Norman Rockwell, pt. 2 – or, How an American Painter Who Died Seven Years Before I Was Born Helped Me Realize that I’m Not Entirely Crazy After All

Thanks largely to my friend Randy McCoach, I have a bit of an update on my last post. (Make sure to read it first before proceeding with this one!)

As mentioned previously, I did hours of research over the course of a few days, trying to find any proof of the existence of a musical I believed that I was in when I was much younger. The musical, I believed, was called Norman Rockwell’s America.

Randy read my post, left a kind comment, and set to work. And this is what he discovered:

This clipping was from the July 2, 1993 edition of the San Bernardino County Sun (the county which Yucaipa is in).

Then, just to be extra sure, he did a bit more digging on my behalf, and pulled up one other gem:

Same paper, March 6, 1993 edition.

It turns out that I was wrong about the year – I had guessed ’90 or ’91; the musical actually took place in ’93. Oops. Also, this would mean that I was seven years old at the time of the performance (despite the casting call saying the minimum age was eight – I would have turned eight just a few weeks after the performances, though).

I was half-correct about a few other items, though:

1. I had the name exactly right – Norman Rockwell’s America – as well as the college venue – Crafton Hills College.
2. Crossroads Christian Fellowships of Redlands was the church my family was attending at the time. So yes, my connection to this musical came via church.
3. Though I’m still unsure of where this musical originated (who wrote it, etc.), my impression has strengthened that it was most likely a local affair (as opposed to an actual licensed musical).

Also, happily, it turns out there’s no need for me to scour YouTube in hopes that someone happened to have uploaded an amateur recording of the musical all these years later. In presenting all of this to my mom, she was able to present a VHS of the performance.

Now I just need a VCR (or, I suppose, I could find a company that will transfer it to a DVD for me).

I was happy to hear that I was also correct about the first two scenes that I modeled (The Runaway and Family Home From Vacation). No confirmation on the third scene yet – not until I find a way to watch the video, at least.

All this to say:

I’m glad my memory isn’t always out to lead me astray.

And I guess Alex Mandel is off the hook.

Despite these confirmations, I’m still holding out hopes that I might be a time-traveler, though. Seems like it could be fun.

Norman Rockwell - or, How an American Painter Who Died Seven Years Before I Was Born Is Making Me Doubt Everything I Think I Know About My Past

When I was much younger – 5 or 6 years old, I believe – I was in a musical. It was at a local college – Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California – and, of course, I only had a few rather minor roles. The musical must have happened in 1990 or ’91.

I don’t remember now exactly how I came to be involved in the play. I think maybe my parents made some sort of connection through church friends and subsequently got me hooked up with it.

If memory serves, I believe the musical at Crafton was called Norman Rockwell’s America, or something very similar. Every scene started with a still reenactment of one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings. The models would then come to life and act out a full scene revolving around the painting. It was a clever idea, at least.

I was in three such scenes. I didn’t have any speaking roles; all I had to do was hold still for a few minutes before the painting came to life. I also did a small dance in one scene.

If you’re curious, here are the three images I portrayed:

(The Runaway, 1958)

I’m 100% sure that this is one of the three pictures I modelled. 

(Family Home from Vacation, 1930)

Again, I’m 100% sure this is the right image. I remember that I was “sleeping” on some sort of a bench, and that I had a white box with a toy frog seemingly about to escape. I especially remember the frog because the director let me keep it after the show was over. 

(Family Grace, 1938)

I have to say I’m only about 75% sure this is the right image. What I remember is that I was sitting with a family around a dinner table praying. I very clearly remember feeling like it was the most boring of the three. I’d have guessed the family was larger, though, and that there was a turkey involved.

That said, Norman Rockwell has another very famous painting, Freedom From Want, which has a larger family and a turkey. However, they aren’t praying in that image, and, perhaps more notably, there’s no little boy whom I could have portrayed – hence why I think Family Grace is more correct.

