SOTW: "Signs" and "Tomorrow"

I will forever designate 1998 as the year that went "Up in Smoke." Living in the Bay Area, it was easy to cruise through life in a hashish haze. I worked mind-numbingly simple duties in box offices and at receptionist's desks. So it made sense that I spent most of my time after work imagining other worlds and possibilities.

It was 1998 when James Redfield's "The Celestine Prophecy" magically appeared upon my path. Based upon one man's journey to Peru, the novel slowly unfolds the Nine Insights towards enlightenment - the first and, somehow, most important is the notion of synchronicity. Or, in the words of Un-G's mocking rendition of a Dennis Hopper character, "it's the signs maaan..."

Blame it on my anachronistic hippie tendencies, but Redfield's text wasn't the first time I had heard about signs. The first time these theoretical images were posted in my mind was in sixth grade, when I side-stepped the battles waged on West Covina playgrounds between the Power 106 disco bunnies and KROQ new wave skaters by choosing to listen to K-EARTH's oldie classics. In the late 80s fashion of retro fascination with the Vietnam War and civil rights movement, this song presented a simple image that reverberated with the themes of discrimination and protest:

Five Man Electrical Band, Signs - 5 Man Electrical Band

***

As a side note and through a serendipitous chain of events, I received this email today from a dear friend and talented artist, Ramon Abad. In it, Ramon shared the following documentation of a sign he had recently made himself:

****

Stepping out of the Hollywood/Highland Metro Station one January night this year, I found myself somewhere between the magnetic charge of Redfield's spiritual definitions and the Five Man Electrical Band's socially conscious chorus. I looked up and saw a banner announcing the arrival of Annie: the Musical to the Kodak Theatre. This would be an otherwise banal announcement if it weren't for the fact that right next door was the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the same theatre where, in 1982, I watched my first movie -- Annie.





There were other signs and details I remember from that initial cinematic evening -- the neon lights that announced Norm's Restaurant and the fact that I ate pancakes for dinner. The concept of breakfast for dinner was mind-blowing for my six-year old mind. Throughout the later years of my childhood, I would come to regard pancakes as my father's favorite McDonald's meal. In the glistening present-ness of his current state of dementia, these minutiae of the past that I dearly cling onto bear no relevance.

As a recovering hippie and an unapologetically sentimental being, I read the banner announcing the musical's arrival in town and took it as a cosmic directive. Last Wednesday, I found myself walking up the steps of that same Kodak Theatre in the middle of a swarm of little girls --- some dressed in Annie's signature red dress, others complete with curly red-headed wigs, but all in their Sunday best. Some of us came as orphans, perhaps still unwitting. Yet others had come to inhabit what our dearest compatriot, El Bee, would call their "orphan fantasies" -- creative ways of imagining yourself outside of the family you were born into. Our generation's proclivity to these types of reveries might be considered Annie's legacy.

This was my first time watching Annie as an adult and as a theatrical production. Before this last week, I only knew it as Carol Burnett and Albert Finney, Bernadette Peters and "that guy from the 7Up commercials" (Geoffrey Holder). And, in between the 1982 premiere at Mann's Chinese Theatre and 2009 revival at the Kodak, I traced it in my mind through repetitively listening to and singing along with the soundtrack on my parent's coffin-sized turntable system. (And, yes, I did, as most only children do, act out the scenes by myself in the living room.) So it was no wonder to me when a pint-sized little girl in my row leapt up during the first act and stood in the aisle for the remainder of the show. Her eyes fixated on the actors onstage, she sang along with the songs she knew and traced her tiny feet along the plush red carpet in the hopes of remembering the order of dance steps for a later re-enactment.

I wonder if the ways that this 1930s Depression era musical resonate with our early 21st century political moment were recognized by that audience of young ladies. Were the feelings of despair and resignation portrayed by the show's abandoned characters -- from the orphans of the Girl's Annex to the Hooverville residents to even Sandy, that "mangy old mutt" -- the same as those swirling inside these little girls' own homes?

That evening, the scene of FDR singing "Tomorrow" with Annie in the Oval Office uncannily echoed the comparisons made by the media between him and our current president. But after this past Tuesday's historic inauguration, I imagine Obama to be a bit more Annie than he is Franklin -- a realistic dreamer that has developed his personal and political ethos through the fire and against all odds. (That he is something of an orphan too is a fact not lost upon me.) To consider then this past Tuesday's main event as a form of musical theatre is also not so far-fetched -- its high production value to tell a story through words and music, movement and heightened emotions. It would, of course, be sealed by a praise song.

For our 44th president, for those rows of little girls, for the unemployed and underpaid, for those battling the deterioration of the past, there will always be this reminder:

Tomorrow - Aileen Quinn

- (CBB)