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    Freddie Mercury and Virginie Despentes: What ‘We Are Lady Parts’ Is Made Of

    Nida Manzoor, the creator, writer and director of the series, shares what things inspired her to make a show about Muslim women in a punk band.There have been many stories about being young, obsessed with music and starting a band, and the series “We Are Lady Parts” does nail the fundamentals: the joys and the arguments, the feuds and the romantic entanglements, the mortifying gigs and the uplifting concerts. More

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    How to Undress Someone Quickly

    Don’t start frantically grabbing at someone’s garments; trust is key. Let the person you’re disrobing do some of the work. “Wear kneepads, there’s lots of kneeling involved,” says Lacie Bonanni, 36, who works as a so-called dresser, a theatrical worker who helps actors into and out of their costumes. Bonanni got her start on Broadway 11 years ago on a show called “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which involved stripping off a multitude of skintight bodysuits. Although Bonanni’s husband occasionally jokes about her taking people’s clothes off for a living, her skills don’t necessarily translate outside the theater, where the focus of undressing is never singularly speed and where sometimes fumbling is part of the fun. During a show, it’s not uncommon that a complete costume change, including mask and shoes, needs to happen in less than 30 seconds.Let the person you’re disrobing do some of the work. Bonanni tends to go for the bottom half of the body and lets the actor undress up top. At first, you both might stumble, reach for the same garment simultaneously, bump heads even. You’ll get faster as you become more familiar with clothing and bodies. By the time a show opens, costume changes should feel like a choreographed dance.Undressing happens mostly in a theater’s darkened wings and backstage. “Wear a headlight,” says Bonanni, who learned the craft from her mother, a longtime dresser on shows like “Rent” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Costumes get what wardrobe people call “quick rigged,” which mostly means replacing buttons with Velcro. Some garb is unavoidably time-consuming. “A corset is the thing you’re dreading,” Bonanni says. Once you’ve got a person’s clothing off, toss it into a basket to be sorted and cleaned later. Unless, of course, you’re required to put the same outfit back on, as Bonanni had to do repeatedly for the musical “Groundhog Day.” In that case, keep it organized and lay it out in such a way so that the sweat can dry. Backstage is often hectic and crowded; don’t start frantically grabbing at someone’s garments or you’ll exacerbate their nervousness and discomfort. The person needs to trust you. “You want them to feel like they’re in a safe space,” Bonanni says. More

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    Review: Martha Washington, Hilariously Haunted by Her Slaves

