The Beatles and Me

By Kirk Woodward

[Kirk, who’s published many interesting articles on ROT over the past year-and-a-half, is a huge fan of the Beatles. We share that sentiment, but Kirk’s more knowledgeable than I am, both of the history and backgrounds of the Fab Four and of the musicology of their work. Kirk’s a composer and musician, among his other talents, and while I have the albums and try to sing along with the songs on the radio, he knows a thing or two about the musicianship of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. When Kirk sent me this recollection, he told me he was surprised to find that he’d recorded his impressions so soon after the events. “It felt like finding a buried treasure,” he wrote me. I’m mighty glad he did—and that he’s sharing the memories with us. ~Rick]

For those of us who first encountered the Beatles in 1963, when they made their initial impression – to put it mildly – on the United States, the idea that I or anyone I knew would ever have a personal encounter with any them, much less see them perform live, was practically inconceivable. Yet I’ve done both, and the most recent event happened only a short time ago as I write this. I’ll begin at the beginning . . .

The first I remember of the Beatles was a song on the radio – I think it was probably “From Me To You,” and I liked the harmonies, but I only heard it once at that point. (Initially the “single” didn’t sell in the US at all.) The next I recall, following a lot of stories in the newspaper, was watching their first Ed Sullivan appearance in 1964 with the rest of our church youth group. One of the members of the group was in a band, and I remember his saying, “I’ve heard that they aren’t any better than we are.” In a funny sense, that was true – the Beatles weren’t really virtuosos on their instruments (except maybe Paul). On the other hand, the local band wasn’t on Ed Sullivan, either.

I enjoyed the TV appearance, liked it a lot, actually. Such at least is my memory; my diary’s mention of the event, in its entirety, reads, “Also watched the Beatles.” I also wrote about watching them on May 24, with no more detail. Eventually I caught almost all of their US TV appearances, including the thrilling one on Shindig, which can be seen, among other places, on YouTube. Of course I started buying and listening to their albums, and in no time I was a real fan. I find increasingly frequent references to them in my diary for 1964 and thereafter.

Information on bands today is practically real-time, thanks to the Internet. Not so in the sixties, when there could be a lag of months between what the Beatles did in England and what we heard, or heard about, here. Still, information filtered through. At a record store I saw a book about playing rock like the Beatles, which I wish I’d bought – what a treasure that would be to own today. I recall its detailing John’s rhythm guitar style (beat STRUM beat STRUM, STRUM STRUM STRUM STRUM), whether accurately or not I have no idea. I also remember a picture of Paul singing with an earnest expression, and the caption “Paul puts his heart into everything he sings.” That’s fan journalism for you.

Our friends the Paradises saw the Beatles on their first major American tour, and enjoyed them. I remember they recounted how George spat on a countoff (One, two, three, SPIT), which one either finds funny or not. I listened to their reports with deep envy.

My diary contains various inconsequential Beatle references for the following couple of years, but a significant milestone occurred in my freshman year at college, when Rubber Soul came out. It’s difficult to convey today the sensation that each new album, from Rubber Soul on, caused. Each was an artistic earthquake, an event to be discussed, analyzed, and absorbed. We would ordinarily hear the songs on the radio before the album was available. After a night of initial listening to Rubber Soul (the American version, of course – we had no idea that the British album included some different songs), the next morning at breakfast I said to John Burgard, a friend from Louisville who was a fine guitarist, “That’s different, isn’t it?” He confirmed it – yes, he said, it’s not like anything else. I wrote home:

Please latch onto ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’ in any form as soon as possible, and I’ll repay you; guess they’re not out as singles or albums yet. A boy here who’s a lead guitar player when in Louisville says the Beatles aren’t technically tops in speed or agility at playing but their songs and arrangements are superior and they have great style, and have fun while they’re performing all the time, among the few, he said, that do. Professional opinion.

John Burgard, incidentally, was later to try desperately to learn to play the thirds on the guitar lead in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” He was never able to do it, which makes sense since either Paul or John – accounts differ – played one of the lines along with George – it wasn’t one guitarist. Rubber Soul, in its American format, is heavily folk-oriented, but more than that, it’s musically wonderful, and more than that, you get the feeling, or I did, that the Beatles as people are people you want to know more about.

That’s the key to the Beatles for me, really – not just the music, but the sense it conveys of what George Bernard Shaw calls the greatest achievement in art: belief in the artists’ real selves. That hasn’t changed for me in the years since. I don’t mean that I followed the Beatles’ positions on religion or politics necessarily – I try not to take my guidance from popular songs – but they and I were friends for life.

June 13, 1966 – I checked on the new Beatles album, not in yet. “Want to see why?” the man at One Stop said. He showed me a photo of the cover, with the Beatles amid dismembered toy dolls and thin pieces of raw meat. Bad taste, protest is growing. My faith is a little shaken . . .

August 4, 1966 – John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Christianity, and that Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. The entertainment world, which is made almost entirely out of pretenses aimed at money-making, was horrified and played the situation to the hilt. WAKY had periods of silence (except for violins playing), ended by “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” One interesting thing was how little ministers who were quoted understand things. One said he was glad these people had brought out in the open the immoral content of their songs – about the Beatles! Another, God bless ‘im, said he felt this was the beginning of the end, not just of the Beatles, but of all popular music . . .

August 10, 1966 – new Beatles album, Revolver, staggeringly good. The atonal/electronic things are fascinating. It’s not rock ‘n roll – largely undanceable. The lyric to “Here, There, and Everywhere” is lovely. I hope they don’t split up. How will they be in person, now that they’ve taken this enormous step?

Well, I found out, because when the Beatles came to the US on what turned out to be their last tour, I wrote for tickets to perhaps a dozen cities, got positive replies from several, and chose two. My friend Wally Wobbe and I went to the first concert. I had no idea that the day I first saw the Beatles in concert was also the day John apologized, sort of, at a press conference for his remarks about (or not about) Jesus. Here’s my report of the concert as recorded in my diary:

August 12, 1966 – Wally and I got to the L&N train station at 6:00 and took our seats on the day-coach for Chicago. [NOTE: I have told countless people that the concert was in Detroit. Apparently not.] The trip lasted 8 hours or so. The train was late, so we got off at Englewood station to take a cab to the stadium at which the Beatles were playing.

At the Amphitheatre, the Beatle magic started. Thousands of people moving toward the doors. When a new door would open, a hundred people would immediately line up, followed by more. Mostly girls – mostly cute – many in slacks; maybe 20% boys; few adults. Vendors outside selling “We Still Love the Beatles” pennants, postcards (we bought some), buttons.

Inside we had to check Wally’s camera and tape recorder. The auditorium is a big old barn holding 13,500. It was filled all but about 500 seats. Stage at one end. Before the show some thought they spotted Paul in the press box, and screamed. The show started. The Remains, on that huge amp system, blasted us terribly. [NOTE: By today’s standards there was hardly any sound system at all, but truthfully, at the Chicago concert we could hear everything, including the Beatles, just fine. It was different in Cincinnati, which was outdoors.] The Cyrcle were clean-cut and bland. The “Sonny” man (name escapes me) needed experience. The Ronettes were good though they were better at W&L.

Then an announcer came out and said, “For three years now I’ve been traveling with the Beatles and I’ve never gotten to introduce them. Now, at last, I have the honor. John, George, Paul, and Ringo – THE BEATLES!!!” and everybody screamed and stood. Then a workman told the announcer that they had to clear some equipment off the stage, so the fellow announced a two minute break. Then the lights dimmed again, the announcer introduced again, and the Beatles came on.

It was almost disappointing in a way to see them come on stage. There was so much tension, holding of breaths – I felt it tremendously, waiting for them to appear, especially after the first introduction. Whatever the Beatles did, they couldn’t be as great as the image we had of them at the second before they came on. But almost. Ringo sat, unsmiling, and just drummed. George was facing the back of the stage a lot, apparently working on equipment. McCartney carried the real performing load [NOTE: In Cincinnati it would be different]. Lennon, the coolest man in the world, stood looking like a crocodile staring at its tail waving in front of itself and being fascinated by it. All four were perfectly relaxed and under control. They did:

Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, She’s A Woman, If I Needed Someone, I Wanna Be Your Man, Baby’s In Black, Yesterday, Nowhere Man, I Feel Fine, Day Tripper, Paperback Writer, Long Tall Sally.

On “She’s A Woman,” Paul’s mike went off. “Yesterday” was tremendously received. On “Baby’s in Black,” a wonderful number, they swung their guitars back and forth. On “Nowhere Man,” in which they pulled off the harmony successfully, Paul’s bass went out; they started the next song but it wouldn’t work. Repairmen were behind them; John filled in the time by doing a dance like the one he does in A Hard Day’s Night for about a minute. John plays the guitar introduction on “I Feel Fine.”

Finally, “We’re sorry but this will be our last number,” and Paul sang “Long Tall Sally” in a great performance which really showed why people started to scream in the first place. Tremendous excitement. Then they bowed, waved, and left. In the box next to ours as the lights went up, six girls were weeping unashamedly. It was a great spiritual experience.

