Back When the Stage First Struck Me

So many choices! How to decide!

 

No, I'm not going to be writing about “Tea and Sympathy.” It’s just that this past Sunday was a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark day that cried out for tea, and since I have no photographs to illustrate today’s opening story from my teenage years, you might as well have pictures of tea.

 

My story begins in the fall of my freshman year of high school. Only fourteen years old, never before had I been on a date with a boy old enough to have his driver’s license. We didn’t have to have a parent deliver us to the high school to see the senior class play, and it wasn’t a double date, either! In both ways, then, that date was a first for me -- and you might expect that having my date as the driver would have been the most important aspect of the evening, then and in memory, but no --. 

 

As it turned out -- I had no way of knowing ahead of time that this would be the case -- the play was the thing. A live stage play: another first for me. 

 

“The Curious Savage,” it was. When that final curtain came down (after the curtain calls, which I loved!), I didn’t want to leave the auditorium, didn’t even want to get up from my seat or speak to my date or have him speak to me (though he was a perfectly nice boy). Given a vision of another world, I was riveted. Spellbound. Indeed, stage-struck.

Crunch to go with sips

Every year our high school also produced what we called an “operetta,” and the production of the spring following my fall evening with “The Curious Savage” was “Show Boat,” but for the operetta my seat was in the orchestra pit, where I was section leader of the second violins, which meant that I attended the show (as it were) over and over, intimately connected to it, part of it, through the course of rehearsals I could only wish would never come to an end. 

 

My music stand partner and I were as close to the stage apron as possible, squeezed in practically under the very edge, so we could see the actors only when the action onstage was directly above us. The first violins, on the outside closer to the audience, had the better view of the stage. All violinists, however, were facing stage left, on the conductor’s left hand, and so when the soloist stood at stage left, at the very edge of the apron, to deliver the haunting, unforgettable “Ol’ Man River,” we missed none of it. That young man could have been on Broadway, I felt sure! 

 

A brief comic moment from the show has always remained in my mind, as well. The owner and captain of the showboat, desperate to fill the unexpectedly vacant position of juvenile lead in time for the next performance, asks Gaylord Ravenal (what a name!) if he is a quick study – that is, can he learn lines quickly. Ravenal, who has just seen the captain’s daughter on the deck and been told that she is the ingenue he would be playing opposite, responds, his eyes on young Magnolia, “Lightning!” Or rather, as I recall it from that high school production, “Lightnin’!”

 

As a member of the pit orchestra, required to be at every rehearsal, eventually I knew every line of the play by heart. Now the spoken lines are gone from my memory, but song lyrics remain, along with melodies. 

Honey first --

“Show Boat” was a ground-breaking event when first staged in 1927, “The first Broadway score ever to have a coherent plot and integrated songs.” (See here for more details.) That is, the show had a story, and the songs amplified the story. Before "Show Boat," a stage musical was a series of unrelated, spectacular, highly choreographed musical numbers featuring young women prancing about to music in scanty, feathered outfits and high heels. But “Show Boat” went beyond just having a story, presenting onstage “two unhappy marriages, alcoholism, the harsh realities of life for Southern Blacks, and the delicate subject of miscegenation.” (See here for more details.) Eventually, musicals with real stories, i.e., plays with music, became the American norm, something we take for granted, but “West Side Story” would not have been possible without the trend “Show Boat” started.

 

Very few people probably care that Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (on Burdick Street, I believe), but since I learned that fact, I have always remembered it, having lived in Kalamazoo myself for a number of years. Yet somehow, as far as I recall, I had never read any of her novels. Then, there it was, just the other day -- Show Boat, the book that gave birth to the musical stage show I had loved with such a deep passion at age fourteen, the book available to me as a public library-bound discard priced at one dollar. So on a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark Sunday that cried out for tea, having finished another book the night before and looking for one to go with comforting hot tea, how could I hope for a better choice?

 

Edna Ferber’s novel was written in 1926, with a story beginning (in flashbacks) after the Civil War, shortly before railroads usurped the place of riverboats for carrying passengers and goods throughout America. Although a riverboat such as the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre was much more than a “houseboat,” it was home to the owner and his family and the cast of players, and as in our old household favorite, Shantyboat, the Mississippi River lends its strong, unconquerable, fluid character to the story, which made me decide immediately that Show Boat needed to be housed in my Michigan farmhouse with all our other 19^th- and 20^th-century books, fiction and nonfiction, featuring life on American rivers, despite the novel’s cringe-worthy casual racist dialogue and commentary. It is a picture of its time, and like any time in history (including our own), there was both beauty and ugliness in it, and, in my opinion, we need to recognize and acknowledge both for what they were. The musical certainly did that, and I think the book does, too.

 

But best of all Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled; sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you – that is, Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. … But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper, the chief pilot, always knew. You wouldn’t believe that it was possible….

 

Where Did YOU Go to High School -- and When?

