On the Road with Julie

If you are reading this post, you probably have heard, at one point or another, that I decided I needed six weeks alone in a van in order to finish writing a musical. That statement could potentially lead to a number of questions – so I’ll try to answer them here.

What exactly am I doing?

Well, I’m writing a musical! That statement also leads to a lot of questions. Here’s the story.

25 years ago, I was a student at Brown University, studying theater. Brown had a program called Brownbrokers which was the yearly production of a student written musical. At some point, I had the thought, hey, I could do that. Had I ever written a musical before? Nope. Had I ever written a play before? Nope. Had I been taking classes on writing plays or music? Nope. But, I already had a habit of saying, “I can do that.” with all the unearned confidence of youth.

But, I really felt I could. I felt it in my bones. As soon as I decided to write it, it felt more like it started writing itself, like the decision I had made was more like accepting an invitation to relay a story than like making a decision to conjure one up.

I had taught myself to play piano when I was a kid. I took clarinet lessons when I was in elementary school and, even though I subsequently lost my clarinet and ended my not-all-that-promising clarinet career quiet early, it left me with two very impactful abilities. One, I knew how to read sheet music. Two, somehow, through the process of taking my clarinet lessons, I had come to learn where “C” was on the piano. My parents had succumbed to my pleading for a keyboard. I set it up in a corner in the empty basement. I had a book of sheet music from the play, Oliver. I knew I wanted to unlock the hidden treasure in those black and white keys. To me, music was magical, and I wanted in on the alchemy. In would go the lead, a simple mechanical action of my little finger pressing a key, and out would come the shiny gold of music that would cause my heart to swell and pound with all sorts of feelings that were so much more wonderful than any simple emotion. I would spend hours, counting out the notes on the page starting from the one note I knew on the piano, middle C. It was a long and tedious process. Once I got the top hand down, I then took on the bottom hand. I remember when I was finally ready to put them together, I was intimidated, but undeterred by what seemed a nearly impossible challenge at the time. I would count out the top hand and then the bottom hand and then methodically and slowly find a way to play the two notes at the same time. Then, I would stop and count out the next set of notes that my right and left hand would need to coordinate with each other. Probably took an hour to get through the song once using this, likely, brutal-to-listen-to method. Though my first 20 or 30 renditions of “Where is Love?” were likely less than rousing, eventually, I got so I could play the song with some smoothness and sing along to this tune of deep and innocent longing.

I would so look forward to heading to my little corner in the basement enthralled by the fact that I could make music and songs I knew from the screen or the radio come out of that little empty corner. It amazed me that I had gotten there just by counting. I began to feel that sheet music was this tremendous portal into all those heart-swelling feelings that come when you hear a song. It felt like a secret and magical power that I could somehow coax those melodies out of their hiding place to fill up the air around me. By the time I was in middle school, I was begging my parents for a piano. Because I played for hours on the keyboard, alone in an empty basement, I suppose nobody really noticed that I could play. So, my parents took some convincing. Kids go through phases and pianos are expensive. I had to convince my parents that my desire for a piano was not an mere adolescent phase. I knew just how to do it. I wrote up a petition and then I went to all of my friends who had pianos at their houses and asked them and their parents to sign the petition attesting to the fact that, as soon as I would show up to their houses, rather than hang out with my friends, I would just go straight to the piano. I submitted the petition to my parents and before long, I had graduated from a keyboard in the basement, to a piano in the living room.

I continued to play, though typically in the privacy of an empty house. I loved to play the themes from movies. It was amazing to me that those grand adventures that John Williams and Alan Silvestri would take me on in the dark-roomed portal of the movie theater could come out of something that I did with my own hands. I spent long hours, when alone in the house, going on the adventures of Indiana Jones or Forrest Gump on my own. When Guns N’ Roses made, what I felt at the time to be the most dramatic and epic musical tale of love and loss on MTV, I marveled that I could bang out November Rain right there in my own house. For me, time alone with the piano was a magical spaceship that I could travel anywhere in the world – and most of all – something inside of me came alight – telling stories with music. I knew I was no piano virtuoso – but that is what amazed me the most. I didn’t need to be for this feeling in my heart to climb it’s way up and out into the keys and fill the air with beautiful music.

So, in 1998, the moment I decided that I could write a musical, something inside of me lit up and, for the first time, the music that was coming out of my hands was music that came directly from me. I don’t remember the moment of writing the first song, but I do remember it was clear as day and I just sat down and played it. I had gotten a red composition notebook to start brainstorming potential musicals to write. I had started out writing a somewhat supernatural story having to do with gods and goddesses – as I had been in a Greek mythology phase for a few years. After only a few pages of that, that story lost its vigor and the story that would come to life inside of me first took hold. I sat down and played that first song on the piano and wrote down the lyrics in one shot. I scribbled them in pencil in my notebook and that was the beginning of “Janey’s War”.

That was 25 years ago.

