The Big Picture and the Closeup

Both the play and the play-within-the-play preach the same sermon: You may be trying to do something that attains meaning by being witnessed and judged, but in truth no one will ever see you or judge you. As an understudy, you are condemned to eliciting what meaning you can from what one frustrated character in A Chorus Line summed up as “dancing for my own enjoyment.”

Thanks in good measure to Herbie Hancock and Ramsey Lewis and Minnie Riperton and Macke Vending, I became an intellectual…

It spurred me to try to find shared topics to fascinate her with. Which is where Beatlemania came in. I persuaded my father to take me to see the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night, largely to have something to talk about with her. But of course, to a teenager in 1964, Beatlemania was like a Roach Motel: you could check in, but you couldn’t check out.