I am grateful to Sirius which has a Broadway channel.
And I am grateful to my mother who shared with me her love of Broadway musicals.
I didn’t have the relationship I would’ve liked with my mother. She was a difficult woman, who, in all fairness, had had a difficult, if not unfathomable first twenty years. And I was probably not a child she felt a particular affinity for. Independent, argumentative, strong-willed, emphatic, dramatic, uninterested in all the predictable girl things. Chose a summer class in acting at the New School over a Sweet Sixteen; lived on a kibbutz and married an Israeli over traveling through Europe. My mom and I never seemed to have much in common.
But we were unabashedly in sync on Broadway musicals.
As a child, when I was sick and had to stay home from school, my mother would always put on one of her many albums of show tunes. I would be upstairs with whatever illness, (I especially remember chicken pox—from which, to this day, I carry a small scar) with the music wafting up the stairs. Gigi, South Pacific, Funny Girl, The Sound of Music, Mame, The Apple Tree—to this day, I can sing all the words to all the songs, pulling them out of a place in my brain, deposited long ago. I am sure it was then I caught the theatre “bug,” from which I have never recovered.
Years later, no matter what tension existed between us, I could diffuse it by persuading my Dad to put on the CD. (I have no idea what happened to all those albums…) And she would hum and I would sing along. Putting aside petty differences for that moment.
That theatre bug was never eradicated. I went on to get a Ph.D. in Theatre Criticism; oversee theatre courses at a university; and all these many years later, David and I spend an ungodly amount on theatre tickets.
As the 15th yahrtzeit of her passing approaches, I hope somewhere she knows that whenever I get into my car, and the music billows forth, I think of her and give thanks.
“How strong you were, how young and gay, a prince of love, in every way,
Ah yes, I remember it well.”
Gigi
