Why a Mostly-Serious 67 Year Old Man is Insane with Excitement to See Wicked

I'm kind of busy these days.  Even as my country hurtles toward perhaps the most important Presidential election of my lifetime, I'm spending my time helping my wife run for the Michigan State House and preparing my startup company to announce and demonstrate its product for the first time shortly after the election.  At 67, I don't think I've ever had more to do.  So why is it that I can barely think about anything except the debut of the Wicked movie later this month?

This will be the fifth major retelling of the Oz story over the course of 125 years.  The 1900 book, The Wizard of Oz, and its successors were beloved to my mother in her childhood.  The classic 1939 movie was first shown on television in 1956, the year before I was born.  By the time I was old enough, in the 1960's, the annual telecast happened every February, and every kid I knew watched it raptly after weeks or months of anticipation.  The Wicked Witch of the West was one of the scariest things I could imagine as a child.

Gregory Maguire's novel "Wicked," an underrated masterpiece, premiered in 1995, just after I took the plunge from Internet researcher to entrepreneur.  I quickly came to realize that my enthusiasm for the technology was completely dwarfed by the greedy gold rush to exploit it,   I met many captains of industry, and although a few were great people, most were more like Maguire's reimagined Wizard, cultivating an image of good while behaving quite otherwise.  Maguire's reimagination of the witch as a misunderstood creature trying to do good in a world of evil wizards struck a deep chord with me.  If you hear me describe the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley as wizards, know that this is more likely to mean they are humbugs and frauds than practitioners of any real magic.

I didn't get to see the 2003 musical until I went to work for Mimecast in 2010 and started spending a lot of time in London, but it was love from the start.  One of the highlights of that decade for me was seeing Wicked on the West End over and over -- with my wife when she was in town, otherwise with local friends, and at least twice all by myself.  It soon replaced Sweeney Todd as my favorite musical of all time.  Give me half a chance and I will sing much of it for you myself!

Does it surprise you I got hooked, and all too soon?

What can I say? I got carried away. And not just by balloon

Then, as many of you know, my life got harder, and in the year of the pandemic I suffered many losses -- my daughter, my son-in-law -- and was preparing for my own massive open heart surgery.  The song "As Long As You're Mine" will always be, for me, the story of my daughter's beautiful and tragic love affair and her husband's slow death from brain cancer. 

And if it turns out it's over too fast.

I'll make every last moment last 

As long as you're mine.

I listened to the soundtrack often that year, taking particular comfort from the notion, embodied in "For Good," that the people you love continue to shape who you are long after they are gone.

Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea

Like a seed dropped by a skybird in a distant wood

But the worst year of my life was followed by the best period of my life, when instead of open heart surgery I started taking the then-experimental drug Camzyos, and was not merely restored to health but given the best health of my life.  I had spent a year preparing for my own possible demise, so I suddenly found myself with no loose ends in my life, semi-retired, my finances and friendships in perfect order, but with more energy and better health than ever before.  For the first time in my life, I felt like I could do absolutely anything I chose to do.  My life was peaking, and the song that echoed through my brain was of course "Defying Gravity."  

Something has changed within me.  Something is not the same

I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game

Too late for second-guessing.  Too late to go back to sleep

It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap

Since then I have started a company, written a book, returned part-time to academia, completely avoided the periodic depression that has haunted me since childhood, and generally lived my absolute best life in my 60's, when most people are simply hoping to reach a peaceful retirement.  And when people ask me about it, I always think, and often simply say, "I am defying gravity."

I'm not someone who generally follows the entertainment industry, but as a fan of the musical I've closely tracked the unfolding of the movies, which took over 15 years to get made.  As the plans soldified, John Chu was chosen as the Director, and the cast was fleshed out, my anticipation has only grown.  It's going to be a cinematic epic -- they planted 9 million tulips just to show how the munchkins farm tulips for their colors!  Some fans were upset with the decision to split it into two movies, but I was thrilled -- instead of compressing the story, they are expanding it to include more from the books.  And there are new songs!

With each leak and preview, I've only grown more excited and hopeful that the movies will be a worthy next chapter in this long, glorious story.  Now, with the first movie's release only weeks away, the early reviews are starting to come out -- uniformly glowing, with one reviewer calling it "the movie of the century."  It is downright embarassing how excited I am.

Wicked premieres in Michigan on Friday, November 22.  I have tickets to take my youngest grandchildren, ages 3 and 5, to see it in IMAX on Saturday morning.  Their introduction to this glorious story will be in its fifth incarnation, likely my last.  I've also got a ticket to see it alone the night before, with nobody to distract me from the magic.

By the time I last saw Wicked on the London stage, the first measure of the overture was enough for me to feel the tears starting to well up.  I can't begin to understand the magic of this story, or how L. Frank Baum (in whose honor Gregory Maguire named the witch Elphaba!) managed to start all of this in motion.  But the story is always with me, like a handprint on my heart.  It has changed me for good.

I can't wait!

[If you have an hour to spare for it, I highly recommend this excellent video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_NjQonmX8M 

which tells the story of the politics and social impact of the Oz story, from the original books to today.]

