Observation Mission

Skap thinks I’m superstitious. But I am very in touch with the universe,

As we approach the planet, I feel certain there is a reason we are here, something beyond our basic mission. I feel it with every atom, gluon, and haydon in my being.

But Skap insists I don’t belong on a crew if I think that way. He says we are here to observe the primitive life, take air, soil, and plant samples, and to record images of the landscape, He says we are here to observe, nothing more. Objective, cold, distant. We’re not even supposed to land. We’re supposed to stay above these primitives.

Of course, I say he’s a little behind on the times. There is no such thing as real objectivity. Everybody knows that. The act of observing, of standing above something and looking at it, sensing it in any way with any of our 23 senses, changes the thing observed. That is obvious to most of us, even at the subatomic level. You can’t really ever stand above something objectively. There is often value in trying, but only if you remember that it isn’t really possible.

I tell Skap he’s the superstitious one, still believing in the ancient myth of objectivity. Objectivity is just one more subjective experience.

He grunts and walks off the bridge.

They never should have paired us together for this mission.

We approach the planet. It’s not that unusual: varied landscapes, varied temperature and climate zones, varied species of lifeforms. The only sentient beings are only recently evolved from other lifeforms. On the last mission here, they hadn’t developed yet. It’s such a sad, sad existence. They kill each other. They enslave each other. They pretend surface features like skin tone, birthplace, facial features, or culture-based rituals give them the right to oppress their fellow creatures. They are so violent about such trivial things, but if they could see down to the levels of matter we can see, they would see that they are all the same.

I feel sorry for them. I must look forlorn, or empathetic, or sympathetic, because Skap tells me I look pathetic. He tells me I’m too soft. We are here to observe, not to feel pity for them. They are simply developing, going through growing pains, as any species does. Someday, if they don’t destroy themselves, he says, they might become like us.

Yes, I reply, cold, heartless observers of other species’ misery.

He asks what I think we should do, go down and civilize them, force them to conform to our standard for how a society should run. If we forced them, we would be no better than slave masters ourselves.

I admit this. Perhaps, I say, we could go down and merely demonstrate a new way of existing, show them how to treat people, show them how to live in harmony.

Are you kidding? They’d kill us, he says. They don’t want to hear a message like that. Better to stay up here, to merely observe them in stealth mode. Better to keep out of it. Objective.

Still, sometimes I think we should land. Sometimes I wish we could go down there and actually interact with them. There is only so much we can learn from a distance. I tell Skap that perhaps the best way to learn about them would be to actually put ourselves in their places, to immerse ourselves in their experience. He gets so disgusted with me, he leaves the bridge.

We’ve surveyed most of the planet now, and are over the final area we are supposed to scan. It’s a bleak, desert landscape, a land of oppression, slavery, and death. We fly over by night, taking up data.

Suddenly, the sensors hit an anomaly, and alarms go off. A strange reading from somewhere in a small cluster of dwellings where some kind of cultural gathering is taking place. Population levels are elevated above the average. But in one area, there is a reading, or several interrelated readings. Temporal anomalies, signals functioning in multiple quantum modes.  It’s coming from a life form, I think. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure what the readings mean, and neither does he. I decide we need to investigate. We fly to the area where the readings come from, but we can’t discover what they are, or precisely where.

Again that instinct kicks on: we are here for a reason. I don’t know what it is.

I insist on breaking protocol. We need to turn on additional sensors to see if we can see what is there. The problem is, those sensors will look like a bright light to the primitives below if we turn them on.

After some resistance, Skap relents when I tell him people will just think we are a very bright star.

We turn on the additional sensors. We follow the anomalous readings.

When we rest over the group of dwellings, There is nothing there to explain them. But we stay for a time, trying to make some sense of things.

The primitives below do not seem to notice.

At least not at first.

The sensors pick a large grouping of the primitives, riding on slave-creatures, appearing to come toward us, as if they view us as a sign. Three riders in the front seem to lead the way.

I continue to tell Skap not to worry. They will mistake us for a star. They will forget this little incident of a rogue star. It won’t even be a footnote in history.

But I’m lying.

We are supposed to be here. I know it.

And when I finally figure out the source of the anomaly, I don’t tell him what it is. He wouldn’t believe me, anyway. It would seem too small to be the source of so great an anomaly.

