The Big Picture and the Closeup

The big reason for the audience’s enjoyment, however, is the performance of Nigel Reed as Barrymore, who absolutely inhabits the legendary old ham’s persona, grandiose and gross and catty and orotund. A strong physical resemblance to the man does not hurt either.

I’m glad to say that neither my dad nor Tom ever lost a penny by this rickety arrangement. But it was a harbinger of the generally lawless lifestyle we were to pursue at 2209. We started with that fraud (though we meant and did no harm to anyone by it), and went on from there. It wasn’t just that we were drinking underage or having sex without benefit of clergy. Kids, don’t try this in your home: LSD was literally kept in the fridge for consumption by – one or more of us – but let me hasten to say it wasn’t me.

The first car may frequently be more important in a young man’s life than the first sex. Sometime in the first two weeks of May 1969, my dad bought me mine, a well-used blue Chevrolet Nova. The car finally necessitated that I get a job, in order to pay for insurance. The following Monday I was at the gate of the Grove Street plant of the Ford Motor Company.

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

Sometimes darkness makes the music more intense, especially music about things you can only see in the dark. This one is about that experience.

It had many of the aspects of perfection. Against odds, we found the time to get together, we had the double date, we played in the surf, we had two meals and lots of dancing and necking on the beach. And yet, in the end, it should have been more.

Of course there’s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve’s parents’ front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.

But in the end I passed that test. After agonizing over it for a few days, I sent Cindy a letter telling as much of the truth as I could bear to tell.

All over my dorm I was hearing new things, or hearing old things in a new way. One of the most dramatic discoveries for me was courtesy of a guy a dorm block or two over who played the flute really, really well. I’m guessing I heard the sound of his instrument coming from his window, then traced it to the dorm room it came from, and, if memory serves, invited myself into his room.

For me and most of my fellow-undergrads, there had been an unreflective choice of but one world or two at a time when it might have been possible to become a citizen of many. And now we could only cross those borders under the temporary visa of an open house. Doors we had never even thought were open had closed behind us, years ago. And now we could see them, quite clearly.