    James Ijames’s amusingly cynical and eclectic new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” is at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through July 30.On an evening train back from the Hudson Valley last weekend, I overheard two drunken friends — one white, one Indian American — having a loud, expletive-ridden debate two rows behind me.History was irrelevant, the white friend was saying. Between Cold Spring and Yonkers, they argued about police brutality, institutional racism and citizenship, but they kept circling back to the topic of reparations. “If my grandfather was a serial killer, why do I have to pay for his crimes?” he asked. He said history was being used against him. The past is the past — so why should he suffer?That this experience followed a performance of James Ijames’s stunning new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” directed by Taylor Reynolds at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was an event of stage-worthy irony. The theater gods certainly have a sense of humor.And so does Ijames (“Fat Ham,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”), though his is laced with a brutal sense of cynicism. I say that as a compliment: What else could be more appropriate to the obscene joke that is this country’s treatment of its Black residents? In “Miz Martha Washington,” George Washington is dead and his wife, Martha (played by Nance Williamson), seems about ready to follow him to the grave. Ann Dandridge (a sharp Britney Simpson) — her slave and also her half sister, who is unfortunately tangled up in Martha’s line of ancestry — tends to the former first lady while raising her own son, William (a perfectly jejune Tyler Fauntleroy).Martha is weak and feverish, talking nonsense and having hallucinations while Ann and the rest of her slaves — the Washingtons held hundreds, historically — continue to cook her food, clean her floors, chop her wood and polish her silverware, as they’ve done her whole life. But now they’re antsy and less accommodating: In his will, Washington offered the slaves freedom upon his wife’s death.In a series of hallucinations, her slaves appear as lawyers, prosecutors and historical figures who try to show her how accountable she is in a system of oppression. Her fever dreams include chats with Abigail Adams, Betsy Ross and Thomas Jefferson, all of them Black; a game show hosted by a Black King George and Queen Charlotte; and a “People’s Court”-style trial. She should just do the right thing and free her slaves while she’s still alive, but it’s hard to be ethical when you’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle.“Miz Martha Washington” bears the signature of Ijames’s clever wit: He writes the slaves as more than docile stereotypes; these slaves have personality to spare, and they joke and sing with a threatening jocularity. You know how baring one’s teeth can be a sign of joy or hostility? Ijames does.Two female slaves, Doll (Cyndii Johnson) and Priscilla (Claudia Logan), act as twin jesters in the play, clowning and gossiping at Martha’s expense — as when Priscilla acts out what she hopes will be Martha’s “death rattle,” a hilariously odd sound that falls somewhere between a groan and a screech. They don’t talk purely in the expected dialect of stage slaves, but in an anachronistic mix of that with modern Black American vernacular.All of the elements of the production have a bit of this playful mash-up approach (which recalls the style of other great Black playwrights like George C. Wolfe, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks). In terms of plot, the play recalls, of all things, “A Christmas Carol,” as Martha is haunted by her wrongs. But “Miz Martha Washington” is never as procedural as that; scenes set in the real world are broken up by dance interludes with disco lights and by surreal fantasies like a reverse auction in which the slaves, posed as owners, examine and bid on Martha.Even the costumes, by Hahnji Jang, are sportively eclectic, with clashing patterns and colors — along with additional anachronistic details, like hoop earrings and sneakers. Under Reynolds’s puckish direction, the tone, too, whips from exaggerated sitcom-style