For my Music Theater class, I have been tasked with reading the “Ragtime” Libretto, as I am performing a song as Mother this week with my classmate as Tateh (”Our Children”). And as I read about her character, and watch her growth as these new people come into her life, her feelings toward her husband and her children and to justice and truth and her own freedom, I am reminded of previous relationships I have been in, and how I have gone through this journey, at least, in part. I am astounded how I could have so much in common with a character who is a mother, as someone who does not want children, but feels a great deal of maternal love for various people around her. I am watching her relationship with her husband unfold and change, and I see too many similarities, I feel for her. I have been her. I have experienced her freedom, her hair loose from pins as it rains, her bare feet on the sand, her loved ones at her side, the wind whipping at her skirts and slapping against her face in a random, erratic pattern.
“There was a time
When you were the person in motion.
I was your wife.
It never occurred to want more.
You were my sky,
My moon and my stars and my ocean.
We can never go back to before.
We can never go back to before.”