How We Spend Our Evenings

Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Robert Wilken, Richard John Neuhaus

After this year’s board meetings, several of us gathered for . . . well, a hootenanny, I guess you’d have to call it. Little did we know that our junior fellow Nathaniel Peters used his camera to record some snippets—which would have been a disaster, except that Robby George can actually play. Here he is, for instance, playing the theme from Deliverance :

Mostly, though, the evening was more fun than competent, and several people suggested that our friends might like to see the results. Here’s the whole gang, with Hadley Arkes joining in, on the Dolly Parton song “Coat of Many Colors”:

Turns out that our assistant editor Ryan Anderson is very good on the hammer dulcimer, a tuned percussion instrument he bought recently because his marimbas and vibraphones don’t fit in a New York apartment. Here is a snippet from his rendition of the William Butler Yeats song “Down by the Salley Gardens”:

And, for a laugh, here’s “Shootin’ with Rasputin” on the autoharp:

People often ask what life in New York is like these days. Now you know. Or at least you know how it is when the geniuses of First Things take time off from their monumental labors.

Kathy Barr, Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Russell Hittinger, George Weigel, David Novak