The concert was a benefit for Songs of Love. It raised about $30,000 to $40,000, thanks to corporate sponsors and to the Fab Faux agreeing to play a 90-minute set for less than their usual fee, said John Beltzer, the founder and CEO of Songs of Love.
Lots of charities in lots of ways help children who have life-threatening illnesses, and celebrities like to put smiles on those innocent little faces by visiting the kids in hospitals. Songs of Love is something different.
For 11 years now, the nonprofit foundation has enlisted professional musicians to write and perform personalized songs for seriously ill or disabled children. The lyrics always contain the child’s name and references to his or her favorite activities, pets, people, and things; the song is recorded in the style the child likes best (rap, r&b, rock, or whatever). The family is given the CD—what the foundation likes to call "the medicine of music."
Singers including Billy Joel, David Lee Roth, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Michael Bolton and now the Fab Faux’s Will Lee have performed the vocals. Songs have been sent to children in all 50 states and abroad and have been written in several foreign languages.
It was impossible to tell how many people in the sold-out concert hall had come specifically for the presentation of the 15,000th Song of Love—written for and about 14-year-old Steven Domalewski of Wayne. The audience sat through an overly long but intriguing opening set by various configurations of students, ages roughly 13 to 17, from the Paul Green School of Rock in South Hackensack. I want to get back to them later in this post, for they deserve a shout-out.
The tickets said 7:30 pm, the concert started a few minutes late, the kids played for roughly an hour—shuffling on and off stage with each song, their gleaming Gibson and Fender and Epiphone guitars almost as big as some of them were–and then the lights came up and the first of several speakers who had worked on the benefit began profusely thanking various people for making the evening possible.
John Beltzer came out and gestured up towards Steven, who was strapped into his wheelchair in an open area at the front of the balcony, and the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Also onstage was the writer of Steven’s song–Tony Asher, a gray-bearded, barrel chested guy who, among other things, worked on the Beach Boys’ famous 1966 "Pet Sounds" album and composed one of its best songs, "Wouldn’t It Be Nice."
Steven’s song, which had already been recorded with a vocal by Will Lee, was played for Steven and the audience. Steven, who was described in the program as "recovering from a serious baseball accident," seemed to be enraptured.
What the program did not say, but some knew from local news accounts, is that he was struck in the chest by a line drive off a metal bat while pitching in a PAL game 21 months ago. His heart stopped, and by the time it was restarted, he had suffered significant brain damage. He remained in a coma for a number of days.
Steven has (at least so far) lost the capacity to speak and has incomplete motor control. As the song played, his head bobbed and arms waved in a manner that, while clearly impaired, seemed just as clearly to respond with delight to the music.
Not everyone could see Steven. Beltzer got the audience to open their programs and sing the chorus of the song, which includes the rhyme, "Steven, you’re the best/ A-Rod thinks you’re special and we must say we’re impressed/You’re the best, the very best."
After a few run throughs, the mikes were turned on and the audience sing-along was recorded. Beltzer asked for a couple re-takes, which the audience agreeably provided.
I don’t recall if the final version, with the audience singing the chorus, was played back, but the whole thing went on a long time. When intermission was declared, a woman in the row behind me said, with evident annoyance, to the person next to her, "It’s too much to ask of people to come at 7:30 for a show that doesn’t start until 9:15."
I felt a little of that myself. But that was before I walked over to meet Steven’s parents and watch him respond to people coming up to greet him. Many of them were teenage girls and young women, prompting his mother, Nancy, to quip, with a laugh, "He’s a real chick magnet."
If something like this had happened to my son (who is now 21) I don’t know if I would be able to display the composure and humor and plain normalcy that Nancy and her husband, Joe Domalewski, did on Saturday night. And it was so unaffected that it was clearly just how they are, not a display for public consumption. I’m sure they were in a different state 21, eighteen, maybe even twelve months ago,
Steven, though mute, has a way of literally connecting with people that is startling to see. He reaches for the person’s hand and pulls it towards him and opens his mouth wide and appears to almost gnaw on the person’s hand and touch it with his tongue. It’s hard to describe. He isn’t gnawing or licking. But he is connecting with them through this tactile oral communication, as close to verbal communication as he can presently manage.
It is also hard to describe the emotions I felt watching him. A kind of momentary recoil overcome by a piercing empathy. Like many seriously stricken kids, he has a quality that I hesitate to call angelic, but let’s put it this way….it’s a quality that perfectly normal average kids don’t always, um, reveal on a daily basis. Anyone who is a parent knows what I mean. I don’t know what Steven was like before his accident. He’s described as being a regular kid, and the pre-accident pictures of him in the program show just that.
I’m going into this detail because I’m trying to get at something that, again, I don’t quite have words for. It has to do with the difference between the public level and the private level of experiencing things. Or maybe it’s the mass level versus the one-on-one level.
On one level, the whole thing dragged on too long before the Fab Faux finally took the stage. And singing a song with a thousand or so people you don’t know, declaring some kid you’ve never met and know nothing about to be "the best, the very best," feels sort of dopey.
Would it be a better world if we all could embrace such things without feeling hokey, without feeling that our precious sophistication is being compromised? I’m sure it wouldn’t be a worse world, but I’m a guy who isn’t into smiley faces and has never used an emoticon and never will (and was shocked, absolutely shocked, when David Pogue, the technology columnist of the New York Times, wrote that he had nothing against them. There goes civilization.)