I saw the Beatles perform twice on this tour. At the first concert, as I said, you could hear them, and they were in a good mood. The second concert was in Cincinnati, you really couldn’t hear them much at all, and their mood wasn’t all that great either – someone has written that on the way from that concert to the next, they decided not to tour any more, ever. Jay Paradis and I saw them in Cincinnati, and the concert was rained out on Saturday night – the Beatles faced danger of electrocution if they performed – and rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, so we tried to find a motel room (impossible) and ended up sleeping overnight in the car. When we finally saw the concert, Jay was disappointed because Ringo didn’t play a neat drum figure that he plays on the record of “Day Tripper.” I don’t remember a whole lot more than that.

So I saw the Beatles, live in concert. I also saw Elvis once, in Richmond, Virginia. I wonder how many people have seen them both.

As I said, each new Beatles album was a revelation – such an event that occasionally I still dream a new one is out, and I run to the store and listen to it. (It’s always good, but unfortunately I never remember the songs.) Sergeant Pepper couldn’t have been better, and I adopted the White Album as mine – it’s still my favorite. I wrote an article for the college newspaper about it, trying to describe why I thought it was so special; I’m still working on that question, but I think basically it’s because the album is about music, about what it can be and do. I even liked “Revolution No. 9,” which reminded me of the times I would drive late at night and move the radio dial around, trying to find something to listen to.

Abbey Road, including its second side medley, which I consider a great work of art, came out without announcement, and I went over to the school radio station and sat in the hallway to listen to it being broadcast, since I had no idea how to find the station on the radio dial. It was so wonderful to hear how, completely unexpectedly, the Beatles had done something so great. I wrote home, “New Beatles album coming out. I’ve only heard a few tracks – ‘Octopus Garden’ written and sung by Ringo, a maniac vision of happiness, like ‘Yellow Submarine’ only madder, is my favorite so far. . . . Also some astonishingly good singing – chorus work and some gorgeous Harrison guitar.” And after I bought it, “I have now bought the new Beatles album and it’s simply splendid. You know that this is the one they put together this summer when they decided not to release the one they’d spent a year on, and I figured it would be good but not remarkable. Shows how much I know. On the second side is a long medley – really a long song . . . funny and subtle.”

When the Beatles actually did break up, I wasn’t depressed or even particularly surprised; there had been plenty of indications that all wasn’t well. Since then I’ve seen Paul McCartney several times in concert (always excellent), although at least at one point I wasn’t that excited about the music he was producing:

I saw Paul McCartney and Co. on Flip Wilson. He seems determined to be the best composer of wallpaper-music in the world.

I know some people who’ve had encounters with various Beatles. In 1969, I was in a store in London when someone ran in and reported breathlessly, “I just saw Paul McCartney on the street!” I also have a friend who told Paul he couldn’t go to the bathroom. Honest. It was at a production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui by Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre, with an all-star cast including Al Pacino and John Goodman. Paul went out to the lobby just before the second act started, and my friend had to tell him that if he took too long, he wouldn’t be able to get back in.

And as I hinted at the start of this piece, I’ve had a personal interaction or two with them myself, on a small scale. I saw John Lennon on the street. This took place in Manhattan in the late 1970s, on a cold winter night while I was on my way to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church to advise a group (not with much result, I guess) on a theatrical venture they were considering. There was a crowd at a window on Fifth Avenue, but I didn’t think much about it. I realize now that the crowd must have gathered around John and Yoko. Then, when I got to the corner, I looked to my right and there was John standing next to me, with Yoko, in a huge fur coat, on the other side of him. I started to say something, and John winked at me! – a wink that said, “You know who I am, and I know who I am, so what do you say we keep it like that.” This thought was perfectly fine with me – I’d had my John Lennon moment – and I walked on down the street, forty feet above the pavement.

I saw Yoko once more on the street, actually, walking just ahead of me after Bob Dylan’s wonderful concert at Madison Square Garden in late 2001.

I spent moments with friends and family of the Beatles at a Beatlefest in the New Jersey Meadowlands. I met the Beatles’ long-time friend Astrid Kirchherr; Louise Harrison (George’s estranged sister); the bass guitarist Klaus Voorman, who played and recorded with three of the group’s members and designed the cover for Revolver; and Bob Gruen, who autographed a copy of his famous photo of John Lennon in the New York City T-shirt for me. The place was filled with Beatle cover bands, none of them outstanding. Years later, though, my wife, Pat, and I saw the best known Beatle cover band, the Fab Faux, and they really are outstanding.

And Ringo sent me an autograph. For my fiftieth birthday Rick Van Horn, then the editor of Modern Drummer magazine, asked his friend Jim Keltner, who’d worked with the Beatles individually and was friends with Ringo, if he’d get me an autograph. Some time later Rick’s secretary came in to say, “Ringo Starr’s on the phone!” This news was naturally an event at Modern Drummer. Rick and Ringo chatted a bit, and then Ringo said, “This friend of yours, that you want an autograph for – is he dying?” Rick said he thought not, and Ringo said, “Good. They’re always asking me to do that. It’s so depressing.”

So I have a copy of Modern Drummer with Ringo on the cover, autographed, “To Kirk – Happy Birthday, Ringo” and a drawing of a star. Astounding.

I’ve seen Ringo and his All Starr Band five times. If you aren’t familiar with Ringo’s routine, he fills the various editions of his All Starr Band with musicians who’ve had a hit or two. Maybe you wouldn’t go to a whole concert by any of them, but put five or six together and it makes for a fine evening. People used to make fun of Ringo for being the least interesting Beatle, for not having much to say, and so on. Not a word of all that is true. When Ringo’s onstage you can see that he’s extremely quick-witted, and he’s the most relaxed performer I’ve ever seen – astonishingly comfortable onstage. Some of my favorite moments with the All Star Band were his work with the sensational drummer Sheila E. How egoless of Ringo to have a drummer in his own band who’s so much showier than he!

Ringo, bless his heart, still tours every year or so. Several years ago, out of a desire to share my heritage with my children, I took the family to see him at Radio City Music Hall. “He’s good,” said my son Craig, maybe twelve years old at the time, “but I’d like to see all the Beatles.” So would I, Craig, so would I.

And in a way, I did. When I read that Ringo’s All Starr Band would be at Radio City this summer, I bought a ticket for the July 7, 2010, concert, not knowing at the time that that date was Ringo’s seventieth birthday. Of course there was a good deal of publicity about it, since he was the first Beatle to reach that age, and a number of papers featured interviews with him.

From the beginning the omens were good for the concert. For one thing, there was great sound balance, which in my experience is rare for Radio City, where the sound tends to boom. The band was great too – four of the members had been in the previous edition of the All Starr Band, which I didn’t like very much, but this time everything worked wonderfully, and the audience was enthusiastic. It was a feeling of great comfort – you just knew the next song would be good too. Ringo was in excellent voice, singing most of his Beatle numbers and two from his new album, which sounded excellent. He also provided fine drumming (along with another excellent drummer, Greg Bissonette), as always.

Ringo has always ended his shows with “A Little Help From My Friends,” sometimes blending into “Give Peace A Chance.” When he reached that point in the show this year, about twenty people came out to sing along. According to published reports the group included Yoko, Jeff Lynne, Ray Davies, Max Weinberg, Steven Van Zandt, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Procol Harum's Gary Brooker, Cream's Jack Bruce, Billy Squier, Colin Hay of Men At Work, Ringo's son and drummer for the Who and Oasis Zak Starkey, Jim Keltner, Dr. John, and others – truly an all-star crowd. A couple of Ringo’s grandchildren helped push out a little drum set on which the snare drum was a cake, and we all sang “Happy Birthday.” Ringo walked off stage singing “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.”

The stage went dark for several minutes. Then the band came back on in the dark, the lights came up, someone brought on a bass guitar, and everybody started to scream – because walking onstage was Paul McCartney, looking terrific in a nice suit. Paul and Ringo, together! Paul sang “Birthday” while Ringo drummed. I believe I can speak for the entire audience when I say that we were all beside ourselves. I suppose I have never been in a room with a happier group of people. It was an absolutely magic moment. At the end of the song Paul hugged Ringo a long time and kissed him twice. Then everybody left the stage, and I flew home.

[Saturday, 9 October, will be John Lennon’s 70th birthday, so this is an auspicious time to publish Kirk’s memoir of the Beatles. A new film, Nowhere Boy, has just been released as well; it tells the story of Lennon’s teen years (from a memoir by his half-sister) and the founding of his first band with Paul McCartney, The Quarrymen. In addition, a new documentary about Lennon’s time off from music to raise his son Sean, LENONYC, is about to air on PBS.

[When the Beatles were first emerging as a new sound in rock ‘n’ roll, I was a high-schooler in Switzerland. I began hearing this new music as soon as the group began being played on European radio; many of my schoolmates were British, and Beatles music began being heard around the dorm before it was heard over here. (I even still have the 45 of the German-language recordings the Beatles made as a tribute to the German audiences who embraced the band before they became popular in England—and then the rest of the world. My first Beatles album is Mit Die Beatles, the German release of With The Beatles.) Unlike stateside listerners, however, I missed their now-famous TV appearances like the Ed Sullivan début on 9 February 1964. But while I knew I was hearing a new sound—and I loved it immediately—Kirk had an understanding of the music that made his appreciation for it much deeper than mine ever was.]