humor (hammy facial reactions, quick comedic beats) to poetic surrealism (a young slave boy’s prophetic monologue) to tragedy (accounts of abuse, sexual assault).Cyndii Johnson, foreground center, plays a slave who also serves as a kind of jester, joking and gossiping at Martha’s expense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the slaves sing and dance and drum around poor, sick Martha’s bed, it looks like a dark sacrificial ritual or an exorcism of America’s evils. And when one slave laughs, and the sound is joined by an offstage chorus of laughter from other slaves, the thunder is spirited at first but then quickly becomes unnerving. As Ijames notes in his script, “Laughter is a weapon.”And yet Martha isn’t a meek, quivering pupil to the slaves’ lessons on the debts America owes to its Black people; Williamson pivots from pleas to commands, fear to rage, declaring herself America’s mother, a woman who “did right” by her slaves, and refusing to be spooked into more righteous behavior.Behind the simple staging of Martha’s bed on a sandy patch of ground, an opening in the tent on the beautiful lawn of the Boscobel House and Gardens, in Garrison, N.Y., revealed a backdrop of mountains and a hazy blue sky. This view, which dimmed over time into the buzzing, uninterrupted darkness of the evening, for me recalled the ways our American mythos is tied to grand landscapes — “amber waves” and “purple mountain majesties” for white explorers and white landowners. All fitting for a show confronting questions about freedom, inheritance and birthright. (“Miz Martha Washington” is part of the festival’s 34th and final season before it moves to a new location.)I couldn’t help but imagine how much greater the show would be on a big Broadway stage with all the fixings, so to speak. After all, Ijames’s revisionism works, in many ways, as the inverse to “Hamilton.” “Hamilton” uses its Black and brown actors to reclaim history as a story of hope for immigrants, minorities, the disenfranchised. It’s a rebranding of the American dream. “Miz Martha Washington” uses its Black actors to expose the blights of the American dream and the hypocrisies of our historical narratives.And so the hilarious Brandon St. Clair is the obliging slave Davy as well as a very Black — and priceless — George Washington, resurrected from the dead. And another slave, Sucky Boy (Ralph Adriel Johnson), appears as a humorously tactless Black Thomas Jefferson.Does the play have a happy, inspirational ending? Well, let me just say that despite Ijames’s antic fabrications, he is ultimately tethered to the tragedy that is America. And we all know how that story goes.On the train after the show, the conversation between the two friends seemed to stretch on forever. When the white friend got off, after saying he had enjoyed the “discourse,” a fresh silence took over. Infuriated by the ignorant, racist statements I had been hearing, I walked over and spoke to the Indian American man, a lawyer named Ash.“You’re totally right on everything,” I said. “I’m not sure you should bother.” He gave me a fist bump and said that he still wanted to try.About halfway through the play, Priscilla says to Doll, “Hard work openin’ folks’ eyes,” to which Doll responds, “Huh … you can say that again.”But are we all accountable for our fellow citizens who are, if not explicitly racist, at least complicit in the systems and institutions that degrade and oppress? Does Ijames consider his work educational, a corrective? I would wager not. History has taught us that even our most high-minded foundational ideals — “all men are created equal” — can be interpreted to a single group’s advantage or be a basis of manipulation. You can’t teach a person humanity if it’s a lesson they don’t want to learn.In the fairy tale version of our country’s racial politics, we all learn about justice and skip happily toward the future. I, for one, am done with fairy tales as history — and patient explanations. Give me the harder truth of Ijames’s fantastical version any day.The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha WashingtonThrough July 30 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; 845-265-9575, hvshakespeare.org. More

