I remember the first time I became aware of the musical Company, the tale of a New York man on his 35th birthday. I was sifting through albums at a record store, in the “Showtunes” section of course, when the purple cover with the one-name title came into view.
The song names were intriguing. Barcelona, Ladies Who Lunch, Being Alive. Actually, then, I would have said they were “cool” or maybe even “neat.”
“Mom, will you buy this for me?” I was 12 years old, living in San Jose with my parents and two brothers, working my way through the sixth grade, and apparently developing a taste for Stephen Sondheim shows.
I couldn’t have known it at the time but Company would become one of the two musicals I embraced as a boy (the other being “A Chorus Line”) that would utterly define how I looked at the world as an adult.
I played that album over and over and over. I stood in the living room, pretending that I was Elaine Stritch (Joanne) demanding another vodka stinger, not really sure what a stinger was or why I was being drawn to Joanne’s caustic personality. I pictured what life was like for adults, filled with entertaining, witty conversation and a city where “another hundred people” were always coming into view.
It wasn’t until more than 20 years later, after I’d swapped my Company album for a CD and I’d made my way through college, swung through Washington, D.C., and landed in New York City that it hit me why Company’s songs were always with me. I was Bobby, the birthday boy, the single man whose friends wondered if he would ever settle down, the lonely guy who finally realizes he needs someone to need him too much.
When I had my own 35th birthday party, before guests arrived, I played the CD and sang each word of Being Alive as though they had been written for me. Here I was, finally an adult as defined by Sondheim. Very soon I would have it all – the good job, the cool apartment, the love of my life.
I’m now 42 and life didn’t quite turn out that way. Though I’ve had some amazing men in my romantic life, I’m comfortably single and may well be that way for a long time to come. I’m a year into my new life without a corporate boss above me though with a nearly empty bank account. At least I still have the apartment.
Last night, I saw the revival of Company on Broadway (see review below). Bobby’s lament, being the boy who everyone both wanted to be and everyone wanted to save, no longer struck me as being so relevant. Instead, I found myself drawn to Joanne, she who has been married “three or four times” and who mocks the “girls on the go.”
“We’re in a strange place,” she says at one point. “We’re too old to be with the young people and too young to fit in with the old ones. This is what they call the generation gap.”
Will someone please get me a vodka stinger now?
