The MagazineMoral Rest in Old New YorkJoseph Epstein loves New YorkApr 11, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 29
• By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
 Tourism, it has been said, is a condition of moral rest. On a recent trip to New York—where I was lent a two-room time-share apartment on 56th Street across from Carnegie Hall—I invoked this maxim time and again. I ate what I pleased, saw what I wished, did no work of any substance, and achieved nothing whatsoever in the way of self-improvement.  Michael Sloan I enjoy New York’s hum, the cacophony of foreign languages I hear on its streets, the high quality of its food, the frankly sexual get-ups of its female denizens. For these reasons, and for the wondrous variety of its shops, New York is one of the world’s great walking cities. Walk in it I did, every chance I got, yet scarcely able to take in all the rich tumult—the rhooshey-booshey, in a fine neologism of my mother’s—there on display. Moral rest includes cultural rest. One of the things I did in New York was drop my highbrow standard and take myself to a musical comedy. I saw Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which has been running for five years. Without a dead moment, the show is well-made, which in part explains its long run. The music isn’t my music—I am of an age that puts me well on the other side of the rock ’n’ roll divide—but not without its charms: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” “Silhouettes,” “Walk Like a Man,” and the rest. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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