Born Under the Sign of The Music Man

…why we’re different people when we finish writing our memoirs

Photo Cliff Scholz

[NOTE: This posting got a little longer than most – almost 2400 words. If you’re accustomed to reading through these pieces in your emails, thank you. If it seems a bit more than you want to read yourself, you might also want to consider accessing the voiceover recording on Substack and let me read it for you. Do enjoy the links in the text, though. They’re mostly fun, and I think they help.]

It was 1962. The film adaptation of a successful Broadway musical hit the screens of theaters across America, eventually rising to be the third highest-grossing box office that year. The movie went on to garner six Academy Award nominations, ultimately winning an Oscar for “Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment”. The film also took a Golden Globe for “Best Picture - Musical” and had six other Golden Globe nominations and more industry awards beyond even that.

The title of the film was The Music Man. And for years afterward, the moviegoing public would assume any respectable marching band had to have precisely 76 trombones.

Here in Southeastern Michigan, the picture flooded through a projection lens out across the silver screen where it was gathered and refocused by the lenses of my mother’s eyes into the unfathomable depths of feeling and perception behind them. At the same time, a sound track was converted into electric signals driving loudspeakers that filled the theater with all of that soon-to-be award-winning music, which was likewise taken in. Together these sensory inputs led to responses such as smiles and laughter and a biochemical cascade involving neurotransmitters, hormones, and more.

Floating in amniotic fluid in my mother’s womb at the time, I took in all of this. The music from the cinema loudspeakers mixed together with my mother’s heartbeat and penetrated every cell of my being. Flashes of images appeared in the inner sight of my fetal brain.

Thus it came to be, my friends:

I was Born Under the Sign of The Music Man.

But wait, BZZZZT! REWIND! Please let me start again.

The year was 1962. Yes, it was in the very same year that The Music Man had been released and within weeks of my birth that a US spy plane took photos of Soviet nuclear missile installations then under construction in Cuba — an island nation located, it is often emphasized in this context, a mere 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Such missiles emplaced there would have the capability of quickly striking targets anywhere in the continental US. In the weeks that followed this discovery, a tense standoff took place between the two countries during which the US instituted a naval blockade, demanding the removal of the missiles and the dismantlement of the launch sites. In the midst of it, President Kennedy addressed the American public. Ultimately, the missiles were removed. The period came to be known historically as The Cuban Missile Crisis, and it has often and again recently been cited as when the US and Soviet Union came the closest they ever came to nuclear war.

As with the delightful and witty screen musical, I absorbed all this, though by the time of the Crisis I was outside the womb and was several weeks into my young life. This time, my exposure came through externally focused senses and via an infant’s capacity for sponge-like absorption of the emotional emanations of caregivers and indeed everyone in the society into which I was born. Waves of apprehension passed through my troop of fuzzy fellow humans much as if a cheetah had been spotted by some baboon peering over the grasses of the African savannah. Our whole troop felt it. Such events induce shifts in everyone.

And thus it came to be, my friends:

I was Born in the Year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So if anyone wonders why I sometimes get a little cranky when I read the news these days, now you know why. International nuclear brinksmanship can be a bit of an emotional trigger for me.

Friends, I’m kidding. Well, I’m at least half-kidding about most of this stuff.

Still it’s true that, as the years passed, whenever the topic of The Music Man came up, family members did associate it with my mother’s late pregnancy and the time of my birth. I don’t want to exaggerate — it wasn’t a super big a deal, but apparently someone in the family liked the music enough to purchase the film’s soundtrack as an LP phonograph record. In my early teens I often listened to it down in the basement when I was building plastic models of… hey, wait a minute, now that I think of it, this is kind of strange: I had a thing about building models of WWII bombers and modern jet aircraft. “Modern” at the time, I should say. From plastic kits I built, for example, an F-16 and an F-14. Funny all this recent fuss about F-16s and who does or doesn’t get them. Those planes are older now than the WWII-era Mitchell B-25 was when I completed a model of one in about 1974 and hung it from fishing line in the corner of my bedroom ceiling. I can see it now, its wings tilted down at a menacing angle… suggesting it was about to deliver a payload of heavy ordnance to the bed where I slept every night. Which I only just realized, thinking back and picturing the scene.

Over a span of a couple years my room had become something of a model air museum, festooned in this way with suspended warplanes dating from WWII on up.

I recall one time when a beloved friend of the family was visiting and peeked into my bedroom to say hello, he saw the hanging B-25 and told me he had flown as crew in that particular type of plane during the war. After his brief account, his face was uncharacteristically grim. “You’re lucky to get out alive,” was his summative statement. And I got the shuddering sense he was talking about getting out of the aircraft itself, after each and every flight mission. It was exactly the same statement I’d heard from my 7th grade history teacher regarding his own war experiences when he was persistently questioned about the war by some inquisitive and unconsciously glib 12-year-old boys around that time: “You’re lucky to get out alive.”

However, hearing the statement a second time left a particularly vivid impression on me coming from a person I knew better, truly one of my favorites among my parents’ longtime friends: quietly witty, he was a thoughtful man who smoked cigars so expensive they actually smelled good while they were burning. I thought about what he said. I started to vaguely wonder what in the world I was doing. At the time I was also into poetry, herb gardening and houseplants, and, thanks to exposure owing to my older siblings, I liked the sweet and mystically inclined musical stylings of Donovan. These seem a little incongruous, looking back, in juxtaposition with the laboriously painted red-white-and-blue F-16 that I was so proud looked just like the one on the box.