Short Takes: German Humor

[When I was a teenager, my dad joined the Foreign Service and my family went to live in Germany for several years. Dad had learned German as a boy because his family were ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe; the first language of his grandparents and their generation was German. 

After school, Dad would spend the afternoons with his grandmother, who never learned English (she refused, according to family lore), so my father learned to speak German at her knee, so to speak. 

[He continued to study German in school, of course, and during the Occupation of defeated Germany after VE day, he was assigned to the Counterintelligence Corps because he spoke the language. When he returned to Germany in the early ‘60s, Dad made use of his German again (and the rest of us began learning it when we got there). 

[Among his pleasures, however minor, was collecting humor that was either German or, in some cases, bi-lingual. (Those latter were jokes told by embassy personnel that depended on some knowledge of both English and German. They weren’t all necessary sophisticated jokes, as you’ll see.) 

[Some of the jokes I’ve collected below were among my dad’s favorites back then. Vergnügen Sie sich! as we used to say.]

* * * *

The answer is “Nine W.” What’s the question?

“Herr Wagner, Herr Wagner! Do you spell your name with a Vee?”

“Nein, Double-u.”

* * * *

Two men, strangers to each other, were seated next to one another on a plane to Honolulu. The first passenger turned to his seat companion and asked, “You know, I’ve never been sure how they pronounce the name of this state. Do you know—is it Ha-WAH-ee or Ha-VAH-ee?”

“Ha-VAH-ee,” said the second passenger.

“Thank you.”

“You’re velcome.”

* * * *

Did you hear? There was a terrible fire in Herr Professor Müller’s apartment last night.”

“Is he all right? Was there any damage?”

“He’s fine, but his study was completely destroyed.”

“Gott in Himmel!”

“Yes. He’d just finished his 30-volume history of the German people. He saved 29 of the books, but the last volume was lost.”

“How awful!”

“It is. That’s the volume that had all the verbs in it!”

* * * *

I was meeting a friend in a bar, and as I went in, I noticed two pretty girls looking at me. "Nine," I heard one whisper as I passed. Feeling pleased with myself, I swaggered over to my buddy and told him a girl had just rated me a nine out of ten. "I don’t want to ruin it for you," he said, "but when I walked in, they were speaking German."

* * * *

Josef Edelstein emigrated from his native Germany to a town in the United States. To make things simpler, he thought, he changed his name to Joseph Edel. He was a printer in the old country, so he set up a print shop in his new home, too. On the day he opened his business, he hung up a sign over his door which read Joseph Edel, Printer. No sooner had he opened his doors than the man with the shoe store next door paid him a courtesy visit.

“Good day, Mr. EE-dell. Welcome to town,” said the neighbor, pronouncing the new businessman’s name the way it’s spelled in English.

‘So,’ thought Joseph to himself, ‘that’s how they pronounce my name here. I’ll just change the spelling to match the pronunciation.’ He changed his sign to Joseph Idel, Printer, and set about having his name changed again.

The next day, the druggist down the block called. “Hello, Mr. EYE-dell,” announced the friendly neighbor.

Once again, Joseph thought, ‘So, they pronounce my new name like that, do they. Well, I’ll just spell it to match that, then.’ He wanted to be accommodating to his new neighbors, so again, he changed his sign to say Joseph Aidel, Printer.

Sure enough, the next day, the dress shop owner from across the street came for a visit. “How are you today, Mr. AY-dell?” he asked.

Well, Joseph just threw up his hands in frustration. ‘Now we’re back to the way I spelled my name when I arrived. What can I do but change the sign again?’ And so, the next day the printer hung a newly painted sign that said Joseph Edel, Printer once again. This time, Joseph decided, he’d just leave well enough alone: he’d just become Joseph ‘EE-dell’ in his new hometown.

‘These Americans sure do pronounce things oddly,’ he thought to himself. (You just can’t fight the Great Vowel Shift.)

* * * *

Just as in the old Soviet Union a lot of the humor was political and tinged with bitterness, so, too, were many of the jokes that came out of East Germany.

When is a sausage like a compass?

When you place it on die Mauer (the Berlin Wall). You can tell which way is east by the end that’s been eaten.

As you might imagine, this kind of humor was almost as popular among the Wessis (West Germans) as among the Ossis (East Germans) because it made them more secure about their freedom and economic wellbeing.

* * * *

In my recent collection of Russian jokes (“Short Takes: Russian Jokes,” 28 May 2010), I related one that was based on the names of the two national newspapers of the Soviet days. In the German Democratic Republic, there was a similar joke. The major, party-owned newspapers in the GDR were called Freiheit (‘Freedom’) and Neues Deutschland (‘New Germany’). The joke plays both on the newspapers' names and the constant scarcity of everything in East Germany.

A customer stops at his neighborhood East Berlin newsstand for a New Germany. He doesn’t find one and asks the newsvendor.

"All out!"

"So, I’ll take Freedom, says the customer.

"Don’t have that, either!"

"When will there be Freedom again?"

"When there’s a New Germany!

Curiously, this joke seems to blend the Russian joke about Pravda and Izvestia and the one about “Thank Stalin” and “Thank God.”

* * * *

One morning, Erich Honecker, the last Communist boss of the GDR, arrived at his office and opened the window. "Good morning, dear Sun!" he beamed.

"Good morning, dear Erich!" replied ol’ Sol.

Honecker got down to business and at noon he went to the window again. "Good afternoon, dear Sun!" he said.

"Good day, dear Erich!" came the reply.

That evening, Honecker quit for the day and stopped by the window on his way out. "Good evening, dear Sun!"

But the sun was silent.

"Good evening, dear Sun!” repeated Honecker. “What's wrong?"

"Kiss my ass,” said the sun. “I'm in the West now!"

* * * *

I first heard this joke back at the height of the Cold War from a classmate in the army Russian language program who grew up in a German neighborhood in Chicago. It depends on two German puns so it doesn’t translate very well, but it’s worth recounting anyway. (In German, the word aufhängen means both 'hang up' [as a telephone] and 'hang' [the form of execution], and wiederwählen means both 'redial' and ' vote again' [wählen means ‘to dial,’ ‘to choose,’ and ‘to vote’].) Let’s give it a try.

What's the difference between Erich Honecker and a wrong number?

None! In both cases, you just hang up (aufhängen) and try again (wiederwählen)!

* * * *

The East German secret police, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Ministry for State Security, universally known as the Stasi), was almost as notorious as the KGB, on which it was modeled. (In fact the names of the German and Russian agencies both translate nearly the same into English.)

Two Stasi agents are stuck on a boring surveillance operation. Agent Müller breaks the monotony: "Hansi, what are you thinking about?"

"Nothing much. The same thing you’re thinking," muses Agent Schmidt.

Müller turns suddenly. "In that case, you're under arrest!"

* * * *

This isn’t a joke, really. It’s an actual exchange between one of my classmates at the Bundeswehr intelligence school (MAD-Schule), where I was one of two U.S. guest-officers attending a course, and the other members of the class.

The MAD-Schule was in Bad Ems, only a couple of hours’ drive from Bonn, then the capital of the Federal Republic. The Bundeswehr officers in the class were stationed all over the country, so for some of them, this was the closest they’d been to the capital in a long while. To let them have some time at the Ministry of Defense and to take care of paperwork and a little networking, we took a day off from class and drove up to Bonn in a motor pool bus.

Among the officers were one from the Allgäu (our class leader) and one from Bavaria. While our classmates liked to tease the class leader about his Allgäuer dialect—we two Americans spoke better German than he did, they liked to say—they had a whole different attitude toward our Bavarian classmate (whom I’ll call Wolfgang). To Germans, Bavaria’s a little like Texas is to Americans: almost a separate country.

As we approached Bonn, we passed some of the foreign embassies on our way downtown. “There’s the French Embassy,” someone would call out, or “Look, the British Embassy,” and so on. “Herr Leutnant, there’s your embassy—the Americans.” They knew my dad had served there.

Before we arrived downtown in Bonn, where the main ministries and offices of the Bundesrepublik were located, one of our classmates shouted out, “There’s Wolfi’s embassy!” Everyone laughed, including Wolfgang. Not understanding the joke, since I knew there wasn’t such a thing as a Bavarian embassy, I looked confused at the others on the bus. It was Wolfgang himself who explained: “It’s the Bavarian state tourist agency. My embassy,” he chuckled.

* * * *

The GDR actually manufactured an automobile, the Trabant. It was the butt of many jokes because it was not only cheap but poorly made and without a single amenity.

How do you double the value of a Trabant?

Fill the gas tank.

* * * *

An Ossi driver pulled into a gas station. "Can I get a wiper blade for this Trabi?"

The mechanic looked the car over for a long time, thinking. "Okay, it's a deal!"

* * * *

Like bureaucrats all over the world, German Beamte are the cause of much humor—not often of the complimentary variety!

Three youngsters are arguing over whose father is the fastest.

Klaus says, "My vati is a race-car driver. He’s the fastest."

Willi counters, "Nein, my father is a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. He’s obviously the fastest one."

"That's nothing," insists Hans. "Mein Vater is a Beamte. He’s so fast that when his office closes at 5 o’clock, he's already home by 1 in the afternoon!"

* * * *

What day is the busiest for a Beamte?

Monday. He has to turn over two calendar pages.

