch how they would say certain things and what reaction they would get.”

The original plan was to have a single LP of his live performances. But he was persuaded to add more songs to fill out a second disk—notably, “Baby I Love Your Way” and “Show Me the Way,” which became hit singles that lifted the collection into the sales stratosphere.

“Show Me the Way” featured the distinctive sound of Frampton’s electric guitar filtered through a “Talk Box,” as did the third single, “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

The news that the album hit #1 in April initially made Frampton euphoric: “Career-wise this was the best news I could ever hear—I was in shock.” Then self-doubt began to creep in: “I couldn’t help listening to the man on my other shoulder whispering, ‘How are you going to follow this one up, buddy?’”

By the end of the road tour to promote Frampton Comes Alive!, the new rock idol was feeling utterly frazzled. In an interview this month with Christopher Scapelliti of Guitar Player, Frampton reflected, “The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

But he yielded to the advice of manager Dee Anthony that he get back into the studio and record I’m in You, even though he felt he didn’t have enough good songs at that point to put out a full disk.

The influence of Anthony—who, according to Frampton, was connected to organized crime—was malign in other ways, as perhaps indicated by his listing on this 2019 list of “Classic Rock Musicians Who Got Ripped Off by Managers and Record Labels Part 1.”

Anthony had “three rules of success” cited in Fred Goodman’s 1997 account of the business of rock ‘n’ roll, The Mansion on the Hill: “The first thing is, get the money. The second thing is to remember to get the money. The third thing…is always remember to get the money.”

His ultimate aim was to steer clients away from thinking about their finances, and he had a surefire means of doing so with Frampton, the musician remembered:

“I was kept high. If I needed weed, he [Anthony] made sure I had weed. If I needed cocaine, he made sure I had cocaine. He didn’t want me thinking about what was going on. It was criminal. I could have put him in jail.”

A 1978 car crash almost killed Frampton, and it took 20 years for him to shake his alcohol and drug addictions. The story of his rise and fall sounds like an episode of Behind the Music (and in fact, in the year 2000, it was an episode of the long-running VH-1 series).

Only that wasn’t the end for him. He rediscovered his love of music when he became lead guitarist on tour for longtime friend David Bowie in 1987; released several well-received solo albums in the 1990s; acted in Crowe’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous; and published Do You Feel Like I Do?, a memoir notable for its honesty and thoughtfulness.

In 2024, Frampton was elected to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and as I wrote in this blog post at the time, “few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude” to this honor. His 2019. Frampton disclosure that he was diagnosed with the inflammatory muscle disease Inclusion-Body Myositis left many fans wishing him nothing but the best, and glad that they could see him perform for as long as his health permits.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on a Global ‘Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate’)

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

“Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”—Soldier and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), “Military-Industrial Complex” Speech (Farewell Address to the Nation), Jan. 17, 1961

The last televised speech of Dwight Eisenhower to his countrymen, which occurred 65 years ago today, might be the most famous Presidential farewell address since George Washington left office, largely because the former Allied commander at D-Day unexpectedly cautioned about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex" that had developed in America because of World War II and the Cold War.

But, as I discovered when I read the text in full, other aspects of his speech have also proved relevant, in ways that few could have anticipated at the time.

Take scientific research, for instance. Ike not only speculated that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,” but conversely also admonished against “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”

If the second danger sounds familiar to you, it should. Keep in mind, for instance, this blog post from earlier this week from science magazine EOS:

"Academic science has been under pressure not only through the administration’s targeting of universities directly but also through its efforts to remake the federal grantmaking process, reduce the amounts and types of external research funded, and reduce budget appropriations for scientific research by more than 20% through large-scale cutbacks and reorganizations in federal science agencies. Unsurprisingly, the administration’s actions are having ripple effects for higher education, business (among companies who supply scientific products, for instance), and public health."

But the section of the speech that should receive the most renewed attention is the quote above, especially in light of Donald Trump’s refusal to rule out military force if the United States can’t purchase Greenland from Denmark.

As NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Eisenhower knew the organization’s importance in deterring the aggression of a larger power against a smaller nation. After all, two world wars in which he served began in precisely this manner.

He would be embarrassed at the thought that a later President of his own party is threatening the independence of a smaller member of NATO—and in this case, as well as in the current President’s inexplicable preference for Russia over Ukraine, is also risking the very existence of the alliance.