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    On the Scene: ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ 🎸

    On the Scene: ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ 🎸Michael PaulsonReporting on theater Even before entering the St. James Theater, the theater district was clearly more alive than it was a year ago, at the height of the pandemic. Times Square, even with all but one theater still closed, was mobbed. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’ and Macy’s Fireworks

    PBS airs a documentary about the enduring effects of Agent Orange. And the Macy’s annual fireworks display returns to New York in full force.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 28-July 4. Details and times are subject to change. More

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    John Sacret Young, Creative Force Behind ‘China Beach,’ Dies at 75

    The series, about a Vietnam War hospital, was just one vehicle for him in his writing career to explore war and its aftershocks.John Sacret Young, a writer and producer who was behind the television series “China Beach,” set at a Vietnam War military hospital, and whose work often explored the psychological wounds of war, died on June 3 at his home in Brentwood, Calif. He was 75.The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Claudia Sloan, said.Mr. Young was the executive producer of “China Beach,” which recounted the experiences of several women at an evacuation hospital on ABC from 1988 to 1991. He created the show with William Broyles Jr., a former editor at Newsweek who had served in Vietnam and went on to write the screenplay for Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995).Mr. Young was later a writer and producer of the Aaron Sorkin’s series “The West Wing” (1999-2006) and co-executive producer and writer of the Netflix series “Firefly Lane,” which was released in February.“China Beach” drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” particularly when it came to their settings: one in a military hospital in Korea, the other in Vietnam. But where “M*A*S*H” was part comedy, part drama in mostly half-hour installments, “China Beach” took a fully dramatic approach in hourlong episodes. It drew praise for its well-drawn characters, particularly that of Colleen McMurphy, an Army nurse played by Dana Delany.With a cast (many headed for stardom) that also included Tom Sizemore, Kathy Bates, Helen Hunt, Don Cheadle and Marg Helgenberger, “China Beach” won the 1990 Golden Globe Award for best drama, beating out contenders like “L.A. Law” and “Murder, She Wrote.” It also launched the careers of Ms. Delany and Ms. Helgenberger, who went on to a leading role in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”Though the show was not a major ratings hit, “China Beach” earned praise for its writing and period-appropriate score, featuring a theme song by Diana Ross and the Supremes.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2013, on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary, Mr. Young called the Vietnam War “a story of our generation” and said that choosing to focus on women felt “crucial, interesting and relevant.”The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor wrote in 1991 that “the series sensitively tapped into national terrain that remains difficult.” The year before, he lauded the show for avoiding the clichés of prime time television in favor of something “inventive, imaginative, adventurous.”Much of Mr. Young’s work — in books, television and movies — explore the impact of war. In addition to “China Beach,” he wrote the mini-series “A Rumor of War” (1980), which adapted Philip Caputo’s celebrated memoir of his time in the Marines Corps in Vietnam and the emotional devastation that followed; “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” (1998), a television movie set in the aftermath of the Gulf War; and the theatrical release “Romero” (1989), starring Raul Julia, which addressed the civil and religious upheaval leading to the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador.Vietnam was also a prevailing theme in a memoir by Mr. Young, “Remains: Non-Viewable” (2005), which centered on the death of his cousin Doug Young in combat in Vietnam and its emotional fallout.The memoir focused on a culture of New England stoicism that, he wrote, prevented his family from processing their loss.“There was a shoe to drop,” Mr. Young wrote in the book, “the actuality, the coming of the coffin, and that would happen soon enough; but in the waiting there was a free fall of silence, an odd decorum, and the postponement of a free fall of emotion that could not be measured.”Mr. Young told NPR in 2005 that though his family had actually been able to view his cousin’s remains, the title, read another way, suggested how they had “looked at that war after it was over and said, ‘Remains non-viewable.’”A scene from a 1989 episode of “China Beach.” The series drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” without the comedy. Walt Disney Television via Getty ImagesJohn Sacret Young was born on May 24, 1946, in Montclair, N.J., to Bill and Peggy (Klotz) Young. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked for the Public Service Electric and Gas Company in Newark. John was the youngest of four siblings.He attended College High School in Montclair and earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, graduating in 1969. Ms. Sloan said he chose to study religion primarily because the program allowed him to write a novel as his senior thesis.He married Jeannette Penick in 1973. After their divorce, he married Ms. Sloan in 2010. Along with his wife, Mr. Young is survived by two sons, John and Riley; two daughters, Jeannette and Julia; a brother, Mason; and three grandchildren.His first big break came with “Police Story” (1973-1987), a crime drama for which he began as a researcher and eventually wrote three episodes. To add verisimilitude to his scripts, Mr. Young embedded himself in the Los Angeles Police Department, Ms. Sloan said.Mr. Young spoke at a ceremony for the Humanitas Prize for film and television writers in 2020. Much of his work centered on the impact of war on combatants and society.Gregg Deguire/Getty ImagesAmong his other credits was the movie “Testament” (1983), starring Jane Alexander, about a suburban family’s struggles after a nuclear attack.Over his career, Mr. Young received seven Emmy nominations. An avid art collector, he also wrote “Pieces of Glass: An Artoire” (2016). The book functions as a memoir, his life as seen through the lens of art as he considers how artists, from Vermeer to Rothko, had affected him.Mr. Young opened “Remains: Non-Viewable” with a reflection on storytelling, the art form that defined much of his life and career.“Call up a story: a writer makes them up and sets them down,” he wrote, “but it is what we all do to make shape of our days.” More

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    Review: A Darkly Satirical Glimpse Into Life ‘Off Broadway’