I track the caravan of primitives. They seem to use us to guide them…

We will leave soon, with more questions than answers.

Why were we meant to be here?

There must be a reason.

Star Wars and Christmas

This Christmas season toy shelves will be jam packed, already are jam packed, with Star Wars toys. Some of the Legos are already in my household. I know of a young couple with joint custody of a BB-8.  A trip to the Disney shopping outlet at Disney World had an entire room devoted to lightsabers, T-shirts, action figures, Legos, toy spaceships and even a lumpy, potato-like creature with no name and nothing to make him the least bit appealing except that he has a label announcing that he will make an appearance in Episode 7, The Force Awakens.

And I’ll admit it, I’ve bought in. Literally. I already have my tickets to a 7pm December 17th XL showing at our local multiscreen theater. All Star Wars movies until now have been released in late May, so the December release date has given me reason to reflect on how much Star Wars and Christmas have in common. When I have mentioned this connection to people, they seem baffled. But I think there is merit to my comparison.

I need to start by acknowledging that the two phenomena, Christmas and Star Wars are at heart, very different.

Christmas began as a celebration of the birth of Christ and was designed to transform the pagan yuletide-winter solstice holiday into a Christian one. In the 1800’s the popularity of the holiday was actually on the wane until Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. While didn’t single-handedly save Christmas, he did turn it into the cultural holiday it is today, though I doubt he would have predicted or approved of the extreme commercialism the modern holiday has bred. It didn’t begin with commercialism, unless you are one of the cynics who views the two gospel accounts that actually have Christmas stories as brilliant marketing tools. Yet if Christmas didn’t start in consumerism, it has certainly ended there, despite 50 years of Linus telling us otherwise on A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Star Wars, on the other hand, began as an attempt to remake the old Flash Gordon serials. When that failed, George Lucas decided to tap into something older: the mythic archetypes popularized by Joseph Campbell in the 1970’s. He dressed up the ancient stories of heroes living in an ordinary world, being called to adventure, and changing the world, and set them in a past (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) that was also the future. Yet despite those mythic roots, Star Wars has always been, from the start, commercial. Lucas, in a 1977 interview admitted that he set out to create something that would sell a lot of merchandise. Succeed, he did.

So that’s a rough estimate of how both phenomena got started. Why in heaven or on earth would I want to compare them?

Well, for starters, the commercialism issue. Let’s face it, our entire economy, at least according to news-casts, appears to depend entirely on how much stuff we sell around Christmas time. All merchandise sells at Christmas time, but even limiting our view to Christmas-themed merchandise, the mind boggles. Christmas sweaters, deliberately ugly Christmas sweaters, collector’s ornaments, Advent calendars, designer manger scenes, crazy lighting displays, Christmas albums, special holiday editions of various cookies, crackers, snacks, and Ziplock bags. And special holiday packaged and flavored coffee creamers. I just recently saw a Christmas sweater that had jingle bells strategically placed in the nipple zone. It read “Jingle My Bells.” Classy. What does any of this have to do with a baby born in a manger? Absolutely nothing. But of course, no one, so far as I know, has a firm legal handle on the merchandising of all things Christmas. Star Wars is another story.

LucasFilm, Ltd. has had a firm grip on merchandising all things Star Wars since 1977. It was part of Lucas’s deal with 20th Century Fox, and his company brilliantly exploited their intellectual property. Nobody merchandised better than LucasFilm. Except one company. Disney. And Disney just bought LucasFilm.

Here’s the weird thing: Star Wars merchandise strays just as far from its source material as Christmas merchandise does. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the companies were doing everything in their power to make you not take Star Wars the least bit seriously. You can by Darth Vader helmets with Mickey Mouse ears, play sets that recast the Star Wars actors with Mickey and the gang or the Muppets. There have been Jar-Jar Binks twirling lollipops, Darth Vader cookie jars, M&M dispensers, and Pez dispensers. There are funny Star Wars T-shirts like the one declaring the 5-day weather forecast on Alderaan, with the last two days left blank. Ha! Millions of people died in the context of the story, but now it’s just a joke. But I laughed when I saw it. Oddest of all is the attitude toward Darth Vader in the new merchandising. Vader is arguably one of the greatest Villains in movie history (the American Film Institute rated him 3rd after Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates), but he is also now the butt of T-shirt humor. He can be seen scrubbing his own helmet with Windex, poking a pinata with his lightsaber, telling Princess Leia to pull his finger, and sculpting a Death Star topiary. Disney corporate synergy now has him riding the Dumbo ride at the Magic Kingdom while eating a Mickey Mouse ice cream on a stick, among other theme-parky activities. And, of course, I currently have in my refrigerator Darth Vader Mocha Espresso Coffee Mate Coffee Creamer. It’s delicious.

