We went to see Hair at Weston Playhouse
and the opening performance of the epic song Aquarius
was easily worth the price of the ticket.
It opened the floodgates
of my own Hoover Dam
and the 60s came roaring back into my psychic space
as if my heart had willingly become a vacuum
in anticipation of a kind of private ecstatic homecoming.
The theater momentarily disappeared
as pellucid youthful voices,
heralding the dawning of the age of love,
swept me out of my simmering funk
into a heightened state of believing
that anything is possible with love.
Love will steer the stars.
Then the story slowly chipped away at that vision.
The story of a young man, Claude’s
enlistment into the army
and the downward spiral of his consigning his soul
to the military industrial complex.
As Claude said when he returned
to his old haunts and was questioned by his peers:
“Berger, I feel like I died.”
He is like Jesus of course, crucified by the war machine.
The hippie in him was easily erased
or, more accurately, blown away with a violence
that they somehow conveyed
with a concussive sound effect
and a flash of blue light.
In terms of stage craft, the actor stripped off stage,
donned camouflage fatigues,
pulled off his wig, mussed up his hair a bit
so he looked like he hadn’t slept in a few nights
and was instantly transformed
into a casualty of the Vietnam debacle.
Another zombie for Uncle Sam,
a drone, a stooge, an interchangeable cog
in the military juggernaut.
So, there I am, sitting
in my cushy theater seat
next to my wife,
holding back a tsunami of grief.
The effect of the anthem of freelove of the 60s
all but forgotten by my fickle memory
along with all the storied memories of my own experiments
to return to the garden of human possibility
that was just so fragile, so doomed, so,
as it turns out,
unAmerican.
What is American, by the way?
What is in the stars for us if we do away with love?
What will steer the stars?
'…a major destabilizing influence'