Even before I was a hip music editor for this publication, I listened to music I deemed semi-alternative. When I got a Discman at age 12, I purchased the X-Games soundtrack, and man did I love Goldfinger. My music taste went along with the typical Holden Caulfieldesque disillusionment with the world, the "knowledge" that few people truly understood me and a lot of terrible short stories.
This WOTS is not, however, about my cliched adolescence or my penchant for non-poppy music. No, this is about the little secret that went along with my love for the Offspring -- pre-Americana, of course. What is the most counterintuitive guilty pleasure for a Sylvia Plath-reading teenager? Show tunes.
As Guys and Dolls' Nathan Detroit sang, "sue me." I'm from New York. I grew up listening to My Fair Lady and Cole Porter, and show tunes have had a pretty serious impact on my life. In fact, I can thank the wonderful world of Broadway for my first (and only, I swear) visit to a psychiatrist.
When I was eight years old, my parents took me to see Miss Saigon, in which a Vietnamese mother kills herself so that her son can grow up in America. Somehow, the melodramatic play really got to me, and I couldn't get the mother's cries of "you will not touch him -- don't touch my boy" out of my head. My parents, worried about my sleepless nights, made me see the school psychiatrist about my fear that my mother would shoot herself for me while singing a power ballad. Good ol' Dr. Suna had me write an alternate ending to the play, draw some happy pictures and BAM, I was cured.
Still, when my siblings bring up that dark period in my life, singing the lyrics to one of the tear-jerking songs, I shiver and realize that while the Magnetic Fields are emotional and all, when I really need catharsis, I turn to Stephen Sondheim.
