I would seriously buy this music video if it were available for purchase on iTunes. I'll put it in here so I know where to find it easily. Best.Music.Video.Ever:
Stevie Nicks. The heartthrob of males of a particular age (mine). There is nothing more to say.
Billy Joel had a lot of good music videos. I even bought a DVD compilation. Check out this one as he deals with despair of daily life and the healing balm of love. OK, he's bringing sex into it but it's clearly love and commitment and family of this young couple, and Mr. Joel, that wins out.
In the old days, musicals were the music videos. This movie just gets me crying to no end, every dang time:
Now there are a lot of people who think Broadway-style, musical theater is just silly. And music videos have seen their big days come and go. In real life people don't break into song or dance especially just after someone has died and the corpse is still warm. But my Dad liked musicals. And his Dad. Maybe it was the Welsh in us.
But it gets even weirder. The film version of Carousel came out in 1956, the year my parents were married. And they saw it back then. I came along in 1957. I first saw the movie on black-and-white TV. As I little kid I had enough sense of awe and imagination to appreciate the dead guy cleaning stars and readily caught the symbolism of "the Starkeeper." It was the hypnotic music of the Carousel Waltz and the dreamlike fantasy of the ballet that got to me - and that male dancer. He looked like my dad! That was weird.
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| Jacques D'Amboise |
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| My Dad as a Youth |
OK. Maybe not the greatest of resemblances. My dad is no movie star. But darken Jacques's hair as it was in Carousel and not as he appears here as brother Ephraim in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954!) and, well, my dad didn't do ballet either. But that guy with the dark hair and dark eyebrows like my Dad's could dance! And they were born the same year. And my Dad is a bit French-Italian.
There are dark themes exposed here of abuse, crime, death - not the usual musical frolics. Yet there is an overpowering sense that in spite of all the ugliness in the world and in us, there is something that transcends. Something that heals beyond pain, death, and stars.
If they loved.
They did.
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