Then there’s the question of televised Christmas and televised Star Wars. Televised Christmas specials range from the classic (A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas) to the ridiculous (Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and The He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special). Star Wars, of course, has only the legendary Star Wars Holiday Special, with nothing positive to balance it out. There are good Star Wars TV shows, and middling ones, just like Christmas specials come in a wide range.

In other words, Christmas and Star Wars are both great big messes of merchandising, tacky commercialism, bad television, and money-grubbing.

But here’s the thing. Move away from all that, closer to the original thing itself, and you get two things.

One of those things is music. Christmas music, of course, has its own tacky, terrible novelty songs, but if you go to the actual carols, there is a kind of haunting, deep longing in them that I think many people find moving whether they are religious or not. “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” all evoke a feeling of numinous for many of us. John Williams's Star Wars score, spanning over six movies (soon to be 7) evokes the same kind of deep longing at its best. The Force theme, the theme that plays as Luke Skywalker watches the setting suns over Tatooine, conjures up the same sense of mystery and longing as the most profound Christmas carols.

Mystery. In a sense, that is what lies at the heart of the best of both Star Wars and Christmas. When you hear the Christmas stories re-read, whether by Linus or at a Christmas Eve service, they evoke something older and more mysterious than the mere words on a page seem capable of evoking. Star Wars, somehow, manages to do the same thing. An amusing YouTube video of the second Episode 7 preview intersperses the preview with shots of Matthew McConaughey's character from Interstellar crying as he watches video messages from home. The effect in the YouTube video is that he is crying because seeing the new Star Wars preview is obviously a quasi-religious experience. And the response to people for the final preview has been just as rapturous. The events of the original trilogy are now mythic, even in the Star Wars galaxy. And so when Han Solo tells the new characters “It’s true, all of it,” I find myself inexplicably moved. Star Wars may have been born in the squalor of commercialism. Jesus may have been born in the squalor of a stable. Yet they both seem to transcend their origins.

Star Wars is fiction. We know that. But it is based on ancient myths. There are those who claim that the Christmas story is based on older, pagan myths. That may be the fact of the matter. But somehow, they both point, as the old myths do, to ancient truths that can’t be pinned down. “It’s all true,” Han Solo says. And what he seems to be saying for all of us is that what’s true is that our lives are epic tales. We are all heroes, even if we don’t face Sith Lords and blow up Death Stars. The Christmas Myth says something similar. The holy is found in the ordinary. Being human matters.

And in the end, all the commercialism in the world can’t ruin either of them. Even the tackiest Alvin and the Chipmunks song, even the dulcet tones of “What do you buy a wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Has a Comb)?” are part of the big, messy deals that are Christmas and Star Wars. They add to the fun, but can’t cover up the Myth. The Myth survives, not in the modern Myth-Busters sense, but in the C.S. Lewis Mythical sense of deep truth. It’s true. All of it.

Even if I’m sipping my Darth Vader espresso flavored coffee and listening to “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.”

How "To Kill a Mockingbird" Changed Me As a Reader

"Close-reading" is all the rage these days. 

Teachers are forced to force on their kids a program of reading and re-reading texts to sift and analyze them, annotate them.  I've heard students say that by the time they are finished reading a novel, the post-it notes they've put on each page outweigh the book and kill the joy of reading. A student in the summer fiction writing class I am currently teaching mentioned today how much she loved To Kill a Mockingbird--until she was forced to annotate it and over-analyze every sentence.

I found her statement particularly interesting in light of Mockingbird's recently renewed notoriety caused by the release of the author's long-lost novel, Go Set a Watchman, and in light of what we are doing in our class this week. 

