The year after I graduated from college I lived in West Philly and worked for a nonprofit downtown. For New Year’s Eve that year I wanted to do something special, so I got tickets to Les Misérables and made reservations at an Italian restaurant on the waterfront that one of my coworkers recommended as “authentic.” For several weeks I’d been walking by the theater and I was excited to finally see a Broadway production, especially one based on a book I’d read and loved and a film I had fond memories of watching with my grandparents.
Our showing was the early one at 7pm so our seating for the New Year’s Eve prix fixe menu was also the early one at 5pm. At that time the restaurant was nearly empty and we got a nice seat by the window. At which point the waiter began leisurely bringing us a nine-course meal and I began to get increasingly anxious about actually making it to the theater on time. I have never eaten such delicious food so sparingly and quickly in my life and I am sure that it was a sad day personally for the waiter, although a profitable one for the restaurant in terms of what we actually consumed. I confess that we were somewhat distracted by the steady stream of dressed-to-the-nines families and individuals making their way into the restaurant, being checked over by two huge guys, and then being ushered through the doors they were flanking into a room that we never did get a clear look at. We weren’t quite counting on early dinner with the Don!
We then raced (on foot) up to the theater, me in a long velvet dress and suede heels–which I was, shall we say, inexpert at walking quickly in–and my partner in a suit and tie, making it just in time to be seated as the lights dimmed. The show was fantastic, everything I could have wanted it to be. At the end the cast led the audience in Auld Lang Syne and we poured out into the street. Where there was still over an hour before we rang in 1997, so we headed up the street to the Irish Pub. When we got there not one but two fistfights over taxis were happening out front and we decided to give it a miss. At which point we pivoted and walked into the place across the street, a lovely little spot (which may or may not have been an earlier incarnation of Caribou Café) where they squeezed us into an upstairs table and kept bringing the bottles of champagne I kept ordering. We stayed well past midnight, and then asked our waiter to help get us a cab. Such naïveté! It was snowing, it was New Year’s Eve, we were in downtown Philly: there were no cabs. Having no other choice but to walk four miles to my house–which I often did but not in heels and a dress in the winter–we closed out the place, insisted our waiter help us finish the champagne we had accumulated, and then for the price of some gas accepted a ride home from him. Never has some kind of little red hatchback been a more welcome chariot!
Many things have changed in the two decades since that night, but one that won’t is the rousing and defiant spirit of the story and the score. It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.