11 April—It appears that one Monitor reader—and only one (who has the temerity to take issue, anyway)—was somewhat more impressed by Monday’s nothingburger eclipse than less impressionable and more critical folk. Here’s how the “dedicated, long-time Litchfield Monitor reader,” as the dedicated, long-time Litchfield Monitor reader wishes to be identified, put it:

“Gotta call you out on this one. Your remarks on the eclipse are akin to a music reviewer who experienced a performance from the street outside the concert hall and reported that the acoustics were muddled.

“I was in Buffalo, NY, and even though cloud cover dampened the effect somewhat, the midday darkness that came with totality was otherworldly. None of the 20 or so people up on the fifth-story rooftop with us would have called it a nothingburger.

“It was truly extraordinary.”

Okay. But that’s all there was. Buffalo? And otherwordly simply means things like supernatural and metaphysical; nowhere does the dedicated reader speak of awe and magnificent midday darkness. Certainly it was extraordinary if only because eclipses don’t happen every day, even if they fizzle. In all events, down here there wasn’t anything even approaching darkness during the nothingburger eclipse.
And that’s all there was.

More important, though, is the dedicated reader’s pointed reference to being outside the concert hall. That brings back a particularly fond memory of Carnegie Hall. It was 16 January 1938, a typically cold winter night in New York City before it became the Rotten Apple. The family, not having had the foresight to buy tickets in advance to the historic concert, was forced to huddle outside the hall in the driving instant slush along with hundreds of others who couldn’t get in.

(One of the other unfortunates was Alisa Rosenbaum, who as Ayn Rand titled a play “The Night of January 16^th” even though it had nothing at all to do with that night outside—or inside—Carnegie Hall and had been written four years earlier. Alisa couldn’t help repeating “It is better to receive than to give” in an effort to keep warm. It worked and still does. She didn’t know it, but she invented the welfare state as we know it.)

So even though the acoustics outside Carnegie Hall were certainly not as crisp as those inside the hall, Uncle Izzy was able to record the concert on the portable digital recorder he was perfecting at the time.

Here, then, is the finale of the great 16 January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert: “Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)” by Louis Prima, performed by Benny Goodman and his swing band, with Gene Krupa beating time . . .