Musical Memories

Whenever My Fair Lady plays on my stereo (or now on my ipod) I am always taken back to being six-years- old and going to see the movie version of the Lerner and Loewe musical with my father.  He took me because I was infuriated that Audrey Hepburn had beaten Julie Andrews out for the Academy Award that year. I could not imagine how Eliza Doolittle could possibly have been better than Mary Poppins!  Daddy took me to the movie because he wanted me to see what was so special about My Fair Lady. 

 I had seen Mary Poppins for my 6th birthday. It was a memorable birthday all round. After attending Mary Poppins,  I came down with a case of lice - much to my mother's horror.  I remember sitting in the living room of our home, Mother picking through my hair with some ghastly medicine burning my scalp - the both of us crying all the while.  But I digress.

I recall sitting transfixed through My Fair Lady and can say that it was quite possibly the moment I fell in love with musical theatre.  I remember bounding through the front door of our house on Resh Place and reciting Henry Higgins' famous "Damn, damn, damn, damn" to my mother and not getting in trouble for cursing -  "I've grown accustomed to her face..." what a line! What a moment.  My heart was utterly captured and the course of my life was set.

The role of Eliza eluded me as a performer, but I still have every word of the score memorized as if I'd played her. In fact, it will always be the role that got away.

Funny how those roles stay with us.  Last night I saw the movie Quartet.  It is a charming film about a group of aging singers and musicians who live together in a retirement home for musicians in England. As I sat in the audience, I couldn't help thinking of how I'd fallen in love with  My Fair Lady at six  and   how I was sitting in another movie theatre forty-seven years later, gray and vocally out of shape, watching these grand thespians, opera singers, and musicians still clinging to their favorite roles,  reciting the number of curtain calls they'd taken. Roles that last a life time.

It is touching and life affirming.  I fell in love with the theatre all over again. The passion, the eccentricity, the ego, the pride, and the poignancy of the  inevitable passage of time reflected in dressing room mirrors and shaky soprano voices.
I adore the bigness of personality and the joy that comes from a line, verse, or chorus belted out by a group of performers gathered around a piano.

To this day, I hear the swelling of those strings at the end of "I Could Have Danced All Night,"  and my heart soars, my throat tightens and my eyes brim  with tears. Sitting in that movie theatre last night, watching Quartet,  I was grateful that Daddy had taken me to see My Fair Lady when I was six- years -old.  

 I am grateful that I have spent my life loving musical theatre.