Joe Borenstein: A Survivor and a Good Man

Joseph Kandall Borenstein, September 1, 1950 - August 5, 2024

[I set out to write about my brother Joe, but my relationship with him was so formative, so fundamental to who I am, that a lot of this turned out to be about me.  Nonetheless, I'm writing this for him.]

Joey's mother could not keep him, and he moved from one foster home to another until he was five.  At that time, he was adopted by a loving couple, Stan and Debbie, who had been told they could never conceive a child.  For nearly two years, he was the center of their world, and their extended family's.  I always feared those were the happiest two years of his life, but I now suspect he was happiest in the last part of his life, with Joyce.

Then Debbie got pregnant, which the doctors described as "a miracle."  That's why, when I was born a few weeks after Joey's seventh birthday, my parents named me Nathaniel -- Hebrew for "gift of God."  And that was how they and Joey treated me.

I suspect I was no more than 3 or 4 years old when I came to understand that my parents treated me completely differently than they treated Joey.  He was, by nature, athletic, artistic, fashionable, and fastidious, while my parents were intellectual, musical, political, and messy.  It was never a good match, and I was the child Stan and Debbie had always dreamed of.  By the time I was in kindergarten, I remember them asking Joe why he couldn't be more like his little brother.

I adored my big brother, but because I understood the unfairness of my parents' treatment of him, I never really understood why he loved me so much.  It would have been totally natural for him to hate me, but he never did.  I suspect he must have dreamed of a brother in his pre-adoption days, and calling my birth a miracle must have sounded just right to him.

As we grew up, Joe was my education in the unfairness of life.  The things that I was good at -- mostly school work and clever jokes -- made my parents praise me to the skies.  The things that Joe was good at -- art, athletics, and a neat clean room -- were dismissed as unimportant. Joe left home at 17, ending several years of steady conflict with our parents.  Starting not long after that, for over 50 years I was the only one in our family who kept in touch with him.  (My younger brothers -- also miracles according to the doctors -- were just 1 and 6 when he left home, so they never knew him like I did.) 

The Borenstein brothers

Joe had a rocky start in adulthood, quickly marrying, having two children, Jason and Barbra, and  and divorcing young.  But by the time he was 30-something he had moved to San Francisco and begun a successful new life as a contractor, where his exacting artistic nature made him a favored remodeler for the wealthy, and then as a real estate investor.  He stayed close with Jason and Barbie as they grew up in Ohio, knowing and loving him, albeit mostly from a distance.  He was always part of their lives.

Eventually, in San Francisco he met Joyce, his companion of nearly three decades.  She made him happier and more peaceful than I'd ever known him to be.

Me, Trina, Joyce, and Joe with Shana in 1999

(Who could have guessed Shana would die first?)

I don't want to romanticize Joe.  He meant well, but he always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and an acerbic attitude to match.  San Francisco quickly cured him of the homophobia that was the default in Central Ohio, but even as he became an ally to them, he was one of the few straight men I ever knew who dared to scoff at gay men's allegedly superior fashion sense.  He accepted people but noticed their flaws.  He often gave food to street people, but he'd also sometimes give them unwanted and unhelpful lectures on how to improve their lives.  He helped a fair number of people when they were in trouble, but he wasn't shy about letting people know what he'd done.

Joe made the best of a very difficult start in life.  I think that a lot of my lifelong preoccupation with religion had its origins in trying to understand why I was so much more fortunate than him.  I couldn't accept any kind of God who would arbitrarily give him such a harder road than mine.  Reincarnation and karma appealed to me because they offered the hope that the universe was fair, and that his fate was making up for a previous life and earning a better one, but there was never any evidence to make me see this as more than a hopeful fantasy.

Nor have our senior years been any more fair.  While I was gifted, in my 60's, with a medical miracle that gave me the best health of my life, he was struck, just a few years older, with a particularly cruel degenerative disease that led to a slow, agonizing illness that finally ended yesterday.   Both my earliest and final memories of him were of the unfairness of life and my complete powerlessness to make his life better.

One of the last pictures of us in happier times

More than anything else in my life, Joe's story makes me believe that life is deeply random, and that those of us who are fortunate should spend our time trying to help those who are not.  I suspect that's one reason why, despite the kind of successful career that has made so many of my contemporaries into smug, self-satisfied Republicans, I remain a socialist; I have never been able to convince myself that those less fortunate deserve their fates, because I know without a doubt that Joe deserved better.

Nonetheless, I still want to believe in a more meaningful universe, and I recognize that my limited human brain might blind me to a larger, happier truth.  If the universe is built around anything humans might recognize as a moral order, then Joe is now in a much better place, where people take care of themselves and treat each other well, where beauty is valued everywhere, and where even his kid brother dresses fashionably and fastidiously.  I hope you are in such a world now, Joe.

A rare family portrait from 1979.

(Top: Trina, Nathaniel, Eliot, Seth, Joe.

Bottom: Jason, Debbie, Stan, Barbie.)