“They Were You” from The Fantasticks by Jones/Schmitt | Human Merely Being

Описание: Is it a lullaby? A folk song? A hymn?

It’s all of the above and yet, like each of us, entirely its own thing.

Such is what I most love about this lilting song: it’s whimsical, undeniable ambiguity wrapped in an assured blanket of sonic familiarity--which makes it much like life itself, a perfect little paradox.

A duet sung at the end of the chamber musical The Fantasticks, “They Were You” is a perfect period on a charming theater piece that marries Shakespearean soliloquies and operetta style with the simplicity and directness of the great 20th-century American masters like Copland and Steinbeck. The young lovers--after much derring-do, idealism, idealism lost, a staged “abduction” and a metonymical rainstorm--reunite to sing a song that makes perfect sense and yet (literally/lyrically) somewhat confounds.

Much like Eliot’s The Wasteland (which I so love and hope you all come see “musicalized” again this Spring), the lyrics make sense figuratively, cosmically, holistically, not necessarily formally. Yet this so captures the characters’ spirit, to again invoke Eliot, as they return to the “place” (the beginning, love, each other) and “know” said place (now) for the first time.

On New Years Day, I left Saturn and entered Mercury. What awaits may be wildly different or different only in my mind or in name, but fundamentally, it will be different (as each day is) because I am most assuredly different than the 20-year-old kid who commenced her Saturn cycle crying all over campus, layering scarves over a perpetually racing heart, who wandering in equal bits wonder and worry.

Like the young moon, the month of May, the done dance and hung balloons, it’s all the same, but different; it’s all me--whether Saturn or Mercury--ebbing and flowing, ever protean and yet consistent as the first, the last, the only (but somehow also common and ubiquitous) Holly J Caracappa the First.

So ends the Saturn cycle. Stay tuned for a new cycle to come this Winter. For we are always cycling--in song or otherwise.

A special brava to Joon, as always, for her thought to start this piece pizzicato--which really captures the sweet innocence lost/remembered this song so embolizes.

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Portrait by Thais Aquino