The grade eight teacher at my elementary school always chose to real aloud The Outsiders to his class, and when I was in grade six, he created a musical performance out of the story for the whole school, with him reading connecting bits and his students dancing, lip-syncing, pantomiming to appropriate songs (the only song I specifically remember is Cherry singing I Don't Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar after she first meets Ponyboy). I was one of those students who tended to be volunteered for things during school hours, so I was put on loan to this production to be a spotlight operator. I stood on a stepladder with a filmstrip projector and followed the action, the most exciting scene being the chaos the spotlights brought to the big rumble. The Outsiders would have been the first novel we ever studied, and the fact that I had become intimate with the story years before I actually read the book, made it very personal to me; wrapped up with my time in elementary school and my relationships with my own brothers. Because of this, and despite having been the targeted audience when the movie was released in 1983, I never saw it — that was the first time that I just intuitively knew that the book was too precious to watch on film, or ever reread.
But when Kennedy mentioned that she was going to the stage production in Toronto, and that the run was ending this past Sunday, Dave and I decided to go as well. Soon after we were seated, an elegantly dressed older woman (she had happened to mention that she graduated high school in 1969) sat beside me and we began discussing the book at her prompting. She told me that The Outsiders is the favourite novel of a fifty-something-year-old friend — who told her she must see the musical — and I shared the fact that I had read it in school but had declined to see the movie in order not to spoil my memories. We had a lovely conversation as we waited for the curtain to rise.
The first half of the show was a little slow — maybe because it was the touring cast, or perhaps that's just the way it always is; Dave and I were a little nonplussed as we discussed it at the intermission. But it certainly picked up in the second half, and when it got to this song, with the two brothers singing about their lost brother, everything hit me in a swirl of missing my recently deceased older brother and tears started streaming down my face. I turned to Dave and said, "It got me," and his eyes were teary too. (The final song by Dallas, Little Brother, was so powerful and so visceral and so well performed that the tears then came for real.)
When the show was over, the woman beside me said, "So what did you think?" I said, "Well, it made me cry." And she said, "I know. I was going to offer you a tissue, but then I started crying, too."
Any art that touches this jaded heart is a total win in my books. Stay gold, my brother.