The class of 12 students I am teaching at Stetson University's HATS program this week is an interesting mix of fourth through twelfth graders. My college-aged son is teaching with me, and at this point we have broken the class into two groups of 6, and each group is writing a short novel. We will, as a class, produce two short novels this week. I am in no way suggesting that we are going to produce works of literary art on the level of To Kill a Mockingbird in just five days, but what we are doing, in our own humble way, has distinct similarities. Our stories will have settings, characters, themes, plots, subplots, and ironies. If someone felt the need or was forced to do so, they could sit and close-read our books and find all kinds of interesting things to analyze or annotate. 

We wouldn't want them to, though. We are having fun putting all of those elements into our books. Fun. Shouldn't readers be allowed to have fun pulling those elements back out? Why do we take reading and turn it into a chore? Why does literary analysis have to ruin reading? 

I don't think it has to. 

Thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird took me back to when I read it for the first time in my ninth grade English class with my teacher, Mrs. Myers. When I was in school we didn't annotate. We created projects. For my project, I drew a map of what I thought the town of Maycomb looked like. I love fictional maps, and tried to craft one that was consistent with the action of the book. To draw the map, I focused on one scene: Scout standing on the porch of Boo Radley's house near the end of the book. Scout mentions the things she can see from the porch, which are the settings of nearly every main event in the book. 

Re-reading this scene and creating the map were an epiphany for me. The scene had virtually no action. It involved a little girl standing on a porch she'd never stood on before and looking out at her town. On one level,that's all there was to this scene. Girl stands on porch. Girl looks at town. Big deal. 

But what I realized was that this scene, this simple act, was operating on multiple levels all at once. 

Plot-wise, it was a flashback of epic proportions, a review of all the major events in the novel. If the climax of the book in terms of a high point of the action was Mr. Ewell's attack on the children, then the climax in terms of a turning point of the plot was this scene. Everything in the book, I realized, led to this moment when every event was replayed in Scout's mind, but from a different perspective. 

The scene also represented the literary tool of setting in a complex way. Scout, in reviewing the events of the past months, is revisiting the various places around town where important events happened. And by seeing the events from a different perspective, Boo Radley's perspective, Scout helped me to realize that how we perceive a place, and even how we act, greatly depends on where we stand. And I came to realize how much the town itself was a character in the story. 

In terms of character, this is a transformative moment for Scout. In seeing the world from Boo's perspective, she sees the truth of one of her father's adages, that you don't understand someone until you consider things from his point of view. It's one thing to get advice from one of fiction's most admired (at least until recently) dads. It is another thing entirely to experience the truth of that advice for yourself. 

The scene is also, of course, about the literary concept of point of view. 

The irony of the scene is that from the early chapters of the book, Boo Radley is a mysterious, ghoulish monster living at the end of the street. Here at the end of the book, Scout finds that he is not only not a monster, he is a hero. He saves Scout and  her brother Jem from being killed, and all through the story, he has watched over them.

The themes that are present in this scene, this simple scene of a girl standing on a front porch are almost too many to count. Seeing things from someone else's point of view. Prejudice. Memory. Family. Fear. Judgement. Compassion. Growing up. All these ideas and more gather around Scout as she stands on the porch, just looking out at her town from a new perspective. 

What struck me in ninth grade, and strikes me still as an adult is this: a single scene working on so many levels is not a thing to be dissected and analyzed. It is phenomenon to be marveled at, savored, appreciated. Harper Lee probably never even intended the scene to be so infused with levels of meaning, but they are there nonetheless. Writers often write more than they know. 

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the first books to make me feel wonder at what story can do, wonder that a story could mean so many things. Had I been forced to analyze those meanings to death, I might have missed appreciating them. What Mockingbird, like many of my other favorite books, taught me, was that it is not only books that operate on many different levels; life does too. We don't need to be doing anything spectacular like standing at a mountain's summit, walking through the crashing surf, or skydiving to realize it, either. We might realize the different levels of meaning in our lives standing in front of a class, in front of a mirror, over a campfire, or on a front porch. 

At the Frederick Buechner Writer's Workshop I went to recently, Yolanda Pearce, a seminary professor as Princeton, said that we tend to view mystery as "not understanding," but suggested that perhaps "mystery is the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend." 

