MY OLD FRIEND
FREDDY ZALTA
THE OTHER MORNING, I HEARD A SONG BY HARRY CHAPIN, “REMEMBER WHEN THE MUSIC,” AND IT BROUGHT BACK A SENSE OF NOSTALGIA TO ME. NOT THAT IT TAKES MUCH TO MAKE ME FEEL NOSTALGIC. I THOUGHT ABOUT THOSE OLD TRANSISTOR RADIOS I USED TO HAVE AND LISTENING TO THE AM BAND AND SINGING ALONG TO THE SONGS THAT CAME FROM THAT SMALL SPEAKER.
I thought about my father, who as a kid had an aluminum radio kit he would set up on a roof and listen to whatever it would pick up.
For years I would schlep vinyl albums with me in boxes, then cassettes, CDs, and miraculously my iPad. These days I listen to any song I want to hear, and it only takes a moment at most to find it.
It’s amazing to this 57 year old man that, to this day, when I hear a song which I played on my record player that had a scratch on the vinyl, I still expect to hear that skip.
From thinking about the music I loved, my mind moved on to the plays we used to put on when a group of us were teenagers.
Bye Bye Birdie, was the first show I was in. I played Mr McAfee, the father of a teenage girl who falls in love with a Justin Bieber (circa 2000 something) like star. My “daughter” wins a lottery and this star, Conrad Birdie sleeps at the McAfee house. There begins all the hysteria.
At one point, the father, me, gets so fed up that he screams, “this is my house!”
I got so much applause from that one line that it caused a sort of rush which I would try to relive, I guess, for the rest of my life.
However, it wasn’t the performances which kept me coming back to perform many more shows. It was the bond that the cast forged. We would sit backstage in the stairwell and together sing songs — Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Elton John.
It’s strange and it sounds kind of foreign to me at this point in my life, but a love grew between each of us. Waiting in the stairwell for our turn to rehearse, we’d talk and we would reveal our dreams, fears, and fall in love over and over again. We would simply just hang out and talk, not in a rush to get anywhere. There were no distractions other than having to memorize our lines.
Our director, most of the time, was Steve Doueck. Somehow he would always be patient with us and despite our inability to stop performing, even off the stage, teach us about acting, life, and the importance of being team players. Later on we were blessed to have Hank Menahem, Max Anteby and Yishai Gross as our directors, among others.
The rehearsals were fun, if you ever watched a reel of bloopers, you can imagine what sort of craziness went on with teenagers blessed with undiagnosed ADHD. We definitely tested the patience of the directors and at least one of them almost blew up in front of us. We knew it was our fault, but we were kids and we tested the limits.
We didn’t want the nights to end, as if we had some intuitive sense or defense mechanisms in place to avoid this part of our lives ending.
We never went straight home after the rehearsals. Usually we would end up in a diner, Carvel or Del Rio. Filled with a false bravado only a teenager can have, we were respectful to everyone, yet we felt empowered by each other’s presence.
I would drive my friends home sometimes and occasionally we would sit in the car, outside their homes for hours, laughing and talking about our lives off stage. We would laugh. We would laugh, did I say that already? We would be cracking up all the time.
We would sing the songs in the show we were rehearsing or one of us would start singing a random tune and the rest would join in. I remember one night I was sitting alone on the stairs and I started singing a Bob Dylan song. A castmate walked in and joined me. Then another and another. Soon, we were all there and the stage manager had to pry us away to join the rehearsals.
Years later, I was in a show with some older people. I became very close to each of these ladies and gentlemen. We all shared a common sense of wanting to be heard and seen. I didn’t realize it at the time but now I do, as an adult we are subconsciously selling ourselves. We flirt, we speak nicely and we wear the masks of the faces the people want to see. We become salespeople, teachers, advisors, mothers and fathers. We will be there for whoever needs us to be. It’s in our nature, or perhaps it was passed on to us by the directors throughout the hundreds of hours of rehearsals. We want to be acknowledged, no, our actions demand we be acknowledged. Parents are the best actors or we try to be. With mountains of pressure and constant weights upon our psyches, we manage to smile and try to act as if we have it all figured out.
We learn, eventually, to admit to our shortcomings. First, unwillingly to ourselves and then to the ones who matter. So, those ladies and gentlemen and myself, we stood for each other. We each listened.
My father used to watch Al Jolson movies at home. I used to love seeing his smile and watch as his tears fell. I learned so many of those songs that I was able to sing them with the older folks in the stairwell, always with smiles and a sense of nostalgia on the faces of my friends. It was something I knew at the time, I would remember forever.
I am not talking about my championship seasons, Lord knows we played shows with only the four mothers who would show up as our full audience each evening. Our seasons, like most people’s and even sports teams, end too soon.
These days, nostalgia has taken on new meaning. I had forgotten about that fleeting time since October 7. My mind has been overwhelmed with pain and confusion.
When I am speaking about my past, I’m talking about the years when our spirits were alive and pouncing on each moment. We were young, too young to realize that those times, and our days on this earth, would be numbered.
Success and failure would never be as intense as it was then. Later on, those emotions would be lessened by life’s responsibilities and the truth in failure and success.
Falling in love would never end, only the faces and the names would change. I will never forget that sense of love, that sense of community, that sense of being seen, and being heard.
Even if the words were not our own and were rehearsed, it was us up there, all eyes and ears focused on us — and there was that gnawing feeling that we were more than what people perceived us to be and more than what we perceived ourselves to be. We were singers, actors and dancers. As artists, we reveal ourselves through our art. We have the temerity to stand naked (metaphorically) on stage revealing all of our scrapes and scars.
We get older and it’s ok. You cannot paint or inject yourself with the fountain of youth. Our lives and the lives who touched us and the lives we touched become beautiful memories.
Nostalgia can captivate us, but in truth it’s the future that revives us. Let us pray, let us join together in song, in love, friendship and faith in each other that we won’t forget our lines or miss our marks. If one of us does, we will catch him with some improvisation and an adlib or two.
Freddy has published 4 novels available at Amazon.
