The Best of Times

How do you explain to anyone who wasn't there what it was like to hear George Hearn sing, "The Best of Times (is now)" from La Cage Aux Folles in the 1980's -- when it really was "as for tomorrow, well, who knows?" for so many people. We were thick in the beginning of the AIDS crisis and there were already so many people gone. Gone. They're still gone, of course. I'm not begrudging anyone who enjoys the revival of the show -- it looks great from what I've seen. There's just no way to imagine and no way to replicate, probably, that feeling, being in a vast audience of people, all of whom were somewhere between crying and...well, crying, when they heard the song. I read some nitwit's comment on Youtube regarding Hearn's rendition that he was too masculine. First of all, that's shows a very narrow view of what masculinity is and how its performed. But, that wasn't the point. It was the timbre. It was the breath before "who knows?" that was what most of us heard first.

I don't know why I keep coming back to the song and to the moment, but I have been for a while. So much of history is pressed in books like dried flowers. There is a part of me that would love to begin a unit on the 80's with this song. It encapsulates so much. Reagan not saying the word AIDS until he was almost out of office. The Civil Disobedience of Act Up. The loss of so many important figures to what felt like a plague. The world before the personal computer was ubiquitous. The end of the Cold War -- the mythology of Reagan's role and the real poverty which drove it. The world in which baseball players were skinny guys with shaggy hair. Before George Steinbrenner was an icon, but just a corrupt and bloated owner of a baseball team. Would La Cage Aux Folles have been turned into a musical in 2011? It needed to be in the 80's. It wasn't just gay people who needed it -- my mother needed it. Everybody had lost somebody -- if only Michael Bennett. Plus, we needed a good, corny love story about, more or less, every day folks. And we could admit it.

I don't know what it's like in the audience of the revival because, well, for one thing, I can't afford to see it. I've seen lots of clips on Youtube. (Douglas Hodge is straight. Who knew? Everybody, thanks to some goofey fan interview. I'm still not taking bets of Kelsey Grammar.) It looks campy, which the original show wasn't really. It was about camp, which is different. (It may be different with Fierstein in the show replacing Hodge who seemed coy to me from clips, and not so much heroic.) Of course, it also looks great - the music, the dance -- it's an incredible show sans context. I guess now I know what it's like for people who see Fiddler on the Roof but have no idea what a pogrom was. (Oh, those neat Russian dancers! Why is it they have to move again? What's a Czar?)

But, for now, it is my memory. And my blog post. And that's all.