On Saturday night, we took Charlie to see a student variety show at the college where I teach. I’ve taken Charlie to these shows before. We sit in the back—the auditorium’s not very large so every seat is good—and it’s a very relaxed and homey atmosphere. A lot of my students were in the production and they had given me an idea of some of the program: A couple of songs from Disney movies and Broadway musicals, and some improv acts.

The show was almost an hour and a half, with an intermission, and Charlie sat through it all. We got there just as it was starting. A couple of students were clustered at the back and then the opening lines of “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King rang out. The students (or rather, animals) trooped in, with us behind, and “….to the path unwinding” being sung, with piano accompaniment.

Charlie first sat quietly and was rapt when one student sang a solo and a couple of guys did a song (complete with swords) from The Pirates of Penzance then put his hands over his ears and started stomping and verbalizing. (The microphone volume was too loud at one point and —I almost felt I could feel something vibrating— and I started to put my hands over my ears.) I put a finger to my lips and encouraged Charlie when he was quiet, and rubbed his back, and repeated those steps when the stomping and verbalizing started up.

That was into about 20 minutes of the show after which Charlie sat quietly (with hands on and off his ears) not only through the songs, but also during some of the comedy improv scenes. These are only a few minutes long but with a lot of fast talking and topical humor that’s hard for Charlie to follow. He watched the first few scenes intently as Stitch (as in Leelo and Stitch—-it was a very Disney show) was featured in one short and Iago (as in Aladdin not, as I thought, Hamlet).

At intermission, a couple of students came over to say hi; I’ve known more than a few of them since they were freshmen, and now they’re seniors in their last year of college. I used to bring Charlie to class some days in my first year when he was sick. We reminisced that Charlie’d been just up to my shoulder then, and now here was a tall boy with gangly legs splayed out, his head propped up on his elbows. I mentioned to one student—a Classics minor—about a trip to Greece in the spring; her face brightened, and then she sighed when she found out that it would be at a time when she has to be working.

“I’ve never been there,” I said. I explained that I’d been to Italy and Rome when I was in graduate school. Jim and I got married just after I got my doctorate and then Charlie was born and then—–since then, travel itself has been pretty much a luxury.

“I’ll get there someday,” my student sighed.

“You will,” I said.

Charlie’s favorite moments were when the whole cast stood in a line on the stage and sang and danced in unison, or wove in and out among each other. After the cast had taken their bows and the curtain had closed, one student stuck his head out and called out “super duper!” “Super duper!” Charlie repeated. I agreed; “super duper!” Charlie said again, and smiled.

Oh yes.

One of the final numbers in the second half was “The Bare Necessities” from Jungle Book—-a song I remember singing not only with Charlie while tugging him around the room to dance, but also with my sister. (With the record spinning on our kiddy record player, she’d be Baloo the bear; I was Bagheera the panther). So many worries and strife in life; so much time spent looking around for something I thought I wanted, and it can’t be found With the basics of a very lovely boy and really lovely husband, of love and home and work, and a good school for my boy, I think I’ve got what I need, right here and now.

My college students are performing Cabaret and tonight Charlie and I went to see it. For the past month, Charlie has been doing something he has never done before, putting his hands over his ears when the radio is on in the car and when he hears human voices that are too loud or high-pitched. So I was not sure if bringing Charlie to a musical was the best idea.

We sat down in the back row and Charlie said hello to the athletics director (at my prompting) and then “no” to shaking hands with the chair of the history department. There were musicians on stage and when they started playing, up went Charlie’s hands; the same happened when there was dialogue and for most of the singing (especially when two female students sang in high girlish voices) and when the drums played. Only at the mellower voice of the student playing the lead role of Sally Bowles, did Charlie put down his hands, and then up they went again when the talking began.

At first I thought we should leave but Charlie did not ask to go. When a group of people sat in front of us, he craned his neck to follow the actors, and his eyes intently followed an ensemble of dancing figures moving around the stage. And in the scene when Sally Bowles entered the room of the young American writer Clifford Bradshaw and said, “Can I get you a drink?”, Charlie beside me said “Yes, green drink.”

