Growing up, my mom and dad had a big collection of Broadway albums, including The Music Man. I would play it for hours, imagining myself in that little Iowa town, where I too fell in love with Marian the librarian.
As a teenager I was given a chance to go there, when Warner Bros. put out a call for high school musicians to march in the River City Band as part of the movie version. I didn’t make the cut, but several of my friends did, and to this day I can watch them in the film finale, shown here.
That same year, I enjoyed listening to the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You” on the radio.
When our daughter Maggie was born, we started playing the movie soundtrack CD for her at bedtime. By the time she turned six, she was singing “Gary, Indiana” for friends and relatives.
Maggie is now 25, and when she learned that I had a ticket to the new production, she sent me this text: “Pick a little talk a little pick a little talk a little CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP (talk a lot, pick a little more).”
At the theater that night, I settled back and watched the curtain go up on my latest, but certainly not my last, encounter with The Music Man.
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