Tag: The Real Thing

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Tom Stoppard Is Dead, Long Live Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard mounts a surreal bicycle, 1967.

There’s a hole in my heart.  Slowly, inexorably, depressingly, one by one, my literary heroes pass away.  The latest, Tom Stoppard, generally regarded as the greatest living English playwright, died November 29, 2025, at age 88.  And before him, Tom Wolfe (2018), Terry Teachout (2022), and Paul Johnson (2023).

Tom Stoppard had a way with words and cherished them.  In his play The Real Thing, the playwright character utters this plea, “Words … They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more … I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

Those who value Stoppard’s words will be quoting him long after his death.

Stoppardian

A dramatist and Czech-born, Englishman, Tom Stoppard is far from a household name in America.  He wrote intellectual plays of wit and humor, and farcical plays of intellectual intrigue.  He didn’t write musicals or comedies, so many, probably most, have never seen his plays in theaters.  Stoppard wrote plays, “because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”  Contradiction and conceptual enigmas were his stock in trade, though always delivered with dry comedic wit to drive the story.  The adjective, Stoppardian, entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978.

I first encountered Tom Stoppard 50 years ago – with a pair of offerings at Seattle’s Second Stage.  I was enrolled in The Living Theater, a class whose students were expected to attend at least seven live performances on campus or off.  I invited my Mom to join me for a double-feature of two short Stoppard plays, After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound.  What we saw was both surreal and absurd, which led me to write a lengthy review trying to capture in detail the experience of the event.  Stoppard believed that theater is an event, for which words and script are but a movable and changing part.

With each new Stoppard play I saw, The Real Thing, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Arcadia, Rock ‘n Roll, Leopoldstadt, or audio-plays I heard, Darkside, The Hard Problem, In the Native State, Albert’s Bridge, or Professional Foul, the greater my admiration grew.  His most accessible work is no doubt Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 film whose script won Stoppard an Academy Award.

My collection of theater playbills from Tom Stoppard plays I’ve seen.

But for me, his 1993 stage play, Arcadia takes the cake.  I’ve seen it staged three times and listened to several audio versions.  Set on an estate in rural Derbyshire, England, the play examines its owners, the Coverly family, in both 1809 and their present-day descendants.  Arcadia is an exploration of determinism and chaos theory, love and literature, Lord Byron, lust, and the falsity of biography.  As with all of Stoppard’s plays, it’s really about the characters who inhabit the stage, delivering lines that help the audience to first think, then understand, and later feel.  It’s a multi-layered drama filled with romance, humor, tragedy, sorrow, science, rice puddings, and a tortoise.  The L.A. Theatre Works audio staging of this nearly three-hour play will introduce you to entropy and mathematics, but in a way that is fun and cleverly explained.

One of Stoppard’s most intriguing and accessible pieces is Darkside, a radio play that conceptualizes one interpretation behind the meaning of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.   Stoppard received the band’s blessing to use their music at the soundtrack for his drama.  Darkside was released in 2013 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a best-selling album that stayed on the Billboard 200 for almost 15 years.  The story follows Emily McCoy, a philosophy student as she travels through a series of thought experiments vividly brought to life by the characters she encounters, and seeks to answer the question, “What is the good?”

I could share a dozen quotes to conclude this tribute, but have settled on just one, fittingly from his 1967 breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.”

And my collection of Stoppard biographies and copies of scripts.
Afterword and Looking After

Theaters were really devastated by Covid-19, and as a result, fewer plays are staged, with musicals and crowd-pleasers the staple.  Tom Stoppard’s works are still occasionally performed in England, but not often in the U.S.  Jennifer and I were fortunate to have seen his last play, Leopoldstadt, the story behind his Jewish roots on Broadway in 2022.  But locally, there hasn’t been a staging of any of his plays since 2014, that I’m aware of.

Yet there are ways to listen to his dramas, foremost among them, Tom Stoppard – A BBC Radio Collection featuring 14 plays.  His 54-minute radio play, Darkside, is easily found on YouTube and elsewhere.  L.A. Theatre Works has staged audio versions of three productions, including excellent adaptations of Arcadia, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. They are available through Libby or your library.  Only one of his plays has been filmed, a 1990 version of Rosencrantz, starring Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss. Plus, there’s always the film, Shakespeare in Love, while not totally his own, it’s a satisfying representation of the Stoppard style.