* * * *

“(ICH BIN DER) DOKTOR EISENBART”

This isn’t a joke but the lyrics to a silly folksong (taught to children for the most part, I believe). I learned it in college and it’s always stuck with me because it’s so silly. I’m providing a free translation here (which doesn’t rhyme or scan, of course), but I think you’ll get the idea. (Because it’s a folksong, the lyrics will vary—and there are many, many verses—but they’re all along the same lines.)

I’m Doctor Eisenbart,

I cure people in my own way.

Can make the blind walk

And the lame see again.

*

My greatest success

I had once in Osnabrück.

An old fellow had a case of gout;

I cut off both his legs.

*

When a patient puts himself in my hands,

I first have him make out his will.

I send no one from this world

Until he puts his house in order.

*

That's the way I heal,

It’s tried and true, I guarantee it.

That all my methods are effective,

I swear by my doctor's cap.

*

[There’s a refrain after each line, but it’s just nonsense syllables

—and it varies from version to version anyway.]

—

There actually was a Johann Andreas Eisenbarth (1663-1727; spellings of the last name vary), an oculist and barber-surgeon from Bavaria. He didn’t actually have a medical degree, but that was no impediment in the 17th century, and he descended from a family line of similar practitioners. He was apparently a successful and skilled surgeon who was, however, something of a braggart and self-promoter. He had an itinerant practice and traveled with a large entourage of entertainers and musicians. The carnival-like spectacle attracted patients and the noise covered the screams of pain. In 1977, the Federal Republic issued a postage stamp with his image.

* * * *

A customer in a coffee shop calls the waiter over. “My coffee is cold!” he complains.

“It’s good you told me,” replied the waiter. “Iced coffee costs 2 Euros more.”

* * * *

Two men are attending a political event where the Chancellor is speaking. One turns to the other and asks, “How long has the Chancellor been speaking?”

"A half an hour,” replied the other.

“And what’s he speaking about?”

“He hasn’t said yet.”

* * * *

The German teacher asked Karl: “What case is it when you say, ‘Studying makes me happy?’”

“A rare one,” said Karl without hesitating.

* * * *

This joke depends on a German pun, so it won’t translate. I think it’s worth passing on anyway. (Keep in mind that in German, Mist is manure, used widely for fertilizer.)

An American was visiting a German farm. He called out to the farmer: “Hey, mister! Mister!”

The farmer turned to the American angrily. “I’m not the Mister. I’m the milker!”

* * * *

We all know this one in a slightly different context:

A tourist was on his way to a long-anticipated concert by the Vienna Philharmonic. Not knowing the way to the concert hall, he stopped a passerby and asked: “Excuse me, but how do I get to the Philharmonic?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

* * * *

This joke, which turns on a German mondegreen, depends on the German pronunciation of a girl’s name. Julia, in German, comes out YOO-lee-ah.

Little Julia went to Easter Mass for the first time. After the service, her father asked her, “So, what did you like best about the Mass?”

“I liked that everyone sang ‘Hallo Julia’!”

* * * *

A mountain climber went into a hiking-supply shop. He told the clerk, “ I need some underpants.”

“Long?” asked the clerk.

“I want to buy them,” replied the hiker, “not rent them!”

* * * *

Believe it or not, this is a joke Germans tell on themselves:

Two Polish friends meet at their favorite bar. “So, Lech, what are you up to these days?” asks Stanislaw.

“I’m studying Hebrew,” answers Lech. “That way, when I get to Heaven, I’ll understand everything.”

“But what will you do if you go to Hell?” jokes Stanislaw.

“Oh, that’ll be okay. I already speak German.”

* * * *

What's the difference between an English, a French, and a German retiree?

The Englishman drinks a whiskey and goes fishing.

The Frenchman has a glass of wine and goes to play boules.

The German takes his cardiac meds and goes to work.

* * * *

This isn’t so much a joke as a language lesson. It points out the confusion between English and German, which share many words that seem to be cognates but actually don’t have related meanings. (Mark Twain was delighted, for instance, when he discovered the German word damit—until he learned that the emphasis was on the second syllable, not the first. The word, by the way, means ‘with’ [mit] ‘it’ or ‘them’ [da, a contraction of das, ‘that’]. When I lived in Germany, popular souvenirs among American and British tourists were key chains inscribed with the German expression Gute Fahrt. The phrase is simply the German equivalent of Bon Voyage—despite its appearance.)

A German exchange student, newly arrived in Britain, had ordered her first full English breakfast. She got hungry waiting for her meal to appear, however. "When do I become a sausage?" she asked impatiently.

The waiter, not understanding the student’s error, simply replied nonplussed, “Why, never, I trust.”

[In German bekommen means ‘to get,’ not ‘to become’ (werden in German). The German student’s mistake was in assuming that the English word has the same meaning as the German verb it looks and sounds like.]

* * * *

There’s a TV commercial running now on which an American exchange student is in Germany “to get some culture.” What he doesn’t get, he says, is the humor. His German friends are laughing at some video or TV show, but I have a suspicion that some of what the young man doesn’t get is the German fondness for the antiwitz, the anti-joke (or un-joke.) This is a construction that starts out with the familiar structure of a joke but ends illogically or without a punch line. The humor is in the surprise lack of . . . well, humor. In other words, it’s funny because it’s not funny! I thought I’d finish up with a few examples.

A few of the ones with illogical endings:

What’s green and runs through the garden? A herd of cucumbers.

Two men cross a bridge. One falls in the water. The other one’s name is Hans.

Two guys go through a tunnel. The third guy says to the fourth, “I think there are five of us.” The sixth guy says, “I don’t understand . . . .”

The kind without a punch line:

Knock, knock!
Who's there?
It’s the police. I'm sorry to tell you, there's been an automobile accident. Your husband’s been injured and is in the hospital.

How many plumbers does it take to change a light bulb?
One. His profession is irrelevant.

Two cows are grazing in a meadow. All of a sudden, a rabbit leaps out from behind a hedge and hops off. One cow looks up, chews her cud, and then ambles away.

You’ll have to decide for yourself if you think any of these is funny. I’m just providing the examples.

Building Better Lives Through Science

[After the explosion on the BP drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico last April, reporters, commentators, analysts, and ordinary people demonstrated two conflicting—but often simultaneously held—opinions about science and technology. On the one hand, they assumed, even demanded, that science solve the problem and became impatient, even angry, when it didn’t do it immediately and completely. Science, in the minds of many Americans, is credited with the capacity to solve any problem no matter what. The second view is disillusionment with science and technology because it is seen as the cause of such catastrophes as the gulf oil spill, global warming, nuclear contamination such as that caused by the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island melt-downs, the Challenger and Columbia explosions. Except for the environment, science and technology gave us those devices, they failed, and science hasn’t been able to stop or fix them. So we expect an almost magical power from science, which is our servant, and at the same time we believe science is flawed and inadequate and is poised to become our master. Clearly, neither of those propositions is accurate—or not wholly accurate. I’m going to examine the issue from a very personal perspective and see what, if any, benefit science and technology has provided in my own life.

[In a 1992 article called “Science’s Big Shift” in Time magazine, Dick Thompson wrote: " The public hears that we're No. 1 in science, and they want to know why that fact isn't making our lives better. The one thing that works in this country doesn't seem to be paying off." I was teaching a writing course at the time, so I quoted this statement for an essay exam and asked my students to address the idea that we don’t see science making our lives better. I also decided to answer the question myself as a model for an essay-exam response. I’ve based the essay below on that response.]

Science is the most visible indicator of how far humans have come from stone tools and wooden wheels. There’s question, however, whether scientific developments are actually making our lives better. While some perceive no betterment, even evils, from modern science and technology, the indisputable benefits in such fields as medicine, computers and robotics, and energy demonstrate that science makes our lives easier, healthier, safer, and more productive.

Medicine and health are fields plainly affected by new science and technology. Advances in organ transplants, immune-suppressant drugs, diagnostic tools like MRI’s and CAT scans, and new medicines and therapies mean illnesses we might have inevitably died from, like heart disease and cancer, are now routinely curable and others we couldn’t even diagnose until an autopsy, like tumors or weak blood vessels deep in the brain, are treatable. If medical technology has outstripped our ethical and legal capacities, that’s hardly a reason to disparage the usefulness of the scientific advances. It’s a reason to spur society and the law to catch up.

