This section used to open chapter 5. I cut it because, while I love it, it plants a bunch of seeds that then don't flower in the chapter.
I saw Man of la Mancha for the first time when I was fifteen. I was at summer camp for geeks taking a class called, if memory serves, Musical Masterpieces, a combination of music history, music theory, and music composition. A week or two from the end of the semester, during a section of the course devoted to program music—instrumental music intended to tell a particular story—we listened to Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, a piece for cello, viola, and orchestra that depicts the adventures of the mad knight who was the hero of the first novel in history. At the end of class, after a discussion of the piece, our instructor informed the twelve students in the class that we were going to have dinner at his house that night and watch a movie based on the same story. I felt a little sick, as I had found Strauss’s Don Quixote lugubrious and boring, but since it was imperative that the instructor love me I said nothing, which is how I found myself sitting in front of his TV later that evening with eleven of my geek peers watching the opening credits to Man of la Mancha, the movie made of the brilliant 1965 musical by Joe Darion, Mitch Leigh, and Dale Wasserman.
The protagonist of the show is not, as one might expect, the country-gentleman-turned-cavalier who towers over Spanish literature, but his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, who has been thrown into prison to await trial before the Inquisition. He amuses his fellow inmates by telling them the fanciful story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a man in his dotage who has read so many trashy novels that he goes insane and comes to think of himself as a great knight, on a quest to vanquish injustice wherever he finds it. With his squire—his next-door neighbor Sancho Panza, who admires him so much that he plays along—he travels the countryside, tilting at windmills, rescuing servant girls who didn’t realize they needed rescuing, and generally leaving things much messier than they were before he showed up. But the Inquisition comes for Cervantes before he finishes his tale, and he—well, I don’t want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn’t seen it.
The 1972 movie version of Man of la Mancha, starring Peter O’Toole as Cervantes/Don Quixote and Sofia Loren as the scullery maid/lady Dulcinea, is very bad. The conceit of the entire show involves looking at one thing and imagining it to be something else; when a man on a bare stage imagines that sticks of wood and panes of fabric are actually a broken-down nag and a windmill— which items he then reimagines again as a noble destrier and a menacing giant—we are pulled organically into his imagination by the force of his vision. When in the movie he’s in prison that looks like a prison for one scene, dressed like a 17th-century Spanish guy, and in the next instant he’s riding down a road in armor plate, form and function work together a little less harmoniously. Add to this the voice of Loren, brilliant as an actress but a songbird by no reach of the imagination (O’Toole’s singing was dubbed by Simon Gilbert), and you end up with something pretty dismal.
But I didn’t care, because from the very beginning I was under Cervantes’s spell. Never before had I seen articulated with such clarity and such fierce beauty the idea that we don’t have to see the world in front of us and accept it as our only option. The most famous song in the show is “The Impossible Dream,” in which Don Quixote pledges his life to the pursuit of the unreachable star, but another moment, for my money equally powerful if not more so, comes after one of the prisoners interrupts Cervantes to object, indicating their perilous surroundings, that they have an obligation to see life as it is. In one of the most memorable speeches in dramatic literature (at least to me), Cervantes responds, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams—this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” A thrill rushed through my body at those words—“maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be”—as they found a place in the inmost depths of my being, a place they have yet to abandon.
So you can see how it made perfect sense for me to lie my way onto a reality TV show.
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