“They Were You,” from The Fantasticks (196?)
By 1963, I’d been teaching in my home town of Olmsted Falls for four years. The first year, I’d taught 4th through 6th-grade Spanish, moving between two grade schools. For the past three years, I’d taught in the junior and then senior high schools, Spanish the first two years and history (world and American) and government all three years. On the side, I directed the school plays and with another teacher (a failed Jesuit) led a Philosophy Club, which met one evening a month, rotating among students’ homes with their parents invited to join us.
If someone had told me when I was in college that I’d like teaching, I’d have thought he was nuts, but it turned out I loved it, absolutely adored it. What could be better than living the life of the mind (more or less) and making life better for students I cared about deeply?
In the summers, I worked –one year at a gas station; another, an ore boat on the Great Lakes; then a plant policeman at Alcoa; and one summer, carpenter at a summer theater. But by 1963, I was well enough off that I could pass taking a paying job that summer. Instead, I taught a course for my students –twentieth-century history. I’d never made it all the way through the twentieth century in my regular world history course so I felt I owed it to my students, whoever was crazy enough to sign up for three hours a morning, four days a week for a month of extra study for no credit, to bring them up to date on the the present. The course ended by July. I was free until fall.
***
I’d seen a notice in the Cleveland Press about a musical, The Fantasticks, at Huntington Bay Theater, in Bay Village. I’d acted and sung in college, and I’d had three summers on the Showboat Majestic, so though I’d never acted in a musical before, I thought hey, there has to be a first time for everything and it looked like fun. I tried out and was cast as Matt, the male ingénue. Opposite me as Luisa was a young lady named Esther. Esther Bendik. We were to be the love interest in the play. Most of the time, we would be together on stage –singing, talking, dancing– yoked for the duration of the show.
***
I met Esther the first time at the read-through. On the basis of no evidence at all except that I already had a girlfriend who wouldn’t be happy if I was interested in anyone else, I decided Esther wasn’t my type. But she definitely was a looker, that I had to admit. Petite. Dark brown wavy hair falling to the middle of her neck. Skin glowing with health. Lips to die for. Eyes gray-green and big enough to swallow me whole.
I fretted that we wouldn’t match up on stage, me 6’ 3” and bean thin, and her 5’ 2″ (and a quarter –she insisted on that quarter inch) and curvy. Very attractive curves.
We went for coffee after the read-through to get to know each other but it didn’t work out. I came across as self-centered and opinionated. (Which I was.) I thought she was stuck on herself. (Which she wasn’t.) When she got home that night, Esther told her sister Irene, with whom she shared an apartment, that she’d met the guy who’d be playing opposite her and he was a loser! She didn’t know how she could stand being partnered with him for the next month and a half.
At some point during rehearsals, my feelings changed. I didn’t even realize it or admit it, but the more I was around her, the more attractive I found her. Yes, it was physical –physically she was very attractive– but it was more than that. I admired her. I found myself thinking how passionate she was about things that mattered to her, how easy she was to talk with, how exciting it was to be around her. I found myself looking forward to rehearsals because we’d be together for a few hours. I was on my best behavior around her –well, as best as I could manage. I paid attention to what she said even if she wasn’t addressing me. I tried, sometimes successfully, to exercise restraint in my remarks, not always to be the first to voice opinions. I had it bad! I just didn’t know it yet.
Then in one afternoon, I blew whatever gain I’d made with her till then. We met to go over lines. The night before, I’d started a letter to my girlfriend in Erie, PA. She wasn’t at all happy about me being in a play with an attractive woman and she was irritated that I didn’t have time to visit her on weekends any more. I poured out my frustration with Esther in my letter to her.
Even as I wrote it, I didn’t believe what I was writing. It was my girlfriend: she was suspicious and angry and I wrote to placate her. Whatever I wrote about Esther, underneath was frustration with not getting through to her and how much I wanted her to notice me. I hadn’t even admitted to myself that was what I wanted, but it was, and it came out screwed up in that letter. I read the letter preparatory to mailing it off and realized how unfair –untrue– it was. So I didn’t send it off. I stuck it in my script to throw away later. Then I forgot it was there.
Fast forward to our meeting to go over lines. We read the lines to each other and when we were done, I left. By accident, I picked up her script and left mine behind for her, with the letter inside. At rehearsal that night, it was like I was standing next to an iceberg, she was so cold. What had happened? What had I done? I thought we were friends. When we left that night, she handed me my script and took hers back. Then I knew. I wanted to die. I’d blown my chance with Esther before I’d even known I wanted one.
There were two weeks left in rehearsal. By the end of it, we were on friendly terms again. The freeze had done wonders for me. It clarified how I felt about her. I wanted her to like me. I wanted to show her I was –or could be—a better person.
I’d never cared for anyone like I cared for her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.
Finally, it was dress rehearsal. Afterwards, we took off our makeup, changed out of our costumes and headed for the door. Everyone else climbed in their cars and left but Esther and I stayed behind in the parking lot, talking. I said, why don’t we walk down to the lakeshore –it was only a few hundred feet away. She said yes. We walked down to the lake, climbed some rocks and ended up sitting shoulder to shoulder on a boulder jutting over the water. There was no moon overhead, little starlight. The sky was black. We could hear the waves wash against the shore, the occasional cry of a seagull. We kissed, then kissed again. We talked and kissed some more.
