HONORABLE MENTION CREATIVE WRITING

Lorraine Goodman

“Musick

has Charms…”

While music has been a part of my life since my earliest days — whether that meant trying to stretch my small hands to reach across an octave on our baby grand piano; toting my cello to rehearsals for high school chamber orchestra, the Suffolk County Training Orchestra, or the Long Island Youth Orchestra; or driving my sisters crazy by practicing Handel’s Rejoice Greatly over and over and over again—its real importance to me emerged in the mid-80s, shortly after I graduated college. I had decided to pursue a career as a singer/ actress in musicals when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A lifelong Broadway fan, my mother became obsessed with two songs in particular: the hit tune “Memory,” from the recently opened musical sensation by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. The lyrics: “When you walk through a storm hold your head up high, And don’t be afraid of the dark,” combined with Richard Rodgers’ soaring music still make me cry and remember her and that frightful period in my life.

But it was “Memory” that she wanted to hear most often — over and over and over again. Any time I sat with my mother, she would ask me to sing it to her. Being somewhat shy and somehow sensing that a hospital ward was not the place to let my particularly loud voice fill the halls, I demurred. My mother never gave up trying, but I was too young, too stupid, too… embarrassed? I tried to make up for it by creating a “not-really-a-mix” tape that had only two songs on endless repeat. Should she so desire, she could listen to, “Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement. Has the moon lost her memory? She is smiling alone…” over and over and over again.

Five years later—four after she had passed and after I had auditioned for the role numerous times—I was cast as Grizabella in the Vienna, Austria production of Cats. For nine months (nine lives?), night after night, six shows a week, I belted out, “Touch me! It’s so easy to leave me… all alone with the memory… of my days in the sun” — and, of course, on stage, before a packed audience and yet alone with the memory of my mother and my refusal to sing for her when she was ill and wished for that comfort.

For years after the production closed and I returned to the States, at every family event, be it Bar Mitzvah, wedding, funeral, BBQ, birthday celebration, people would ask, “Will you sing Memory for us?”

My penance, perhaps? But also, I now know, an enduring reminder of my mother and the gift of music that she shared with me.

I eventually lost my hesitance to sing in hospital corridors — not during the Covid pandemic, but during an earlier one — the height of the AIDS pandemic of the early to mid-80s. While performing on Broadway in Les Misérables, I was asked to join a small troupe of traveling singers as part of an initiative called, “Hearts and Voices.” Each week, five, six, or seven of us Broadway performers would spend our day off visiting one of the too many AIDS wards in the City. We would gather in a common area and sing songs of hope and joy to the rail-thin patients there. I remember the smiles on their gaunt, ashen faces, their bodies marred with lesions and ulcers, some barely able to sit up. Oftentimes, we would visit some of the rooms, as many of the patients were too ill to get out of bed. But when we walked in to sing? These invalid, very sick, weak, old-looking men in their 20s would reach out and clasp our arms. They would sway to the beat or try to hum along. I will never forget the sense of joy and connection to community that our music brought to those desperate halls. It, too, was a reminder of the enduring power of music to bring hope and comfort to people in need.

I now know more about the research and academically-proven importance of music in healthcare settings. I have read about its numerous therapeutic benefits; how it can reduce anxiety and stress, improve sleep, and provide a sense of calm and relaxation. I have been told that it can even help manage pain and other physical symptoms and that it is a medically-useful tool in coping with chronic illnesses such as cancer and AIDS.

But reading about music’s benefits and witnessing them in person are two very different things. I will never again decline the chance to sing to someone in need or share my music with someone in pain.