Show Boat

The history of Broadway is divided between everything that happened before Show Boat and everything that happened after Show Boat.

Miles Kreoger - Broadway Historian  

I'm currently watching Broadway, The American Musical, Full Documentary.  It will take me a while.  It's five and a half  hours long.  

Why was this 1927 Broadway musical such a game changer?  For one thing, racism was almost as rampant on the stage as it was in real life.  Not because of those composing and performing, but because of the audience .  

So, it's reasonable to understand why Florenz Ziegfeld, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein and others were extraordinarily brave to (instead of following cultural change) instigate cultural change. Its themes include racial prejudice and tragic, enduring love. 

Show Boat was fully integrated.  This was new to Broadway.  It was a musical featuring dramatic pain and suffering.  This was new to Broadway.  Much of the story line was about a woman who was half Negro, passing as white,  a federal crime in 1927.  She was arrested and taken away.  

So what was life like for a Black man at that time?  "Old Man River" tells the story. 

By the way, when I was a teenager, I saw Frank Sinatra sing "Old Man River" at a movie theater in downtown Indianapolis."  Even then I was thinking "How does Sinatra have the right to sing this song?"

But, I digress. 

The Broadway musical "Show Boat"  was a radical departure in musical storytelling, pairing spectacle  with real life human suffering.   And it was a huge success.  And it was the beginning of a new way of doing musicals. Without it, we would never have had "Porgy an Bess" or, my favorite musical of all time, "Ragtime."

And Broadway continues, to this day, to tell society's unvarnished truth.

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Ash Wednesday 2025

Let conversation cease.  let laughter flee.  This is the place where death delights to help the living

 - Georgetown University School of Medicine Gross Anatomy Lab.

 I take Ash Wednesday seriously.  For me, it's a time of introspection and dealing with the fact that we are mortal.  

 I'm sharing part of a post that I wrote in 2014.  It's a beautiful story about my David's choice to share himself, even in death. In 2012 David and I toured the new University of Central Florida College of Medicine.  It was magnificent.  When we got to the gross anatomy lab, where the students would be dissecting deceased bodies, I was a bit skeptical - but   it was a holy experience.  

Shortly after leaving, David made arrangements to leave his body to the school.  I had a bit of a hard time with this and I was concerned about his children.  

But then I read a Washington Post article by Dr. Edward Beal, a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a clinical profess at the Georgetown University School of Medicine

In the article he said that he was shocked when his wife announced that she was going to donate her body to the Georgetown School of Medicine.  Dr. Beal goes on to say that he was remembering the old days when pranks were pulled and respect was not paid.   When he expressed his concerns to his wife she told him she was going to attend the School of Medicine's annual liturgy and Catholic Mass for families of donors. 

He went with her.

Dr. Beal said the room was filled with faculty, and family members who had come to collect the ashes of their loved one.  He goes on to say:

...nearly 200 students filed into the classroom; they each carried a lighted candle in honor of their donor body and placed the candles on a stage.  There were Jews, Muslims, Protestants, atheists and outright anti-religious students in the procession.  

Afterwards Dr. Beal spoke with several students.  One talked about her cadaver's heart and how it did not look like anything in a text book.  Another student said there was no doubt in her mind that she would donate her body when the time came.

And yet another said that....throughout the entire class, the cadaver's faces had remained covered, out of respect, until the time came to study the face.  She spoke almost reverently of how moved she felt the day she and her classmates removed the covering over the face of their cadaver and looked for the first time into the donor's eyes.

So, on this Ash Wednesday, which is very much about living and dying and how we do it, I'm feeling grateful for David and all the other people in my life who've gone on before me.  



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