faltering run lasted just long enough for me to get there, quiet as a postulant throughout the interminable ride to the Martin Beck Theatre. Divining that this was a momentous occasion, my dad had nabbed us front-row seats; and all the grown-ups around us thought it was so cute that this little boy was blissing out at sitting close. It’s cute at age eight, perhaps; but it would seem less cute than suspicious later on when I counted the amenities of theatregoing more heavily than those of making the team. Real men don’t care where they sit at a musical. Real men don’t watch spellbound, taking in every move that Barbara Cook and Irra Petina make, memorizing the show like a camera. I wonder if I sensed, even then, that a lot of things real men don’t do were the most stimulating things done.
By this time my parents had begun to realize that they had called up a monster in me. My older brothers played touch football and my little brothers played Candyland; I played show albums. Who were their heroes? Mickey Mantle and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Mine was Alistair Cooke. My mother took to calling me “The Changeling.” Perhaps I was too sophisticated, or too self-important in my sophistication. When our maid Sarah Lee Patterson purloined my Mr. Wonderful souvenir book, I fired her. I was nine years old.
My brothers were flabbergasted; my mother, for once, speechless. But Sarah Lee had been generally screwy, using the carpet sweeper on the lawn, eating TV dinners frozen, right out of the box, and spending her days in her room writing a movie script decorated with colored stick-on stars and stolen from Raintree County, with Sarah Lee all set to replace Elizabeth Taylor. Sarah Lee knew I had the goods on her, and went quietly. And lo, when the smoke cleared, it turned out that she had been systematically looting the house of treasures great and small. “Bud fired the maid” became a catchphrase in the family, admiration and horror at once. Real men don’t fire maids at the age of nine. Real men have no relationships with maids whatsoever.
Theatre governed my existence to the extent that I can chart my Bildung through the titles: Peter Pan, my first chance to see the magic worked upon someone younger than myself—my brother Andrew, who crowed at Mary Martin. New Girl in Town, my first musical noir. Auntie Mame, my first nonmusical. Redhead, my first inkling that not everyone loves musicals to death, when my dad abruptly got up after ten minutes of—I must admit—infantile nonsense, told me he’d meet me in the lobby at five o’clock, and left. Salad Days (in London), an experience in culture shock: the playbill cost money, Britishers tend to cluster in the middle of the house (leaving me alone in the first row, cowering under the souvenir program), and the level of production was far below what Broadway took for granted. Flower Drum Song, the first show I saw twice, first with Mother and then in one of those dynastic theatre parties in which every living relative takes part, serried along an entire row of seats. My littlest brother Tony, who was so excited by The Music Man that he couldn’t sit down once the curtain went up, did not take to the solemnity of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and wandered in and out of the house in search of the men’s room, the candy counter, and other arcana, to my digust. Worse yet, my dad happily sang along with the orchestra during the overture—and I mean aloud, improvising lyrics when memory failed. “No talking during the show!” I explained. He just tousled my hair and went right into “Grant Avenue.” You can’t get anywhere with someone like that.
Not many real men get into musicals. My dad and Oscar Hammerstein II are the only two I know of. The rest of us do almost as a matter of course. Why? One possibility is what I call the Candide theory: musicals make you smart. I got more out of that one show—in lit, music, and social history—than some people got out of four
By this time my parents had begun to realize that they had called up a monster in me. My older brothers played touch football and my little brothers played Candyland; I played show albums. Who were their heroes? Mickey Mantle and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Mine was Alistair Cooke. My mother took to calling me “The Changeling.” Perhaps I was too sophisticated, or too self-important in my sophistication. When our maid Sarah Lee Patterson purloined my Mr. Wonderful souvenir book, I fired her. I was nine years old.
My brothers were flabbergasted; my mother, for once, speechless. But Sarah Lee had been generally screwy, using the carpet sweeper on the lawn, eating TV dinners frozen, right out of the box, and spending her days in her room writing a movie script decorated with colored stick-on stars and stolen from Raintree County, with Sarah Lee all set to replace Elizabeth Taylor. Sarah Lee knew I had the goods on her, and went quietly. And lo, when the smoke cleared, it turned out that she had been systematically looting the house of treasures great and small. “Bud fired the maid” became a catchphrase in the family, admiration and horror at once. Real men don’t fire maids at the age of nine. Real men have no relationships with maids whatsoever.
Theatre governed my existence to the extent that I can chart my Bildung through the titles: Peter Pan, my first chance to see the magic worked upon someone younger than myself—my brother Andrew, who crowed at Mary Martin. New Girl in Town, my first musical noir. Auntie Mame, my first nonmusical. Redhead, my first inkling that not everyone loves musicals to death, when my dad abruptly got up after ten minutes of—I must admit—infantile nonsense, told me he’d meet me in the lobby at five o’clock, and left. Salad Days (in London), an experience in culture shock: the playbill cost money, Britishers tend to cluster in the middle of the house (leaving me alone in the first row, cowering under the souvenir program), and the level of production was far below what Broadway took for granted. Flower Drum Song, the first show I saw twice, first with Mother and then in one of those dynastic theatre parties in which every living relative takes part, serried along an entire row of seats. My littlest brother Tony, who was so excited by The Music Man that he couldn’t sit down once the curtain went up, did not take to the solemnity of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and wandered in and out of the house in search of the men’s room, the candy counter, and other arcana, to my digust. Worse yet, my dad happily sang along with the orchestra during the overture—and I mean aloud, improvising lyrics when memory failed. “No talking during the show!” I explained. He just tousled my hair and went right into “Grant Avenue.” You can’t get anywhere with someone like that.
Not many real men get into musicals. My dad and Oscar Hammerstein II are the only two I know of. The rest of us do almost as a matter of course. Why? One possibility is what I call the Candide theory: musicals make you smart. I got more out of that one show—in lit, music, and social history—than some people got out of four
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