Happy birthday

Happy birthday to madlori!

The Fantastiks

I checked "The Fantastiks" soundtrack out of the library and have been listening to it today.

I was in the crew for one staging, in high school, and in the show itself, playing the Mute, when I was in college. I haven't listened to the soundtrack for years, but every note came back to me as if I had just heard it yesterday.

It is very strange: when I was working on the show, I identified with Luisa, of course, brimming with life, longing for romance, who is perfectly well aware that she is perched right on the cusp of womanhood, who sings

I want to do the things I've dreamed about
But never done before
Perhaps I'm bad, or wild or mad,
With lots of grief in store
But I want much more than keeping house
Much more! Much more! Much more!

I was desperately in love with the actor who played El Gallo. Alas, although he knew it, and was always a gentleman about it, he nevertheless broke my heart just the way that El Gallo broke Luisa's. The line in the song "Try to Remember" without a hurt the heart is hollow reverberated much more than I wanted it to.

Now, listening to the show twenty-five years later, it is of course the fathers with whom I identify: I understand intimately the reverse psychology in "Never Say No," in a way I could not then. And now it is my daughter Fiona who is burgeoning with life, bursting with beauty, on the cusp of womanhood.

I was thinking today that I am getting to the point of my life where I suddenly understand with a certain amount of sympathy the point of view of the wicked stepmother in Snow White, who kept checking back with her magic mirror obsessively to make sure that she was the most beautiful. Because she was getting to the point that she could no longer ignore the niggling sad truth that her daughter was surpassing her.

Luisa ended up sadder but wiser. Tonight, I feel as though my young womanhood made me sadder, but I am not sure it made me any wiser.

At least Luisa got to go to India. Unlike me.

I'll bet she never figured on being stuck working as a legal secretary, twenty-five years later. Dammit.

I desperately want that feeling back, that I was on the brink of something, something wonderful, just because I was young and therefore the world was meant to be mine. I'm not young anymore. I went out, and I struggled throughout my twenties and thirties to find my place, and here I am, midway through my life, and I have a terrible suspicion that I still haven't found it yet. Perhaps I will never find it, and the very idea that the world has passed me by seems horrible to me.

I still want to be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes.

And I am still in love with El Gallo, at least a little bit. Even after all these years.