Viva, Viva la Musica!

I took the kids to see a high school production of"Brigadoon" a town over--the town I grew up in. We knew one of the kids in the chorus. The high school had been totally rebuilt, except for the auditorium, which was the exact same way I'd left it back in '79, when we moved. Same seats, same walls, same stage, same orchestra pit: same place I'd performed in productions of "Pajama Game" and "Finnian's Rainbow" and "The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd." I was a music freak then, and accompanied all the choral groups and music productions, and was treated a bit like staff by the music department teachers. I was particularly close to the director of the music program--a short, round little powerhouse named Doris Theotakis. Doris was there today--looking a little older, a little hoarser, but still making it happen year after year.

I was Doris's student for five years, until we moved to the town Doris lived in (but didn't teach in), and I met her daughter, Michelle, my first day as a sophomore in the new school. We had so much in common: both of us music freaks, both us of terribly close to her mother. Our bond was sealed the day Michelle called me and cried, "My father just died." He'd been on the commuter train, and his heart just stopped--boom, like that. A lovely man, and the first adult I'd ever known who'd died. I dropped everything and raced to their house, and stayed there for days, until the crowds had come and gone, and their lives began to settle back into a routine. But it was clear that something had changed--deepened--between the three of us; I think the intensity between Doris and Michelle required a quieter third party. A buffer, even. Michael had been that buffer. Then me. (Didn't figure that out for about twenty years, though.)

Which is how it came about, I think, that two years later I wrote Michelle a letter explaining to her why I couldn't be her friend anymore. I can't even really remember what I wrote--only that I wrote it on purple paper, of all illegible choices to make. I remember feeling that when I was with her, I was getting swallowed up in mud--pulled down, plugged into. I remember feeling such heaviness, and having no words to express it. Michelle was so needy--an unfillable hole of need--and I was 18. Being unequipped to deal with it head-on, I just became unreliable: made dates and didn't keep them, again and again, until I became the problem. When I wrote that letter, I knew I was also ending the relationship with Doris, and that's the part that was hard.

A few years ago, when we moved back to Connecticut, I ran into Doris in Border's. My heart was in my throat; I'd thought of her and Michelle so many times over the years--Doris with sorrow, Michelle with fear and guilt. She talked to me the way I'd seen her talk to countless former students over the years: cheerfully, impersonally. Broke my heart. Later she sent me an email and told me that Michelle had been diagnosed with all kinds of mental illness--that she was on medications, that she had been in and out of psychiatric centers, that she lived in a halfway house and would never have a normal life: never have a family, never drive a car, never pursue her career as a mezzo singer. I think the loss of career devastated Doris more than any of the rest; it was always all about the music for them.

Today she came up and hugged me, and I introduced my children to her, and felt so proud, as if I was showing her my war medals, my resume: the best part of me--my vindication. Couldn't help but feel, too, that she'd never meet grandchildren of her own. She mentioned Michelle, and I mentioned that I'd just thought about Michelle the other day and wondered how she was. (In fact, I'd had a nightmare about her. ) She told me she'd read my article on single parents, and I joked about how all the errors in it had been introduced at the production stage. "I want to have you over for dinner," she said. "I'd love that," I said, and meant it--even though I know Michelle would be there, too, and I know the water's deeper there than it was when I left it.

Human relationships: nothing harder.

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Hey, I want to take Maisie to a show in the city for her 9th birthday. Is Rent too much for that age? Not sure I'm up for Stomp, and she's too old for the Beauty and the Beast and Lion King.