In a blog post from last March, David Lake, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, adeptly summarized the implications of this:

“This is the most basic rule of leadership: leaders need followers, and others will follow only if they are confident the leader is taking them where they want to go. To accept U.S. influence over their foreign policies, allies must have some confidence that Washington will be attentive to their needs. Allowing another country to exert authority over one’s policies is an awesome choice, and one made only if the ally is confident that this authority will be wielded in the common interest. In ignoring Europe, in the case of Ukraine; initiating trade wars and putting tariffs on our allies even before our geopolitical competitors; disparaging NATO; threatening to seize the Panama Canal, Greenland, and possibly Canada; and intervening in the domestic politics of our allies, Trump is flouting the basic rule of leadership."

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Breslin, on a Con Artist Who Played Reporters and ‘Financial Geniuses’ for Suckers)

“[A] famous, well-tested theory…is named after Bill Corum, who once wrote sports for the Hearst papers when they were in New York….‘Gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed.’ [I]nstead of horseplayers, the suckers who must get screwed are a combination of news reporters and financial people. It is all quite simple. Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery…He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the newspapers in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night. The financial people, who lead such dreary lives, believe what they read and see on television. Trump is larger than life. No, not Trump. Don't use that name. It's Donald! He cannot lose. The financial geniuses can't wait to rush into the glamour and lights. They want to touch Trump's arm. ‘Here, I'm from Prudential, the rock of Gibraltar. Take our $75 million to build another crap game. Can I ride on your boat?’"—Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin (1930-2017), “The Art of the Trump: Call It Corum's Law,” Newsday, June 7, 1990

Quote of the Day (David Lynch, on How ‘People Are Like Detectives’)

“People are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues. Some people wonder and look around and they take what they see and try to figure out what it all means. And they reach different conclusions. We are all like detectives, trying to figure out the meaning of life. And the same thing goes for film. You want to find a meaning – at least some people do. But now the world goes so fast. It’s just screaming on the surface loudly. And there’s not that much time for people to contemplate things and daydream and ponder.”—American film director David Lynch (1946-2025), quoted by Ross Simonini, “ ‘Daydreaming Is So Important To Me’: How David Lynch Fishes for Ideas,” Art Review, Jan. 5, 2021

The image accompanying this post, of David Lynch at a ceremony for Sissy Spacek to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was taken on Aug. 1, 2011, by Angela George. 

Quote of the Day (Anne Perry, on the Need for ‘The Voice of Dissent’)

“Let us hear the voice of dissent, because the person who asks you why you think what you do and expects you to explain is your best friend. They are clarifying your view, and if you don’t really think what you do, it’s a good time to change. And if you do think what you do, it can make you realize that, well, it’s because of so-and-so. No friend lets you walk over the cliff. They give you the voice of warning.” — British historical mystery novelist and convicted teen murderer Anne Perry (1938-2023), in conversation with Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Anne Perry,” The Strand Magazine, Issue 13 (June/September 2004)

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on Willie Nelson)

“How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never quite fit in and don’t much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn’t tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I’ve always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He’s like the invisible air. He’s high and low. He’s in harmony with nature. And that’s what makes him Willie.”—Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, on 92-year-old country-music legend Willie Nelson, quoted by Alex Abramovich, “Profiles: Last Highway: How Willie Nelson Sees America,” The New Yorker, Dec. 29, 2025 and Jan. 5, 2026 issue

(The accompanying photo of Willie Nelson getting ready to perform at Farm Aid 2009 was taken by Larry Philpot.)

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on Technology and ‘The Problems That Really Matter’)

“If the future is anything like the past, technology will continue to solve problems that are not all that pressing, while doing nothing to address the problems that really matter. Thus, while a 2-year-old may never know what Roku boxes are, he will know what massive traffic jams are. To date, technology has done nothing to improve the flow of traffic on I-95, I-25 or the 405, much less the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Desktop PCs may go the way of tape recorders and pocket calculators, but the Beltway will still be backed up halfway to Baltimore.”— Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: There Are Some Things Technology Won’t Change,” The Wall Street Journal, May 25-26, 2019

Well, for a while, during the pandemic, it looked like traffic jams were easing, including in the DC-Baltimore area that Queenan talks about—and I suppose that tech-enabled remote work facilitated that.

But, according to this report from a year ago by an NBC affiliate, more people were on the road in that area than before the pandemic, with return-to-office edicts rising. It just goes to show: technology can’t really dislodge institutions and individuals from their stuck-on-stupid mode—even if stuck-on-stupid means being caught in massive traffic jams. 

This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.