Speaking of sweetly mystical song lyrics, it’s worth pointing out that the reason I started thinking about all this was that a few days ago a song had popped into mind from The Music Man: "Till There Was You”. You can hear Shirley Jones sing it with almost operatic intensity in a scene from the movie, linked here, or you might want to check out my current favorite rendering, a live performance by the Beatles broadcast in 1963 with a very young and utterly adorable Paul McCartney singing lead, linked here. For me, “Till There Was You” is a song about how our experience of the world can be renewed in a moment if we allow ourselves to be transformed through our love, so in a way it connects with my previous essay in which I start out writing about very old religious artworks and end with a celebration of possibilities and newness.

But while the eternally valid metaphysical implications of “Till There Was You” are well worth exploring, another memorable song from the movie, the sociologically instructive, “Ya Got Trouble,” linked here, is, well, perhaps more timely. In it, a Professor Harold Hill, his professorial credentials and motivations both questionable, needs to manufacture a sense of crisis in the community to promote a solution he already has in mind — a boy’s band. For which he will sell the instruments, of course. Here’s the link again: ya gotta see it.

We could all take a cue from this performance if ever we catch ourselves, like the folks in the movie, chanting “…Trouble! Trouble! Trouble! Trouble!…” all together in 4/4 time whenever today’s hucksters with questionable credentials and unsavory motivations roll into town or show up on our TV screens seeking to play upon our fears for our children, our community, or our nation. Oldest damned trick in the book. Of course, it’s easy to laugh at some fictional yokels in 1912 Iowa falling for this tactic in the movie. It’s less easy to laugh, perhaps, when we realize we’ve been part of that crowd, singing and dancing along with them. Hopefully, we can learn.

Goodness, how did I get here? Oh, that’s the subject of the essay: How did I get here? Honestly, I have no idea.

Here’s what I do know, though: When it comes to our personal histories, our origins and other experiences, seems we have two things: 1. We have those origins and subsequent experiences, and 2. We have our stories about those things.

First, let me validate: We absolutely do have our origins, our histories, all our experiences. And further, those things absolutely can and do affect us, though as I’m starting to grok even better through this writing, the effects of these influences may not be at all obvious, at first. This writing started out as an instructive spoof, but now I’m not so sure. Sometimes these early influences work their way through our lives by means difficult to comprehend. Like when my first deep-dive, 10-page research paper as a college freshman turned out to be an assignment to write about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Did my Freshman Comp professor consider the fact that the Crisis had occurred when the young adults in front of him were still sucking on pacifiers? Or was that just a flukey coincidence? Whatever it was, delving into that topic became part of my experience, too.

But here’s the other thing: not only do we have our origins and the long train of experiences that follow, we also have the stories we tell ourselves about those experiences, which is what I’m exploring here in this essay. The question is: What do we choose to emphasize, right now? Do we tell the stories of the abuse we’ve experienced, or of our pain or trauma? Or do we emphasize the helping hand, the moments of upliftment and inspiration, the patient supporters, the lucky breaks, the friends and sudden shifts of perspective that helped us get through all that stuff?

In simplistic terms, what will it be? The Music Man or the Cuban Missile Crisis? Well, both are legit. Both are real. Both can count. Both were part of our national experience at the time. And of course we can look at many other big and little things, besides.

Life can be experienced as a kind of poetry.

In the present telling, the Cuban Missile Crisis is probably a stand-in, a symbol, an icon and particularly heightened example of the general sense of anxiety and unease that permeated the Cold War era during which I grew up. Okay, so, this is important: Just because it’s functioning as a symbol doesn’t mean it didn’t really happen. And by the way, it’s worth pointing out, we didn’t end up blowing the world to pieces over it, after all. I just read on the JFKLibrary.org website linked earlier that the U.S. had as part of negotiations agreed to pull its nukes out of Turkey, a fact that that it says remained undisclosed to the U.S. public for 25 years. The U.S. backed down too, in other words, backed away from the precipice of mutual annihilation. I’m guessing that making that concession was probably a good idea. Somehow, sanity crept in. I’m open to the possibility that it can creep in again somehow today.

And likewise, in the present telling of my story, The Music Man, the movie, probably serves as comic relief, a thing of lightness perhaps mirroring in my life those blessed periodic respites from the anxiety and unease that characterized so much of my mother’s way of being in the world and to some extent colored my own. As a movie, though, even today, it’s still kind of a hoot.

For now, that’s my read on this whole thing. Tonight, tomorrow, next week or next year it’ll be different, because I will be different. I’ll be different [in part] for having written it. This is now part of my experience. That’s the freedom available in our successive redefinition. That’s also why we’re different people when we finish writing our memoirs.

And, yes, everything counts. It’s just that “everything” also includes the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others. Some of these stories we murmur to ourselves like a mantra, nearly unconscious of our repetition. Some we say right out loud, moment to moment, day by day, and even year after year. And yep, those inner phonograph records can get stuck in a groove sometimes. We might unwittingly tend our wounds in such a way that they never heal, and we might with various degrees of awareness nurse grudges till they drain our hearts dry. Thing is about all these stories we tell ourselves that don’t really serve us: we can change those if we like. Starting now. We can make them better, truer, fuller, more comprehensive and more redemptive.

My hope is that this essay can serve as a demonstration of this process. I know I’ve probably stretched a lot of boundaries in this writing, but it can’t be helped. Stretching the boundaries is part of it.

We can find the hidden parts of our stories and our histories and make it all connect in deeper, more beautiful ways. And we can live forward from that better-connected place, more beautiful and more whole, to places richer and more beautiful still.