In the spring of 1978 I was dashing around my studio walk-up in Manhattan, doing my best to tidy up from the naughty night before. I was expecting a visitor—a blind date, if you will.
I was twenty‑five, a “serious” musician, lately dabbling in the composer pond. I had a few art songs under my belt with plans underway to move to Germany in the fall to work and study at The University of Freiburg.
If living in New York City in the 1970s, he who hesitates was lost. That was me. Years before, I had been advised that if you wake up one morning and cannot immediately recall why you came, then you should leave. By 1978 I was struggling to find my fit in this Emerald City of extraordinary and troubled people who crowded my life. So without much emotional effort, I had decided to move on—to foreign territory—challenge my southern brain with a new language and fresh inspiration.
Then out of the proverbial blue, from a free ticket to a play and a chance introduction, I was offered an opportunity to score an original musical—one of those messy beasts of the theatre giggled at and ridiculed in the halls of Julliard. After being urged by a swell of think-what-can-happen speeches from the Tony-craving Broadway clan I had recently met, and other reasons too distant for me to detail or fathom now, I agreed.
In the weeks that followed, I had attempted to write a few mock songs for the project about a teenage bootblack in the mid-1800s. But frustrated by only a slight skill for lyric-writing, I was now being introduced to a possible collaborator—a real lyricist—a Broadway baby who might work with me. But I knew little more.
The downstairs buzzer rang, followed by the taps of feet coming up the three flights of stairs, eventually delivering to my door a boyish little man no more than five foot two or so…in his mid-50s, I guessed. A huge grin spread across his face—and mine.
His name was Lee. He arrived in my gray and confused world with a contagious passion and overwhelming love for theatre I never had. Through the years ahead I would borrow that enthusiasm for my yet clarified own, and we shared it over four decades of collaboration, friendship, adventure and heartbreak.
We wrote our first song that afternoon. He sat back on the worn sofa and scribbled a fragment of lyric on a scrap of paper. It read, “Someone whose life is about to begin—” Words for a shoeshine boy, but meant for me.
Lee Goldsmith
January 4, 1923 – October 5, 2021
What gives a life its shape?
What gives a life its size?
Or does it only live at all
In someone else’s eyes?
(Abe, Soliloquy)