When I drew my map, I realized that it would be possible to read To Kill A Mockingbird's final pages and think of them as being about nothing more than a girl standing on a porch. It is sometimes easy to read our own lives the same way. My life is about going to work and coming home, eating and sleeping. 

Rather than being forced to dissect and pull out individual meanings in To Kill a Mockingbird, I was allowed dive into and explore the levels of meaning. Appreciating the levels of meaning there has lead to me to appreciate it in other books I've read. I've come to believe that just as Scout is surrounded by multiple levels of intertwining meanings as she stands on Boo Radley's porch, we are surrounded by more meaning than we can comprehend, even when we can't see it or sense it. 

But once in a while, we get a glimpse of some of it. 

Call it close living. 

Friday Night Signs

I avoid the intersection downtown on Friday nights

If I can help it. 

Despite the small town shop fronts and brick-paved side walks,

There are the people with the JESUS SAVES signs,

The TURN OR BURN signs, 

The BELIEVE AND THOU SHALT BE SAVED signs. 

There is the preacher, 

His deep, resonant voice booming up and down the street

With one consistent, loud message:

Believe as I do

Or spend eternity burning alive.

I have to wonder who he's there for

Or what good he thinks he's doing. 

I don't see people stopping to talk to him very often, 

Asking him questions,

Or, heaven forbid,

Being listened to.

And I seldom see people stopping to ponder his words, 

As if this man who shouted at them 

Has the power to change their lives 

Without ever getting to know them.

Instead, I see Friday afternoon shoppers scuttling past,

Heads down, eyes averted, 

Trying to ignore the shouting, the signs, 

By hurrying on to dinner or the Fourth Friday crafts show around the corner. 

The Friday night rush hour traffic hurries past as well, 

Windows rolled up against the sounds. 

The preacher might say these people are trying to avoid ultimate reality,

The holy presence of God Almighty. 

The preacher would be would be wrong. 

They are just avoiding his noise.

Now there are new additions to the street corner:

People with signs that say things like IT'S OKAY NOT TO BELIEVE.

One lady has little rainbows and flowers on her sign, 

And hair died in funky rainbow colors.

They don't shout. They just stand quietly and hold their signs,

Which I think makes a pretty good case for them. 

But it pretty much seems like an impasse to me.

I wonder how many minds either set of sign holders is changing.

And I wonder if they ever talk to each other. 

I wonder if they ever lowered their signs and talked to each other, 

What they'd find out about each other.

I wonder if they really listened to the people hurrying past

What they might find out about the people around them.

I suspect what they'd find is that people aren't easily tagged with signs

And belief and unbelief aren't always easy to classify categories. 

I think most of us might like to hold up a sign, 

If we were forced to stand there at all, 

That said, THE TRUTH LIES SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.

I can't speak for anyone but myself,

Which is one reason I'm not on a street corner with a sign,

But neither point of view seems completely satisfactory.

It is okay not to believe. 

Anyone who tells you they believe every day, every minute, every second,

Is deluding themselves and lying to you.

The Bible itself is full of doubters. 

But these days, I find that unbelief is as problematic as belief. 

People like to call themselves humanists, 

Yet science seems to not actually believe in humans in the way we have always thought of them.

Science seems to reduce us to moist robots, 

Random collisions of atoms that evolved by chance into creatures 

Who are here today and gone tomorrow 

And suffer under the illusions that we have choices,

That we have wills,

That we have selves,

When all we really have are brain cells. 

I am fully grateful to Science and all it teaches us, 

But it seems to reduce life down to its component parts. 

It explains how and what

But not Why. 

It explains facts.

It might even explain truth.

It doesn't explain Truth.

The best science seems to be able to offer

Is a more comfortable life until we die. 

That's what I think when I see the rainbow hair lady and her sign. 

Of course, the signs on the other side of the street, 

BELIEVE AND BE SAVED,

Are equally reductionist. 

Say this prayer and you go to Heaven when you die. 

What happens here doesn't really matter. 

All that really matters is your personal salvation. 

Believe the right things and you're good with God.

That kind of faith, which seems to have God

Figured out, reduced to a formula, 

And trapped in a box,

Is equally unacceptable. 

That's what I think when I see the shouting preacher. 