“Audience” is from the Latin word for “hear, listen,” audire. Even with his hands over his ears, Charlie was definitely doing his part as a member of the audience, totally tuning in.

There’s been plenty of press for Autism: The Musical, which has been shown at a number of film festivals and will be shown on HBO tomorrow night, Tuesday, March 25th at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Here’s an interview with educator, performer, and acting coach Elaine Hall, the mother of Neal, one of the children in the show, and the founder of The Miracle Project, a program she created to get autistic kids involved in theater. The six-month process of those five children meeting, developing, and performing “Who Am I: A Time Traveler’s Tale” is recorded in Autism: The Musical, which is directed by Tricia Regan.

Reviews of the film from Toronto can be found here, and also from the Seattle Times Newspaper (”the documentary fully engages the viewer and observes the kids’ accomplishments without a saccharine moment”) and the New York Times. You can read more about the families here on HBO and also see five clips of the movie here.

I first heard about Autism: The Musical just about a year ago. As I’ve frequently noted, music a big part of my son Charlie’s life, from the time he was a baby and Jim whistled and sang specially adapted songs (”We love you Charlie, oh yes we do”; “O Cholly Boy”—-yes, “Danny Boy”; Charlie is half-Irish). I set him on my lap while I played lullabies and Bach on the piano and there’s a photo somewhere of baby Charlie on Jim’s lap tapping a congo drum. What would car rides be without CDs playing (no more Barney ones, thankfully) or now FM radio? How many therapists and teachers have happily reported to me “Charlie loved it when we sang together!” And (ok, cue in the violins), I get that mom-heart-in-throat-thing when Charlie plays the songs in his piano book, and when he reached for the bow and rosin before we practiced the cello, and when I can feel him move his own finger from the D to the A string as he reads from his book. Music is one of the main ways that Charlie and Jim and I communicate.

Sometimes it does feel that the music playing as the background to our lives has been something like “I am a poor wayfaring stranger”—Jim and I were counting last night that Charlie has lived in eight different places so far and he’s not yet eleven. He’s been in nine schools and I’m not going to start counting how many teachers, therapists, and aides he’s had. Sometimes when something simple and lovely happens—-when Charlie started to play piano with both hands simultaneously after working on this for months—-strains of the Beatles’ “In My Life” fill my ears. And I still often hear Paul Westerberg’s weary-world voice singing “Sadly Beautiful.”

I guess you could say that it often feels that someone around here is ever on the verge of breaking out into song……..just like in a musical.

Some interesting reviews from Toronto of Autism: The Musical which (EyeWeekly notes) offers a “real life alternative to Rain Man.” And, while I’m on the subject, two more musicals: In Brick Township, NJ, a “rock opera,” Day After Day, that is about “the daily struggles the families of autistic children face”; it’s being performed this Friday and has also been performed eight times in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York over the course of two months in 2004.

On a slightly different note (sorry for the unintended pun), in New York there’s Next to Normal, the city’s “first mainstream musical about manic depression.” Housewife Diana is manic-depressive and, it seems, undergoes electro-shock treatment in the course of the show (someone it seems a little off to have just written that); one supposes taht a dance of “pill-proffering pharmacologists” will not exactly enchant the “this vaccine thing is all a conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government” lobby. Notes the February 14th New York Times:

………“Next to Normal” assesses the fragmenting effects of mental illness within a family. It also, in an honored tradition of all-American hometown weepers, makes a high school dance an acid test for a central character. And the lyrics traffic in Lifetime-style buzzwords. People sing with some regularity of wanting to “begin to heal,” and they ask questions like: “Who’s crazy: the one who’s uncured? Or maybe the one who’s endured?”

Schmalzy stuff but “the uncured” and “the one who’s endured”: Those phrases resonate around here.