Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

Peter Zeisler took an instant dislike to me. This was 23 years and 2 months ago, and I had shown up at the TCG offices on Lexington Avenue to ask him for a job. It was, I found out later, mainly the Louisiana drawl that set his teeth on edge. Peter didn't like the American South. He'd been there, at the end of his military service, and a lot of what he saw and heard dismayed him, apparently indelibly. Some time later, when he'd begun to tolerate both me and what was left of the drawl, this is the story he told me: Passing through New Orleans on his way back from his tour of duty in World War II, Peter stayed at a hotel on St. Charles Avenue. One of the bellboys was an elderly black man with a shiny bald head, and as Peter walked into the lobby one morning he saw a white New Orleans businessman giving the bellboy's pate a vigorous rub—for good luck, somebody told Peter when he asked what the curious gesture meant. For Peter—who was once demoted from corporal to private after ostentatiously saluting a high-ranking black officer—that moment of casual racism was an emblem of the trouble he would always have with the South and its Faulknerian social legacy.

Besides, Peter already had one drawling southerner in the office—James Leverett, TCG's director of literary services, who came from Monroe, La., just the next parish over from the farm where I grew up. Was he to be surrounded by redneck refugees with secret Huey Long fixations and lingering resentments about the War of Northern Aggression? I was hired, Peter's Yankee preconceptions notwithstanding, as the leader of a team he and TCG deputy director Lindy Zesch were putting together to launch a new national monthly magazine about theatre in America, and gradually Leverett and I chipped away at our fearless leader's misapprehensions about our origins.

I made a killer gumbo for a TCG potluck dinner; Leverett landed Eudora Welty as keynote speaker for a national conference. If Peter never grew to love the South, at least he learned that its finest manifestations were incomparably rich and nourishing.

Other memories of Peter Zeisler appear in a memorial on the TCG website. He was my boss and ethical compass for 13 years, and the nearest I can come to summing up that experience is this: How lucky I was to have cast my lot with a great man of the theatre. —Jim O'Quinn