Or hear him.

I can't find a place to stand on either side of the street, 

Which is why I hurry past on foot, 

Or roll up the windows and turn up the radio and drive through as soon as the light changes. 

What if doubt is necessary

To tear down our idols

Because when we think we know God...

We don't? 

What if science would like to explain everything away, 

But can't?

What if faith and reason 

Are like quantum mechanics and relativity: 

Hard to reconcile

But both there nonetheless. 

Some mutually contradictory metaphors come to mind.
First--what if we all lowered our signs?
What if we all lowered our signs and just listened to each other?
What if we all lowered our signs and admitted we don't have all the answers?
What if we all lowered our signs and stopped trying to be right?

Second--what if the place to be is in the middle of the street, 

Between the shouting and the simple signs

In the midst of the movement and bustle,

Where you aren't certain what's coming next. 

It's dangerous to stand in the middle of the street. 

But I can see further in both directions there. 

I Always Think There’s a Band, Kid

This spring I finally fulfilled a long held wish. After decades of waiting, I finally landed the role of Harold Hill in The Music Man.

Once I had the role, though, the rehearsal process turned out to be pretty rough. We had a great director who my wife and I have worked with many times before, but we lacked a musical director. We tried doing it Karaoke-style. The Music Man does not work well Karaoke style. When we got further into the rehearsal process, it became evident that dancing is not my strong suit.

 I’ve always been a bit stiff onstage, and this extended not only to dancing, but to my awkward first attempts to kiss the young lady playing Marian. I was also not great at throwing a punch at Charlie Cowell. After one particularly weird attempt at a punch, my director said, “Well, you’re a lover, not a fighter.” I immediately thought back to my awkward kiss from just a few minutes earlier, and said, “Actually, I’m not so hot at either. I’m beginning to wonder why you cast me…”

I’ve talked to people—including members of our cast—who aren’t super fond of The Music Man. They found it corny. A bit sexist. Old fashioned. Out of date. They had originally planned on being in The King and I, but when the theater lost the rights because a Broadway revival was opening, The Music Man became the backup plan.

I started to wonder—exactly why had I wanted to play Harold Hill all these years? I knew part of it was my somewhat limited ability to sing and my rather unlimited ability to talk. Harold Hill is a patter-part where you talk your way through a lot of the songs. I loved the songs. But reading the play again, I began to see that it had a dark side if you actually thought about the characters. Although it’s played for laughs, throughout most of the show, until the last 15 or 20 minutes, Harold is not just a con man, but a particularly heartless one. In particular, he befriends a little boy with a lisp named Winthrop, brings him out of his shell, and becomes a surrogate father to him, all the while planning to leave town with his ill-gotten gains, leaving Winthrop devastated and disillusioned. And yet audiences like Harold Hill.

 Why had a wanted to play Harold? How was I going to play Harold? Who would he be for me?

The key to Harold Hill became, for me, the scene near the end of the play when he finally fesses up to Winthrop. Harold confesses that he can’t lead a band, that he’s a liar, that he’s a no-good rotten crook. But then he tells Winthrop that “I wanted you in the band so you’d stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself.”

“What band?” Winthrop replies.

“I always think there’s a band, kid.”

That line became the key to the part for me. Harold always believes there’s a band. What does that line mean? It raises the question: Who is the real Harold Hill? Is the real Harold the con man named Greg who is cynical, heartless, and willing to spend weeks cozying up to people he plans to swindle? Or is the real Harold Hill the act Greg puts on? Does he really, somehow, believe there’s a band while he’s pretending he’s going to lead one? I played it as the latter.

Harold really believes there’s a band, even though it’s just make-believe. The way I thought about Harold, he had to pull the cynical shell of Greg back on when it was time to go. But while the con is in full swing, he believes every word he says, and his belief is the thing that makes him a great con man.

I have always had an affinity for stories of make-believe, but especially for stories of supposed lies that somehow come true. I’m not sure why. I guess I often worry that faith is a lie. That a lot of what I tell myself to get through a day is a lie. As a teacher, maybe I’m not really impacting my students as much as I’d like to be. Maybe my creative endeavors aren’t really worth the attention I lavish on them for not much tangible reward. Maybe I’m not as good a father or husband or friend as I’d like to think I am. Maybe the things I spend so much time and attention on aren’t really worth doing.

