“If a choo choo train will go, it will stop.” – Bruce Cantwell
I have no memory of saying these words, but on the off chance that the family stories about this being my first intelligible sentence are true, it explains where my pursuit of happiness began to go awry.
When I got frustrated by the limits of my own pursuit, I started wondering where others found happiness. Few things made Mom happier than musical theater. She had a file cabinet full of sheet music from Broadway shows. She loved to sing and play piano. She and Dad met in a church choir, the effects of which were their marriage, my brother, and eighteen months later, in December 1958, me.
By 1963 the original cast album on heavy rotation in our house was Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot. Neither my brother nor I could piece together the story, but the songs referenced sword fights, jousting, dragon-slaying. We were all in. We improvised sword fights, occasionally bumping into the phonograph and making the record skip. Then Mom would step in to suspend the tournament.
Midway through my fourth year, Mom and her mom took us downtown on the Illinois Central railroad to see a Wednesday matinee performance of the first national touring production of the show. I loved the novelty of taking the train downtown, the Chicago South Shore backyards with their laundry lines whooshing by. It was exciting joining the buzzing throng merging into the theater, the packed elevator (with attendant) to the nose-bleed section, the usher inspecting our tickets, guiding us to our seats, and handing me my very own program that I couldn’t read.
Mom squeezed my hand with excitement as the lights dimmed. A spotlight hit the invisible orchestra (my sight-line started a little past the foot of the stage). And the familiar overture sounded.
I had trouble figuring out why the singers sounded different than they did on the album. I strained to make sense of the story.
The show opens with King Arthur emerging from a tent, asking himself some questions:
Why Guenevere is in that castle behind walls he cannot enter.
Why he’s on the far side of the channel waiting for dawn to do battle against the man he loves for the woman he loves.
The answers make up the rest of the show, but here’s my cause and effect takeaway.
After five years of marriage, King Arthur realizes that he hasn’t kept his word to wife Guenevere that he would become the wisest, most heroic, most splendid king to ever sit on any throne. Feeling like a failure, he decides to shake things up, reasoning:
It is far better to be alive than dead.
So why have battles where people are killed?
Because someone attacks.
Why do people attack?
Because it’s fun.
It’s fun because knights can afford armor and slice up the peasants and foot soldiers who can’t afford it.
Since they have the might, they’re right whether they’re wrong or right.
But that’s wrong, right?
What if might were only used for right, to improve, instead of destroy?
What if the knights, still dressed in armor, still violent, used violence to redress grievances, help the oppressed, etc.
What if might were used for right?
Eight years later, Arthur has his answer.
Guenevere seeks refuge in a convent after Lancelot rescues her from being burned at the stake, her sentence for cheating with him. Arthur finds himself waiting for dawn to exact vengeance.
A boy named Thomas stumbles upon Arthur’s camp, eager to join the knights of the roundtable. He’s been inspired by the stories people tell. Arthur, seeing an opportunity to salvage his legacy, enlists him as his minister of propaganda, to repeat those stories to anyone who’ll listen. The boy runs off behind the lines to carry out his mission and Arthur declares victory.
Wait? What?
I was confused. Not because of the show’s moral ambiguity, but because my favorite number, “Fie on Goodness!” had been cut.
Was it because even a comedic song extolling the virtues of torching a village, slaying a dozen men, and bemoaning the fact that virgins may wander unmolested was a bit much for audiences?
I can’t say for sure how much I took away from that show.
You’ve noticed that I started this narrative by looking back from a point of crisis, so there’s that.
I went on to major in journalism and specialize in advertising, so the idea of spreading stories somehow stuck.
I still adore catchy tunes with ironic or cheerfully nihilistic lyrics.
I would later come to question Arthur’s initial statement of fact.
As for observing how virtuous actions lead to personal and professional ruin and worse, that may have come from the real-life Camelot.
On a rainy 62-degree Friday afternoon in November, I watched Bozo’s Circus. Shortly after the grand march ushered the audience out of the tiny studio at WGN on Bradley Place in Chicago, the 1:00 p.m. news break was interrupted:
“Here is a bulletin from WGN news just handed me. President Kennedy has been shot and seriously wounded. Kennedy was shot at just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. A photographer on the scene said he saw blood on the President’s head.”
Mom gasped. I looked up. I had never seen this emotion on her before.
She went to the TV and turned the knob to find out more. All of the network anchors had rushed to their newsrooms as chaos reigned for the next 38 minutes.
On CBS, Walter Cronkite said, “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.”
I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know who was president until that moment.
Over the next several days of uncertainty, in hastily assembled obituary pieces, I would hear echoes of Arthur’s “might for right” in Kennedy’s inauguration speech.
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required…If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich…Let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved…a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
And once again, I would know where these noble aspirations ended before knowing where they began.
These events likely had limited influence in warping my values since touring Broadway shows and assassinations were rarities. What I observed within my own home carried more weight.
