Circling Back.

So. A year ago last March, I was getting ready for a first table reading of the musical I’d been working on for a couple years. I had a date, a room, a cast, a draft. And then the world changed. I put my musical on the back burner and decided to begin writing a book because I had an idea I was excited about and I could write a book at home by myself.

In the last year, I’ve made great progress on the book. It’s big and gets bigger as it slowly takes shape in my mind and on the page. I’ve written about 150 manuscript pages and I’ve only dealt with less than 1/4 of the material. Now, I have a lot of research to do requiring travel to various towns and libraries and courthouses, and that should be possible before too long.

It occurred to me this week that another thing that will be possible before too long is a table reading of my new musical. So I’ve been listening to the songs and revising the script all week. The book and musical are not exactly the same story, but there’s significant overlap. I’ve changed names and fictionalized quite a bit in the play whereas the parts of the book that are autobiographical have not been altered — except in the way that one’s memory is always making revisions. So I decided to remove one thread of the story from the musical which is dealt with more directly in the book and which I struggled mightily to integrate into the musical, probably unnecessarily.

I wonder now if I’ve made a big mess of it, but that’s what table readings are for — to find out how big a mess you’ve made.

This song is sung by Augusta Cheney who is the sister of Horatio Alger, the nineteenth century writer of books for boys, who was lionized by 20th century conservatives for his “rags to riches” stories, all of them variations on a narrative established in his first book “Ragged Dick” of a homeless but smart and ambitious street kid who rises in the world through dumb luck and the mentorship of an older man who takes an interest in him. Alger’s first career as a minister was cut short when he, as the young pastor of a Unitarian church in Brewster Mass., was accused of sexually molesting boys in his congregation and run out of town. The church covered up the scandal, Alger moved to New York City, and he began his long literary career. In his will, he stipulated that his sister Augusta destroy all his personal papers, correspondence, and manuscripts, which she did. Modern historians consider this a great loss and Augusta Cheney somewhat of a villain. In this song, she defends herself.