But the only way out of this conundrum is to act like they are, act like I am. I can’t really prove most of what gives my life meaning, religious or secular. I can prove that my eighth graders achieved high standardized writing scores last year. I can’t prove that those scores will make their lives any better in the long run, or that the scores mean they will be better writers in real life. I can prove that my own children have had high test scores all through their schooling. I can’t prove that the years of reading books to them every night from the time they were 3 and 4 until they finally asked me to stop reading aloud sometime half way through Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince many years later will make them better people as adults.

And so much of the time, we are con men and women ourselves. Are we really doing things for other people, or are we doing them so we can feel good about ourselves? But despite my own flaws and my endless need to know I’m doing a good job at this or that or the other thing, while I’m doing these things, I really believe in them. I have to, or I couldn’t do them. I have to believe my creativity, my teaching, my family, matter even if I can’t prove they do.

At the end of the play, Marian the librarian knows Harold is a sham, yet she gives him the piece of evidence that she could have used to condemned him. She is willing to let him go. From a rational point of view, she is being willfully stupid, aiding and abetting a criminal and allowing him to run off with hundreds of dollars of her fellow citizens’ hard earned money. Taken at face value, Marian has become as morally bankrupt as Harold.

And yet…

When Winthrop asks Marion, who is his older sister, if she believes Harold, she says she believes every word he ever said. She tells him that everything he said would happen had happened—and that you could see it in the way every kid and adult in town had behaved all summer.

Harold’s lie had transformed River City from a place full of “Iowa Stubborn” to a town full of creativity and high spirits. They mayor’s wife is dancing. The juvenile delinquent has become a positive role model. The gossipy women are reading more. Most importantly, Winthrop, who had been morose and withdrawn on account of his father’s death and his lisp has become a happy kid again. It may have been a lie, but it came true. And perhaps what Marian realized is that the Harold who transformed the town and her brother was the real Harold in the end.

At the end of the play, of course, Harold is caught because he realizes he is in love with Marian, and lingers to tell her so. He gets his foot “caught in the door.” They are taking a vote on whether to tar and feather him. The ever-suspicious mayor points out that after all these weeks, they have never heard a bit of music or seen the band actually perform. “Where’s the band? Where’s the band?!” he asks.

And then the band enters. The kids have put themselves into their uniforms, gathered together with their instruments, and come to the professor’s rescue.

Each night, as I stood in handcuffs downstage, trying to feel Harold’s despair at having been caught, the sight of the band entering from the opposite side of the auditorium gave me goose bumps. I can’t quite explain why. The deus ex machina effect?

The band played the Minuet in G as an out of tune cacophony, and the citizens of River City loved it anyway, and my handcuffs came off. 

This ending is a little baffling in some respect: it simply concludes with a terrible performance being hailed as brilliant. Will Harold learn to be a real musician? Will he and Marian actually be happy together? Who will pay him to continue leading the band? Will he get away with all his past crimes, despite Charlie Cowell’s evidence against him? The answer, it appears, is yes.

Early in the show, the mayor’s wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn, scratches a bunion on her foot and Harold pretends that this scratch is a movement of ballet-like quality. “What grace!” he declares, lying to flatter her.

The Music Man is a show about lies, but it is mainly a show about grace. Real grace. The grace that allows for a swindle to transform a town, a child, a librarian, and, in the end, the swindler himself. Sometimes the pretense becomes the reality. Sometimes there is love hidden all around, but you have to pretend you have it before you can see it for real.

I can only hope and pretend I’m being as good a teacher, husband, father, or actor as I pretend to be, but with some grace, perhaps I am. Our production had a graceful ending as well. A wonderful piano player who had just finished playing another production of the show came to our rescue and her presence was the final element that made it all gel. I learned to fake dancing just enough to get by, and by the last show a fellow cast member told me he could tell I wasn’t counting under my breath anymore. High praise. And we added on a final coda to the show that apparently doesn’t usually happen—several of the kids in the show actually played a rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones” right before the curtain call.

I always believe there’s a band, kid.

I think that’s way I wanted to play Harold Hill. And I’m glad I did.

 All photos by Nadia Schult