I can personally attest to at least one benefit of medical science and technology in my own life. Like most men my age, I’ve suffered the indignity of prostate examinations and colonoscopies, procedures that have come along only in recent decades to detect cancers that kill millions of men—but killed many more in the past because they weren’t detectable until much later in their progress. Those are common experiences for men (and women, too, in the case of colon exams) of a certain age, as they used to say. But somewhat rarer is the operation I had some years ago now that relieved me of a encumbrance with which I’d been saddled since I was about 12. I’m very astigmatic and I’ve had to wear glasses for over half a century. (I wore contacts for several years in the middle of that period, but they’re still lenses, prostheses.) I hated wearing glasses—not out of vanity (I’m not so good-looking to begin with that lenses were an additional disadvantage), but because as my eyes got worse, the lenses got thicker and heavier, and I couldn’t go anywhere without them. I always had to go about with glasses, and usually a pair of prescription sunglasses, too. If I traveled, I had to take an extra pair. Eventually, I got bifocals, which drove me nuts anyway; I took to carrying reading glasses for work in a library or other environment (because doing a lot of reading with the bifocals gave me headaches) and the bifocals for street use, plus the sunglasses. Three different pairs of glasses. I’d been asking my eye doctor about Lasik surgery, but he kept telling me it hadn’t been perfected enough to correct my vision problems yet. (Ironically, the same situation had occurred when I wanted to replace my glasses with contacts decades before.) Finally the doctor agreed that I was a good candidate and I had the surgery in a procedure that lasted 15 minutes, caused no discomfort, had no side effects, and left me with vision so good that I didn’t need even the drugstore reading glasses the doctor told me I might. It’s been over five years now and I haven’t worn prescription glasses of any kind since the operation (though my eyes have deteriorated in the meantime—the operation can correct the current conditions but it can’t stop your eyes from continuing to age). The operation cost several thousand dollars, which wasn’t covered by any insurance, but it was the best money I ever spent. Just waking up in the morning and not needing glasses to read the clock justifies the decision. For this alone, I can affirm that technology (for the laser device that performed the actual cutting) and science (for developing the technique of applying the laser) has benefited my life unquestionably.

Technological benefits from computers are also indisputable. Factories and offices work more efficiently, products are cheaper, retooling is easier and faster, and dangerous tasks are performed safely by non-human workers. Computer-aided design, for instance, makes possible the development of products with fewer design flaws before a prototype is even manufactured. Computer-generated models are created and tested in computer-generated environments, less costly than test laboratories and tracks, and their potential malfunctions and weaknesses detected long before metal and plastic are molded. The final design is electronically sent to the robot machine that makes the product, saving hours of expensive labor. When the time comes to change the design, the new specifications are sent to the robot, avoiding costly retooling and retraining. Though outsourcing has become an economic drawback (but not a technological one), the lost manufacturing jobs are eventually replaced with high-tech work programming, maintaining, and running the computers, and the computer glitches that occasionally plague our daily lives are becoming less and less frequent as we all become computer-literate.

I’ve written about the application of computer technology to theater and live performance (“Theater and Computers,” 5 December 2009), and that progress continues apace. (Film, which is always in the vanguard of such applications, is beginning to use performance capture—a feature of James Cameron’s Avatar—and the appearance of that tech on the live stage is probably not far away.) But once again, I can testify to the benefit computers have provided my own life. We all use ATM’s for their convenience and many of us use PDA’s and smart phones to access e-mail and the ‘Net when we’re on the move. (On my recent trip to Istanbul, many of my traveling companions were busily texting and e-mailing their friends and families back in the States from their hand-helds.) But my personal boon from computers is probably simpler and more commonplace. I’ve also written about my writing process and how I developed it (“Writing,” 9 April 2010). When I first contemplated that, I’d just started using a wordprocessor and I was very conscious of how that tool was changing how I wrote. I began to write more avidly, and sometimes more words as well, because it was fun. I couldn’t count drafts anymore, because each piece of writing was all one flexible draft that just reformed itself every time I made a change—until I decided it was finished, and sent it to the printer. Since there was no retyping every time I wanted to edit a draft, I began to do far more editing and revising. Where I’d used to give up on a change because it was too tedious to make—say, changing a small word or reversing the order of two sentences—I could push a couple of keys and I’d have exactly what I wanted, instead of what I’d used to settle for. Then conveniences like dictionaries and encyclopedias on CD became available and I had a whole reference and research library at my fingertips, obviating the need for constant trips to a library for small tasks. (I still go when I have major research or have saved up several smaller tasks that can’t be accomplished at home.) This was followed by the Internet and the array of reference and research sites that technology brought right to my screen. (All this eventually led to the launching of ROT, a lagniappe from the computer world that isn’t a benefit to my writing, but has become an outlet for the results. Others will have to determine whether that’s been worthwhile.)

The wordprocessor’s also been a huge asset for my teaching, as has the ‘Net. E-mail’s made communicating with research clients, colleagues, students (I work by e-mail with a woman now whom I tutored for a while and now help as a writing coach and editor), and, of course, friends and family. Business correspondence by e-mail is faster than by letter and more efficient and unambiguous than by telephone. We all know about the inaccuracies and even falsehoods that can be found on the Internet, but judicious use can make it a terrific research resource that saves countless hours in a library or even in my home reference collection. Small details I might have just left out, I can now verify and include because I don’t have to run off and spend an hour or two getting to and from a library and looking for the right reference book. As a result, my writing is both more detailed and specific, and faster. No danger that the Internet poses would make me wish to go back to a typewriter and a legal pad. I may prefer a printed book to an electronic one for reading (“Books in Print,” 9 July 2010), but I see no drawback to writing on a computer; there’s no downside.

A sidelight to computer writing that comes not from my own experience but from a friend’s is on-line publishing. I don’t mean publishing such as a blog or submission to an on-line journal, but publishing a book through an on-line service. Kirk Woodward did that with The Art of Writing Reviews, on which I commented at length on ROT (4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009). It’s the only way I know of for a little guy like Kirk or me to get a book into print. Furthermore, Kirk can reedit the text instantly to make corrections and additions and potential readers can buy Writing Reviews on line as either a printed book or as a download. I have no idea how well the books published that way do in sales, but it’s still an accomplishment, and computers made it possible.

Communications and media are another field in which scientific and, especially, technological progress have had prominent consequences. Television has improved at both the viewing and the transmission ends with the introduction of digital and high-definition broadcasting, flat screens, green-screen technology, and satellites. (The content, however, may not seem better than 50 years ago! There’s just more of it.) Even old reliable radio has advanced with the birth of satellite transmission. In world events, we’ve seen how the fax machine brought news of the 1989 Tiananmen protest in Beijing out and sent encouragement in and then, two decades later, when Iran erupted after a disputed election, it was digital cameras, cell phone images, and the Internet that kept the story before the world. Perhaps the most salient—and personal—technical change in communications, however, is the cell phone which has gone from a large, clumsy, expensive device that few but the wealthiest enthusiasts owned to the ubiquitous, nearly omnipotent, tiny object that resembles the Star Trek communicator. While we’ve all heard (and experienced) the annoyances that go along with the proliferation of cell phones on our streets (and in our restaurants, stores, theaters, and everywhere else), the convenience and, in an emergency, necessity of a mobile telephone can’t be denied. Readers of ROT may already know the recent urgent situation that prompted my mother and me finally to get our first cells; I described it in “Meeting Mom” (in “Short Takes I,” 30 March 2010). To recap briefly: I was waiting at Penn Station for my mother to arrive on a bus from Washington last Thanksgiving. She was scheduled to get in at 3 p.m. but the bus ended up being 3½ hours late and she couldn’t reach me to tell me what was happening and I couldn’t call her to ask where she was. Long story short: we now each have a cell. No emergency like that has occurred since (yet, halevai!), but the potential exists, hence the necessity of the cell phone in my life.

In the mid-1970’s, the oil-producing nations embargoed the source of most of the world’s energy, teaching us that relying on this imminently exhaustible product is dangerous. Now the spill in the Gulf of Mexico gives us another reason to reconsider fossil fuel, even domestically produced, as our sole energy source. For twenty years, scientists have been looking for new, less vulnerable energy sources. Though no replacement for hydrocarbons has yet emerged, many possibilities have. Nuclear energy, the most common next to oil and coal, has serious drawbacks, but it also has advantages. It’s efficient, cheap, and virtually inexhaustible. The radioactive waste and the danger of a leak or melt-down, as has already happened at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and the former Soviet Union’s Chernobyl reactors, are very real problems. This doesn’t mean they’re insoluble, and the technology to make reactors and their waste safer is already under development. Meanwhile, scientists are working on producing power from nuclear fusion—much cleaner than the fission used in current reactors—geothermal energy, and electromagnetics. The latter is already used in Japan in trains that float on cushions of air instead of rolling on wheels and track. The reduced friction saves wear and energy, and the high speeds will greatly reduce overland travel time. Even the old stand-by, petroleum, is being cleaned up in experiments with so-called gasahol where alcohol is added to the gasoline to make it burn cleaner and pollute less. Ethanol, too, has been examined as an alternative and though it’s not perfected, the prospect is still encouraging. The resulting more efficient engines and cleaner air are doubtlessly beneficial to all of us, and electric and hybrid engines are gaining popularity as that technology is improved and made less expensive. Busses that run on natural gas are appearing in cities all over the country as well.

