Dolly Gallagher Levi, the central character in the musical comedy, "Hello, Dolly!," is determined to leave her widowhood behind.
Early in the show, as Dolly first takes the stage, she hands out business cards, each listing a different service she provides. They include financial consultation, instruction in the guitar and mandolin, varicose veins reduced. Also short distance hauling, fresh eggs, ears pierced, pierced ears replugged, and restoration of national monuments.
But she focuses mostly on being a matchmaker and sets out to help several young couples overcome assorted obstacles between themselves and the altar. But these efforts mask her main goal of matching herself with Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy merchant who is also bereft of his spouse.
To accomplish her goals, she lures Vandergelder and the various lovers from their small town of Yonkers, New York, to the big city to the south. All this takes place in the 1890s, when New York City’s entertainment hub is Fourteenth Street. This happens to be the day for the annual Fourteen Street Association Parade.
Eventually, everyone will converge on the upscale Harmonia Gardens restaurant, the site of assorted high jinks, mishaps, and close calls, before all the couples — including Dolly and Horace — are matched up at the final curtain. But it takes two acts and fifteen songs to get there.
Dolly Gallagher was a showgirl at the Harmonia Gardens before she met and married Ephraim Levi. So she looks forward to a triumphal return to her old stomping, er, dancing grounds. In that setting, she will dance and sing the title song with the waiters, who tell her, “It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.”
The show is a comedy, both in our contemporary sense of being comical and the historic sense of things turning out well for the main characters. So we aren’t too worried about whether the couples will eventually get to “tie the knot,” and we don’t leave the theater overcome by sad or serious thoughts.
This calls to mind Lorenzo Jones, a soap opera in the “Golden Age of Radio” in the 1940s and 1950s. The daily introduction described Lorenzo as lovable and impractical but still loved by his wife Belle. His impractical nature showed up in his strange inventions, including tri-spouted tea pots: one each for strong, medium and weak. Despite such experiments, the narrator told us, life with Lorenzo, “has more smiles than tears” (Old Time Radio Catalog http://www.otrcat.com/lorenzo-jones-p-1539.html).
In the case of Dolly Levi, she may shed a tear or two in a moment of reflection as she recalls her former life. She talks to her late husband from time to time in the show, and as she thinks about the parade on Fourteenth Street, she asks Ephraim’s permission to re-marry.
As a middle-aged widow, Dolly feels she has been sidelined. Life’s parade moves on, and she doesn’t want to be left behind. She’s a survivor. She is determined to become the wife of Horace Vandergelder, “the well-known half-a-millionaire.”
The one serious song, “Before the Parade Passes By,” closes the first act, so by the time the intermission ends, as with Lorenzo, so with Dolly, there will be “more smiles than tears.”
To Dolly, the literal parade becomes a symbol of the excitement and enjoyment of life she longs to return to. So she is determined to “taste Saturday's high life” and get some life back into her life. She doesn’t want to watch life go by her in the passing parade.
Amid the noise of horns and cymbals and the lights of sparklers, she wants to raise the roof and carry on as she holds her head up high. She’s ready to move out in front and lead the parade herself.
So, the fluff and nonsense of the story line notwithstanding, Dolly’s song offers encouragement to women and men who are widowed, divorced, or those who have never been married but would like to be: You don’t have to be sidelined as the parade of life passes by.
Dolly’s call back to life has many implications beyond romance and marital status. Norman Vincent Peale, longtime pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, convinced thousands and thousands of people around the world of “the power of positive thinking.” For Dr. Peale, this was not simply “operation bootstraps.” Rather, as a Christian minister, his call to positive thinking was an affirmation of the power of God through Jesus Christ as the resource for combatting life’s problems.
My wife Pansy and I encountered a walking, talking testimony to the miraculous positive power of God a few years ago: a man named Robert Vandergrift in Bountiful, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. As lifelong Baptists visiting the world capital of Mormonism, we hunted for a Baptist church as we spent Saturday night in a motel in Bountiful. We found our way to Bountiful First Baptist Church for Sunday morning service. That’s where we found Bob and learned of his outliving medical predictions of an early death from colon cancer that had metastasized to both lobes of the liver.
About ten years earlier, in 1996, Bob was sixty-eight when a surgeon found the mass in his colon the size of a baseball. Bob was told, statistically, he had “six months to two years to live.” He got a second opinion and was told, “Get your affairs in order because you have about four months to live.”
Bob was a Christian and active churchman, but he said, “I didn’t want to die. Our faith is tested when we face our own mortality. There was a lot of panic and prayer by the time I was told to get my affairs in order.”
In his book, My Home is in the House of Cancer, Bob tells of another doctor who told him, “You don’t have to be a statistic. Some of that is up to you.” In a book by Dr. Peale, Bob learned about a process of “visualization” that included developing a strategy. He had encouragement from many sides. He described his “team”who worked with him: “The Creator, the surgeon, the oncologist, the clinical trial, the medical social worker, a coordinator, and an angel who has been gone from this earth for nearly a century, family and friends as they held me in the light.”
As he thought of what he could do, Bob drew on his faith. He found a challenge in Deuteronomy 30:19: “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” He accepted that challenge and chose life.
Bob said, to bolster his determination to choose life, he went to a bank and asked for a loan of twenty-five thousand dollars. “Of course, I didn’t tell the banker my medical prognosis,” he said. With part of that money and as part of his vision, he bought a new car. He said, in effect, “I didn’t have a Volkswagen vision. I had a Cadillac vision. So I bought a new Cadillac.”
He has shared his story with thousands of people, face to face, in correspondence, in public speeches:
"I wrote about some of my thoughts along the way and that was important. I sometimes called others when I learned they had cancer. People I had never met. Sometimes, they lived far away. I sent my story to them hoping there would be something in it for them, but somewhat anxious because I didn’t want to mislead them. I included some words of encouragement.
"I had shared my thoughts about cancer with others because I was being asked what I was doing because I was improving so much. I finally put it together as a little book and took it to Kinko’s and printed it. I looked at my future in 1999 and I wondered … Why have I survived while others have not?
"I didn’t know what the tomorrows would bring. I set my sights far ahead but I knew I must walk them one day at a time.
I was invited to give a talk at the Intermountain Health Care Cancer Conference in Sandy, Utah on September 29, 2005. The audience consisted of oncologists, nurses, medical social workers, cancer patients and survivors. There were other talks, some with many in attendance — some with few. Eventually, there would be about 10,000 visits on my web page in a year and I developed some relationship with many cancer patients."
As I was writing this blog a few days ago, I reconnected with Bob by email. His wife died about six weeks ago, but now in his mid-eighties, he is still a survivor. He wrote this:
"As far as my cancer is concerned, my cancer marker is up a bit but I have not been on treatment of any kind since the original, which was, I think, about 13 years ago.”
So this courageous man long ago followed the instruction from Deuteronomy. He chose life.
Bob has not let the parade pass him by.
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