Nellie and Lt. Cable muse about their respective ill-fated loves...
Nellie: "Did you ever get a letter from your mother telling you everything you do is wrong?"
Lt. Cable: "Actually, my mother thinks everything I do is right...but I don't tell her everything I do."
(excerpted from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'South Pacific')
Would life be easier if we lived in a musical? It certainly seems so, at times. Despite the usual quota of death, unrequited love, love lost, love star-crossed, love forbidden, love forgotten, love ill-begotten, etc...the guy generally gets the girl in the end, while saving the world from certain disaster.
When I think of all the awkward moments I've endured, deafening silences, speechless, inarticulate, brimming with unexpressed emotion, paralysed by overanalysis, wishing I could convey my thoughts and feelings to the person sitting inches from me..and all I had to do was SING! Hell, it worked for Emile and Nellie, Maria and Baron von Trapp, Maria and Tony, Eliza and Professor Higgins...why not me?
Perhaps the next time I'm marooned on a desert island, fleeing the Nazis, dancing my way out of a puerto rican gang and all the while trying to perfect my english accent, I'll try it.