View From The Stage: Putting Our Focus on Love
In light of the recent shootings in Atlanta and Boulder I bring to you a column I wrote two years ago, March 2019 that sadly is still relevant today.
1972 was the first time I ever went to New Zealand. I was twenty years old and playing viola in the Long Island Youth Orchestra. We had taken a 6 week summer tour to the South Pacific with multiple stops in New Zealand, Australia, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. I met a young girl in Auckland while I was there. We corresponded for a few years and eventually got married. We lived the first ten years of the marriage in my home town of New York City where we had two girls. We moved back to New Zealand after that, had another child and eventually got divorced. I lived in New Zealand for five years before returning to the states to pursue other music opportunities however my three children and now six grandchildren still live there. I return twice a year to go and visit them and I was in New Zealand a few weeks ago when the terrible massacre occurred down in Christchurch.
The flight across the Pacific from Auckland to the West Coast takes about 12 hours so on my way home I was able to watch two movies about music that I had been wanting to see.
The first movie was called The Green Book, takes place in 1962 and tells the real life story of Dr. Don Shirley, a black pianist living in New York City. It details a road tour he took through the mid west and deep south during the time of Jim Crow. It shows the prejudice, hate and discrimination he had to endure just for being a black man in the South, from being arrested for being caught in a “Sunset Town” after dark, to not being allowed to eat, stay or even use the bathroom at places he was performing at. He talks about how he had wanted to be a classical pianist but was told by his record company that “there was no audience for a negro playing classical music”. So he was forced to pursued a career playing original music instead.
The second movie was called Bohemian Rhapsody and is the story of the English rock band Queen and their rather flamboyant but extremely talented lead singer Freddy Mercury. His birth name was Farrokh Bulsara and his parents were immigrants to England from Zanzibar, Tanzania. His family was Parsi and practiced the ancient Zoroastrian religion. The movie chronicles the bands start and rise to fame along with Freddy Mercury’s struggle with his bi sexuality. Of course back in the late 1970’s and early 80’s gay people were still fighting for their rights, the aids epidemic was rampant and unfortunately Freddy Mercury contacted aids and eventually died from it at the very young age of 45.
The two movies clearly show how prejudice, fear, hatred and discrimination not only effect the people that they are focused against but how we all as a society suffer as well. For we are denied the gifts and talents of these people. Who knows how much more great music Freddy Mercury and Queen could have given to the world if Freddy hadn’t died prematurely from a disease that society was reluctant to initially spend money to cure. It was wrongly considered a “gay disease”. How much more great music could Dr. Don Shirley have produced if he didn’t have to experience the limitations and restrictions of being born a black man in a time of segregation.
We look back on those time now and can see what this negativity can do and the harm that it causes yet that same kind of fear, hatred, discrimination and prejudice goes on today.
Sadly the killings in the Mosques of Christchurch, New Zealand are a perfect example of that. 50 people are dead and another 48 seriously injured and we as a society and a world will suffer from the lose of what they could have contributed. It is sad to think of how much the world has missed out on because people have not been free to be themselves and scary to think of how much we could lose in the future to our ignorance, hatred, fear and anger. I hope we will all concentrate and live our lives in what Freddy Mercury refereed to as, “that crazy little thing called LOVE”.
I wish you all much peace and until next time, I’ll see you from the stage.