The Fantastiks

[pegkerr]

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.

Comments

[tinymich.livejournal.com]

You made me go pull up my Fantasticks soundtrack.

I have a special fondness for being kissed upon the eyes -- and I know that a large part of that comes from having listened to (and secretly sighed over) that line many, many times before I was ever first kissed.

Soon it's gonna rain -- I can feel it....

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

The funny thing about life is that as our daughters become young women and move on to their own lives, we, or at least I, find that on the brink of something feeling returns. Women of all ages are doing incredible things now. I think Grandma Moses started it. I know my mom felt it and did many things, important and new things, in her 60's and 70's and even in her 80's just after she took her firefighting class. As we each bloom where we are planted, again and again with bright new promise, the world comes to us instead of passing us by. At least that is what I am finding on my good days. On my sad days I just keep wanting to get there faster than was ever possible. Either way, I feel excited and curious about what the world has to offer. Then a guest column comes along like last week and I see even more possibilities and wonder if I dare to reach for that brass ring. LOL Hope you feel better and see some more possibilities soon. Until then, there's always chocolate.

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

Interesting... after never having heard of "The Fantasticks" at all, it comes up twice in as many days. I'll have to check it out.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing about this. I don't know what more to say, except: I hear you, and I'm glad you're telling me.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to note that I know the feeling you're describing, and the damnedest things set it off. It's very hard to keep from berating myself for the lost sense of possibility and the direction I have gone. Yet I must -- must acknowledge the feeling and then dismiss it -- because I still must do whatever I can. And I don't want to feel bad about the direction my life took, when any other direction would likely have not resulted in being with Velma.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

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.

While I identify a great deal with what you say about your feelings as a young woman--and "Try to Remember" has been one of my favorites since the first time I heard it, lo, these many years ago--I can't relate to this quoted part at all. To me, it seems the natural flow of life that my children will surpass me (in some way or another); I'm more (Disney versions) Lion King than Snow White.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am not saying that I agree with it, mind you. I, too, know that the cycle of life is normal. I am getting gray hairs now, and I actually think they are pretty.

I am just saying that I understand it.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I have no doubt whatsoever that you could take a step in some direction--unseen right now, but there--and launch into an entirely new creative You. All that wisdom and experience you've gathered is probably seeding itself right now way deep in your subconscious. You just need a bit more time to get your physical universe to calm down a bit before it sends up shoots--and flowers.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

I hear you
in the echo of my heart
when beauty fades
if there is no laughter in its place
what then
where then
men have legacies
women only memories

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I'm in love with El Gallo, too. How not?

I try to tell myself new stories, about growing in wisdom and stature. Sometimes I believe them.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'm in a similar place right now, so I understand at least some of what you're saying. But what I find really interesting is that you're talking abdout and conflating two different things.

There's the wanting to blossom into life and love, and finding that love and feeling the fireworks. And I've done that and I think you have too, and so now the challenge, when the first flush has long faded, is to keep the warm sustaining glow going in the hearth with, yes, occasional outbreaks of fireworks. Sometimes between the outbursts it feels like the glow is down to coals and you just have to hope and trust, and sometimes it's like it was at first and you have to carefully store it in memory. But either way, on that rtee the bud has flowered and has now come to fruit.

Then there's the other area, finding what Sayers called your Proper Job, the work that you want to do and then going out and making that world your own. You're ahead of me there, in that you've found something that's your work, or maybe two things, writing and parenting, even if you're not doing one of them at the moment. It is hard when you see so many others, especially on LJ, who are at the cusp or maybe a bit past the brink of entry into that world, and I don't even know what world it is I should be entering.

Anyway, I found what you said interesting. I'm not familiar with the Fantasticks except the one song Try to Remember but I'd bet Luisa is thinking mostly of love, not work. Yet for meat least, it's the work-world that's passed by, that leaves me feeling bereft.

Proper Jobs

[whapnoggin.livejournal.com]

This is why I reread Gaudy Night regularly--because it has one of the best novelistic treatments of finding and adapting to and honoring one's proper work that I can think of. Since I'm always at a different point in the process when I read the book, I always get something slightly different out of the reading.