I also can remember a few random lines of lyrics from some of the songs:

The main theme must have been called Norman Rockwell’s America, which featured the line,

Norman Rockwell’s America 

– let’s give three cheers for this great nation

One song, I imagine, must be called Gossip, Gossip, or something similar.

Gossip, gossip, mean old thing
Most unhappiness it brings
If you can’t say something nice
Then “don’t talk at all” is my advice
Yes, “don’t talk at all” is my advice

There was also a song called At the Hop, which featured a lot of na’s or la’s or bah’s or something along those lines. This is the song I danced in (and, if I remember correctly, which broke off of the scene based on the painting The Runaway). I believe the main line was

Let’s go to the hop, oh baby, let’s go to the hop

And, of course, there was a song about the Saturday Evening Post (the magazine which debuted many of Norman Rockwell’s paintings), which featured the chorus:

Oh, I love the Saturday Evening Post
It’s the magazine I read the most
I think you will discover
If you look beneath the cover
It is more than any other magazine comes close

No clue why/how I still remember these random lines 25 years later. They just stuck, for some reason.

Anyway.

Just this week, I was thinking about this musical again. Though it was about 25 years ago, I wondered if it was perhaps one of those things that someone recorded at the time then uploaded onto Youtube many years later for nostalgia’s sake, or perhaps to make fun of someone else who was in the musical when they were younger – someone like me, hopefully.

After a bit of searching, I couldn’t find any such video on Youtube. That’s okay; I knew it was a long shot.

Now then. All of the background I just explained is merely a prelude. Here’s where my story gets much more tricky:

Not only could I not find any such video of the musical on Youtube, I actually can’t find any evidence of the play existing at all.

After many hours of searching online, I haven’t been able to find a single scrap suggesting that this musical is even a real thing. Here are all of the interesting/relevant items I have discovered, though:

ONE

There is, in fact, a musical based on the life and work of Norman Rockwell called ROCKWELL. This musical premiered in Vermont in 1992 – at least one year after my musical of memory.

The same musical was then “re-premiered,” so to speak, with the new name Perfect Picture. This re-premier debuted in 2013.

(Interestingly, the full name of the new version is Perfect Picture: …but was all of this real? What a peculiar name for the topic, especially given my current predicament over this memory I am trying to research.)

Also, in addition to the dates not adding up, the track listing shares nothing in common with my musical 25 years ago.

Definitely not related to my musical. 

TWO

Clearly, this approach wasn’t leading me anywhere on my quest to find this illusive musical I was in. I decided that my next step, then, was to work backwards from the music/lyrics that I remembered. And so…

It turns out that At the Hop was actually a famous pop song from 1957 by Danny and the Juniors, which my musical clearly just licensed for the play.

Similarly, Gossip, Gossip is actually entitled, Gossip, Gossip, Evil Thing (not “mean old thing,” as I thought I remembered), and was a calypso song from the 60’s or 70’s by Jester Hairston. It, too, must have simply been licensed for my musical.

Though I can’t find any song entitled Norman Rockwell’s America with the exact line I provided above, I discovered a song called Celebrate America with the line

Celebrate America 

– let’s give three cheers for this great nation

- the only change being “Celebrate” instead of “Norman Rockwell’s.”

This song was written by Mark A. Brymer, but not for the sake of a musical. If this is indeed the same song – and either the words were changed for my musical, or else I’m simply remembering it wrong – then, once again, it must have been licensed. (I can’t seem to find the year Brymer’s song was written/published; it seems to be the right age for the musical, though.)

And, finally, if there’s a song about the Saturday Evening Post magazine, I can’t find any evidence of it online.

*sigh*

Back to searching for the musical itself then, since the music was a dead end.

THREE

Ah, but what’s this?

It turns out there is, in fact, a musical called Norman Rockwell’s America, which was written by Alex Mandel!

At last! This must be it, right?

…there is just one small problem, though:

Alex Mandel’s Norman Rockwell’s America first premiered at the Theatreworks New Works Festival in California in 2014.

Yep: two years ago.