    Torrey Townsend’s backstage fiction is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment.It is the fall of 2020, and the American National Theater is desperate to survive the pandemic.In Torrey Townsend’s blistering and hilarious satire “Off Broadway,” presented by Jeremy O. Harris and streaming free on Broadstream, this tenaciously middling nonprofit is millions of dollars in the red, and operating with only a skeleton crew.But it sees one route out of financial calamity. When it finally reopens, it will do so with a surefire smash: Al Pacino in “Othello,” playing the title role. In blackface.Andy, the company’s staggeringly underqualified artistic director, doesn’t recognize this as regressing to a shameful and banished tradition. Rather, he frames it as a brilliant provocation, a metatheatrical challenge to quaintly limited thinking.“Y’all are gonna get eaten alive,” Marla, his horrified associate producer, warns during a Zoom meeting, but no one pays the slightest heed. She is Black; the others are white. They are happy to rationalize the idea.And that, like most of what happens in “Off Broadway,” doesn’t seem at all far-fetched.Directed by Robert O’Hara, who also directed Harris’s “Slave Play” and is an accomplished satirist in his own playwriting (“Bootycandy”), this backstage fiction is both raucously funny and devastatingly on point. It is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment — not just in New York, but nationwide.This spiky critique arrives with perfect timing: as the industry begins to emerge from well over a year of shutdown, with many companies having publicly pledged their allegiance to the goals of the initiative We See You, White American Theater. Will this indeed be a reset to a more vital, inclusive theater, or merely a blip? “Off Broadway” wants to know.Structured as a series of Zoom calls, it’s powered by a top-notch ensemble. The company’s ailing founder, Daryl, is deliciously played by Richard Kind as a shambling, pretentious gasbag, untethered from reality. He is on the verge of retirement when a ticked-off letter writer mocks him as a “morally insensitive, artistically incompetent fraud.” His rage kills him before his cancer can.Andy, played by Dylan Baker, is his chosen successor. That casting is our first clue that Andy will turn out to be a deeply unnerving guy. (This is a compliment; no one does creepy like Baker.) At least as thin-skinned as Daryl, and just as aggressively certain of his own laudable intentions, Andy shuts down any internal criticism of the company’s racism — in hiring, in programming and in what Marla calls its “fusty, elitist, Anglo Saxon neoclassical fetish.”He sees himself as a hero for retaining two people of color, Marla (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Steph (Kara Wang), on his ravaged staff. He is thrilled at “the optics” of promoting Marla from literary manager, and when he promotes Steph to replace her, he promises a raise — eventually. “Fingers crossed,” he says.The surprising beauty of Zoom here is that the format doesn’t prioritize one character over another. Even when Andy monopolizes a meeting, steamrolling Marla and Steph, the eye of the camera in their little rectangles is unblinking. We see in their faces how strenuous it is to endure him silently.And when he is alone online with Steph, we also see that working from home is no barrier to sexual harassment. With that plot twist comes a new layer of grievance. The company’s managing director, Betty (Becky Ann Baker), reflexively defends Andy. And when Steph takes graphic evidence to The New York Times, no #MeToo article comes of it.Well paced at nearly two hours, but segmented to allow watching in shorter chunks, “Off Broadway” entreats us to notice whose voices, perspectives and experiences are dismissed, talked over, ignored. It asks who in the theatrical establishment is willing to listen, and who is willing to act — and act differently — based on what they hear.That is the question of the moment. Whether we get a healthier, more urgent and empathetic American theater depends on the answer.Off BroadwayThrough Sunday; broad.stream/off-broadway More

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    Christian Slater Is a Still-Life Artist