Prized Possession
The autographed copy of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern at Dead” that I bought by pure chance.

Several years ago, we stopped at the Half Price Books in Tukwila and browsed.  I found this used copy of Rosencrantz at an attractive price of $8.00, so bought it.  For a couple of years, it collected dust on a nightstand filled with other volumes I haven’t yet read.  It wasn’t until I packed it along on an extended trip and finally read it.  Enthused, I began to read it again but was struck by the introductory page.  Was that a real autograph, or just stamped artwork?  Felt pen stain-marks bleeding through to the opposite side proved it was real.

Unwittingly, without trying, and by pure chance, I purchased an autographed copy the U.S. printing of the 1967 play that launched Stoppard’s career.

But of course, Tom Stoppard said it best as a line in this very play, “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

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My Living Theater

A collage of nine of my favorite plays.

April 1975 – the final quarter of college and the end of 17 years of schooling. My afternoon job at Rogers No. 3 coal mine conveniently came to an end.  Six months of 17-hour days driving from Enumclaw to Seattle, attending classes at U.W., studying, then on to Ravensdale for eight hours of grimy work, showering in the washhouse, with a half-hour drive back home, to bed by midnight, only to repeat the process six or seven hours later.  It wore me down.  I wanted to retire.  Spring break was my last week, thankfully on the day shift.

That quarter provided a fresh beginning. Though only one college credit shy of graduating, I took a full schedule of 14 credits, including two finance classes to round out my Economics degree. Expanding my interests, I chose a two-credit Home Ec class in nutrition, one credit for tennis, plus a three-credit class called The Living Theater.

Growing up I had zero interest in theater and never even went to a school play during high school.  I did attend one musical my senior year – the Who’s Tommy, presented at the Moore Theater, with a little-known, Bette Midler as the Acid Queen.  In May of my freshman year, I saw a touring company’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Program cover from the Who’s Tommy presented at the Moore Theater, 1971.

My true interest in theater grew one Sunday afternoon during the summer of 1973 while reading Rex Reed’s movie reviews in the Seattle P-I.  Reed highlighted a just-announced collection of filmed plays to be presented in movie theaters, on a limited basis, and only by subscription.  The American Film Theatre, produced by Eli Landau filmed eight stagings of top theatrical works all featuring notable actors.  Each film would be shown just four times, and exclusively at 500 select movie theaters across the nation.

I convinced Mom to subscribe and Dad joined, as well as Aunt Betty and Uncle Charlie Falk.  The local showings were at the Crossroads Theater, east of Bellevue.  I was a junior at the U.W. and each month drove my 1967 Renault across the I-90 floating bridge to meet the folks with an occasional dinner beforehand.  In the “don’t trust anyone over 30” atmosphere of the early 1970s, a sentiment, I roundly rejected, it was a thrill to hang with my parents, aunt, and uncle, all comfortably in their late 40s and early 50s.  I took pride in having launched this event to see the best of Broadway.  The ushers even handed out real playbills!

Among the plays we saw: The Homecoming, A Delicate Balance, Butley, Rhinoceros, and Three Sisters.  But, the greatest theatrical event in my estimation was The Iceman Cometh starring Lee Marvin as Hickey, a traveling salesman in an all-star cast of Robert Ryan, Frederick March, Bradford Dillman, and a young Jeff Bridges.  The Iceman Cometh was four hours long, three acts, and two intermissions.  It showcased Eugene O’Neill’s story of dead-enders with delusional pipe dreams who stayed drunk in Harry Hopes’ last chance saloon and boarding house to avoid facing the world.

That introduction to serious drama couldn’t have come at a better time.  We subscribed for the second season that featured Galileo, In Celebration, and The Man in the Glass Booth.  Unfortunately, the major Hollywood studios pressured local theaters to cancel American Film Theater screenings and the enterprise thereafter collapsed.

