Our Time

One of Stephen Sondheim's least successful shows was "Merrily We Roll Along", based on the play by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart. It chronicles the lives of three people - backward. The show starts "now" and tells itself in reverse until the beginning - where we see the three friends just graduating from school and fully believing in all their hopes and dreams. It ran only 16 performances. The most famous song from the score is probably "Not A Day Goes By" (which you likely still have never heard of), but the finale of the show is an anthem for youth who are sparked with the thrill of a world of possibilities that has been beckoning, and one they can't wait to enter, even if it is with a bit of fear. Its called "Our Time" and its not a great song, but it is one of my favorite songs ever.

The orchestrations are what really resonate with me. There is a sense of sustained anticipation you hear in the strings. Chimes sound like dreams being unleashed, the brass and wind instruments sound like the comfortable, untried courage of the naive. Overall, it sounds respectful of believing.

Okay that was an embarrassing display of grandiose and romantic talk over a mostly unmemorable show tune - but to me, the song itself feels like promise. And I remember the feeling. It was grand.

Hopefully you've guessed that I am not getting all dopey about about a song. The fact is, I attended, along with my family, a bat mitzvah for the youngest daughter of one of my oldest friends in the world. It was surreal to look at my older daughters and her oldest daughter and think that Jackie and I were only a couple of years older than they are now when we met. When I count backward...

Never mind.

First of all I should say that Jackie is only one year younger than I but she looks virtually the same as she did nearly 30 years ago. So, by the way, does her mother. Excellent genes. But the point is that it isn't hard to look at her and be back in 1980 - 23 years old and just starting our "adult" lives. We worked for Kelly Services - the temporary help company - along with Meg and Peg and others who are mostly absent from my life, but still present in my heart. We did an awful lot of things I get really mad at my girls for doing now. We kept ourselves entertained by playing stupid pranks on each other at work (filling the receiver end of the desk phone with cold hand lotion comes to mind). Jackie would often crawl under her desk for a nap at lunch (such, apparently, were her nights). We wrote silly notes to each other, competing with each other to write in the teeniest handwriting imaginable in order to feign extreme humility. (We did not need reading glasses then. To read those notes today would require coke bottle glass). We thought we were hilarious. And in fact, we were. Jackie had a strand of pearls that she believed was inappropriate for her to wear until she was 30. I remember thinking she may as well throw them out than wait so long to have any use for them. We were idiots. But what the hell - it was "our time" and the world was all about us. We all had eternity ahead of us with nothing but doors wide open.

I know that as we were living them, our lives felt ordinary. None of us thought to ourselves: "Wow! We're living through disco!" or "This is the Reagan era. I wonder what's next." There was no next. There was just "now". Why would we ever think that "The Breakfast Club" or "Flashdance" would date us? We wore leggings over our jeans. We had lots of padding on our shoulders. We had big hair and bigger earrings. We went through a recession during the 80's. It meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Our worlds were still very small back then. The dreams we dreamed were of a future where our circumstances changed but we didn't. I don't think either or any of us back then ever imagined a day when we would cherish our spanx or look in a mirror and ask: "What happened to my neck?"

And why should we have? How could we have? Every experience was new and made our hearts beat a little faster. We felt everything a little stronger. We were a little more fearful, but we had a little more courage. We drank champagne and ate brie and went to dinner parties in chic cocktail dresses. The music then, was written for us. The movies then, were made for us. The 80's were about us. And we believed, unconsciously or not, that it would always be about us. We dreamed of being in love, of being married, of having children. We dreamed of having wonderfully successful careers. A teacher, an actress, a businessperson. We dreamed of being homeowners. We dreamed of travel. And security. And happily, miraculously, we all got most of what we dreamed of. But it does look different than how we dreamed it and getting it felt normal. The luster of dreaming had worn off in the getting. Still, the lyrics of this song, hokey as they may sound, kept running through my mind that day:

Feel the flow, Hear what's happening

We're what's happening

Don't you know

We're the movers and we're the shapers

We're the names in tomorrow's papers

Up to us, man, to show 'em

So it was kind of strange, this bat mitzvah. I had one foot in the day and another in yesterday. And it was oddly disorienting. But then, as we were leaving, we chatted with Rick for a moment (Jackie's husband, who, by the way, was there from the beginning too) and he said something that brought everything around full circle for me. Looking at his family and then at mine, he observed: "I like that we all turned out okay".

Indeed we did. And I like that too. Dreams fulfilled.