Play On!

I am probably going to raise eyebrows, but I’m stating here and now that my wife is a factotum. That is, she can do just about everything that needs to be done, do it quickly and do it well.

I asked her once, “What do you want from me in return?”

“Everything you got,” she replied.

Fair enough, I thought, as we stroll down the pathway of a realistic American marriage.

When you reach my age, you realize that everything you’ve got, you gotta give to someone rather soon. And what’s more logical than to reward the wife who brought you coffee in bed all through your marriage? The worst thing a guy can do is to ask if he’s worthy of his wife — that’s just opening the door to trouble without end. Of course, you’re worthy of your wife if she’s fool enough to put up with you! In fact, you are some smart dude!

Payback

A Harvard official is coming to visit me soon — you know, one of those super-nice guys who goes around visiting old grads. Harvard is a whiz at not letting you forget where you got all those smarts — and how you can show your appreciation to that grand old institution. Well, as an impecunious lad of 17, I took off from Florida to Massachusetts to see what that famous university was all about, and it was about plenty that has affected my life ever since. Somebody long dead helped me mightily along the way, and now it’s my turn to do my share — and I will.

Job maker

Politicians keep suggesting that we create jobs for people. I figure I did my part when I married b.w. If you don’t think that it’s a job to live with me, just ask her.

Alpha and omega

In Hamlet, Shakespeare says, “to be or not to be,” which ponders the question whether to continue living and face all the inequities therein, or to do oneself in and escape “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. Most of us reason that we will be dead soon enough, and have no wish to speed up the process. As long as a creative mind is working, living delineates its own raison d’être.

Shakespeare concerned himself much with thinking and how the mind converts thought to action. In my young days, I sang the part of Romeo in Shakespeare’s/Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” in the U.S. and Europe. Romeo is a young, high-spirited guy, a man of action. Whereas Shakespeare’s/Verdi’s late creation Othello (Otello) is a man of brooding tragic emotions that motivate all that he does and demanded the maximum of my artistic abilities and life experience. In these two roles were the histrionic alpha and omega of a man’s life — and singing career.

Many things

In 1983, b.w. and I founded Festival of Orchestras. In 2001, after 17 years of bringing concerts, we retired. The organization continued for 10 more years. I started writing Play On! some 30 years ago and was a distinguished professor on the UCF faculty for 24 years. Meanwhile, I sang as soloist eight or 10 times with the FSO and the Bach Festival organizations. The funny thing about all this first-person “horn-blowing” is that at the end of an extended performing career in 11 countries, I returned to my Winter Park home town in 1980 to do absolutely nothing!