[I’m wrong about that. Civilization was destroyed when we put the words REAL SEX on the cover of the January issue this year, some readers have told us. A couple of them wrote say that they threw the disgusting thing into the garbage without even opening it. These people have probably not turned on a television set in the last couple decades, but Lord love them.]
Anyway, that’s the public level, or whatever we should call it. (The late George W.S. Trow, author of "In theContext of No Context," probably had a better name for it.)
But everything changes when you move to the one-on-one level. And I do believe that the world would be a better place if we could all experience everyone and eveything on that level. But that would take an awful lot of time out of one’s day..
In talking with Steven’s father—a burly athletic man with dark hair and a powerful voice, who teaches graphic design and printing technology at Kearny High School—I learned that Steven is making progress. "He had MRI’s a month ago that showed improvement in his brain function," he told me. "Six months ago, a loud crowded place like this would have put his spasticity into high gear and we would have had to take him out right away."
Joe Domalewski said that even before his son’s accident, which he witnessed, he was alarmed about the frightening power engineered into the high-tech metal bats that are ubiquitous in youth baseball. Now, of course, he considers them potentially lethal weapons and thinks they should be banned.
"Don’t get me started," he said.
While I was talking to Joe and Nancy, a woman of about her age and slender build came up to her and embraced her warmly. I thought they might be sisters. But the reality turned out to be more interesting and unexpected, which is what I like about reality, my imagination being far from novelist level.
The woman’s name was Shari Ungerleider, and she was there with her husband, Jeff. She told me that she had met Nancy through Songs of Love and that ten years ago, when the organization was new, a song had been written for her son shortly before he "passed away.".
She said that the song was played at the boy’s funeral, and was very moving. I asked her if her son had heard the song before he….I almost said ‘died,’ but something about her choice of words and the way she spoke them made me stick with "passed away." I felt that changing the verb, especially to one so bare and direct, would have violated a boundary that I couldn’t see or fully understand but wanted to respect.
She said that her son had heard the song, and enjoyed it. I asked her how old he was when he died.
"Four and a half," she said.
Like Nancy, she seemed to have long since processed what had happened. Still I felt I might be intruding and apologized if that were the case. But she assured me that she had no problem talking about it. So I asked one more question. What had caused their son’s death? Shari and Jeff were standing side by side.
"Tay-Sachs," Jeff said.
If you are still with me in this admittedly long post, you may be wondering why I titled it, "Into the Light of the Dark Black Night." It is, of course, a line from "Blackbird," a beautiful and poignant Beatles song by Paul McCartney. (John was my favorite Beatle, but no one could top Paul for poignance.)
Why not pick the more famous line, "You were only waiting for this moment to be free," which in a later verse is restated as "You were only waiting for this moment to arise"?
I suppose in that choice you have my view of things in a nutshell. An impenetrable nutshell, perhaps. But for me, the latter seems too easy, facile, and unequivocal to fit my experience of Saturday night. A smiley face of a title, it would have been. I’m not talking about the context of the Beatles song. I’m talking about the meaning of the evening, as I experienced it.
I like the paradox of "the light of the dark black night." Though a sworn enemy of redundancy, I forgive it here, because I can see a distinction between ‘dark’ and ‘black.’ Which is that the two words indicate a progression, from dark to black, deeper into the void (or the infinite wonder) at the center of things and so, after all, not redundant.
A light in the dark is my provisional definition of hope. Or even of life. And that the dark itself contains a kind of light, a knowledge that we all must face, seems an incontrovertible fact, and not at all a nihilistic one. Though it doesn’t make it any easier to find a parking space in my hometown of Montclair on a Saturday night.
Finally, for I really have to get to bed and then get up at the crack of dawn for a doctor’s appointment and then to the office to close our May House & Garden Issue, a quick word about the kids from the School of Rock.
It brings me back to the difference between the public and private levels. Sitting in the balcony, watching the kids perform, looking at them through binoculars, they looked like kids, some of them, and some of them looked very grownup,. And all of them had that odd magnitude that the stage seems to impart.
They were a motley crew, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, some of the guys with incredibly long hair some with short haircuts, some looking kind of absently cool or detached in the way guitarists have, others displaying more visible energy or passion. The two girl singers looked rather mature and sexy, though they were dressed demurely. One was sultry, the other perky.
They played classic rock and heavy metal songs, not in a dazzling way but in a pretty confident and competent way, especially given their age.
One of the Fab Faux, Rich Pagano, a Paterson native, later commented on the stage on how good they sounded and how uplifting it was to hear kids so young going at it hammer and tongs like that. Those weren’t his exact words, but he seemed genuinely stirred and made a point of it to the both the crowd and his bandmates.
Noting that the kids had played a Dylan song, he remarked, "Bob should hear that."
After the concert, I ran into a few of the kids in the lobby, and complimented them on their performance. They seemed like average kids again. The girl singer who had the sultry style was there, and I asked her how old she was. Fourteen, she said. And she did seem like a fourteen-year-old girl in person, and that’s as it should be.
The stage and the spotlight change things in a powerful way , and that’s why theater and music and performance will always be with us. But then there is the one-on-one level, the reality check, the corrective. Each level in its own way shines a light into the dark black night. Or sends us better equipped into the light of the dark black night.