“I don’t think I want to go to high school,” I finally confess to my mother as we sit at the kitchen table two nights before school starts. She’s in a pretty good mood, so it seems like the right time to bring it up.  

My mother stubs out an L&M 100 in the hubcap-sized ashtray we keep in the kitchen. I make a note that it’s due to be emptied. She looks at me, exhaling the last pull of smoke almost away from me, but not really. “Excuse me, what did you say?” 

- Michael Zadoorian, Beautiful Music

Literary critics call a novel like Beautiful Music a Bildungsroman. The term a combination of the German word Bildung, meaning "education," and Roman, meaning "novel." So a "bildungsroman" is a novel that deals with the main character’s formative years, especially psychological development and moral education. Here in the U.S. we generally call these books “coming-of-age” novels. 

In Beautiful Music we meet Danny Yzemski and his parents shortly before Danny begins high school (didn’t you know he wouldn’t get out of it that easily?), and as we read we travel with him along his particular, sometimes frightening and occasionally exhilarating, path through 1970s urban adolescence.

Danny has not been looking forward to high school. He’s not even excited about learning to drive and would have postponed getting behind the wheel indefinitely, if not for his father’s insistence. In fact, Danny might have been content to hide away in the basement forever building his model cars, if he’d had his way. High school — well, that’s an obstacle course of dangers and pitfalls.

At school, I master the art of not being seen. Even though I’m not so tall and slightly wide, I’m very good at working my way through all the different kids in the hallways without making any contact. While I’m weaving through the halls, the other kids are only blurs to me — white blurs, black blurs (more every day), pretty blurs who see right through me, smart blurs who I work the hardest to avoid. I bend my body, weave and wiggle between them, like walking between raindrops, taking care to never touch or look at anyone. If I brush anyone at all, that’s a point against me in my head. Touching or being seen also makes me more vulnerable to the mean blurs who torment kids like me. That’s why it’s best to keep moving. The faster I walk, the less they see of me. I’m a bat, flying low through the halls, using my sonar to find the spaces between the other kids….

Danny’s parents do not have the happiest marriage in Detroit, but they are together, and his father looks after his pretty obviously depressed and alcoholic wife as best he can. And both of them love Danny, which is a big plus. But it’s the boy and his father who are close buddies, without having to put their closeness into sentimental words — and that makes his father’s sudden and unexpected death all the more traumatic for Danny, already feeling at sea in his transition from boy to man.

What saves his life, basically, is music, though I’ll leave the what and how of it for you to discover in reading the novel. And seventies rock doesn’t solve every problem or answer every question. It certainly make Danny’s mother stop drinking or bring his father back to life. But it does give him a reason to get out of the basement. Something to hang onto. Eventually, it opens a few doors for him into the larger world. 

Sometimes Danny uses music to stop thinking, but he’s too smart to cut off his thoughts altogether, and one of the theories he develops has to do with bad dreams. Parents, he reasons, “build a bubble around you” and tell you that a bad dream is “just a bad dream, nothing to worry about…,” instead of what he now thinks it is, “your own creeping awareness that you … are going to die.” He wonders how childhood might be different if adults didn’t distract kids with “tooth fairies and Easter Bunnies and Santa Clauses” but told them the real truth about the world.

That people do bad things. They beat you up. They say horrible mean words to each other, even when there doesn’t seem to be much difference between them. That dads don’t wake up and moms stop taking care of you and start going crazy. That nothing is going to turn out like you think. 

Even if a young person were told these truths, though, hearing the statements would not be living the experiences — surviving, becoming stronger, and finding a way through to a reasonably happy and fulfilling adulthood in an imperfect world. At the end of Beautiful Music, although for his sake we wish his path were easier, we think Danny is going to do all right. 

The music of the Seventies grounds and surrounds the story. It is the friendliest part, for him, of the world Danny inhabits. More than that, it is his salvation. The uneasiness of race relations in that decade of Detroit’s history is mostly in the background, except for a few incidents, but then, Danny’s life has been very quiet and protected and narrow until his father’s death — he has never had a date and doesn’t hang out with a “crowd” — so for me the fact that he doesn’t dwell more deeply on racial issues is just part and parcel of where he is in his growing up. He’s an adolescent white male, a loner who has lost his father, and he is naturally preoccupied with his own personal problems.

Only once time did the narrator’s language depart from what I thought a high school boy like Danny would naturally use. The use of the term “cross-stitching” (or was it “cross-stitched”?) stuck out in one sentence. But that was all. On every other page I believed every word came from a teenage boy, albeit it one who is something of a “nerd.” 

Beautiful Music is a novel for adults, but I can also see it being read and enjoyed by teen readers, especially those interested in “what the Seventies were like.” It wasn’t even my era (I was a Sixties teen) and have never lived in Detroit, but Zadoorian made the era and the protagonist come alive for me. 

Michael Zadoorian will be my Thursday Evening Author on August 8, when I look forward to meeting him and hope you will be able to join us.