Cranial Gunk

Writing about Romeo and Juliet, got me thinking about Tony and Maria.

Thinking about Tony and Maria got me thinking about Maria’s brother, Bernardo and his girlfriend (and Maria’s surrogate sister), Anita .

Thinking about Anita started Rita Moreno singing in my head : “I like to be in America, everything for free in America…”

What makes West Side Story an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the catchiness of its musical numbers, clever lyrics, and its ambitious address of a serious American social issue – Immigration.

It’s a distinctly “American” issue to me not just because I’m the Second Generation son of an immigrant but because I grew up in New York City, sitting through social studies classes year after year, elbow-to-elbow with kids from Europe, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Greece, and the Dominican Republic (to name a few), and being told how the Puritans and Quakers sought to escape persecution in their native lands by endeavoring to start fresh and free in the New World.

It’s the statue in the harbor. The one they told us about in social studies class:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

More than just a story vehicle to drive Tony and Maria to their tragic end, the Jets and the Sharks provide a glimpse at the tensions that arise when two waves of immigrants (assimilated and newly arrived) meet. The dialogue between Bernardo and Anita that sets up the song, “America,” discreetly tell us that the Jets are Second Generation Polish immigrants and the Sharks are newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrants.

“America” describes the hopes immigrants arrive with and the challenges they face in pursuit of the hopes described. It’s a playful song that draws upon universal expectations and disappointments experienced by all new immigrants. It succeeds in its storytelling because it avoids heavy-handed preaching about hardships. Instead its seemingly superficial lyrics tug at deeper shared experiences.

In my opinion, Anita’s story is more tragic than Tony and Maria’s. The exuberant woman who so playfully teases her boyfriend about his unwillingness to assimilate and leads her friends in praising their newly adopted country is transformed by the prior wave of immigrants (deluded natives) into the angry woman who warns Maria to "Stick to your own kind."

Despite Tony’s tragic murder (and that of Maria’s brother, Bernardo), Tony and Maria maintain their “innocence” (for lack of a better word). Nothing really changes emotionally? Spiritually? (What’s the word?) Anita, however, has her innocence robbed. Following the murder of Bernardo, that Anita that sang “America” dies also. Where Tony and Maria traverse a plateau of faith, Anita falls off the edge and loses her faith.

And then there’s Riff and his gang of Second Generation Immigrants. Unlike the Sharks they’ve been born without their parents’ their accents – But at a cost. They cope daily with their parents coping in the not-so-new-anymore-“New World." Their parents (perhaps like Anita) have also suffered a loss of faith. However, they’ve found ways to manage the disappointment, as detailed by Riff and his gang:

I can’t help wonder if Anita and the Sharks will grow older in America to raise “Piranhas,” a Second Generation gang like the Jets?

Former immigrants and their children seem to easily forget that it was them on the receiving end of blame for every convenient social ill when they first got here. To bastardize Riff’s remark: “You see them Cops [Conservatives, Republicans, Tea Party members, etc.] they believe everything they read in the papers about us JDs [immigrants, Mexicans, South Asians, Middle Eastern, etc.]”

There’s a curious lyric right after the famous opening lines of the Talking Heads song, “Once In A Lifetime.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

It’s curious because when you think of “letting the days go by,” you think of “going with the flow,” you think of “floating.”

This lyric seems to say, “Allow yourself to drown.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again, after the money’s gone. Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

:As written out in Frank Olinsky and the Talking Heads’ What the Songs Look Like.

I think I’ve said all I’ve want to say about 9/11. I’ve told you about the night before. The heavy rain and the fight I had with my live-in girlfriend (who would become my wife and the mother of my first child). On the day of the attack, it was cool and sunny. A beautiful day. My girlfriend and I weren’t arguing anymore. We made plans for lunch.

When we were told it was a plane – a plane had flown into the World Trade Towers — we thought it was a Cessna, one of those little private planes flown by amateur airmen. Just a few weeks before Aaliyah had died in a Cessna crash in the Bahamas. We never imagined that it was a commercial airliner that hit the Tower. We never imagined another would follow soon after. And we never imagined it would all be premeditated. 

A neighbor told us that one of the Towers had fallen. We looked downtown to where the Trade Center Towers were visible over the horizon and saw nothing but a column of smoke. I couldn’t believe it. Those Towers couldn’t be broken. It was a trick of light and smoke. They wouldn’t fall.

But we watched the devastation on TV. We had no phone. We couldn’t reach anyone. We just watched the second Tower fall over and over again. My girlfriend cried.

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

That’s the other refrain from “Once In A Lifetime.”

After the smoke had cleared there was a big push by Mayor Giuliani and other city officials to get back to “business as usual.” I was eager to do so too. We all grieve differently.  Some like to hid in corners, letting the sorrow wash over them and then run off. Others like me need to keep moving, distancing themselves from the Tuesday the Towers fell as far as possible.

I was going to have a family now. The Saturday after the Towers fell, my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. We got married and prepared a home for our child. My coworkers wanted to celebrate but I said, No. I didn’t want to attract bad luck by celebrating so soon after the tragedy. In hindsight, I should have said, Yes. Everyone seemed hungry to celebrate something. I needed something to celebrate too but was too timid, the weight of the tragedy compounded by the superstition surrounding death and the unburied (Wandering Ghosts). 

Chee Wang Ng addresses the Chinese aversion to “death talk” and “ghosts” in his rice bowl installation: The depiction of bowl of rice with the tabooed placement of chopsticks stuck straight into the mound. I had an opportunity to speak with him at a reception for his installation in the Manhattan Borough President’s office. 

Several candles on a low circular table like a coffee table or a side table, draped in a red tablecloth, topped by a sculpted bowl of white rice impaled by two enormous chopsticks. It was interesting to listen to his rationale for the choice of objects and their placement. And their size. If you were not paying attention, you might easily walk past the installation. Chee effectively explained his rationale for this: It is not a celebration or something we should single out and promote. It is something to be pondered, low key, and reverent.

It was the year after the Towers fell that shirts depicting the Towers still standing or smoking became popular. Accompanying the images,  the words “Always Remember” or “Never Forget” were written.

But what exactly don’t “they” want me to forget? The hysteria that followed after – Guantanamo, the racism, and the hate? Or the images of droves of scared and confused people holding onto each other (to assist in support and for strength), helping each other through the toxic cloud? 

In the version of “Once In A Lifetime” they perform in their concert film, Stop Making Sense, they include the verse:

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us, time doesn’t hold you back

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us

Resilience.

That’s the word that used over and over again from the 911memorial.org site to the site for the National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) when the conversation is about speaking to children about the 9/11 tragedy. I tell my children that sometimes people want what they want so bad that they don’t care who they hurt to get what they want. I tell them to take care not to become one of these people.

I tell them sometimes you lose more than you gain when you win.

I tell them everyone is different even when everyone else says they are all the same.

I tell them not to give up so quickly on broken objects, sometimes the pieces can be brought together and put together into something just as great.