Speaking yesterday about lilacs and their intoxicating perfume, my good and wise friend Ralph Richey reminded me that odors are the strongest triggers to past memories. I wonder. Music also has that devastating potential to reveal long buried, sometimes wonderful, emotions.
Last night, a cascade of feelings rebooted me without warning, emerging from a single memory buried for 60 years. I suddenly found myself five or six years old, the wide screen above me stretching across the dark space, seated on the right of my Mother in one of the front rows at the Dipson Family Theater, on Main Street in Batavia, NY. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was thrilled, my eyes wide open, and transfixed by the colors and the sounds. It’s possible that this was the moment, when my life passion was revealed and now was being laid out before me for future dreams. Oh, the swelling tears, oh, the spinning of a lifetime of musical memories, and the realization of the importance my parents played. “Oklahoma,” was the film, my first musical, and it was – as it still is – an enchantment to me, and for those following days it seems I was constantly singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” by heart.
Back to reality. Imagine us last night, Mom at age 99, in her wheelchair while holding her digitally enhanced telephone directly to her hearing aid, me in an indescribably ridiculous and precarious position, holding two telephones together on the edge of my bed in Paris. I was playing to her a feed from Youtube I had come upon by chance, “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” sung in the original version by Gordon MacRae. This while being physically separated by 6 hours of time difference, by 3000 miles of sea.
This shared musical moment catalyzed with the precision of a scud missile thousands of recollections of Mom purchasing my first piano, and driving me to lessons; the regular arrival of those wonderful LPs from the excellent RCA Victor record-of-the-month club and the amazing hi-fi equipment; Mom or Dad driving me to voice lessons; then flying with me to Boston to audition for NEC; the multiple examples of encouragement, of the love, and of the blind confidence. She travelled to Europe and to San Francisco to hear me sing, and now I make it my job to travel back home whenever it’s possible. Someday I’ll want to write something significant about what is real parental devotion and love, but while she’s still here on this earth, I’ll be preparing for our next phone call tonight.