Weekly Update 10/03/26 – 10/09/26 (The Phantom of the Opera at 40, Zoom Meetings & Life's Challenges)
Well, it's been a hard week, and I can't go into details. Just to say, please pray for my mother, not so much that she gets better, but that God's will be done.
Also, at work, I finally had to accept the fact that my project would not be finished this month and that we need to push it back at least a month. The good news is that it's not my part of the project that's causing the problem. Other parts are behind schedule, and those delays are affecting my part.
As for the office remodel, I haven't been putting as much energy into it this week. The floor is down, but I need to replace two boards that I didn't cut correctly and tighten up some of the others. I've started reinstalling the trim, but I'm doing it slowly, partly because I found a couple of pieces that hadn't been stripped of their paint, and mostly because I'm just lazy.
I also still need to get a window treatment, rehang my diplomas, organize my desk, and clean up the rat's nest of cables.
At work, I have a daily Zoom meeting and a couple more meetings each week. I have a 42-inch monitor, so putting the camera on top of the monitor doesn't give a flattering picture. I've tried several locations for the camera and found that if I put it on a tripod next to the monitor on the left side, I get a good picture as long as I'm looking at the left side of the screen. When I look at the right side, I'm in profile, and I worry that my viewers will think I'm not looking at them.
The reason I bring this up is something I've noticed. When I was a kid, I remember being told, "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" And I do my best to follow that.
But it makes me feel strange when I'm in a video meeting. My instinct is to look at the image of the person who's talking, but that often means that the image they see is one where I'm not looking at them, and that makes me feel strange. This is especially true when Zoom is enlarged on my screen and their image is farther to the right, causing me to be in profile and making it look like I'm staring away from them.
I've tried different ways to adjust the camera, and nothing seems to help. This isn't a real problem, just an observation.
On October 9, 1986, 40 years ago, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera officially opened in London. I'm not certain how long it took for me to discover this musical, but it wasn't long before I found that I was in love with it!
So many parts of it spoke to me. The story of someone shunned by society, a love that could not be expressed, even the name of the Phantom, Erik, painfully reminded me of my past.
When people refer to the show, they often call it Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, and of course, the magnificent music of the show is just another example of Andrew's genius. But while the music is magical, it is the words of Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe that really capture me.
“This face, which earned a mother's fear and loathing A mask, my first unfeeling scrap of clothing”
is always the 1st thing I think of when I think of the show. How closely that compares to my own life. How, because of my dyslexia and other learning disabilities, I had been shunned and was an outcast for most of my education. How, instead of hiding my face behind a mask, for a huge part of my life I hid myself behind the idea that I was a Vulcan.
How I yearned to be different from what I was can be heard in "The Music of the Night."
“Close your eyes, for your eyes can only tell the truth for the truth isn’t what you want to see. In the Dark it is easy to pretened. That the truth is what it owt to be?.”
Or
“Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the life you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be! Only then can you belong to me.”
I hear something of my own longing to be different.
The invitation to let one's mind journey into a strange new world, to leave behind the life one has known, and to let one's soul travel to where one longs to be also speaks directly to me.
Not only did the show speak to me of my own life's journey, it also spoke of my spiritual development. The story wasn't about that, but in the words
"love me, that's all I ask of you,"
I heard the voice of God speaking to us all.
I also saw other connections to myself. The name of the heroine was the same as someone I once loved and still love, and it made me aware of a strange triangle between this show, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and me.
You see, when I was in high school, there was a buffoonish villain named Eric (not Erik, the name of the Phantom) who used to call me Quasimodo without knowing that his girlfriend was my Esmeralda.
There are many things in the show that stood out to me. So many lyrics that play over and over in my mind and on my sound system.
I've lost count of how many times I've seen the show. I know at least twice during its record-breaking run at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and at least once here in Portland.
I even remember sitting at my 10-year high school reunion, having an awful time, and thinking that, just a few blocks away, the chandelier was falling to open that evening's performance of the show and how much I wanted to be there instead.
Through the show, I was led to the Gaston Leroux novel. The play is based on that novel, and the novel explains Erik's life in much more detail, especially the fact that Erik was born deformed and not, as many motion pictures have shown, disfigured as the result of some accident.
Erik was really a super genius, not just musically. He had even worked on the opera house that the story takes place in under its architect and was responsible for some of its extraordinary construction.
As I said, for me, the words of the show are more magical than the music, which I love. I've always wondered about the process that goes on between the composer and the lyricist. How is it possible for two individuals, working creatively and sometimes separately, to merge their talents into a masterpiece?
I often think of the story behind "The Music of the Night."
As I remember hearing it, every year Andrew Lloyd Webber held a kind of festival, gathering his friends to work on their shared love of theater. One year, they were working on The Phantom of the Opera when someone pointed out that they were missing an aria for the lead.
Apparently, Lloyd Webber agreed that one was needed and reached into his portfolio, coming up with the melody that would become "The Music of the Night."
As I understand it, the melody had originally been written for Sarah Brightman and was intended for an early version of Aspects of Love, the show that followed Phantom.
Somehow, Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe took a piece of music that had not originally been intended for The Phantom of the Opera and helped turn it into "The Music of the Night."
To me, that makes their contribution all the more remarkable. The music was already there, but the words helped transform it into something that belonged to Erik, expressing his longing, his loneliness, and his desire to be loved.
Well, I hope we all have a good week.
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