Scientific advances can be a double-edged sword, however. In the realm of forensics, we’ve seen how scientific and technological progress has made detection and prevention of crime easier and faster, and solving crime and assigning blame has become more certain because of advances in science. DNA alone must be responsible for the convictions of hundreds of criminals across the country—as well as the exoneration of wrongly convicted defendants from the past. (A friend who’s a criminal defense attorney is very active in the Innocence Project, which has effected the release of hundreds of innocent prisoners.) But the trade-off, as I experienced it in a court, is that we civilians have come to expect a level of certainty that probably can’t be met in real life. I call this the CSI Syndrome because that TV show and its like have popularized the notion that science and scientists can solve any crime. When I was on the jury of an assault trial, we deliberated for several hours and ultimately found the accused, a man charged with the attempted rape of a women who rented a room from him, not guilty. The problem, we determined, was that there wasn’t enough evidence to convince us beyond the mandated reasonable doubt that the man had actually tried to rape the woman. We knew something had happened and that the woman had been a victim, and we suspected that the charge was true, but we couldn’t convict the defendant of such a crime solely on the testimony of the woman (who had credibility problems herself). There wasn’t any forensic evidence of an attempted rape. There was no medical evidence (the woman hadn’t gone to the hospital until after she’d reported the attack, which was some time after it was supposed to have occurred) to confirm a failed sexual assault. (There was also no corroborating testimony from other witnesses.) The accused hadn’t been charged with simple assault, a charge on which we could have convicted without a problem (the prosecutor explained that the DA’s office had decided that an assault charge carried too light a penalty), so we had no alternative but to acquit the man. But, I wondered afterwards, Were we putting too much reliance on criminal science? Has the CSI Syndrome convinced us non-scientists, non-criminalists that there must always be forensic proof, that there always is forensic proof and if there’s not, then conviction is impossible? Have we been taught, apparently falsely, to expect, to trust in, something that’s not really possible?

One question must be asked now, of course: Was my one experience at all typical of other juries of lay people across the country? If it was, then court cases and forensic science may be a metaphor for society’s general attitude toward science and technology: we raise it up on a pedestal, attributing to it capabilities it doesn’t have and when science fails to meet the impossible standards we’ve set, we tear down the pedestal and cast the whole discipline into the trash bin of cultural authority. Meanwhile, of course, real forensic scientists and technicians continue to do their valuable work and to push the envelope of their field to new and useful accomplishments.

Yes, there are disadvantages to scientific developments, and some new technologies may seem frivolous now. The new computer-generated environment called virtual reality is little more than an expensive toy right now, but its potential for real benefits is unmistakable. Television was a rich man’s plaything in the 1940’s and many intellectuals dubbed it a “vast wasteland” poised to rot our brains. Its power as a means of global, even interplanetary communications, however, has been demonstrated time and time again. From the first TV war in Vietnam to the landing on the moon in June 1969, this electronic gadget has proved its value, however badly it’s sometimes used. The same is obviously true of inventions in fields like space (miniaturization), transportation (supersonic jets, bullet trains), the military (nightscopes), and communications and the media (cell and satellite phones). Clearly, science has made our lives better—as long as we know how to use what it gives us. And don’t expect too much from its gifts. Despite the horrors of apocalyptic sci-fi tales, the true dangers of technology and science are on the human side.

A Broadway Baby

On Sunday, 13 June, Vanity Fair and GQ contributing editor David Kamp reported in a New York Times “Cultural Studies” column that “the musical-theater idiom has regained its currency, and is enjoying what may be its greatest popularity among young people since the pre-rock era.” When I read that, it heartened me. 

According to Kamp, young teens and preteens, including boys, are going to theater in large numbers; kids in general accept their friends who go to theater more than previous generations; and applications for places like Stagedoor Manor, the summer theater camp in Loch Sheldrake in the Catskills, have increased (also among boys) by large numbers. 

If Kamp's right and this isn't just a bubble, that's really encouraging. One thing Kamp doesn't say, however, is whether there's any evidence that this increased interest in theater is occurring beyond the New York City area. Stagedoor Manor does report, according to Kamp’s article, that the rush of new campers is coming from all over the country and beyond. 

The column, "The Glee Generation," puts the responsibility for the rise in interest on the Disney TV movie High School Musical (2006) and on the TV series Glee (Fox Broadcasting Company, 2009-15) for making it acceptable.

A new generation of young theatergoers would be a great development. As most people who have any interest in theater know, the audiences for live theater is aging and shrinking all over the country. 

It’s not just on Broadway, where ticket prices have climbed well into the three-figure range, that this problem is visible; and it’s not entirely because of the current economic downturn that people are staying away from theater—though that crisis has exacerbated the decrease. 

Live theater, in competition with movies, cable and broadcast TV, DVD’s, rock and pop concerts, the Internet, and iPods and other portable devices, has been losing audience for years, much to the concern of producers, theater owners, rep company artistic directors, and boards of directors. 

Every time a new presence in theater, especially musical theater, shows up, like Jonathan Larson (1960-96) with Rent in 1996 and Paul Simon (b. 1941) with The Capeman in 1998, there’s hope across the theater world that maybe a new, youthful sound will bring young theatergoers into the half-empty houses and get them to line up at the ticket windows. 

We’ll never know what Larson might have accomplished after the immense success of the rock-oriented Rent because his tragic death the night before the Off-Broadway opening cut short any influence he might have had to bring along other new composers; and the failure of Capeman put an end to any draw Simon might have had to encourage other pop composers to give theater a try. 

Spring Awakening (2006) and the revival of Hair (2009), two other rock-infused hits, have brought spectators to the theater, but haven’t inspired imitators. Kamp, however, does note that Hair along with this year’s American Idiot (2009) have been among the biggest attractions for young theatergoers. 

These enthusiasts aren’t like the “bused-in tourists” of past seasons, Kamp observes, shepherded to the big musicals on the Great White Way because that’s what you do on vacation in New York City. 

These young spectators, he says, are “true believers for whom love of musicals brings happiness, transcendence, and, strangely enough, social acceptance.” If Kamp is right, “We’re raising a generation of Broadway babies,” as he puts it.

The emphasis on the inclusion of boys in this new development is not only impressive—girls have always been more drawn to theater, as anyone who’s ever tried to cast a play in middle or high school can attest, and they are much more likely to be accepted by their non-theater friends if they are—but very encouraging as well. 

Not long ago, as recently as 2007, the Times reported that teen and tween girls were the target demographic of theater promoters who were campaigning to build new audiences. The enthusiasm of the girls alone, the producers saw, wasn’t enough to keep shows running into hit territory. If Kamp’s observations are correct, we may now be seeing the brothers of those girls following their sisters into the theater right behind them.

I don’t know if “The Glee Generation” is accurate or not—though I fervently hope it is. It doesn’t bother me at all that the young people Kamp’s encountered, who include his own 14-year-old daughter, are focusing on musicals right now. Anyone who’s ever bought a ticket for a Broadway show knows that the musicals are the most popular entertainments offered by the theater, followed by comedies. 

(Most theater spectators are entertainment seekers; true theater enthusiasts have always been a smaller proportion of the audience. I’d guess that the disparity is even greater for musicals.) 

If musicals are the hook that gets young people into the theater, it’s all good. My own interest in musicals when I was little expanded into a much broader interest in theater by high school. I suspect that that’s how it happens for most habitual theatergoers: we begin with the musicals—I even started with Gilbert and Sullivan—and move on to more challenging fare as our tastes and our intellects mature. 

It’s like drug addiction in a (benign) way: when we start, the light fare of musical theater satisfies our desires, but then we need more to accomplish what the musical used to do alone so we add the straight comedy, then the drama, then, finally, Off-Broadway and experimental theater. (Some traditionalists don’t ever get to that last stage, I think. But the line of progression is the same, even if it stops short.)

I grew up loving what used to be called musical comedy. If I didn't see them on stage when I was a kid, I saw the movies (as I did with Damn Yankees and Oklahoma!) or I listened to the albums, which my dad had from his youth. 

(Dad took my mom to the original Oklahoma! on one of their early dates. He had a collection of cast albums that went back to the ‘30s. Some were even 78’s! I still have his cast albums of Kiss Me Kate and Carousel, among others.) 

I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew (and could actually sing) all the words to all the songs. I’d actually come out of the theater singing the score. I saw all kinds of theater at home in Washington, including Shakespeare, but my first Broadway experiences, when I came to visit my grandparents, were musicals. Fiorello! was my very first show on Broadway (1959); I saw My Fair Lady (1960) a little later, but it still had the original cast. 

When I was teaching upstate, a bus-and-truck tour of MFL came through and played at the college theater. All the theater students went, of course, and I met one of mine in the lobby during intermission. 

"It's really good, isn't it?" she said, adding, "Of course, she's no Audrey Hepburn." I chuckled to myself and responded, "Yes, and Hepburn was no Julie Andrews." 

I smiled, both at the student and to myself. To her, MFL was an old movie with Audrey Hepburn (1929-93)—using Marni Nixon's (1930-2016) voice (see “The Singing Voice of the Stars: Marni Nixon” (27 and 30 March 2022)—and Rex Harrison (1908-90); to me, it will always be a Broadway experience with Julie Andrews (b. 1935) and Harrison. 

Those great performances I saw as a boy have become enduring: Harold Hill is always Robert Preston (1918-87), Maria von Trapp is always Mary Martin (1913-90)—not Andrews, by the way; besides Guenevere and Liza Doolittle, she's always Cinderella (from the original 1957 television broadcast [see “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” (25 April 2013)])—Fiorello is always Tom Bosley (1927-2010), Don Quixote is always Richard Kiley (1922-99), Pseudolus and Hysterium are always Zero Mostel (1915-77) and Jack Gilford (1908-90), J. Pierrepont Finch and Bud Frump are always Robert Morse (1931-2022) and Charles Nelson Reilly (1931-2007), Fagin is always Clive Revill (1930-2025), Fanny Brice is always Barbra Streisand (b. 1942), Charity Hope Valentine is always Gwen Verdon (1925-2000); and, of course, Mrs. Lovett will always be Angela Lansbury (1925-2022).  (I missed a few of the big ones: I didn't see West Side Story or Cabaret until the movies.) 

