Guest Columnist: A Real-Life Maria

This week I offer our latest column from guest Lawrence Christon, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer on theater and comedy, and a longtime culture freelancer in Southern California. This one needs no further ado.

      A GIRL NAMED MARIA

By Lawrence Christon

I’m standing in the deserted home furnishings section of a department

store late at night, shopping for a mattress. It is the dark season,

in more ways than one. The Cheetos-colored Borscht Belt clown with the

funny hair and floppy suit has bullied his way through the long

primary and election run right into The White House, and now, as the

march of the Trumpkins gains volume, the joke is on us.

A young woman in a black business suit approaches.

I know what you may be thinking — a man and a woman alone in a room full

of mattresses — particularly given the conditions for despair that form

the classic background for abandon. But an indiscretion would be

wholly fantastical; the real condition, however, is not: political

free fall. A Democratic party that has abandoned its Rooseveltian

principles. A skewed economy in which the rich get richer and the rest

of us scrap for what’s left on the landfill of diminishing returns. A

culture so rife with capitalist values and attendant

corporate-academic jargon that, as mentioned in a recent issue of the

Atlantic, the ‘60s utopian sentiment of free love has now become, for

eligible women, the search for “an empowered version of uninhibited

sexuality” in a dating scene where “sexual interactions…are explicitly

commercial.” And the question arises, “should marriage be downgraded

to a joint custodial arrangement for raising kids?”

Hannah Arendt wondered aloud if the totalitarian horrors of Stalinism

and Nazism, in an echo of Pound’s line, “helpless against the

systems,” would fundamentally alter human nature in the 20th century.

That alteration was rooted in fear. Now we have one rooted in the

actual invasion of consciousness, by digitized media, by the popular

fusion of politics and entertainment, by every manipulative sound and

image that erupts in ubiquitous screens, big and small, to crowd our

private and communal spaces. The sports screen commandeers our

restaurant conversation. The laugh track attends our pumping gas

outdoors. Continual celebrity updates. News you can use, dumped in

every social media silo we scroll through hourly. Even the chubby

fingers of little kids are swift at working screens. It’s inescapable.

I’m standing in the deserted home furnishings section of a department

store late at night, shopping for a mattress. It is the dark season,

in more ways than one. A young woman in a black business suit

approaches. She’s the salesgirl, or woman, or person, however it’s

phrased in our linguistically fraught time. Her skin is pale, but her

accent suggests Latin America. She’s helpful, patient, knowledgeable about

deals that look good but go bad too soon. She’s professionally

pleasant.

We settle on a high end but not exorbitant purchase. At the

register we discuss delivery options, bonus points, warranty, return

policy, etc. I press a wrong button, and the lengthy process of

printing out a comically yard-long receipt has to be repeated. She

remains patient, laughing gently over how long this wrap-up is taking.

I observe her at greater length: tall and slender, attractive but not

pretty, with an intelligent, somewhat narrow face. Finally the

transaction is done. I look at the printout and see her name: Maria.

“That’s a nice name,” I say. “Made forever famous in ‘West Side Story.’”

Her face looks blank.

“You’ve never seen ‘West Side Story’?”

“No.”

“Surely you’ve heard the song ‘Maria.’”

“No.”

I try to sing the first few lines, but the tattered result is hopeless.

“Got a cell phone? Dial up YouTube.”

She produces a worn pink-framed mobile device, taps in the trail to

the original 1957 Broadway cast recording. The ardent tenor of Larry

Kert issues thinly from the little phone, but it’s enough:

“…”The most beautiful sounds in the world in a single word…Say it loud

and there’s music playing/ Say it soft and it’s almost like

praying…I’ll never stop loving Maria… “

Department store Maria is hooked. She stares at the little screen,

transfixed, unmoving, her lips parted in wonder.

“…Suddenly that name/ will never be the same/ to me…”

As I observe her, the rush of remembering that production comes back

to me. A New York City councilman named Vito Marcantonio had opened

the floodgates of Puerto Rican immigration to the Big Apple in the

late 1940s. Almost overnight a black-and-white city — a European

city — began brightening with Latino colors, music, cuisine and

exuberant street life. Within a decade, “West Side Story” exploded on

the scene. No one had seen anything like it. It changed New York. It

changed the American theater. The film version won Best Picture. The

only show I could afford that year, I couldn’t get it out of my bones.

I danced crazily down the street like young unschooled Billy Elliott

leaping and spinning his way to the sea in North Durham.

Maria explains to me that her parents moved her back to rural Mexico

when she was four. She’s only been in the U.S. for a few years, hence

her ignorance of American culture and lore.

“I bet you’ll be playing that song after I leave,” I say.

“I will,” she says, in a confessional tone. “Thank you.”

I thought of her on the way home, and many times since. A young woman

who’s discovered magic in an ordinary name, her name, which will never

be ordinary again but instead will echo with the fervor of young love

and the most beautiful sounds in the world.

Innocence is still possible. Joy is still possible. You just never

know when you’ll come across the seemingly unremarkable moment you’ll

wind up cherishing for as long as you live.