Ways that Film and Music Make Us Feel Alive

Knowing when it's time for your solo

Recently during my morning routine, I encountered a performance of the Stephen Sondheim song “Being Alive” from the show Company. It came courtesy of the 2019 film Marriage Story. I didn’t see the film—those contentious Oscar-nomination highlight clips made it seem not quite right for me. But seeing Adam Driver walk up to the mic at a New York piano bar and sing this song intrigued me.

Films and songs give us a chance to watch someone coming into his or her own, to flower right there on screen, the way the speaker does at the end of James Wright’s poem “A Blessing.” I won’t quote it here – you should read all the 24 lines yourself.

In the film Before Sunset, Julie Delpy’s character Celine bravely and poignantly sings “A Waltz for a Night” to her paramour Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke), sharing, through an original song, what she couldn’t say during a day of walking through Paris. She admits that “I just want another try.” At least fans got another film in the series.

In the last film my movie critic father ever saw, Lost in Translation, Bill Murray’s character sings “More Than This” by Roxy Music in a karaoke bar. In the mostly forgotten film Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling sings “You Always Hurt the One You Love” (on ukulele). Songs give viewers a chance to uncover an emotionally rich side of characters that otherwise find it hard to emote.

My wife Kate and I met when we both rented the same room on the same day and decided to share it. Otherwise alone in London, we became instant friends and came to depend upon each other daily, rehearsing for the many years of married life that awaited us.

After we returned to the states, Kate sent me mix tapes, cassettes with songs by Odetta, Aretha Franklin, and Joan Armatrading, songs that proclaimed love and devotion in ways similar to how I did in a 100-poem book of love poems for Kate in celebration of our 30^th wedding anniversary. Aretha’s song “Call Me” helped to convince me that I wanted to call Kate from the next room instead of from halfway across the country.

If we don’t take the stage of the piano bar, we could have another singer stand in for us on a mix tape, the way John Cusack’s characters do in the films High Fidelity and Say Anything. Sometimes I wonder if Peter Gabriel can capture my wife’s haunting beauty better than I have.

But once I did take the mic. At my own wedding reception, I took a short break from all the dancing to ask my Michigan cousin Pete if he knew the Phil Phillips song “Sea of Love” on the piano. He went downstairs to try it out on the second piano at the Katherine Legge Memorial Lodge in Hinsdale, Illinois, and I followed him while wearing, for the first day, the same wedding band that I am wearing as I type this.

Pete figured it out, we both returned upstairs, I took the microphone and asked the DJ to pause spinning LPs for a few minutes. And then, right after I heard Kate say “uh-oh,” I serenaded my new bride in front of all our family and friends. My dad, the award-winning director, might have wished that I had followed him into theatre, for that sort of work automatically makes one more brave and confident when interacting with the world, but at least he got to see me perform on the biggest day of my life.

Whether in film or in real life, the ritual of the eye-contact love song, the solo serenade, can either strengthen a bond between two people, or surround the singer with the sort of poignancy that we have trouble accessing otherwise. As another character says in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, another Stephen Sondheim classic, “If I cannot fly, let me sing.”

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Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. Science. What U word refers to the study of sound waves of very high frequency beyond the range of human hearing?

2. Books and Authors. First name Sandra, who authored The House on Mango Street, a defining novel in Latina literature?

3. Current Events –Drugs in the News. According to a recent edition of the Daily Mail newspaper, a NSAID, an anti-inflammatory drug such as ibuprofen, is the only effective treatment for acute low back pain. What does the NS of NSAID stand for?

P.P.S. Our next Poetry Night will feature Clarence Major on April 3rd. Join us at the Natsoulas Gallery!