The Pied Piper

I always used to hear that you needed a doctor, a lawyer, and an auto mechanic in the family if life was going to make any sense at all, and that is all true. But as time goes on one's needs expand and that family needs to be larger than one that sent two children off to professions and kept one in a blue collar to keep the Volvo tuned up.

One family member well-connected in the entertainment world must be kept now. In New York I had "Mr. Opera", actually a brother-in-law, who review operas and always had a fourth row, center seat at the Met. When he couldn't attend he often offered it to me and, even if he did, had the connections to take care of The Opera Queens. Here in Miami I have Matt (holding the beer bottle in a non-scandalous manner), a director of the state theatrical association. He is sort of the Pied Piper of the Broadway set; a new musical opens, he whips out his flute, and all the children follow. Last night we all heard the haunting tune of his pipe a followed him, dancing, to Hairspray's opening night.

Interesting enough to me, Hairspray--a piece so centered around race and prejudice--played to an overwhelmingly "lily white" audience. "Typical Miami Beach opening night", I told Matt, "the old Jewish money from above 23rd Street and the new gay money and their friends from south of it." Truthfully, if a bomb had gone off there wouldn't have been a banker, hairdresser, bartender, or fag hag left to run the town.
Mattie wowed me again with third row, center seats that found me embarrassingly looking up the skirts of the dancers and wishing they were boys. And after a slow start that reminded me (no doubt because of the same time period) of Little Shop of Horrors, Hairspray took off into the stratosphere of High Entertainment. By the rousing final dance number young fags were dancing in the aisles and old, Jewish ladies clapping as if they stumbled upon a revival meeting. Ah, Miami Beach.