17

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Remember it? “Aquarius” and “Easy to be Hard” and “Good Morning, Starshine?”

In high school I became infatuated with Hair. I listened to the recording over and over again. I directed the annual high school talent show with a Hair theme and we sang four of the numbers according to my imaginative interpretation. In the spring of my 17th year, my father said for my birthday he would take me to New York City to see the Broadway production of Hair.

Now, if you lived anywhere on the East Coast, that might not seem like a huge deal. But I didn’t live on the East Coast; I lived in Appalachia, a hinterland by about a hundred years. Hair and its message did not touch me in any tangible way; I had only the LP version and my imagination to draw on. Why my father chose this event, as opposed to going to Forest Hills for the US Open Tennis Tournament (an interest of both of ours), or the Metropolitan Opera for Manon (an interest of his), I’ll never know. He died last year and I never thought to ask him Why?

We went, just the two of us. We left behind the four little kids and my mother. We went for a weekend, stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, dined at steak houses, and recreated his 1949 experience of coming to America by walking from the hotel to the Metropolitan Museum and back again to the theatre for a total of 70 blocks, me in my chunky heels and a short dress, for the equivalent of a 7 mile hike. I got to see a lot of New York.

We saw the musical and I was agog at the naked figures, the actors crawling over the seats, the raw outrage of it all in 1969. It was nothing like my imagination or the high school talent show I’d directed. The expression, “It blew my mind,” that expression originated with me that night.

I have no idea what my father thought about it; we were undoubtedly too embarrassed to talk about it. I can’t recall any of our discussions that weekend. Except one. On the way home, in the car, by the light of the dashboard, I recall his saying, “Jen, there’s just one thing you need to remember. Whenever you get into a fight with your mother, I am on her side.”

I was baffled at the time. Here he had just honored me and my emerging adulthood with an extraordinary weekend, the first ever. And I was about to leave home, go to college, probably never come back for longer than a summer, take off into my life, and he wanted me to know that, much as he loved me, his allegiance was with my mother.

Now that I think about it, five decades later and no one to set the record straight, I think he was saying, You’re ready. Take flight. You and your mother have fought the good fight. You have won by virtue of being the next generation. It’s yours now to make of it what you will.