Wicked

We joined the rest of the world in New York City yesterday—made ourselves as small as possible and got carried away with the crowd. Up Eighth, partway, then Seventh and Broadway, where the snaking lines for the double-decker bus tours swamped the sidewalks and where, when you looked up, you saw not the neon and marquis signs you knew were there but cellphoned hands snapping blind photographs.

You could breathe a little past the David Letterman theater. You could push your hair into its place, throw back your shoulders, recollect your own variety of composure (and no, I've never looked like this storefront mannequin, but since most of you have never met me, I can pretend), and make your way to the head of the street-crossing crowd.

We were on our way to Wicked, at the Gershwin theater, but now that we were through the crowds we had time, first, to step inside the lobby of the phenomenal Hearst building, to climb the rocks of Central Park, to ride the escalator up to the second floor of the Time Warner building for lunch at Bouchon, my very favorite lunch place ever (my son's, too—get the chicken soup with the herb dumplings, get the chocolate chunk cookie with ice cream, break your diet). Then back Eighth to 51st Street, to Wicked, another crushing crowd, another escalator ride, and then a show that in every single way lives up to its impeccable reputation. Brilliantly conceived, this pre-Oz story is. Magnificently acted by every monkey, witch, goat-man, Munchkin. And what can seem more breathtaking and impossible than the set, the costumes, the lighting of Wicked, where monkeys swing across the heads of the audience, and actors rise from the bowels of somewhere, and emerald is the color.

On the train home, I kept thinking about those actors—giving us the show as if we were the only audience they'd ever had and ever would have, as if this were their only moment on that stage. Tell me, please, where you find the emotional stamina for that? Tell me how you go on, every day, summoning your best? No chance to throw away a lazy word or overwrought analogy, to go back and do it better.

If only I could bring that to the page each day. That force, that intensity, that now or never ferocity.