But I was now hooked on stage productions.  The Living Theater class, in the engineering department of all places, was my new ticket to more serious drama.  In addition to learning about the structure of plays and the various venues where they’re presented, students were required to attend seven live plays at the three theaters on campus, including the revered Showboat, a floating auditorium moored in Portage Bay.  In addition, I saw three off-campus productions including Death of a Salesman at Tacoma’s U.P.S. and a pair of Tom Stoppard offerings at Seattle’s Second Stage.

Theater of the Absurd – Which performance?

The Living Theater class really sharpened my prose as we were required to write reviews of the required plays.  One performance wasn’t on the syllabus but really piqued my imagination.  It was a double-feature of two short plays by Tom Stoppard, After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound at the Second Stage theatre. The Second Stage was affiliated with the Seattle Repertory Theatre and typically presented more experimental shows.

The Second Stage theatre program for Tom Stoppard’s, “After Magritte” and “The Real Inspector Hound” – April 28, 1975

Both Stoppard offerings were from a dramatic style called the Theatre of the Absurd – plays that reject traditional storytelling by focusing on what happens when narrative communication breaks down.  In late April, I took Mom to see the double feature and wrote the following review, trying to capture the surreal and absurd nature of what we saw, both on stage and off.

“Reality”

We come on the sloop John B
my dear mother and me.

We entered the Second Stage arena well before show time, found two second-row seats, and proceeded to experience the sights and sounds of the theater.

I pointed out all the Seattle luminaries listed as Second Stage supporters. Behind us, a woman in her middle fifties, whom we were going to encounter frequently as the night progressed, made the same observation. Our eavesdropping skills were in top form so my mother and I proceeded to monitor this woman’s conversations the rest of the night.

“Oh, look here, Christopher Bailey is on the list of supporters. I wonder what night he comes?”

Accompanied by two other women (from their conversations, I assumed the talkative one to be a grandmother with her daughter, and a friend), Mrs. Chatterbox, which my mother appropriately christened her, spoke, “There’s Lori.”

Lori was one of three girls of high school age who were ushers. Lori, it turned out, was also the garrulous grandmother’s granddaughter.

“Now why doesn’t she seat those people over there, plenty of good seats right there. I was shopping today and . . . oh, look, who is that?  Isn’t that Jean Enersen?”

The daughter replied, “Yes, that girl on Seattle Today. No, that isn’t Jean Enersen, it’s that Shirley, yes Shirley.”

“Isn’t that Jean Enersen, the blonde one on King Newservice,” the loquacious grandmother butted in.

“It’s Shirley, that girl on Seattle Today.”

“Now where is Lori going to seat her?  Look, Lori is putting that Jean Enersen in those good seats. I wonder why SHE gets those seats. Just because she’s on TV.”

“That isn’t Jean Enersen. It’s that Shirley.”

“Well, whoever it is, there’s seats over there, Lori,” the grandmother commands as if she’s talking to her granddaughter who must be fifty feet away.

The play begins. After Magritte is a delightfully surrealistic, satirical takeoff on something resembling a mystery or Sherlock Holmes type of script.

At intermission, the fun continues. Lori, the usher comes over to visit with her mother and grandmother. Mrs. Chatterbox asks, “Wasn’t that Jean Enersen you seated, Lori? Why did she get such good seats?”

The mother responds, “That’s Shirley, the girl on Seattle Today, not Jean Enersen.”

Lori tells her tale of what the ‘snobby’ Jean Enersen or Shirley said. In a mock voice, she repeats, “We don’t want THESE seats, I would prefer being seated there.”

“Who does she think she is?” the grandmother retorts.  Lori and her two usher friends giggle and tell of their other experiences as ushers.

Mrs. Chatterbox again, “Look now, that Jean Enersen is leaving, what, doesn’t she like the play? I can’t stand her anyway.  Did you see her show yesterday when they had that psychologist who talked about symbols? I absolutely detest that show.”

“That’s not Jean Enersen. It’s that Shirley on Seattle Today.”