It was midnight by the time we got back to our cars. The park had been closed for two hours by then. We were getting ready to leave when a police car pulled up beside us. The officer asked who we were and why we were there so late. It turned out that he’d been asked to check by Esther’s cousin-in-law, a Bay Village policeman who was working on dispatch that night. He’d received a report that his cousin-in-law’s car was sitting unoccupied by the lake and asked the beat cop to check it out. Satisfied with our story, the patrolman finally drove off. Esther got in her car and I got in mine. We drove off, she toward her place, me toward mine.
We tooted our horns and blinked our lights at each other as we drove away, generally acting like fools. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, another patrol car –we were in a different town now– came up behind us, cherry top blinking. We pulled to the side of the road and the policeman asked what we were doing. He reminded us it was late and cautioned us not to make any more noise –people had to get up early in the morning. He let us go without a citation.
After he left, I turned to Esther and said, “Let’s stop at the White Castle by the airport.” We did and we talked over hamburgs and coffee for another half hour before saying good night for good and heading to our separate homes.
For the next three weeks, while the production ran its course, we were an item, joined at the hips, inseparable, on stage and off. Our off stage romance fueled our on stage relationship. Everything we did seemed magic. It was a bittersweet experience for me, though, because I knew that Esther was planning to leave for New York as soon as the play closed.
She had been planning it for a long time. She wanted to study voice in New York and try out for musicals. I didn’t want her to go but knew it was the right thing for her to do. She had to go but I was sick that I was going to lose her so soon after meeting her.
The play closed. A week later, I helped pack her belongings into the trunk of my little Karman Ghia and we drove to Flushing, where she was to share an apartment with a high school classmate of hers.
I didn’t know how we’d keep our romance together, separated as we were by an eight hour drive (in good weather, in bad weather even longer) but I was determined to do whatever it took. Thus began a courtship that lasted from September that year until December the following, when we married and I moved to New York to be with her.
In later years, we would perform in two musicals —Fiorello! and Baby- and act in one play together. One year, we had our own cabaret group: we held a full-length concert at the local Big Box theater, the Stanley in Utica, NY, performing for a capacity audience.
But none of these experiences was as magical as our first time on stage together when we acted as though, and really were, falling in love.
Here’s how I wrote about it in my memoirs:
MY FIRST MUSICAL I saw my first musical as a junior in high school, at an open-air music theater near Painesville. I don’t know how I got there or who went with me to see it, although it was probably my parents. I don’t remember a thing about the night except the show and how it made me feel.
It was Brigadoon, about an enchanted village in rural Ireland that appears once in a hundred years for one single day, then vanishes into the mist again, not to be seen for another hundred years. I went to the record store when I got home and bought the cast album, 45 rpm, two seven-inch discs with forty minutes of music on them. I listened to the album over and over. Some day, I swore, I’d perform in that musical, maybe play the romantic lead, although there was another part for me that was just as good: the Irish villager Charlie who was preparing to marry a colleen. Charlie had a voice like mine and he sang two ballads that fit right in my voice range, “I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean” and “Come to Me, Bend to Me.”
Five years later, among the songs I sang on the Showboat were two songs from Brigadoon, “There But For You Go I” and “Almost Like Bein’ in Love.”
I saw a man with his head held low, / A man with no place to go, / … There but for you go I.
What a day this has been, / What a rare mood I’m in, / Why it’s almost like bein’ in love.
I never did perform in Brigadoon and at seventy-eight now, will probably never play a romantic role again, certainly not a young man’s part like in Brigadoon. And I didn’t perform in any musical at all until 1963 when I met Esther in the Huntington Bay Theater’s production of The Fantasticks, in Bay Village, Ohio.
I’ve acted in other musicals since then –though not many– but none were as magical as that one.
ESTHER It was July 1963. Esther was tapped to play Luisa and I was playing Matt, her young lover in that magical play.
We became a couple the night of dress rehearsal. The rehearsal over, the rest of the cast left. We didn’t want to say goodbye so we drove our separate cars down to a parking lot by the shore of the lake –Lake Erie. We walked along the shore and sat on a rock that jutted out into the lake. We listened to the water lapping the shore and we talked. Words became kisses.
I don’t know how well we did in that play –I think we were good—but we were certainly authentic. I know Esther was good and I became better acting with her.
The play closed as all plays do eventually. Three weeks later, Esther left for New York to pursue her dream of singing professionally. We began a long-distance courtship that lasted for more than a year, from September 1963 until December 1964, when we married and I moved to New York to live with her permanently.
All that time, I continued singing with my quartet, the Post Grads, but I counted the weekends when we didn’t have to perform as opportunities to visit, write or call Esther.
A few months after she left for New York, I was cast in another musical, playing Julio, the ingénue, in Paint Your Wagon. I had one good song in the show, “I Talk to the Trees,” and I danced a waltz with the woman who was my partner. I don’t remember much about her, or the experience of rehearsing the show. I remember that she had a nice voice. She was short –shorter than Esther, who was only 5’ 2”—but also wide, barrel-wide. I felt foolish dancing with her, me tall and skinny and she short and stout.
Some time before the opening of the show, we were informed there’d been a mix-up in performance dates. The production had been moved back two weeks. I was committed to doing a show with my quartet on the new date, so I had to drop out.
I didn’t mind. I missed Esther so much that I found it hard to interact with any other woman, even on stage.
MUSIC & ME 