Jazz Hands!

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"Music can open up so many emotions that we didn't know we had. It's the magical thing about musicals... on the stage or on film... They work so well because music touches us, emotionally, where words alone can't."

-- Johnny Depp

(huh?... I know. Read on)


Genesis 37:3 changed my life.


And so did Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice

… because they wrote the musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

Thanks to them…

I am now flaaaaaming!

Not quite. But I am a lot happier (and still pretty fabulous).

Y’see, in the Spring of 1998 I was a piddling high school freshman, a reporter for my high school newspaper, “The Cougar Chronicle”, and I was in a small theater at St. Joe’s University, just five blocks from my high school.
As I sat in the front row, the lights dimmed and I prepared to scribble a review of my high school’s production of “Joseph” (as it was known, for brevity’s sake). Going in, I knew two things about the show: both my brothers were in it, and I was not.

Y’see, I chose to play on my school’s baseball team that year instead of participating in Musical Theater (both took place in the Spring).

Why???

Because I was a fool!

I went to a high school full of Jews. Naturally our athletics department was awful and our theatrical department was… passable.

Instead of PLAYING baseball we should’ve been practiced being agents or owners.
(How do you have a baseball team with 2 outfielders and 14 guys carrying the water?)

I sat in that darkened theater 12 years ago and watched kids I had known for 10 years, kids I never thought twice about, kids I never respected…

I watched them kick theatrical ass!

My brothers, too!

This ragtag group of misfits (note: groups of misfits are always “ragtag”) sang, danced, and projected energy and enthusiasm like nothing I had ever seen before.

I had been to plays and musicals, but those were adults performing. Strangers.

These were my peers.

And they had talent!

(Or at least they could fake it… which was just as impressive)

I couldn’t believe it.

Why, oh why had wasted my time playing baseball?!

When you’re playing a sport, any sport, even if you try your damnedest, perform really well, put in 110%... there is someone trying to stop you! A team of guys are standing in your way. People are TRYING to make you fail. Make you lose.

That sucks!

With theater… the audience WANTS to enjoy themselves. People WANT to have a good time and WANT you to perform well.

The only people who hope you screw up are competing actors.

I like those odds a lot better.


“Now Israel (a.k.a., Jacob) loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors.”
-- (Gen. 37:3)

Jacob:
Joseph's mother, she was quite my favorite wife
I never really loved another all my life
And Joseph was
My joy because
He reminded me of her

-- Lyrics by Tim Rice





“And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more… they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.”
-- (Gen. 3:4)



Narrator:
It made the rest
feel second best
And even if they were -

Brothers:
Being told we're also-rans
Does not makes us Joseph fans

Narrator:
But where they had really missed the boat is

Brothers:
We're great guys but no-one seems to notice

Narrator:
Joseph's charm and winning smile
Failed to slay them in the aisle

-- Lyrics by Tim Rice


My God! How can you NOT love it?

No, it ain’t Sondheim, or Paul Simon or Bob Dylan…

But it’s infectious as hell.
And 12 years ago it infected me.
And the musical “Joseph” was the “Outbreak” monkey that bit my soul!



"You're seeing emotions painted larger than life and if you paint them smaller than life you might as well sit at home and watch television or look in the mirror."

-- Tim Rice, lyricist (Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar, Aladdin, Lion King, Aida)

He can make a radio out of a coconut...

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"And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons."


-- Gen. 3:7


Damn!


Looks like they could've used Adam and Eve on Gilligan's Island.



Remember, at the end of chapter two, "And they were both naked, the man and the woman, and they were not ashamed." (Gen. 2:25)

So, after they ate from the tree of knowledge, they realized, "Wow! We're nekkid!"

And apparently they were embarrassed. Come on! How would they know? Clothes didn't exist to begin with! So nudity was the default setting. There were no other options... till they sewed leaves together... using pine needles and thread they coaxed from a silk worm's ass!



Then, as punishment for eating from the spooky tree, God tells Eve "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children..." (3:16).

Makes sense. That's the only logical reason why childbirth would cause a woman pain-- God decreed it. Never mind the fact that she's squeezing a PERSON through her HOO-HA !

Perhaps this was a way ancient people explained child birth. That is all they knew. They didn't have the scientific/technological advances of modern times.

They knew that after guys and ladies got bizzay, babies came out of the ladies. And that was it! That's all they knew.

Just like Adam and Eve, suddenly they "knew that they were naked!"


"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody KNEW the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody KNEW the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you KNEW that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll KNOW... tomorrow."

--K (Tommy Lee Jones), "Men In Black" , written by Ed Solomon, Lowell Cunningham