Back in ’06, I watched Broadway: The Golden Age on PBS. It’s a 2003 documentary by Rick McKay in which he compiles many interviews, including archival footage, with the greats of Broadway theater going back to its . . . well, “Golden Age.” 

Some of the reminiscences of the stars' earliest introductions to theater and to Broadway and Times Square were very reminiscent of my own experiences at a similar age. 

When I used to come to New York City to visit one or another of my grandparents and before I ever went to a Broadway play, we'd go to Times Square. Both my parents were New Yorkers and their parents lived here when I was little, so we’d come to New York for visits. 

My mom’s dad liked Ruby Foo’s on West 52nd Street, and we also ate at Mamma Leone’s on West 48th, all in the Times Square area in those days. (Neither was especially good, but they were family-friendly and kind of a show themselves.) 

Just like the interviewees all said, it was a mesmerizing and indelible experience. The lights, the billboards, the theater marquees, the hokum (the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum!), the crowds—and that Camel sign with the smoke rings! (I always wondered how it did that.) 

It just wasn't quite Real. The Great White Way—you could tell why they called it that. In the '50s it hadn't gotten sleazy and dangerous yet, and it was like a bizarro Disneyland. The experience of seeing it for the first (and second and third) time at that age—I wasn’t 10 when I first went to Times Square with my parents or my grandparents—is hard to forget. 

In fact, it’s the kind of image that’s been immortalized many times, once, appropriately enough, in the “Times Square Ballet” from a Broadway musical from that legendary era, Betty Comden (1917-2006) and Adolph Green’s (1914-2002) On the Town (1944). 

Frank Rich (b. 1949), a native Washingtonian like me (and about the same age, too), described what he called “that ecstatic baptism, that first glimpse of Broadway lights, of every Broadway theatergoer's youth” in an old review of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989):

For any child who ever fell in love with the Broadway musical, there was always that incredible moment of looking up to see the bright marquees of Times Square for the first time.

The moment occurs as Mr. Robbins's show ends. The three World War II sailors of ''On the Town,'' winding down from their dizzy 24-hour pass through the pleasures of New York, New York, come upon a dazzling, crowded skyscape of twinkling signs heralding the smash musicals Mr. Robbins staged between 1944 and his withdrawal from Broadway in 1964. Some of the theaters (the Adelphi, the New Century) are gone now; some of the shows are forgotten. But the awe that seizes those innocent young sailors of 1944 overwhelms the jaded Broadway audience of 1989, too . . . . (New York Times, 27 February 1989) 

Like many of the theater greats in McKay’s documentary, I saw my first theater in my home town. Washington happened to be a minor stop on the pre-Broadway circuit—not New Haven or Philly, but we got some try-outs—and a major stop on the post-Broadway tour. 

Before the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, Broadway shows played at the National, originally built in 1834 (the current building dates to 1885). (Ford's Theatre, which operates today as a booking house, was just a museum and historic site in my childhood; it didn't operate as a theater for over 100 years after Lincoln's assassination.) 

We also had some other theater, including visits by the D'Oyly Carte company and the American Savoyards (as I admitted, I loved G&S in those days) and we went to summer stock shows just like the ones the actors described in The Golden Age. 

I even saw Mary Martin and John Raitt (1917-2005) do Annie Get Your Gun (1946) at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis one summer (ca. 1957). (We almost always went there at least once during the summer back in the '50s. I still remember being astonished at a production of The Wizard of Oz there when, after a tornado generated by the techies, the lights came back up—and there was Dorothy's house on stage, on top of the Wicked Witch, her legs sticking out from under one side! It was impossible! How did that house get there? It was magic!) 

Then I saw my first shows on Broadway when I was about 10. I was lucky enough to catch the end of what McKay called the Golden Age. 

I say that not so much to brag, but out of amazement that I saw some of it before it disappeared. The interviewees in the documentary all named some of the performances they saw that stayed with them or influenced their own later work. 

Almost all of them named Laurette Taylor’s (1883-1946) 1945 turn as Amanda Wingfield in Glass Menagerie, then they went on to list other seminal performances: Ethel Waters (1896-1977) in Mamba's Daughters (1939); Marlon Brando (1924-2004) in Truckline Café (1946), Candida (1946), and Streetcar (1947); Julie Harris (1925-2013) in The Member of the Wedding (1950); Kim Stanley (1925-2001) in Bus Stop (1955) and A Far Country (1961); Geraldine Page (1924-87) in Sweet Bird (1959); and James Earl Jones (1931-2024) in The Great White Hope (1968).

 

Most of those were well before my time (except GWH), but I had a list of my own: the best individual performances I’d seen.  Jones’s Jack Jefferson was on it; so was Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which I saw at the National where it premièred in 1962), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), Stacy Keach (b. 1941) in Indians (which I saw at Arena in D.C. where it began in 1969), Alec McCowen (1925-2017) in Hadrian VII (1969), Ben Vereen (b. 1946) in Pippin (1972), Virginia Capers (1925-2004) in Raisin (1973), Jim Dale in Scapino! (1974), Henry Fonda (1905-82) in Clarence Darrow (1974), Anthony Hopkins (b. 1937) in Equus (1974), Donald Sinden (1923-2014) in London Assurance (1974), Meryl Streep (b. 1949) in A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1976), Hume Cronyn (1911-2003) and Jessica Tandy (1909-94) together in The Gin Game (1977), and Pat Carroll (1927-2022) in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (1979).  I was flabbergasted.

 

(I don’t keep the list anymore—it was only in my head anyway—but I’ve seen two or three recent performances that I’d add if I did.) In The Golden Age, when Tony Roberts (1939-2025), I believe, described the time he saw James Earl Jones in GWH, he was describing my own experience at that show. (I also saw GWH at the Arena, where it originated in 1967, before it transferred the following year to Broadway’s Alvin Theatre—now the Neil Simon.)

I also had favorite actors whose stage work I just liked a lot, even if they didn’t fit on my List of Greats. I first saw Jerry Orbach (1935-2004) in Carnival! (1961) with Anna Maria Alberghetti (b. 1936) and he became a special favorite of mine. (Later, when I trained to become an actor, I often used the songs he sang in his shows in my voice classes.) 

Also in that cast was another favorite of mine: Kaye Ballard (1925-2019), who sang the maddest love song on any Broadway stage: “Always Always You.” Her character was a magician’s assistant and she sang of her devotion to him while in a box into which Marco the Magnificent was thrusting swords! An image like that tends to stick with you. 

Other favorites included Kay Medford (1916-80), Stubby Kaye (1918-97), and Howard da Silva (1909-86)—I tended to go for the character actors, it seems. They all had personalities that shone through in all their appearances and there are lines I can still hear them saying, like Kay Medford: “Don’t worry about the coat. Three mink stoles you’ll have when the train pulls out.” (That’s from 1960’s Bye Bye Birdie in which she played Albert Peterson’s mother, Mae. She was lying across railroad tracks at the time.)

I’ve seen some good and even great revivals, and the later actors offered terrific performances which I enjoyed, but like that MFL upstate, the originals I saw when I was little are permanently engraved in my memory. 

In a recent column, Times reviewer Charles Isherwood wrote, “You cherish some performances so strongly that you may not want to let any other memories get in the way,” but that hasn’t been my problem. I welcome new interpretations that may stand alongside my old memories—but those oldies will always remain the bellwether, though not a barricade. 

In 2004, I saw the revival of Camelot presented by Arena Stage. This production was more than creditable overall—there were even some neat casting and costuming coups—but I had the misfortune of having seen the real, true original in ’60 with Andrews (b. 1935), Richard Burton (1925-84), Robert Goulet (1933-2007), and Roddy McDowall (1928-98). 

Nothing can ever really compare to that no matter who does it, especially since I was still a kid—that impression of the big, Broadway show, with all those stars and that story (I had loved The Once and Future King), is absolutely ineradicable. I can't hear those songs without hearing the original voices. 

The same’s always so for MFL, Sound of Music, Music Man, and all the Golden Oldies that I got to see. (Cyril Ritchard is the voice I hear for Captain Hook, too, but I only saw the Mary Martin Peter Pan on TV [NBC, 1960] when I was almost 14.) 

I also saw many plays in which the whole cast formed a remarkable ensemble (Hair, Moonchildren), and others in which the stand-out artists were the playwright (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Six Degrees of Separation) or the director (The Wiz, The Black Rider); I remember those vividly, but never kept even a mental list of them.

During the week of 16 August this year, PBS broadcast the current, Tony Award‑winning revival of South Pacific on Live From Lincoln Center. Needless to say, I made a point of catching it. (I’d never seen this classic musical on stage until 2003 when I saw a production at Arena’s Fichandler Stage.) 

Now, I can't be very critical about those classic musicals—I love them too much from my childhood. They're like theatrical comfort food to me—I hardly see any faults. 

During an intermission interview with the daughters of Richard Rodgers (1902-79) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), Alan Alda (b. 1936), the evening’s host, admitted, “I’ve seen this production three times. I blubber every time, as soon as the orchestra starts . . . the overture.” Well, me too! As soon as the musicians sound their first note, I become just “as corny as Kansas in August.” There’s no help for me. 