And yet I was in a musical called Norman Rockwell’s America about 25 years ago.

All this to say, here are the options I have come to:

1. Alex Mandel is a plagiarizer, but somehow successfully erased all traces of the play he plagiarized. How very sneaky of him.
2. The musical I was in was simply some locally-written affair. (Maybe a college student’s assignment? – it was performed at a community college, after all.)
3. I’m really bad at researching things online and have misunderstood everything I’ve discovered and just don’t know the right places to look for the information I need.
4. I’m a time traveler and just don’t realize it.
5. My memory is simply playing tricks on me yet again.

Personally, I’m leaning towards some sort of mixture of #’s 2, 3, and 5.

I’m kind of hoping it’s # 4, though.

The Secret Garden

I remember that, one day when I was younger, my great-grandmother took me to see the movie The Secret Garden in a theatre near her house in Palm Springs. I seem to remember it being a rather small theatre—certainly much less grandiose than the monolithic cinemas we are surrounded by today—and that you had to walk through a small, lattice, ivy-laced archway and into a simple portico to get to the theatre’s front door. I have no idea if this description of the theatre even remotely resembles the truth about the place; it’s just what I envision now, for whatever reason.

If I recall, I believe I stayed the night at my great-grandmother’s house the night before, and she had explained that this was going to be our plan for the next day.

For some completely inexplicable reason, I simply knew that The Secret Garden was going to become my favorite movie. I think I may have even told my great-grandmother this. I was, of course, very excited the night before, to be going to see my favorite movie for the first time.

I have no idea why I had simply decided that this movie was going to be my favorite. I knew nothing of the story at the time. I hadn’t read the book – probably, at the time, I didn’t even know it was based on a book.

But I was eight years old. So of course I was excited; of course I could predict the future.

I think something about the idea of a magical garden appealed to me. Though I had not yet seen enough of the world or of the forest or of trees to realize how intimately spiritual they can be, still, I think that somehow I was vaguely aware that plant life had some sort of near-magical quality to it that was worth pondering, and certainly worth making a movie about.

So The Secret Garden was going to be my favorite movie, and that was the end of it.

The big day came, and we saw the movie. I remember liking every moment that the main characters were in the garden—the “secret” garden—exploring, wandering, giving in to its magic. And I thought Colin seemed like a rather interesting person, someone I might even like to know, even though he was quite grumpy at first.

Once the movie ended, however, I remember thinking that the whole movie felt like it was leading up to this surreal (a word I, no doubt, did not know at the time) climax (another word I did not know), but that it sort of just fizzled out. (Did I know “fizzle” then? – probably not.) There was something about a fire towards the end, I believe. (Or was that fire in the beginning? Now I seem to recall the movie pretty much starting with a fire…)

Anymore, though, I can’t remember a single other thing about the climax or the ending. Also, I remember that I thought most every moment of movie outside of the garden was actually kind of flat. (I don’t think that, at the time, I’d have considered using the word “flat” synonymously with “boring” – movie scenes are not deflated balls, after all.)

But I had already decided that The Secret Garden was going to be my favorite movie; there was no changing that now.

I don’t remember what we did after we left the theatre—back across the patio, back through the lattice archway—but I believe that at some point before we even returned to my great-grandmother’s house, I had to admit that, actually, The Secret Garden was probably my second favorite movie. I mean, sure, it was a great movie, but it wasn’t actually the very best. There was, after all, Jurassic Park, which came out two months previously and which I saw a total of seven times in the theatre. (Was it really seven whole times? I say that number now, but actually I really can’t say if this number is exactly true. It was certainly several times, at the very least.)

I only saw The Secret Garden once in the theatre. In fact, I’ve only seen The Secret Garden once ever.

I can’t say precisely how long I continued to say that The Secret Garden was my second favorite movie, but I’d be surprised to find out that it was longer than a week, two at most.

How could I possibly have known that my prediction of the future would be wrong? I was a mighty eight years old, after all. I knew everything else.