The Biblio File July 2018 Essay: “Give My Regards to Broadway”
GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY
My fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, is determined to have a Broadway musical career. She acts, dances, and sings in the Pacific Coastal Youth Theater, and I’ve seen her, on family road trips, spend hours in the back seat poring over scripts, learning her part and the parts of the other main characters. So far, on our vacations together, she and I have watched the movie versions of Hairspray, The Producers, West Side Story, Rent, Newsies, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Annie, and Shrek. Sophie’s passion is a force to behold, and I love beholding it.
But the thing that amazes me most about Sophie is that she’s thought and she’s figured and she has a plan. She’ll join Cuesta, a program that offers college-approved classes in high school, so she’ll have more time for theater classes in the college (preferably UC Irvine) she’ll attend, and, after graduating with a theater major and working to save money, she’ll move to New York. She’s talked with enough in the know folks to know she’ll need to audition for any and every part she sees, in order to be seen. She’ll have to work “a lot of jobs that pay minimum wage” and find roommates to share the rent. She’d love to work at Stardust, a well-known New York diner where the waiters are mostly actors and, from time to time, break into song and dance. She believes she can do this. She can see herself there.
I wish I could go back to my adolescence and be smitten with a passion that would immerse me into something besides boys and booze and trouble. After getting my Masters degree in Psychology in Mississippi, I had not one idea of what to do next and vaguely remember applying to PhD programs in Hawaii because it sounded sunny and different, and to Colorado because I liked Coors Beer. I got accepted at neither, went to Georgia State instead and dropped out early in the program to pursue other interests (see above references to boys, booze, and trouble).
I seldom give advice, and, so far, Sophie hasn’t needed it. But we adults know about the best laid plans, how they go awry, how circumstance and the stars and calamity and karma team up to thwart us. So, one of these days, I’ll tell Sophie about something I read in my early thirties that stuck with me.
I had been fretting over some lifestyle choice, scared I’d make the wrong one. The piece I read said not to fret. When you choose A of choices A and B, it said, and A doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you should have chosen B. You learn from your choice and are steered toward another course. A sort of “correction” occurs which goes on and on, the world providing feedback as you find career and meaning and purpose.
“We learn from our mistakes” seems trite. But hearing how our process “corrects” didn’t seem trite when I was facing A and B and scared of jinxing my existence. As I look back, I can see how that process molded and mended and made me into mostly who I’m supposed to be. I expect Sophie to keep moving forward regardless of roadblocks and detours. And I can only hope that the world works this way—that we are always in the process of correcting our human systems that are so terribly flawed. In the meantime, as Sophie would say—The show must go on.
Give my regards to Broadway, Sweetie. I can see you there.
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