It has amazed me that, through the years, the feeling is that this is a story that exists somewhere in the ether and that it picked me simply to be its scribe. Most days, I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast in the morning, but that first song I wrote, and the subsequent one that came soon after, I’ve never written the music down, but 25 years later, I remember every note. Even when, over the course of 25 years, I would go years in between working on it or playing it, every time I’d sit back down to the piano (that same piano that my parents bought me that has traveled with me from apartment to apartment and now lives with me and my husband in our own home), when I would sit down in front of a piano, that song would be there. I could play it without missing a note and I could sing every line without needing to crack open that red composition notebook.

Why I let 25 years go by without making finishing this musical my top priority, that is another story for another day. But, after 25 years of just going about my life with this musical in the background that I would, every couple of weeks, months or even years, sit down and add a song or two, a scene or plot point, or a character, I am finally giving it top billing in my life. I am now 100% committed to finishing this thing and, eventually, seeing it come to life on a stage. For me, it’s been an epic journey to start it, to discover it and, now, to pursue finishing it. I am beyond proud of it and it means so much to me, both the experience of writing it and the story itself. Maybe, someday, in some corner of the world, some little kid will discover their own power by conjuring these songs that I am scribing out of their own piano and realizing that the music and stories of the whole world are accessible to them right through their own little hands.

So, why 6 weeks in a van? Well, that story is much more simple. Life is full. Life is rich. I am blessed to have a lot of dreams and activities I love doing and so many wonderful people in my life – all of whom I love interacting with, hanging out with, spending time with. You add up all of these things into the space of days and weeks and months and years and, well, it’s been 25 years that I’ve been working on this musical. One thing I’ve noticed is that, when I have worked on it, it becomes all consuming, for the handful of hours that I would dive in. I knew that, even distractions that I like, like waking up next to my husband, talking with him, hanging out with him, attending family events, doing the stuff of daily life, all of which I treasure, are distractions nonetheless if finishing this musical is something I truly intend to do. Last April, my husband and I and some friends went to see Rent at the Auditorium theater – definitely a masterpiece of a musical in my mind – and when the curtain rose after a rousing and inspiring rendition of “Seasons of Love” filled the theater and brought the crowd to it’s feet, I turned to Ryan and said, “6 weeks, alone, in a van. That’s what I need.” And that was it. That was when I decided this is what I needed to make it so this doesn’t take another 25 years. It took another year and a half until I started the 6 weeks alone in a van….but, that’s still less than a decade.

So, here I am – alone in a van – and ready to finish this musical after 25 years of it taking shape inside of my head. I have notebooks filled with notes, a voice recorder app filled with little snippets of songs when ideas would come while walking down the street or in the shower, or wherever they might have arisen, and a whole story that is written only in the nooks and crannies of my own mind.

Before I left on this trip, the musical was complete enough to present two little workshops to some courageous friends willing to subject themselves to it. Though the presentations were of a musical in its roughest form, there was enough there to give a performance and, that in itself was such an arrival and a confirmation that, indeed, all the raw materials are there and 6 weeks alone in a van should be enough. The characters, the plot, the scene outline and most of the songs at some level of development or completion. The workshops, just in themselves, were for me, a triumph and I am so grateful to everyone who attended and to my aunt and uncle who got the first performance a week before, and my college best friend, who got the most rudimentary recounting of it just a few months previous. Each of you have helped to encourage me as I started to build momentum to really go for this all the way.

One issue with having 6 weeks alone in a van is that, well, I only have 5 weeks. By the time I finished doing all the things that I needed to do to get ready to leave, it left me with 5 weeks alone in the van. I consider that first week at home, working non stop to get ready for the trip, during which I accidentally wrote 2 new songs, finished working out the incomplete elements of the plot at the ending and had the chance to perform the thing three times to amazing and supportive friends and family – that counts. So, we are still calling it 6 weeks.

And, right after this now 5 week journey in the van, I have a flight booked to travel with a friend to Amsterdam, which is a destination chosen to be a full circle ending to another story, but which will also lead me to end this musical writing trip on the beaches at Normandy in France. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is, this is a musical that takes place during World War II. It is about many things, but, in no small part, it is an homage, a tribute and an expression of gratitude to the generation that saved the world. I think about the boys that somehow managed to get themselves to run up onto that beach in Normandy a lot. I think about how young they were. I think about what they gave up and why. I think about not just the ones that died in the most horrible ways there, but the ones that lived with the memories for decades hence. I think about the world that I got to live in because they did. I have always felt grateful and like living my life to the fullest, doing everything I can to enjoy every gosh darn minute of it is the least I can do to say, “Thank you.” to them and to everyone else who gave so vigorously, courageously and passionately all over the world at a time where the stakes were as high as they have ever been, and I am the beneficiary of those sacrifices. I believe we all are. I hope, this musical will be a more visible way of saying thank you, among other things. So, ending this trip where I am finally committing to finish writing it on those beaches will be a special moment and another way that I hope to pay my respects.

For me, finishing this musical, just to be able to make it my focus and give myself to it so fully is, in itself a dream come true. And there are many more dreams awaiting inside of this little adventure. I am proud of this little musical and I hope, someday, it will make it’s way to the stage and hopefully give a little bit of the magic that I have felt getting to feel the story in me out, through the stage, to those in the audience. That’s the next dream.

First stop, though, finish the dang thing!