Raiders of the Lost Arcade

For their first date, in February 1953, Richard Seaver and Jeannette Medina went to see a new play called En Attendant Godot. In her telling, there were fewer than a dozen people in the audience. Dick put the number at “thirty-some,” though only half of them made it to the end. Still, he later recalled, it was an improvement over the opening night, a few weeks earlier, when the house was almost as barren as the withered tree onstage.