“Well whatever, look, she’s not coming back. After getting those good seats, she goes and leaves in the middle of the play.  I can’t stand her show. That psychologist explained what it means if you like . . . uh, I mean, uh . . . relate to a circle, a square, a triangle, or a Z.  I draw circles and that means . . .” as she proceeded to give a lengthy pop-Freudian interpretation to drawing circles.

The Real Inspector Hound was another trip into the fantasy world of the absurd. Eventually, the critics attending the supposed play were involved in the fun, murder, and intrigue as critics became players and the players became critics.

Leaving the theater at the end of the plays, I turned to my mother and asked, “Well, what did you think of those shows?  Rather unreal, huh?”

She replied, “Which performance?”

By William Kombol
April 28, 1975
HSS 451, Jack Leahy, Assoc. Professor

Professor Leahy gave me an ‘A’ for the class, writing, “

Great!  You ought to be a playwright.  This is a funny paper.  I don’t quite know why, but the Repertory seems to attract these kinds of audiences – try opening night at a regular Rep presentation – it’s downright awesome, but very much a part of theater.  The Elizabethans were the same. And that’s what makes it fun.  Very much enjoyed reading this paper.”

The first page of my review, titled “Reality” with the professor’s handwritten comments.
My interest in theater grew.

My interest in theater grew with each new play I saw.  I kept programs and playbills from most performances and usually stapled the ticket stub to the cover.  While writing this essay I made a quick count of the collection which totals over 300, though some were lost.  In the early years, I primarily saw were dramas.  Back then only the biggest musicals yielded touring companies. But any musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s name attached found me attending.

Through all of them, Tom Stoppard remained my favorite playwright.  And with each new play of his I saw, so did my admiration.  Stoppard’s plays are first produced in the United Kingdom, and only his most successful make it to the U.S.  Still, I’ve been able to see most of his best including the breakout hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Leopoldstadt, his most recent.  With the advent of audio plays, I’ve listened to the lion’s share of the rest, including the mesmerizing Darkside, inspired by Pink Floyd’s 1973 album.  Stoppard is generally considered the greatest living English language playwright.  His most popular film adaptation is Shakespeare in Love.

In addition to seeing live performances, these days I’m more often listening to the likes of L.A. Theater Works or other recordings found on Libby and Audible.  It may not be for everyone, but when you’re hooked on live drama, an audio play will do quite nicely.

Below are some of my favorite audio plays:

Broadway Bound – In my estimation, Neil Simon’s concluding comedic drama of an autobiographical trilogy, may be one of the finest works of the 20th century.  It mixes humor with pathos and when you’re not laughing you might just find yourself shedding a tear.  The L.A. Theater Works audio production is superb.

Copenhagen – This weighty play explores the ethics and morality of developing the atomic bomb. Michael Frayn, one of England’s leading playwrights explores the real-life 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, and Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading nuclear scientist. There are two audio versions – pick the one starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Heisenberg.

The Real Thing is generally considered Tom Stoppard’s best.  Its focus is broken marriages, adultery, and the nature of love, more specifically the real thing, interspersed with two plays within the play we’re seeing.

Arcadia, another Stoppard favorite explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty, plus the nature of evidence and truth in history, mathematics, and physics.  It’s a complex play that requires several listening’s to fully understand. 

Darkside is probably Stoppard’s most approachable audio play, as it was written as such to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.  It’s 45 minutes long with philosophical dialogue interspersed with music from the album. It’s a play you can listen to time and time again and still hear something fresh.

Post script: Ian Hunter’s 1981 song, “Theater of the Absurd” doesn’t really rise to what playwrights of that style are trying to achieve. Still it’s an amusing song and Hunter, former lead singer in Mott the Hoople is one of my favorites, so here’s a video link with lyrics:

https://youtu.be/OFdfm77R9is?si=Orj8d3nlt0md5tlo

 

 

 

 

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Ten Album Turning Points – Desert Island Discs

From The First Family to The Stranger - Ten albums that became turning points.
Who didn’t love album covers?

In Tom Stoppard’s play, “The Real Thing,” the lead character, Henry can’t figure out which songs to pick when he’s slated to appear as the castaway on Desert Island Discs.  The problem is Henry likes mindless pop music, but he’s a snob who’s afraid to admit he like pop music, so struggles to find songs and performers those of his intellectual class should like.  His wife suggests a more pragmatic approach: pick records associated with turning points in his life.

