The Other Side of the Mountain

The Other Side of the Mountain

You’re wondering where you remember that turn of phrase from. It was the title of a movie in 1975 about an Olympic hopeful skier (Jill Kinmont) that gets paralyzed in 1955 and has to put her life back together afterwards. The title implies that we spend a lot of time pondering the mountains we seek to climb, but often climbing down off the mountain is actually much harder and more evocative of character that the blind obsession of charging up the mountain.

Kim and I have talked often for fifteen years about writing a story (book, play, movie, who knows) about the trials and tribulations of “the other side of the mountain” in musical theater. The story of the front side of the musical theater mountain is told in award-winning style in A Chorus Line. It was very easy for us all to grasp the degree of difficulty of rising to prominence in something so competitive and talent-driven as musical theater. The Marvin Hamlisch songs and the focus on the line of young and athletic men and women, each with a dream in his or her heart, made sense to us. But we knew the other side of that mountain. Given that Kim had spent twenty plus years in musical theater, she had and has many friends that traveled that road with her. She had been an aspiring actress and singer in both Los Angeles and New York. She had done lots of Vermont summer stock. She had traveled by bus doing parts in the national road shows of many of the Broadway warhorses like Show Boat, State Fair, The Sound of Music and Oklahoma. Many of her friends had spent those years literally and figuratively on the bus with her playing all the towns and cities across the United States. Some had also done the cruise ship gig and others had been on the international road tours that traveled to Asia and beyond. When I first met Kim, she was in an off-Broadway show and was being offered a year-long spot in some secondary role in the Asian touring company of 42nd Street (she declined it in deference to our budding relationship). But in addition to the ongoing sacrifices to lifestyle (which is a kind of burden of being on the mountain), there was the carnage of the other side of the mountain.

That other side is the inverse of the drama of the chorus line. Instead of I Hope I Get It as a theme, the theme becomes “How do I Stop Trying to Get It?” Being a natural storyteller, I had noticed that there were lots of stories among her coterie of theater friends and they all seemed to hinge at that moment (fifteen years ago) on how people of great artistic passion brought themselves to the point of being able to give up their dream. When you think about it, it is as necessary and emblematic of the human pathos as any story. It is the unrequited love of art and talent. It is a rejection of the passion that someone holds as dear as life itself. Few people sacrifice for another they love as much as these artists sacrifice for their craft. They literally give away their lives and certainly their youth for the dream of stardom or even the briefest fifteen minutes of fame.

Kim agreed that it was a fascinating theme and she even set up some interviews for me to talk to her friends who were at that point in their careers where they had made, were making or would soon be making their fateful decisions to soldier on or pack it in. Everyone deals with it differently. Do you remember the scene from Rocky when Sly Stallone is talking to Burgess Meredith in Rocky’s gritty apartment?

“Huh, what’s the matter? You don’t like my house? Does my house stink? That’s right-it stinks! I didn’t have no favors from you! Don’t slum around me. Talkin’ about your prime. What about my prime, Mick? At least you had a prime! I didn’t have no prime. I didn’t have nothin’!”

These friends of Kim’s may have had a moment or two of on-stage glory, but for the most part these were not the Sunset Boulevard cases of faded glory, these people were like Jill Kinmont. They went from staring up at the mountain in hopes of climbing it, only to find themselves flat on their backs on the other side of the mountain without ever having reached the summit, without their fifteen minutes of fame. These are the people who had a great passion and a big dream and came up short for one reason or another (I don’t actually think it matters whether they had the talent and lacked the luck or if they otherwise lacked sufficient talent). Very few of them lacked for effort in their endeavors. Dreaming can be just as intense with or without justification. And the fall to earth hurts just as much.

They say that character is based not on falling, but on how you get up. Sometimes that means that you get back on the horse and keep at it. Sometimes it means that you have been thrown off the horse one time too many and that it’s time to stop riding horses. Sometimes it means you learn that you have no business being on the horse in the first place. Different people admire different outcomes when they see someone flat on their back. What I was finding with these musical theater friends was that the most interesting drama in the story was about the internal angst and actions of recognizing where they were on the mountain and deciding to stop climbing and find another path that suited them better.

Guess what? Whether we were aspiring musical theater actors and singers or we were accountants, we all, sooner or later, face the reality of the other side of the mountain. Some people have no big dreams and I always vacillate between feeling sorry for them and feeling they are fortunate. It is certainly easier to be happy with where you are on the mountain if you never recognized it as a mountain to climb in the first place. But to miss the feeling in your soul when you wake in the morning and look up and see that mountain (whatever its shape or size), set against the clear blue sky, inviting you to the “easy” climb to its summit, is a feeling that everyone should have in their lives. I know I have no right to be so judgmental since I clearly count myself among the mountain climbers of the world and there are certainly those who prefer to keep their feet on the valley floor.

Rogers and Hammerstein said to Climb Every Mountain and they had it sung by the Mother Abbess in Salzburg, Austria just before the Anschluss. She describes the importance of dreaming and the importance of staying at it. “A dream that will need all the love you can give. Every day of your life for as long as you live.” Those are hard words to have ringing in you musical theater ears when faced with three survival jobs, a sixth floor walk-up shared apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and no healthcare insurance. Well, the other side of mountain doesn’t care. You can get up and climb some more or you can wander off to find another mountain, or perhaps hill to climb. That’s right, neither the mountain nor the honey badger gives a shit what you decide to do. You just have to do it and please yourself. End of story.

This morning I am on my own little hilltop and I have found that while I can see the distant peaks of the San Jacinto’s and the San Gabriel’s, I am happy to let others climb those while I define my own hilltop and try to stay on this side of the hilltop a little longer.