Remembering The Fantasticks and Jerry Orbach - and Moving Life Online
Way back in 2006, I wrote a post on my personal blog about The Fantasticks. (You remember, don't you?) Today, for reasons you don't want to know, I was reviewing much of my early work and tripped over this post. It seems so appropriate to all of us, to the summer and, well, I just felt like passing it on. Did this wonderful show do the same things to you?
OK - so I should be used to it by now. I've been -- as I often say -- a walking demographic Baby Boomer as long as I can remember. But on the morning after the re-opening of THE FANTASTICKS* - which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, I read a piece about "adults 55+ adapting online." Of course we are -- sooner or later whatever I'm doing becomes part of a generational wave.
Don't worry - there IS a connection.
I saw THE FANTASTICKS with my college room mate and her mother during fall vacation of my freshman year. That was 1964 - four years after it opened. At the end, all of 18, I was crying so hard that the woman sitting next to me - probably 25 or so - handed me the rose her date must have given her at dinner. I kept it on the wall of my room for years.
El Gallo -- the irresistible seducer and originator of the "hurt' without which "the heart is hollow" -- was first played by Jerry Orbach. [hear him sing Try to Remember here.] I met him when I was close to 50 - and told him I'd seen the show when I was 18. His face just changed - not a trace of Lennie Briscoe but a combination of affection, nostalgia and pleasure. We spoke a bit more and then I apologized for approaching him at a reception and acting like a groupie. He replied "You saw the Fantasticks when you were EIGHTEEN! That wasn't an interruption, that was a pleasure." So I guess the story had the same impact on the cast that it had on girls like me. "Please God please," the young girl ("the girl") cries out - "don't let me be NORMAL!" That was me alright. Please let me be singular - not like the others!
Well it hasn't turned out that way. From Internet to health care crisis, whatever I come to, my peers hit within a year or so. It made me a great talk show producer - never a visionary too far ahead to be relevant, just enough ahead to know what story to do next. I guess that's why I accommodated to my role as close enough to normal, but with an edge -- rather than the downtown woman I had once wished to be.
I knew about the headlong Boomer journey online because my older son, in the industry, had read a similar study. When I mentioned, back when the economy had possibilities, that I seemed to be getting a lot more online consulting work, his theory was that companies needed boomer consultants more because more "civilian" boomers are finally hitting the web. I always knew we would; the tribe that is the baby boom loves to be connected. The web was a perfect home for us. Just like THE FANTASTICKS. I can't wait to see what's next.
*OK Feminist friends, there's an element of sexism in this original fairy tale (they've rewritten the only really troubling song) but I have chosen to ignore it. It just can't trump the wonder and poetry.