My list follows the turning point theory–– records that wormed into my ears during special moments experienced early in life.  There are plenty of albums I grew to love after these, but none captured my heart and soul like those from my youth.

I compiled my Desert Island Discs during the early days of Covid-19 when the country was shutting down and a bored citizenry sought new ways to amuse themselves by posting lists of favorite albums.  April Fools’ Day seemed a fitting day to start, so with thanks to Doug Geiger’s original Facebook invitation and Jim Olson’s posts of musical inspiration, I posted these favorites from April 1-10, 2020.

Day 1 – The First Family (1962): Though it’s April Fools’ Day, this is no joke . . . though Vaughn Meador’s First Family sure traded in them.  It was the first record I listened to all the way through time and time again.  It was my 9-year-old introduction to political humor, delivered with Kennedy-style Boston accents plus world leaders whose names I still remember: De Gaulle, Khrushchev, Ben-Gurion, and Castro among them.  This spoken-word comedy album spent 12 weeks as #1 on the Billboard charts selling over 7.5 million copies.  The Kombol family’s copy of the album, listened to so many times, was never played again after Nov. 22, 1963.

Day 2 – Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music (1962): “I Can’t Stop Loving You” was the #1 hit, and Ray Charles’ foray into C&W was what a nation listened to that year.  The album spawned four singles and everyone liked it: kids, adults, even grandparents.  I listened to it once again this morning.  Its soulful, jazzy,  easy-listening, country-feel, sounds just as sweet today as it did 58 years ago.  This was one of the couple dozen albums our family-owned.  My sister, Jeanmarie and I regularly rotated Ray Charles’ “Modern Sounds” with soundtracks from “Oklahoma” and “The Music Man” plus our own personal favorite–– the spoken-word soundtrack to the “Pollyanna” movie starring Hayley Mills.

Day 3 – Meet the Beatles (1964): From the opening notes of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to the closing bars of “Not a Second Time” every song is a winner.  Our family didn’t own the album, but my best friend’s family did.  Every day after 5th grade we gathered at Jeff Eldridge’s home across Franklin Street from ours.  Jeff’s older brother, Ron was a junior at EHS, and his album; “Meet the Beatles” introduced four lads from Liverpool into our lives. Most afternoons were the same––listen to “Meet the Beatles,” followed by watching “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons and Superman episodes starring George Reeves.  When not playing the Beatles, we cued up Roy Orbison.

Day 4 – Sgt. Pepper (1967): It was the perfect time to be 14 years old.  The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper the very week I said goodbye to 8th grade.  That Summer of Love was our summer of sun. It shined most every day in Seattle, setting a record 67 days without rain.  Most days Mom drove us to Lake Sawyer with the radio tuned to AM 950.  That June the Beatles held seven of the top ten positions on KJR’s Fabulous Fifty record survey, published Fridays in the Seattle P-I.  Each song spawned new mental imagery––from tangerine skies to meter maids.

A month later the Beatles defined the spirit of the era with their follow-up single “All You Need is Love.”  It all added up to the best summer of my life; not to mention more than a few hours staring at the album cover or studying the lyrics printed therein.  To this day when anyone asks my favorite album of all time – there’s one quick answer: Sgt. Pepper.

Day 5 – Tommy (1969):  By the autumn of 1969, most of us had driver’s licenses.  Lester Hall drove his parent’s Ford Fairlane with an state-of-the-art stereo.  We’d drive around Enumclaw from here to there but mostly nowhere.  When doing so we listened to the Who’s “Tommy” so many times I’m surprised the 8-track tape didn’t wear out.  We occasionally rotated Creedence, the Beatles, or CSN to give the Who a rest.

“Tommy” is generally considered the first rock musical. In late April 1971, our senior year of high school, the very first theatrical production of “Tommy” was staged at the Moore Theater.  This world premiere featured a yet unknown, Bette Midler portraying the Acid Queen with show-stopping ferocity. A bunch of us saw it.  I was in heaven.

