The Jersey Boys And Me

By John McDonnell

I went to see Jersey Boys last weekend, and it put me in my Birthday Funk.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the show. It’s a terrific show, about Franki Valli and the Four Seasons, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

It’s just that the Four Seasons’ music was the background for a lot of my youth, and hearing all those great old songs like “Walk Like A Man”, “Sherry”, “Dawn", “Rag Doll”, and others made me realize how long it’s been since I was a teenager.

And with a birthday coming in a few days, that time of my life is fast disappearing into the rearview mirror.

This is an annual event for me, a one-day funk that comes a week before my birthday. It’s like a 24-hour emotional virus, and when my birthday comes I’m happy again, but for that one day a gray cloud appears and spreads shadows over my thoughts.

For that one day I look at my life and see only the broken dreams, missed opportunities, lost chances, all the things I should have done or could have done, the times when I should have said or done something that -- drumroll here -- Would Have Made Everything Different.

I run the movie of my life and stop it at critical moments, then sit there in the darkened theater of my mind and say, “Do you remember this, John? The time when you didn’t work hard enough/speak up/follow your heart/know your priorities/play by the rules/grab for the gusto or any of a hundred other things that you should have done but didn’t? How do you think your life might have turned out if you’d acted differently back then? Usually, the answer is, “You would have been a smashing success and everything you touched would be golden. Forever.”

It’s like in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when the Ghost of Christmas Past comes and harangues old Scrooge with thoughts of what his life could have been if he’d taken a different path.

Jersey Boys spurred some of this thinking because along with those great old songs is a story of four boys from the hardscrabble part of New Jersey who started out with a dream of making it big in the music business in the 1950s, and after a lot of struggle and hard work, they made it to the top. They had the same dreams as millions of other young people of their own or any generation, but the difference is they made their dreams come true.

It’s inspirational, but it also makes anyone facing a birthday after the age of 40 wonder, “Could that have been me?”. When you’re in your 20s you can still tell yourself you’re laying the groundwork to achieve your youthful dreams. In your 30s reality is starting to intrude, but you think, “I’m just a late bloomer. I’ll come into my own any day now.”

When 40 rolls around you start looking up biographies of people, like Colonel Sanders, who became successful in middle age or later. When you get past 50, though, the “late bloomer” line starts to wear thin.

It’s enough to make you get very blue when you have another birthday approaching.

But I know the drill, because it happens every year. I’ll be in this funk for a day, maybe two, and then I’ll snap out of it. I’ll realize that I haven’t done too badly, come to think of it. I’m heading toward my third decade of a happy marriage, and I have four kids who love me and laugh at my jokes. That alone is worth more than a hit Broadway show in my book. My career? Well, it isn’t Jersey Boys level, but it’s perking along, and every day I get to do work that I enjoy -- how many people can say that? 

And hey, if you pay attention to what happened between the songs of Jersey Boys, you realize that it wasn’t all applause and hit songs for the Four Seasons -- all those years of touring took a heavy toll on their families. There are failed marriages, jealousy, heartache, and broken dreams in that show, singing counterpoint to all those hit numbers.

So maybe I’ll tell the Ghost of Christmas Past to bug off, and don’t come back till next year.

And remember the lyrics to “Let’s Hang On”:

“Let’s hang on to what we’ve got
Don’t let go girl we’ve got a lot,
Got a lot of love between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on,
To what we’ve got.”