Billy Elliot

Last night I went with a friend to a local production of the original musical, performed in a town nearby famous for its high end amateur stage productions.  It is always an extraordinary experience visiting Venice Florida, first because the main streets have so many very, very good restaurants, then for all the interesting shops that are interspersed between the places to eat, and then again because the layout of the town has not yet surrendered to gaunt towers of residential condos which is the tragic fate of down town Sarasota making one wonder it he has wandered perhaps into the industrial parts of Gary, Indiana.  No, Venice is very dear, if a little bit too twee for my taste.  The musical was also to my taste well done, my companion was far less impressed with the talent on display, although we both warmed--perhaps too much--to the cute young man/boy playing the lead role.  What surprised me, however, was my companion's wanting to leave at the intermission because he was having too serious a negative reaction to the dismal household affairs of little Billy, the grotesque, ill educated and loudmouthed grandmother, the ignorant, ill-educated brute of a father, a coal miner, and brother similarly limited and engaged.  This was England at the height of Mrs Thatcher's war on the unions which is harsh and cruel and which the film soft pedals.  My companion who grew up in an American equivalent low income, uneducated, uncultured home only himself to escape it through persistent education plus the analgesic of being gay, found it too sad, too terrifying, too much close to home.  It was one of those moments when I realized once again of the incredibly easy time I have had in life despite my vaunted lower back troubles.  It was also a reminder to me of what I guess Donald Trump seems to represent to low income voters somehow a way out, although will that turn out to be  chimerical as so many believe?  Here in Sarasota, famed for it "culture," where every fundraiser for theater, art, music, etc. is immediately oversubscribed, and I have actually met people who have a condo over looking the bay in downtown and a "country" place out on Longboat Key, an investment in real estate running into the millions, there evidence of poverty every where you turn, not to mention the homeless who line the streets.  I don't see it, until my companion remarks on one or another resemblance to the world of his childhood, and it comes into my house, so to speak, close up.  The musical ends with the miners having lost their strike lining up to descend into the bowels of the earth again and then being swallowed up, while little Billy, an acclaimed genius of dance, goes on into another life.  That was true in my companion's life, the glory mingling with the guilt, which is offering us all yet another life, which is those of us who are "successful," by virtue of special brains, talents, skills, owe a debt that comes from God to those who are so much less fortunate.