Sunday night’s final performance of TOMMY completed in delirium around the orchestra pit! The audience swarmed down the aisles as the cast rushed the front edge of the stage after their bows; everyone jamming together, dancing, clapping as if to hold the moment in time and never let go. A full out demonstration! But one of love and appreciation for Paramount’s Rock Band joining the crowd and the actors in a scene none of us there will ever forget. I was asked to join them onstage but my impulse to decline was in the spirit of this moment being theirs. I sit here at the keyboard wishing I had joined the hysteria rocking with shouting and screaming and tears; everyone’s smiles and eyes catching looks and arms around each other holding on to these final minutes! But I was all too much aware of having to let go… of having to go on leaving all this behind… but I am feeling I was so very wrong. I avoided the joy to what I thought I suppose would be to avoid the pain of separation from them. What a fool. Basic coward. I chose to stand back and watch them share and hold each other. Perhaps not joining in meant lessening the pain of it all coming to a close… which is unavoidable anyway! Isn’t this the very thing Theatre is about? To join the living! Those of us who are most alive! We all have our part to play in life, and Theatre teaches us to live it fully, actively join the celebration! To be among those who see and respond and do. And there I stood watching them. And yet, who is to say what is right and wrong. I experienced what I experienced. Indelibly imprinted in our memory, the emotional history being made before our eyes, will always live on in our psyches, our minds, our souls. Thinking on… I experienced so much abundant joy and love in TOMMY…as much as before that closing moment…if not more than ever… I just have to remember, to be unafraid to feel it… to love it and live it… to be aware that it is always there… and to let it into my heart. Silly to think it will end. It lives on forever there.
Love & thanks,
Jim