    The former teen idol actor talks about his career comeback, being a father again and sketching his wife.John Varriano, an instructor at the Art Students League, stood behind Christian Slater’s easel, studying the lines that the 51-year-old actor had sketched. “You have chops, man,” Mr. Varriano said. “You have got to keep practicing, man.”On a steamy June morning, Mr. Slater, spruce in a white denim jacket, black slacks and green sneakers, had arrived at the art school’s home in Midtown Manhattan for a still-life tutorial.A movie star from the 1980s and ’90s — “Heathers,” “True Romance,” “Pump Up the Volume” — Mr. Slater now wears glasses and his stubble has gone gray. Behind those glasses, his eyes still have that signature twinkle — a twinkle like a floodlight — that made him crush material for misunderstood girls everywhere. When he chatted with Mr. Varriano about New York City in the 1970s or Matisse’s paper cuts, that daredevil grin surfaced, too.Back when he lived in New York, Mr. Slater wandered into the art school for the occasional drawing class. He began to pursue visual art more seriously a few years ago, at the suggestion of his wife, Brittany Lopez, who signed him up for art classes (watercolors and pastels) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, near their Miami home.“I was in between jobs and my wife was like, ‘You’ve got to do something,’” Mr. Slater said, his voice like finely milled gravel. “And I loved it. It’s great. It’s definitely meditative and relaxing.” He has to do something creative on a regular basis, he said, “or else I’ll lose my mind.”Mr. Slater never quite lost his mind, between jobs or during them, but he did have a wobbly decade or two, when the bad-boy roles he booked bled into his daily life. “You travel down certain roads,” he said. “And you realize that maybe those aren’t the roads that you want to continue to travel.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesVictor Llorente for The New York TimesSo Mr. Slater chose other ones. He got sober 16 years ago. (When Mr. Varriano offered beer, at 11 a.m., Mr. Slater politely declined, asking for a water.) He divorced and remarried and again became a father. After years of taking whatever parts he could get (“I was working a lot but, spending a lot of time in places like Bulgaria,” he said), he is now experiencing something of a career Renaissance, thanks to his Golden Globe-winning turn on “Mr. Robot.”“I’m at a place of such utter gratitude to have people interested in hiring me again,” he said.For his latest project, he has traded a bad-boy role for a good-guy one in “Dr. Death,” a limited series on Peacock based on a true-crime podcast. Mr. Slater stars as Randall Kirby, a vascular surgeon who drives a sports car, loves opera and wears flashy surgical wraps. When he discovers that a neurosurgeon, Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson), has maimed several patients, he fights to expose him.“It’s definitely not the type of character that I would typically play,” Mr. Slater said. “Like, typically, I would be Dr. Death, right? I would be the killer.” But Randall Kirby, who is quirky and ethical, is the type of character he gravitates toward now.In the paint-scarred studio, Mr. Varriano presented various options for a still life. “The flowers maybe?” Mr. Slater said, pointing at a bouquet. “Give that a go?”After arranging the flowers atop a wooden block, Mr. Varriano added a curly-haired bust to the tableau and handed Mr. Slater an assortment of charcoal sticks.“This charcoal’s nice,” Mr. Slater said.“See,” Mr. Varriano said, proudly. “He knows his stuff!”With a swooping motion, Mr. Slater laid down his first line. “That’s it,” Mr. Varriano said. “The first one is always the hardest. Well, actually the second, third, fourth and fifth are equally hard.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHe observed that Mr. Slater drew with his left hand (“A southpaw, I wouldn’t box him”) and gently encouraged him to rethink a few angles. Then he stepped back. “I’m not saying a word,” Mr. Varriano said. “No, no, just roll, man. Just keep rolling. Make believe no one’s in the room.”Mr. Slater laughed. “Draw like nobody’s watching,” he said, smudging a line with his middle finger.Mr. Slater sketched for 10 minutes or so. He adjusted the angles of the block and made a first pass at the spherical shape of the head. He then took a break to show Mr. Varriano some of his early work. He pulled out his phone to show his version of Matisse’s “Bather” rendered in blue painter’s tape, then Michelangelo’s “Pieta” drawn with pencils, and a sketch of his wife in charcoal. “She hates this one, he said.­Mr. Varriano didn’t. “That’s actually really good,” he said. “I’m not just saying that. I can understand why she wouldn’t like it. But so what?”The phone disappeared back into a pocket, and Mr. Slate returned his focus to the bust. The head began to take shape, the brow ridge, the nose, the ears, the curls. He drew with quick, precise strokes, squinting, chin thrust forward, a half-smile ghosting his face.“I’m wiping and drawing and having a grand old time,” he said. He added that he was renovating an apartment nearby, “so I can start to come more often.”Mr. Varriano approved. “You’ll go down the rabbit hole like the rest of us,” he said cheerfully. “You’ll ruin your life.”Mr. Slater thought that was a fine idea. The hour zipped past. Mr. Slater never made it to the flowers. He seemed pleased with what he had accomplished, though he left his sketch clipped to the easel. Until the next time. More