September 11, 2019
What if OBL had moved to NYC instead of Europe as a young man? Gone to a Broadway show and fallen in love with musical theater? What if he’d seen 42nd Street the summer of 2001 as we did multiple times? What if?
That show about a show was, in our opinion, the peak of human civilization. The story, the songs, the lighting, the costumes, the acting and singing – every element was the result of so many individual lifetimes of lessons, practice, injuries, auditions, and rejections that the audience was invariably treated to a drop of the finest creative liquor, distilled through all of those sweaty moments of hard work and perseverance into a ninety minute long thing of indescribable beauty.
We thought about that right after 9/11 and thought about it again last night, while walking through the Theater District on the eve of the terrible anniversary. And our answer last night was the same as it was 18 years ago when we found ourselves wondering the same thing even while the wreckage still smouldered downtown. What if? No, of course not. Nobody who’d seen that show could have ever wanted to harm our beautiful city. No way.
