Sometimes things change so gradually that you have no idea they’re changing at all, until you look back and you wonder…when did that happen? Where did that go? When did that stop?
The mainstage show tonight was a cabaret style production of big band style music; not a true big band of course, as we only have a 6 piece, which always makes things a bit sad (it’s never the same when the brass is tracked in…and it never will be). I’ve seen the show before, I had even seen it earlier this evening. But at the late night show, there was the tiniest bit of a shift in my normal circumstance. As a crew member you see, I’m restricted to sitting at the back of the theatre – by the time the sound reaches me back there, it’s slightly muffled, slightly muted, and I can’t feel anything. Appreciate certainly, but not feel. However, since I’m on this cruise as a (semi) guest, I was able to slide into a seat three rows from the front for the second show.
And suddenly I was crying…
At first I had no idea why I was crying, and then it came barreling into me like a brass-tinged freight train.
I was homesick.
Not homesick for home exactly, home is still there after all, I’ll be back there in a few days. No, homesick for…something that went away…something I was suddenly back with.
When I was growing up, there was always always music. The radio was always on, my family was always singing, practicing, humming something. Growing up I do not remember a time when music was not a simple day to day fact of my life. I came home from the hospital to a full big band rehearsing in my living room, I grew up listening to my Mum singing while she cleared up the kitchen, to my Father practicing in the upstairs bedroom, to my ‘Uncle’ strumming a guitar in the guest room (though that happened rarely, he wasn’t exactly the practicing type). I didn’t learn music, I absorbed it. It was all around me. And in the evening, we used to sit in the sunroom and Dad would hook up the stereo; at first it was records, later CDs, and he would put the giant heavy ‘tin can’ headphones on my head. Those headphones were heavy, I remember how the top of them pressed into the top of my head and they almost fell off my ears…but he would put them on my head and he would turn up the volume and tell me to listen. Listen to how the bass felt, listen to which part was which, listen to the vocals. He taught me how to listen with just one headphone so that I could sing properly without learning myself out of tune…forget my hours and hours of lessons and expensive training, those headphones were how I learned to sing. And we’d sit there, the three of us, for hours…for hours upon hours, and just listen. Miller, Midler, countless broadway and movie soundtracks, even 50s classic rock. I traveled the world through those tin-cans long before I ever set foot on a ship…
And then…I don’t know…something happened. A series of things happened…the radio stations went off the air, my uncle passed away, the stereo broke, the record player wore out…I went to England…I came back….I don’t know…I can’t remember. At some point, something stopped, something changed….and music the way I’d grown up with it…it just kind of…slowly disappeared. I don’t know when, it seems very important that I should remember when, but I don’t. And I’ve tried, but…I don’t remember.
And sitting in that audience this evening, it came pouring back in on me. What it was like. And I suppose that memory spilled out of my eyes…
Because dammit…I miss my tin-cans…
~hugs heaps~ I cannot pretend to understand how you are feeling. I was the first “musical” type person in my family and, whilst I loved every aspect of music, it was not something that came naturally to me and was not something I was allowed to enjoy at home. That situation only made me hunger for it all the more and cling to opportunities with a death grip whenever they arose.
I am glad you had the opportunity to see the show as a guest and that it brought back happy memories for you.