Get Back Up When You're Down!

I'm happy to share this guest appearance from my good friend and fraternity brother, David Spiegel because it's a great article and well, he mentions me.

"Life is like a roll of toilet paper.The closer you get to the end,the faster it seems to go."

-John Maxwell

I love my song choice for my Sunday Song of the Day today, Corner of the Sky from Pippin.The song transports me back in time. Pippin may very well have been the first show I saw on Broadway.I had become involved in musical theater when I went to college. Growing up a stones throw away from the Big Apple, it seems strange that I had never seen a Broadway show until then.We had just struck set on our latest stage triumph,Celebration, a musical by the same gentlemen who brought us The Fantastiks.

For a college fraternity, we did an amazing job, assembling a cast and crew that to this day still fascinates me.The show has a magical quality about it. Those of us involved in this production all have fond memories of just how magical and transformative our production was.

Opening night soon became closing night as an outbreak of spinal meningitis shut down the campus at the then Trenton State College known today as The College of New Jersey today. Little did we know, as our leader, my friend, brother and mentor Doug Smith, his shaking hand holding a cigarette near his head literally lighting it on fire, announced that after months of planning, rehearsing,set building and all of the rest of that which goes into a production of this magnitude, that what seemed tragic to those of us involved in this, would be the stepping stone to greatness for a good many of us.

I remember leaving campus that night heading to our impromptu cast party.Spinal meningitis or not...we were going to have a cast party! It was a wet, blowy rainy night and the bill board announcing our yearly Fall production had been blown over. As my frat brother Rick and I drove past it, he stopped the car. We got out, stood the 4 x 8 hand painted plywood sign back up and set it proudly back up at the main entrance to the campus. As we headed away, he turned to me and said "well, there it is...life in a nutshell. Just like that sign, it's not about getting knocked down, it's all about getting back up!"

Booyah!

Fast forward a few short weeks later. Here I was sitting and waiting for the curtain to rise on my first Broadway show adventure. In the opening ensemble number, a young Ben Vereen pulled a handkerchief through his hand placed on the floor and magically the stage gave rise to scrims and a set that just blew me away. I literally fell from my seat to my knees.

I knew in that moment that magic was possible.

Soon, I was back on campus. The decision was made to start rebuilding what we had lost in the Fall fiasco with an unprecedented Spring production. Since Mr.'s Jones and Schmidt (the writers of Celebration) had been with us when this journey began, they might as well be our muse for the second act, so we chose The Fantastiks.

The rest is just so much more Phi Mu Alpha lore and legend. The following Fall we tackled Cabaret, a moment in my personal timeline that to this day sets the standard against which I measure any and all of my successes. Successes all born from what at that time felt like the end of the world.

Little did we know just how seminal an event like this could and would be.

It set me on my course to find my Corner of the Sky!

-- David Spiegel

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