Then in a conversation with director Bartlett Sherr (b. 1959) and Lincoln Center Theatre artistic director Andre Gregory (b. 1934), Alda also remarked, “As beautiful as this is on the screen, to be in the room with them” is better. 

I know that’s true, but watching this show alone in my living room allowed me to indulge my almost uncontrollable impulse to sing along—something the Arena expressly admonished us not to do there, "no matter how hard you find it to resist”! 

This is one of the scores I learned from my dad’s cast albums (not from the 1958 film, which I didn’t see until some time later), so I was surprised to see that I still remembered most of the lyrics. 

Oh, I can’t carry the tunes anymore, especially the women’s songs—unlike when I was a boy soprano and could actually sing—but there I sat, croaking along with the women’s parts, the men’s parts, the leading roles, the character roles, the solos, the duets, the ensemble numbers. It made no difference—I was a one-man backers’ audition!

I often feel that some musicals are nearly perfect for what they are. I think South Pacific fits that description. Nothing seems artificial, the plot and book all fits without seeming forced or contrived, the dialogue is the right texture for the material (Fiddler is sentimental and poignant, How To is brassy and slangy), the songs all come out of the story and advance the drama one way or another, the lyrics are all suited both to the music and the moment. Everything just belongs. 

MFL was one of those, and WSS. Naturally, the Golden Oldies were, too. That’s why they’re classics. 

Of course, SoPac isn't just a classic musical, it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. Based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (written, 1946; published, 1947; also a Pulitzer-winner), his memoir of Navy service in the New Hebrides during World War II, the play and its music show humans in conflict, not just war but other, inner tensions. 

One of these is prejudice and bigotry, a malady from which even the play’s heroine, Nellie Forbush, suffers. When I taught a 9th-grade English class one year and we read Raisin in the Sun (1959), I wanted to talk some about the underlying theme, racism, and the Langston Hughes lines that gave the play its title: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” 

I brought to class a recording of “You’ve Got To Be Taught”; I figured my 15-year-old students wouldn’t be likely to have heard it before. They hadn’t, and the discussion, as much as I could coax 9th-graders to have one, was one of the best I had in that class. The idea that prejudice is learned not congenital was revelatory. That was in the late ‘80s. SoPac still had something to say almost 40 years after it premièred!

I started seeing non-musicals around high school (not including Shakespeare, a few productions of whose plays I saw as a child). The high school I went to before I went to Europe did the usual kind of school theater, but it was the beginning of my introduction to serious drama. We did Billy Budd (1949/1951) and O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1920), which I suppose was pretty adventurous for a prep school in the early ‘60s. 

Off-Broadway didn't come until college—the 1969 Negro Ensemble Company production of Lonne Elder’s (1927-96) Ceremonies in Dark Old Men at the St. Marks Playhouse in the East Village was my first Off-Broadway drama. (That was my first non-musical OB experience. Ten years earlier, my family went to the Orpheum Theatre on 2nd Avenue to see Little Mary Sunshine, Rick Besoyan’s (1924-70) delightful send-up of old-time operettas.) 

I’ve mentioned before that the university theater at Washington and Lee was an education for me (“Disappearing Theater,” 19 July), starting with Godot and moving on to Marat/Sade, America Hurrah, Harold Pinter (British; 1930-2008), Eugène Ionesco (Romanian-French; 1909-94), Boris Vian (French; 1920-59), Euripides (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE). 

I still loved the old musicals—and the new ones; I saw Hair first in London then again in New York both in 1969—but I stopped being wholly devoted to the musical once I got impelled into the wider world of theater. 

The wonderful thing about theater is that it keeps evolving and growing. That’s true of any art, of course, but theater is the one I know best and love most. I love seeing new ideas of what theater is or can be, experiments with the form. Even if they don’t work, they open up new paths. I didn’t take to Performance Art, or the Happening before that, but I was excited to see what they left for theater artists to take up, adopt, and adapt.

I suppose I’ve gone the long way around my point, but for me, it all began with the musical. If David Kamp has seen a true phenomenon and there are 12-, 13-, and 14-year-old boys and girls out there who are waiting outside the theater entrances for the doors to open on Rent, or American Idiot, or Hair, or Lion King, and they can’t wait till the next musical play opens, whether it’s Spider-Man, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, or Unchain My Heart—well, I couldn’t be happier. 

The love of musical theater can lead to a more encompassing love of theater, and nothing could be better than that short of world peace! After all, that’s how it started for me because . . . I was a Broadway Baby.

[I often put aside the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday New York Times to read later, particularly the “Metropolitan Diary,” “a place for New Yorkers . . . to share odd fleeting moments at Bloomingdale’s, at the deli around the corner, in the elevator or at the movies.”  I enjoy this weekly feature, first launched in 1976, and in the issue of 14 December 2025, the first article in the column was entitled “Broadway Baby.”  In it, Times reader Cynthia Strickland writes about her earliest experiences of attending Broadway plays: 

Dear Diary:

Imagine you are a teenager in the 1970s and the only person in your family to request a ticket to a Broadway show as a gift for your December birthday.

Maybe it was the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” that hooked you, but every year as your birthday approaches, you scan the paper for the show you want to see.

Your father treks back from Midtown and collects you and you depart together from the Ho-Ho-Kus station and then transfer to the PATH train in Hoboken. No stopping at the Clam Broth House.

You emerge in Manhattan, and as your generally stern father gently guides you away from the seediest doorways and alleys of Times Square, you forget about school and your younger siblings at home.

You don’t know in advance where you will eat, but it turns out that your father will steer you over thick cables and into the doorway at Sardi’s for the first time.

You eat upstairs because Jerry Lewis is being filmed downstairs. Another time, you eat at the Ginger Man, where you steal glances at Mary Tyler Moore across the room.

Over the years, you and your father head to the Majestic Theater to see “The Wiz” starring Stephanie Mills, and to the Delacorte — or was it the Uris — to see Kevin Kline in “The Pirates of Penzance.”

Imagine trying but failing to stifle your silent sobs while you watch Yul Brynner perform the death scene in “The King and I.”

Back then, this was me.

[Push the chronology (and the show titles) back about a decade, and this was me, too.  Coincidentally, I have a December birthday also, and I watched Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella also—except that I saw the original, live broadcast in 1957 with Julie Andrews (see my post, “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)”).  The 1965 remake Strickland watched, the first revival of the television musical, starred Leslie Ann Warren and featured Celeste Holm as the Fairy Godmother.

[I saw my first Broadway musical on Broadway in 1959.  It was Fiorello!, which played at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre from 1959 through 1961 and then the Broadway Theatre for the remainder of its run that year.  I saw My Fair Lady (1956-62 at the Mark Hellinger, Broadhurst, and Broadway Theatres) in 1960, but the illustrious original cast was still on stage.

[Prior to that Broadway experience, I’d seen a few Broadway shows at Washington, D.C.’s National Theatre, our Broadway house before the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, on their National Tours.  I’m not counting shows I saw in D.C. in other venues, such as visits by the D’Oyly Carte company and the American Savoyards with Gilbert and Sullivan repertoires, or our version of Shakespeare in the park at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Rock Creek Park.

[Strickland traveled into New York City for her Broadway adventure by commuter railroad from suburban Bergen County in New Jersey and the PATH (Port Authory Trans-Hudson) train.  I got there with my parents when we drove up to visit my grandparents via US Route 1 and the NJ Turnpike.

[I didn’t eat in Sardi’s until I actually moved to New York City in 1974—probably for lunch when I participated in a meeting of local dramaturgs when I served on the board of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now . . . of the Americas) in the mid-1980s. 

[When we were in Times Square, my family often ate at Mamma Leone’s, a famous Italian eatery on West 48th Street, west of 7th Avenue, or at Ruby Foo’s, a pan-Asian restaurant on West 52nd Street, also west of 7th.  Ruby Foo’s was a favorite spot of my maternal grandfather because he liked a bit of a show and Ruby Foo’s was a “scene” restaurant.

[I didn’t see Yul Brynner in his touring revivals of The King and I (he did it twice in New York, in 1977-78 and again in 1985; that last run ended on 30 June 1985, and Brynner died at 65 of lung cancer, attributed to heavy smoking, on 10 October). 

[I did see him in The Odyssey, the musical based on Homer’s epic poem that came to Broadway for one performance (4 January 1976) as Home Sweet Homer.  It was at the Kennedy Center, which produced the play, from 19 December 1974 to 2 February 1975 before it went on a one-year, 10-city tour of the U.S.  (It was pretty awful, as closing on opening night might suggest.)

[As for The Wiz, the musicalization of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown that ran at the Majestic Theatre, where Strickland saw it, from 5 January 1975 to 25 May 1977 and then at the Broadway from 25 May 1977 to 28 January 1979; I saw it in November 1975. 

[I saw G&S’s The Pirates of Penzance, at the Uris, where it played from 8 January to 9 August 1981, in May of that year.  (Produced by Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival—now the Public Theater—it finished up its Broadway run at the Minskoff from 12 August 1981 to 28 November 1982.  Papp first presented Pirates in that summer’s Shakespeare in the Park at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater from 15 July to 24 August 1980.)]