Forty-five years later I gave the double album a long overdue listen from a remastered copy.  How did “Tommy” hold up?  It starts great. In fact, the Overture is perhaps my favorite number.  At times the album soars with melodies flowing nicely.  It’s an album in the best sense of the word.  But, the story (book in musical-theater parlance) isn’t convincing.  As smart and clever as Pete Townsend was, he’s simply not a great lyricist.  The best songs still shine: “I’m Free,” “Pinball Wizard,” and “See Me, Feel Me.”  The worst, “Fiddle About,” “Cousin Kevin,” and “Tommy’s Holiday Camp” remain clunkers.  I can’t claim it stands the test of time, but back then “Tommy” was the height of musical fashion and evidence of our growing sophistication.

Day 6 – Every Picture Tells a Story (1971): “Maggie May” will forever be embedded as my first song of college.  It was late September when I began my freshman year at U.W.   Rod Stewart’s hit album was the soundtrack for initiation to college life – the picture of my story.  While I’m particularly fond of the “Mandolin Wind,” “Reason to Believe;”; there’s no better song than “Maggie” to put a smile on my face and a song to my lips.

“Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you,
It’s late September and I really should be back at school.”

Day 7 – American Pie (1971): Don McLean has a special place in my heart.  His performance at the Paramount on March 17, 1972 was the first concert I ever attended.  I chose my sister, Jeanmarie Bond to be my date.  It was her first concert too.  We dined at Clinkerdagger,  Bickerstaff & Petts beforehand. It was a swank and trendy restaurant on Capitol Hill.

When introducing American Pie, McLean mockingly mimicked some college professor who wrote a detailed analysis of its lyrics.  The audience sang the words and chorus we knew by heart.  The title song has never loosened its grip.  The album’s second hit single, “Vincent” is a hauntingly beautiful musical evocation of artistry focused on the most stunning of paintings: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.  If it’s been some time since you last heard the entire album just say, “Hey Siri (or Alexa), play the album American Pie by Don McLean.” You’ll be rewarded.

Day 8 – Past, Present & Future (1974):  My first introduction to Al Stewart came courtesy of FM radio’s penchant for playing extended-length songs like “Nostradamus” and “Roads to Moscow” in the early 1970s.   Only later did I buy the album and discover Stewart’s lyrical genius runs through history.  In fact, side one of this breakthrough album features a song for each of the first five decades of the 20th century.  My love affair with Al Stewart’s music played out nicely over the decades – I’ve seen him in concert five times, more than any other music artist.

Day 9 – All-American Alien Boy (1976):   While in college I liked Mott the Hoople.  Their lead singer and songwriter, Ian Hunter left the group in 1975, the year I graduated.  The following year I was drifting without direction when Hunter released his second solo album.  It struck gold in this listener’s ears. There aren’t many who feel the same way, but I stand by Ian Hunter’s “All-American Alien Boy” as an enduring work of musical art.  “Irene Wilde” is a beautiful ballad of a true story, bus station rejection that inspired Hunter’s rise to stardom.

BTW, Doug Geiger and I had plans to see the Mott the Hoople reunion tour in November 2019, but sadly Hunter developed a severe case of tinnitus.  He was advised by his doctors to discontinue performing until his condition subsides.  Will we ever get the chance to see Mott the Hoople?  Time may soon run out for the 80-year-old Ian Hunter, who I once saw in concert playing with Mick Ronson.

Day 10 – The Stranger (1977):  This record changed the direction of my life.  The album spawned four Top 40 hits: “Moving Out,” “Just the Way You Are,” “Only the Good Die Young” and “She’s Always a Woman to Me.”  But two lesser-known tunes convinced me to take a giant step outside myself.  When working as a management trainee at Seattle Trust & Savings Bank, I grew increasingly frustrated with my chosen direction.  Repeated listening to “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and “Vienna” (waits for you) convinced me I needed a change.

Those two songs fortified my courage to quit the job with a month’s notice dated to the one-year anniversary of when I started.  I left for Europe in February 1978 with no set agenda and a budget of $10 a day.  I lived and traveled for the next five months and have never forgotten the debt I owe to Billy Joel for drawing out the courage I couldn’t find by myself.