MEMORY OF A PERFORMANCE OF “HAIR”

It was protest in a time of protests. It was a song of joy sung by dreamers in a time of dreamers in search of joy. It was a record of reality: rainbow illusions becoming khaki and guns. It was already a memory of a promise lost in the yesterdays of misbegotten heroes, children without parents, and charlatans.

Yet, they sang—the players and the audience in the theater—at the final moment as if the dream was not already lost but alive and theirs to hold that night.

I joined in the song, my tears falling  for all the lost hopes, as together we all sang and sang again: “Let the sun shine, let the sun shine…”